A Note on Transliteration
This book advances a new vision of the colonial; discusses relations between empire and colony; questions the dependence of national minorities on, and interaction with, an imperial culture; and highlights the anticolonialist trend among national minority representatives in a culturally colonized country.
It contextualizes contested narratives based on competing approaches to geography, history, and culture. The localities, texts, and names appearing in this book meant different things to different people at different times, particularly since some treated them from a minority perspective and others from an imperial or colonialist perspective. The choice of an angle informs my principles of transliteration. As the angle shifted, so did my way of transliterating one and the same place or name. What was Kiev for the Russian authorities in the 1890s became Kyiv for the Ukrainian intellectuals— and for the Ukrainian Soviet authorities—in the 1920s, turned into the colonialist Kiev in the 1930s to 1980s, and again reappeared as Kyiv once Ukraine became independent.This book uses geographical and personal names as they were used by its main characters, who sometimes resisted and sometimes acquiesced to the imperial usage. What today is Kharkiv may appear as Khar’kov before 1917, as Kharkiv in the 1920s, as Khar’kov in the 1930s to 1980s, and again as Kharkiv after 1991. This usage reflects the changing balance between one and the same locale at different historical periods. Ukrainian geographical names appear in their Russian colonial format before 1917; after 1917 they switch, for some fifteen years, to their Ukrainian transliteration—with the exception of the cases when the discussion requires the emphasis on the colonial status of Ukrainian culture under communism.
Sometimes the context of the discussion requires unusual changes, for example Czernowitz (Austro-Hungarian spelling) instead of Chernivtsi (modern Ukrainian spelling).
There are cases when a town appears in its colonial context and is referred to as “Kiev” on the same page that it appears in a quote with a postcolonial connotation and is thus “Kyiv.” In other cases the same people switched languages from Yiddish to Ukrainian to Russian (or in the reverse order) and changed the spelling of their names. Iukhym may appear as Iefim and later as Haim, whereas Il’ia Shliomovych may become Leonid Solomonovych. In most cases this book provides context substantiating and making sense of those variegated usages.If names and places appear in quotes from other languages, the corresponding transliteration of names and places is chosen: Hebrew for Hebrew, Russian for Russian, and Ukrainian for Ukrainian. The Library of Congress system of transliteration is used for all these languages and nonstrict transliteration, for Ukrainian, for example, Pervomais’kyi instead of Pervomajs’kyj. The “soft sign” for palatalization is used in personal and in geographical names. In Hebrew the letter tsadi is rendered as ts and the diacritical signs are omitted. Names that have an established transliteration in English are used in their English-language format: Gorky and Yushchenko, not Gorkii and Iushchenko. Places and authors in bibliographic references are rendered in the language of the cited work. In the Russian-language volume of memoirs on the Ukrainian poet, Pervomais’kyi appears as Pervomaiskii.
This book draws heavily from documents in state and private archival collections. References to these documents follow the bibliographic criteria based on the language of the owner. Some documents from private collections do not have pagination.
By and large, the Ukrainian poetry discussed in this book is characterized by a full-rhyme and strict metrical system. For scholarly purposes, I translated the poetic texts literally. I did not try to convey to the English reader the meter and the rhyme of the Ukrainian original. Rhymes appearing in my English translations are occasional. That they sometimes reflect the rhyme and the meter of the original does not imply they can be used as poetic translations. All translations are my own except when indicated otherwise. The sensitive reader should keep in mind that this book was written in English by a Chicago-based author who teaches in English, speaks in Russian, prays in Hebrew, and dreams in Ukrainian.