Ilya Kaminsky — Dancing in Odessa

Process Note

This translation became an explicit test of my core claim: the video is not an "interpretation" of the poem but a new ontological emergence—another work whose meaning is reconstituted by the conditions of its making. After the invasion of Ukraine, the poem could not arrive in the same contemporary field it once did. "Odessa" could not function as a stable referent; witness could not remain historical in a comfortable way.

The translation therefore had to acknowledge that its present-tense reception was altered, and that the act of re-making the poem now carried a different ethical weight.

Working directly with Ilya, and working with a Ukrainian videographer at the outset of the war, meant the adaptation was created inside an ongoing rupture rather than at a reflective distance from it. That collaboration didn't merely support production—it generated the conditions under which the translation could be accountable to the present.

The work wasn't permitted to behave like a neutral transfer of established meaning, because the world in which the poem is heard had changed. In that sense, the translation's "faithfulness" depended on recognizing that the poem's address—its relation to community, displacement, and testimony—had acquired new stakes.

Methodologically, I still began with a constraint record (the original poem), but I treated historical pressure as part of the constraint system. The translation's task became: how do you carry forward the poem's organizing energies while allowing the new work to register the shift in contemporary meaning that the invasion produced?

The film's existence becomes part of the argument: the translation is a co-originating act that remains answerable to what the poem did, while also acknowledging that what the poem does now is different because the world now demands a different hearing.