Road to Asmara
2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
Road to Asmara
«Дорога на Асмару»
Author: Serhiy Synhaivsky
Translator: Ksenia Maryniak
About the project: In the words of Ukrainian writer, Oksana Zabuzhko: “Road to Asmara is the best book written in Ukrainian in the past decade. This book has a great future not only because it’s well written. It is essentially the first Ukrainian viewpoint on the history of the Soviet Union’s colonial wars in the 20th century. It has yet to reach the wider public, with the exception of the no-nonsense men who were forced into Soviet Army duty, if not in Afghanistan then other military arenas [...] where our boys got sent as cannon fodder in those ‘glorious’ times. And this is precisely the contribution that Ukrainian literature is called upon to make in the world. European journalists I know, who’ve heard there’s a Ukrainian novel written about the 1984–86 famine in Ethiopia, have asked me when the English translation is coming out so that they can read it.”
In the words of a recent review by Ihor Siundiukov: "As with any true and personal story that takes place during a period of transition, the many issues raised by this novel are still relevant today. Some of them are unfamiliar, if not unprecedented, in Ukrainian literature: Soviet racism, the price of independence and personal freedom, individual responsibility and commanding officers’ responsibility, and whether love has any chance at all in this world..."