In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk

Your poems, “Algae” and “Babylon,” blend distinctly sharp images with emotion. How have you honed your writing and editing over the years into these poignant pieces?

Thank you, Jenn. I’ve been writing since I was a child, and I’ve come to a number of writing rules for myself empirically. Roughly they could be squeezed to two: 1) writing mainly when “it” comes itself, as an urge, not letting me do other things before I finish a text, not just when I have a spare moment and feel like I would gladly produce a poem now; 2) letting the poem that started going out define its own form and development, being merely its midwife.

How did you create and maintain the rhythm of Babylon? What inspired this poem?

Traveling almost every day in public transport in Munich (within the last 3 years) I enjoy observing faces from everywhere around the world, listening to all the imaginable languages. Surprisingly it’s Munich, not even Berlin, where statistically most of the foreigners live in Germany. Sometimes I close my eyes in an S-Bahn (city train) and immerse in the ornamental waves of different words around me; some of them I understand and it seems to be my secret because people in front of me have no idea that I do, some of them I really don’t understand, and they sound like mystical music to me. I’ve always been fascinated by letters, words, cultures, everything that is promising to bring me a new fairy tale, a new myth, a new colourful piece of mosaic in my world picture. So I was enjoying it, at the same time being very anxious inside, often at the edge of collapse, because of what is happening in my country, and therefore in my family and my life. And the mixture of these feelings is fully present in this poem.  

Concerning the rhythm I would refer to my previous answer. 

The idea of writing it in a mixture of two languages (Ukrainian and Russian) is rooted in my experiments of the University years, when I tried to make the most out of living in a bilingual environment and implementing Ukrainian into a creative field back then, when it was still unfortunately forsaken in a way. 

Also it lay perfectly on the feeling of mine—turning into a Gorgon’s head, split into snakes of different languages I had to use here in Munich, switching them many times a day (English, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Russian), learning a new one (German). All that made my head almost blast at some points.

Algae encompasses this beautiful moment of being and grieving underwater. It’s a very physical and descriptive piece. Can you talk about where the idea came from?

There’s a small town at the sea shore in Bulgaria, where my family and I used to go almost every summer before the full-scale invasion (of Russia in Ukraine). There live parents of my two very close girlfriends, and it would be our gathering point, because one of the girls has been living long on the other continent, and the other one still lives in Russia, where they are originally from. I have never had doubts about my common grounds in political views with them, but it was still hard for me to go there the first summer of my refugee life (2022) when they heartily invited me to come with my children. First, because it was all too fresh, awkward and painful. I had to reassess all my feelings and thoughts upon it. Second, and probably even more painful was the idea of coming there for the first time without my husband, who wasn’t allowed (as all men under 60) to leave Ukraine.

In 2023 they invited me again (us – together with my children). And I agreed. I followed my heart which was saying to me that I love those two friends of mine. Besides that, my son was depressed, missing everyone and everything, and I felt it would do him good to see his close friend (the son of one of the girls).

When we first met with the girl that was still living in Russia, we both cried at the airport, at some points this meeting had seemed impossible to us. And at once, on the road from the airport, we had a long and hard talk—to clear up everything between us and also probably, once again—within us. 

I know that some people, maybe even many people, might blame me for continuing this communication. But I felt I was doing the right thing. I felt we are friends and we are truly close people against all odds. 

I’ve cut off communication with most of my blood relatives from Russia, because the dearest to my heart had expressed a very weird position at the beginning of the full invasion, when I myself was forced to flee with my children out of fear.  

But with these friends of mine we’ve always found comprehension. 

And this poem is mostly about this.

In general it was a very healing experience for me. I felt, if I could return to the place where I was happy, maybe my happy state could also return once.

And also there’s another aspect, a more physical one. That summer, entering the sea, I felt for the first time in my life, I’m neither repelled nor afraid of the seaweed as I previously was. Compared to the fears I went through since I had last seen it, some things have turned upside down for me. Now the algae, that I avoided even touching previously, were just another expression of life on the Earth, another living entity, tender and harmless, unlike some human species appeared to be. 

While both pieces are distinctly different, there’s a theme of hair growing, hair being shed in both. Is this theme intentional?

Not intentional, rather subconscious. Thinking of it now, I can say, it expresses the overgoing changes through something happening to our hair. Stress causes hair to be shed. I was observing with every head wash how much of it stays in my hand, my daughter was losing it, everyone whom I talked to from the Ukrainians out and in Ukraine were losing it. 

I first heard that people lose hair because of stress, when I was a teenager, and my godmother told me about her first strong but unrequited love and the handfuls of her own hair in the shower that struck her… 

It was strange for me to observe how the whole country’s population is losing hair. Something so personal because of something so massive and impersonal. I was sometimes having thoughts that it had also to do with unrequited love, but the other way round. The unrequited sadistic love of a tyrant to the land he considers to be his, but that land doesn’t want him and she (the land) withstands.

At the same time hair was growing, to all of us, and it was a sign that life continued, notwithstanding anything, and also it brought other chores—it had to be cut somehow. Me and many of my refugee comrades tried to spare money, because a lot of us left homes with almost nothing and though we received help, no one knew what the next day was about to bring. Even the haircut seemed to be a luxury. We asked one another to give us a haircut. 

At some point, I noticed, I started measuring time with haircuts, with hair getting in the eyes, and begging to be cut. 

The waiting for an end to that period appeared to be longer than expected. I’m still in Munich. Temporarily. As nylon. 

I stopped counting haircuts. I don’t know now how many times I had to cut it while here in Germany.

Both poems are translated into English from Ukrainian. What is the process of translating your own work like? What shifts in the narrative because of the change in language?

Translating is one of my favourite processes. Not necessarily of my own poetry. In general. I love the long, calm, thorough translation process. If not by writing, that is my second favourite way of earning money. I would love to be translating literature, especially poetry as much as possible. It’s again connected to my love of different languages and different cultures. The birth of a poem in every new language creates a new poem, even though I’m adept at the most precise word by word translation, with minimal translator’s artistic intrusions, only conveying the sense.

I usually always translate a text using a tool app, get myself a dummy, then start sawing and honing it out endlessly. And, oh, I enjoy that!

What themes or topics does your writing return to?

When I see something habitual for me with a new lense, or find a new way to return balance and harmony within me—I would write about it.

What are some of your favorite books? Which authors have inspired your work?

I’ll stick to poetry in the answer, otherwise it’ll be too long.

Ukrainian: Mykola Vingranovs’kyj, Vasyl Stus, Majk Johansen, 

modern—Borys Khersonskiy, Vasyl Gerasymyuk, Ivan Malkovych, Kolya Kulinich, Roma Makljuk, Dmytro Maistrenko, Oleksandr Shumilin, Liudmila Khersonskaya, Lesyk Panasiuk, Daryna Gladun, Maksym Kryvtsov (killed in the war in 2024), Oleg Kyselytsia.

Italian: Bruno Tognolini

English language poetry: John Donne, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Ann Sexton

modern—Joan Naviyuk Kane, Ron Padgett, Moheb Saliman, Ed Skoog, Stuart Ross, Logan February

German modern: Karin Fellner, Nora Zapf, Sara Gomez-Schüller, Tristan Marquardt, Theresa Seraphine

Austrian: Ilse Kilic 

What are you working on now?

I’m translating now my Munich-period poetry into English (apart from those that were originally written in English), and a very special wondrous Person, Poet and Translator—Karin Fellner—is translating it into German with the idea to publish my first book of poetry in German translations.

Sasha (Oleksandra) Lavrenchuk was born in 1982 in Kyiv (Ukraine) and started to write poetry at age four when, with help from her granny Galya, she produced her first work in red pen and folded sheets of paper. Lavrenchuk has published three books: #1, Toothless Goluba Is Getting Her Teeth, and Tourmaline. For the last decade, Lavrenchuk has been working as a screenwriter. Since fleeing to Munich with her children in 2022, she took part in the exhibition “Border//lines” and in poetry readings “meine drei lyrischen ichs” and “Kooperationen 2024.”