БІЖЕНСТВО ЯК ПОЕТИЧНА РЕФЛЕКСІЯ В АНГЛІЙСЬКІЙ ТА УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ ЛІТЕРАТУРАХ

The forced migration of Ukrainians after the Russian full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022 affected not only the economic and social contexts of Europe, but also manifested itself in art. It was Ukrainian poetry, as a dynamic artistic structure, that was one of the first to take on the functions of recording the memory of forced displacement and talking about the trauma, formed a new narrative thanks to its expressive, plastic, short verbal form. It is primarily about the poetic works of Svitlana Didukh-Romanenko (Boryspil, now - Lithuania), Lyudmila Horova (Kyiv, now – USA), Anna Maligon (Kyiv, now – France), Oksana Stomina (Mariupol, now – Germany), Tetyana Yarovytsina (Kyiv, now – Belgium). Last year, an anthology of Ukrainian poems about the war «INVASION. Ukrainian Poems about the War» (2022) in English translation was released. The publication compiled the poetic texts of fifty-five Ukrainian poets, including many poems by forced migrants.

The new Ukrainian war poetry, and refugee poetry in particular, is quite often devoid of rich metaphors, its language is close to colloquial, it imitates a short message in a messenger (fragmented short sentences, idioms, understandable from the context, conventional abbreviations, anglicisms). At the same time, such poetic art can be aesthetically sublime, somewhat hermetic, when meanings are double-coded and similar to messages in the language of symbols.

In Great Britain, five years apart, two poetic anthologies of poems related to the theme of forced migration were published. Not so long ago, a collective collection of poems «Over Land, Over Sea: Poems for Those Seeking Refuge» (2015) appeared, which united 102 poems of English-speaking poets from different countries of the world. Later, another poetry anthology «Border Lines. Poems of Migration» (2020), which included 112 poems by poets from all over the world, conditionally divided into 6 sections («Moving», «Promised Land"», «Fatherland», «Work», «Language» and «Community»). Both books presented the texts of world-famous writers (Mahmoud Darwish, Andre Shedid), as well as many modern authors (Alan Baker, Kathleen Bell, A.S. Clark, Carrie Featherstone, Chrissy Gittins, Mark Goodwin, Tanya Gershman, Siobhan Logan, Emma Lee, Carol Leaming, Joan Limburg, Aoife Mannix, Roy Marshall, Hubert Moore, Thomas Orsag-Lund, Simon Perrill, Sheena Pugh, Mahendra Solanki, Maria Taylor, Rory Waterman, Gregory Woods and Siobhan Logan, among others).

Suffering and sadness due to the loss of the Motherland and the inability to return home became a common cluster for Ukrainian and English-language poetry on the topic of forced migration, which can be conventionally divided into the following frames: 1) native home – threatened territory; 2) forced displacement: the way to salvation and new threats; 3) painful loss of one's identity; 4) anger and aggression, ubiquitous war; 5) homeless homelessness; 6) the role of the victim; 7) searching for a new destination; 8) the way home. Each of the poetic areas has unique metaphors, symbols and images (for example, the image of the ocean, inherent in English-language poetry, or the image of a bird, typical of Ukrainian). At the same time, such excellent English-speaking and Ukrainian poetic practices are united by the desire to illuminate the trauma of forced resettlement, to retell the experience of a survivor, and thus to include one's own memories, reflections and experiences in the creation of migration artistic discourse.