Project Description

Iryna Starovoyt

Iryna Starovoyt is a poet, essayist and humanist, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University, recurrent visiting fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford. Member of PEN Ukraine, she authored three volumes of poetry. Her poetry has been anthologized, translated into several languages, set to music, embroidered on canvas in Lithuania and fired in ceramics in the USA. She is on the board of the annual Lviv Book Forum, Culture Congress, Drahoman Prize, the Light of Justice Award, and serves as the Head of the Jury for the transnational literary prize UNESCO’s City of Literature based in Lviv.

And in the heart, unsubdued by evil.
— Ivan Svitlychnyi

A letter to speak out, not to say something.
A non-creation of non-art, collective, not mine.
Many, many days spent in energy-saving mode.
Our advantage was once considered vitalism — life-affirmation.
There was so much passion around, such vibrant colors.
And now, like in a hospice, nothing is unfading.
Every day they come for someone.
Sensors have atrophied, it’s hard to feel anything,
except anger or rage.
It’s hard to understand what’s not clear here.
If cows could write, they would also write
about care and guardianship,
about how important it is to be milked carefully and on time.
Caregivers live, like people of war, in circular time,
where there’s no end in sight.
No novelty indeed; we’ve seen it all before,
we’ve gotten used to everything, layer by layer.
No progress, everything is exactly as it was for our grandmothers.
Again and again, without vacation and rest,
without normal sleep, without a comprehensible goal.
Every person needs someone caring, loving,
especially at the beginning and at the end.
Attention is such a rare and generous gift.
Daily care without exaltation, without elevation.
– Hello, we survived the night, we lived to see the morning.
Feed with warmth, wash with fragrance, wipe dry,
listen to the same funny story for the five hundredth time and smile wearily
to understand that you can no longer handle this but handle it somehow.
Take into account the given conditions,
not the ideal ones, as in a school problem.
Care and nursing are blood, pee-poop, and a bowl of vomit.
Even under bombs, especially under bombs,
the crucial question remains the same:
‘How much of someone’s pain and decline are we able to alleviate?’
This is part of the cause-and-effect human connection.
Like a heat-seeking missile launched from MANPADS,
a letter belongs more to the addressee than to the author.