Translation as Creative Writing 

As part of our Poetry Craft series, Steve Komarnyckyj discusses the craft of translation in creative writing. 

Do you think every act of writing is a kind of translation? 

We are all translators. Everything we do is an act of translation. Our brains interpret the sensory data flooding our perceptions. Each of us inhabits a world that we have “translated“ into existence. Every time we speak or write we are translating our souls into language. So, yes, every act of writing creatively is an act of translation.  

However, literary translation is the act of translating between two languages, at least two speech communities. So you are conveying the soul of a writer using your own language as the frail vehicle. Each language each nation each people have their own story their own unique reality. This makes translating between languages making another people’s literature part of your literature uniquely difficult. However, any poetic act is a translation of your soul into sound and vision. 

My course on Fidelity and Betrayal is about translation in poetry in its largest sense, conveying your unique voice into a language others can understand.  

Tony Harrison worked hard to keep faithful to his roots in his writing while also reaching new readers. Do you think all poets face a version of that same challenge — staying true to where they come from, but still wanting to be understood elsewhere? 

Harrison is a poet quite close to me, although I am of part Ukrainian heritage I grew up in West Yorkshire, in Huddersfield like Simon Armitage. Auden, another Yorkshire writer once said that poets hope to “to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere”. However, our three Yorkshires were very different. Simon is from Marsden, a beautiful mill village at the end of the Colne Valley. Harrison was from the terraced housing of Leeds but went to Grammar school- the fusion of a classical education with roots their is a strong part of his local but universal flavour. Auden was from a middle class background in York but grew up near Birmingham and went to independent schools. He is a brilliant writer but his English always seems more universal to me, more distant from dialect. Armitage and Harrison have a very strong Yorkshire feeling. Armitage is of course a brilliant writer but with less a classical feel he pulls off the trick of writing a brilliant poem that gives you the impression of an admittedly very articulate voice simply speaking. Each of these poets tried and is trying to reach an audience of many different English speaking worlds and indeed to reach through languages. This demands that we abandon part of the story of our lives as we live them to craft a narrative that speaks to others.  

I cannot speak to the choices they made or make. My Yorkshire was the pebble dashed housing of a council estate, my Ukrainian father with all the legacies that Ukraine brings and my dyspraxia (which I only recently realised affected me despite a lifetime of chaos, smashed crockery. So my translation from Ukrainian oddly relates very much to my upbringing in Yorkshire and my need to convey part of myself to an audience that is usually unfamiliar with Yorkshire and Ukraine. However, through exploring literary translation and poetry as an art of translation we can all enrich our own writing.  

Harrison also mixed classical forms with a strong local voice. What can poets learn from that balance between tradition and individuality? 

This is a question which is slipperier than a jellied eel! Every poet exists in relation to traditions and expresses their individuality by compliance with and rebelling against them. It is less a balance more a continuous dialogue in which we seek to use the tradition to express our difference with the tradition. Harrison wrote a poem Me Tarzan in which he gave a cameo of himself yelling “Ah bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose” when his friends wanted him to go “Laikin“ (a dialect word derived from time when Vikings settled Yorkshire). That poem speaks to me as someone who has travelled from his roots but tried to stay faithful to them and who grew up using that word and sounding not too different to him, but with some of the peculiar ESOL intonation of my Ukrainian dad who taught me to speak. However, I have written a series called the dyspraxia sonnets which break the form because that was a playful way to express my own unique identity. I know that they have spoken to people with dyspraxia.  

When you’re translating, how do you decide when to stay faithful and when to “betray” the original? Is betrayal sometimes the most creative choice?

This is a complicated question- popularisers of literature, such as Lowell who produced translations of Russian poetry that annoyed the morally dubious Russian author Nabokov. When I began translating Ukrainian poetry Ukraine had been displaced in western and global culture its medieval history and literature stolen by Muscovy. Western academia and culture was full of ugly misconceptions about Ukraine. So the role of a Ukrainian literary translator was to break through that wall and to write translations that were not academic but read like poems written in English. This meant recasting the complex grammar and syntax of some Ukrainian poetry, reordering its beautiful fluid sentences… I avoid trying to capture dialect too partly because it sounds clunking and drags in unwanted associations i.e. People in West Ukraine do not wear flat caps. My poetry translations have reached an English audience with my version of one of Ihor Pavlyuk’s brilliantly original poems featured as a Guardian Poem Of The Week.

I have recently translated The Girl With The Teddy Bear a startlingly original novel of doomed love for Dedalus Books and had to include many footnotes to avoid a betrayal that would have lost much of the novel’s roots in a particular time and place. More or less simultaneously I translated six female Ukrainian authors for Dedalus and had to decide on whether to include dialect.  

Finally, what advice would you give to poets who are curious about translation?  

I would advise them to sign up on my course! However, I would also urge poets who wanted to explore how to become that local but prized valley cheese to join us. Just as every act of writing is an act of translation, so every translation is an act of writing that enriches us.  

As for poets pursuing translation I would advise them to look away from the literary traditions that have been aggressively promoted in English and look to the literatures of those peoples whose voice was stolen. By bringing something new into the English language space you may well enrich your own writing. Studying another poetic tradition, as Eliot, Hughes and Heaney and many others did enriches your own poetic practice because it forces you to reinvent your own language.

Steve is running his course Fidelity & Betrayal: Linguistic Translation with us this Spring, starting on 21 January 2026. To find out more and book your place please visit this page.

Steve Komarnyckyj is a poet and literary translator who is addicted to rescuing disabled dogs from Bosnia. His literary translations and poems have appeared or featured in Index on Censorship, The Guardian, The Economist, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of three PEN awards and a well-regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating “what it means to be human” (Sean Street). His next two translated books, The Girl With The Teddy Bear (Viktor Domontovych) and Take 6: Six Ukrainian Women Writers will be published by Dedalus Books and are financed by the Ukrainian Book Institute and English PEN.