Marta Gosovska, editor-in-chief of translated literature at Laboratoria Publishing House and award-winning translator, reflects on translation during war. This reflective essay is part of a collection called ‘A resilient literary ecosystem in times of war: strategies and individual experiences’, which was produced by the Ukrainian hub within this year’s International Literature Exchange.
I recently finished translating How Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr, the first book in her trilogy of fictionalized memoirs about childhood and exile. Written from the point of view of a girl forced to leave Berlin when the Nazis came to power, the book traces the experience of sudden displacement: flight to Switzerland, precarious attempts to belong in Paris, and eventual resettlement in London. It is a narrative of exile told without bitterness, attentive instead to the minute recalibrations of language, habit, and selfhood that refugee life demands.
For Ukrainian readers today, the book arrives with an almost unbearable timeliness. Its young protagonist learns new languages by immersion and misunderstanding, sits in classrooms where the teacher’s words sound like gibberish, and absorbs, often silently, the unwritten rules of foreign worlds. In short, she undergoes what millions of Ukrainians, including children, are now living through: the experience of becoming a refugee.
Yet I want to begin not with the book itself, but with the act of translating it, and with the way the war redirected my attention toward a text I might otherwise have overlooked among the thousands of memoirs about World War II. Had it not been for the war in Ukraine, I might never have chosen to translate this book at all. And had I not translated it, thousands of Ukrainian children, so much alike with Anna, Judith Kerr’s alter ego, would not have encountered it in their native language.
I first came across the film adaptation of How Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit during my last visit to Kyiv, mere few weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time, I could not have imagined what lay ahead — for my country, for my people, or for myself. That film became the last one I watched before what now simply gets called “the war,” though nothing about it feels simple. In the months that followed, I watched little else but news footage: explosions, destroyed houses, schools, hospitals, entire cities razed.
Later, by circumstance, I read the book in French. I was spending Christmas in the attic of a half-timbered house in a village in Alsace, where I had arrived as a refugee. On the floor, in a pile of books that did not fit on the shelf, Anna was waiting for me, her pink rabbit tucked under her arm. It was then that I knew I had to translate this book into Ukrainian: a book written by a German who lived most of her life as an Englishwoman, who nearly forgot her mother tongue and chose to write in English, now returning, through translation, to another language shaped by displacement and rupture.
A few days ago, while revising the translation, I came across a comment I had left for the editor:
“Won’t it trigger children if I write “a burst of laughter”?”
In Ukrainian, laughter “explodes”. It explodes like a bomb, like a drone, like a missile, like a house or a school when it is hit. I counted how many times laughter explodes in my translation: 86. That is a great deal of explosions.
Four years ago, I would never have paused over such a choice. My attention as a translator was trained to focus elsewhere: on syntax and semantics, on fidelity to the original, on protecting the author’s style. It was not trained to protect the reader — much less a child whose nervous system has already learned too much about explosions. War altered not only my life but my practice. It taught me that translation is never only about words. It is about the world in which those words now land.
And this, perhaps, is where the question of why translation matters must begin.
Translation has long occupied an uneasy position and has often been treated as a necessary but rather mechanical craft. Translators tend to become visible only when something goes wrong. Lawrence Venuti so aptly named this phenomenon: the translator’s invisibility. And yet translation has never been marginal to how cultures survive. It is the quiet infrastructure of world literature. Certain translations, Pope’s Homer, for instance, have shaped entire literary traditions. For Ukrainians, access to world literature in their own language has never been assured, as for decades, publishing rights were routinely acquired by big Russian publishing houses for a so-called “Russian-language market,” a category that implicitly included Ukraine (and Belarus) and, in practice, erased Ukrainian translations altogether. The contracts themselves were often barring — the rights were acquired precisely to prevent the translation of the book into Ukrainian. The system was effective because it left Ukrainian readers with little choice. Those who wished to read contemporary literature had to do so either in the original language, if they were fluent, or in Russian translation. The absence of translations into Ukrainian was never the result of a lack of readership or cultural appetite. On the contrary, Ukrainian readers consistently sought books in their own language — a desire made unmistakably visible by the publishing boom that followed the first years of the invasion, when new publishing houses emerged with remarkable speed. What had long constrained Ukrainian translation was a system of legal restrictions that functioned less as market regulation than as a form of deliberate cultural sabotage, imposed by a neighbouring state intent on maintaining linguistic dependence. Only after legislative changes restricting Russian book expansion did Ukrainian readers begin to receive contemporary global literature in Ukrainian. What looks elsewhere like a market adjustment is, here, an act of cultural restoration.
Ukrainian literature possesses a vast, brilliant, and tragically inaccessible corpus of translations produced by its own greatest writers and poets.
Yet this absence is all the more striking when set against another, largely forgotten fact: Ukrainian literature possesses a vast, brilliant, and tragically inaccessible corpus of translations produced by its own greatest writers and poets. Translation in Ukraine was never a marginal pursuit. On the contrary, it was undertaken by authors whose original work shaped the very contours of Ukrainian modernism. For them, translation was an extension of authorship, an intellectual dialogue with Europe conducted in Ukrainian. And yet this corpus has remained out of reach for Ukrainian readers. During a recent discussion on Ukrainian translation and publishing, a prominent contemporary poet, Iya Kiva, remarked, with a mixture of disbelief and quiet anger, that she felt robbed — she had only just discovered that Denis Diderot (and many other French writers) had been translated into Ukrainian by none other than Valerian Pidmohylnyi, an icon of Ukrainian literature, later executed during the Stalinist purges. I could continue the list almost endlessly. Works translated by major Ukrainian writers in the 1920s appeared briefly, then vanished for the Ukrainian readers: some were published once and never reprinted; others circulated only in fragmentary or censored form before being withdrawn altogether. The disappearance of these translations was not due to aesthetic failure or lack of readership but to historical violence: repression, censorship, executions, and the systematic dismantling of a culture that dared to imagine itself as part of a wider European intellectual tradition. As a result, Ukrainian readers were doubly deprived. Not only were they denied access to world literature in their own language; they were also cut off from a lineage of translation that might have revealed Ukrainian as a language capable of philosophical nuance, stylistic elasticity, and modern thought. At the publishing house “Laboratoria”, where I curate the Classics series, I plan to create a dedicated sub-series, “Rediscovered,” devoted to bringing these long-buried translations back to Ukrainian readers.
Every translation represents a choice about what deserves to travel. In moments of crisis, those choices become ethically charged. Today, as war reshapes both borders and vocabularies, translation functions as a form of resistance against erasure. I am currently translating texts that trace a spectrum of wartime experience: military analysis, refugee memoirs, children’s books that attempt to explain violence without normalizing it. From stark contemporary accounts of combat like What We Will Fight In The Third World War With to Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and the abovementioned Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, these works insist that war must be named, narrated, and contextualized. And so do most of my colleagues who translate both ways — from and into Ukrainian. The choice is dictated by the time and the moment.
Language itself has become a battleground. The avoidance of the word war, the preference for phrases like the Ukrainian crisis or the situation in Ukraine, is not neutral. Precision in naming is a weapon of truth. To translate accurately today is to refuse linguistic anaesthesia: it is to insist that words carry their full ethical weight.
Thousands of Ukrainians now react with visceral indignation when they encounter what they call euphemized translations in foreign media, even in outlets with otherwise solid reputations. The irritation is not nitpicking. It arises when headlines replace the phrase Russia’s war against Ukraine with the evasive conflict in Ukraine. This is no longer a matter of imprecision or stylistic variation; it is a distortion of the reality we inhabit. Language, in such cases, actively rearranges the world, softening responsibility and dissolving agency. The same instinct is triggered when politicians describe the shooting of an unarmed woman by a migration police officer as an unfortunate incident, rather than naming it as an act of violence. The euphemism does not neutralize the event; it conceals its moral contours. Words such as incident, clash, or conflict operate like linguistic fog: they blur asymmetries of power and obscure the direction of force. For years, the Ukrainians have been compelled to write formal appeals protesting the use of the phrase civil war to describe the Russian-Ukrainian war. This insistence may appear annoying to outside observers, but it stems from a precise understanding of how language works. Such use quietly relocates the cause of violence from an external aggressor to an internal fracture, transforming responsibility into misfortune and strategy into chaos. Such phrasing does not merely misname events; it rewrites causality.
Words such as incident, clash, or conflict operate like linguistic fog: they blur asymmetries of power and obscure the direction of force.
Translation is never innocent: every choice, especially the choice of what not to say, carries ethical responsibility. When translators, editors, or journalists opt to neutralize vocabulary, they do not step outside politics; they enact one. It may seem that such a weight of responsibility rests only on those who translate news reports, legal testimony, or evidence presented before human-rights courts and war-crimes tribunals. There, precision is visibly bound to justice; a mistranslated term can alter a verdict, a life, a historical record. But this assumption is misleading. Literary translators bear a responsibility no less grave, even if its consequences unfold more quietly, in our cosy living rooms, and over longer spans of time. Literature shapes moral imagination. It forms the inner map by which readers recognize good and evil: a single omission, a single softened edge, can skew that map. I recall how, in certain Soviet-era translations of Hemingway, a hostile or morally compromised Soviet general could emerge strangely ennobled, because a seemingly minor but decisive sentence had been omitted. This was not a failure of linguistic skill but an act of ideological accommodation. Loyalty to ideology rather than to the text is not, as one might assume, a modern aberration. History offers numerous examples of authorities persecuting translations that were accurate precisely because they were inconvenient. William Tyndale and Étienne Dolet (Mark Polizzotti has aptly called them the first martyr-translators) were executed not for mistranslation or carelessness, but, paradoxically, for fidelity. Their work threatened the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on reading, interpreting, and controlling sacred texts. What a remarkable example of translator’s visibility, indeed!
We may tell ourselves that such dangers belong to the past. Yet the ethical dilemma persists, only in forms that are a bit subtler (albeit writers, poets, and translators unjustly imprisoned by despotic regimes across the world might justifiably argue here). When a translator alters a literary text to align with an acceptable narrative, the harm is not immediately visible, but it is no less real. For a reader with no access to the original language, the translated text is reality. It becomes the sole version of events, characters, and moral relations. Literary translation participates in the formation of collective memory. It decides which truths remain sharp and which are blurred. In times of crisis, either political or civilizational, this responsibility is that much bigger. To translate literature faithfully is to respect the reader’s right to an undistorted encounter with reality, however uncomfortable that reality may be.
Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian poet — persecuted by the Soviet authorities in the 1970th, sentenced to ten years of imprisonment followed by five years of hard labour — translated in jail, often from memory alone. Deprived of books, dictionaries, and scholarly support, he worked in conditions deliberately designed to erase the self, and yet, translation became for him a mode of survival. Among the most remarkable of Stus’s translation projects was his work on Rainer Maria Rilke. For him, translation was not merely a literary exercise. It was an act of inner resistance. It allowed him to remain who he was: an artist rooted in world culture, even as the state sought to reduce him to a number, a body, a silence.
For Stus, translating Rilke was also a way of thinking through his own fate. Rilke’s poetry — so deeply concerned with solitude, transformation, endurance, and the invisible labour of the soul — offered a language through which Stus could articulate his own experience of confinement. In one of his last letters from the Perm prison camp, written when he was forbidden to see his wife, Stus told her that he was continuing to translate Rilke’s poem Euridice for her. These translations were messages of fidelity and presence, proofs that feeling and thought could not be held back by bars. Words, he believed, could not be imprisoned.
This lineage has not ended. Today, young Ukrainian poets write in trenches, between shellings. Many meet their death there. Maksym Kryvtsov, one such poet, was killed by enemy fire; his poetry began to be translated only after his death. This, too, is part of the life of words — their strange afterlife, in which language continues where the body cannot. Translation inhabits this threshold. Translators move texts between states of being: from silence into speech, from isolation into address, from mortality into memory. In doing so, they refuse to disappear. Translation becomes a form of witness. Even when a voice has been cut short, we do not allow it to fade.
In this sense, translation is not merely about bridging languages. It shapes the moral vocabulary of the present. Artificial intelligence may soon outperform humans at lexical equivalence, but it cannot replace the translator’s situated judgment — the ability to recognize what matters now, what must be carried across intact, and what demands contextual amplification. Edith Grossman once wrote that translation matters because it allows literature to exist beyond its birthplace. Today, it matters because it allows truth to enter where silence once prevailed. When the translator does not disappear — when they remain attentive, responsible, and present — translation becomes a deliberate, accountable gesture toward truth.
Marta Gosovska is editor-in-chief of translated literature at Laboratoria Publishing House and an award-winning translator whose work bridges Ukrainian and global readers. Her translations have earned the Best Children’s Book Translation (2020) for Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, the PEN Translation Award (2022) for Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, and the Looren Award (2025) for Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole the Pink Rabbit. An alumna of the HURI Summer School at Harvard (2024), the FILI Exchange Programme (2025), and the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop (2025), she curates landmark classics, champions emerging voices, and fosters cross-cultural literary exchange. Marta is passionate about expanding Ukraine’s literary canon and believes every translation opens a new window on the world. Her recent publication in the Los Angeles Review of Books features her translation of Broken Echoes, an excerpt from Where the Sun Sets by Olena Pshenychna.
The International Literature Exchange is a partnership project by National Centre for Writing and British Council, supported by Arts Council England.
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