Eternal Calendar
2021, Translation-in-Progress Grant Recipient
Eternal Calendar «Вічний календар»
Author: Vasyl Makhno
Translator: Ali Kinsella
About the project: With narratives that move back and forth from the 17th century to the present, Vasyl Makhno's Eternal Calendar layers local, Ukrainian history onto global histories. Various ethnic groups come together and interact in the delineated space of a small town in what the author calls the "Brownian motion of history." Through the Barevych and Wolanski families (and eventually the resettled Mekhamets), Eternal Calendar turns a lens to the uninterrupted multiculturalism of Western Ukraine’s Galicia. Over the course of the novel, the region experiences every manner of foreign occupation: from Ottoman rule, to Austria-Hungary, interwar Poland, the Soviet Union, and ultimately independent Ukraine. In some respects, it is the village of Mytnytsia that becomes the main character, welcoming a host of visitors. By focusing on one corner of the earth, while moving from the year 5426 since the creation of the world, to the middle of WWI, to the end of Stalinism, Makhno takes the concept of linear time, jumbles it up, and lays it back on top of itself. The effect is to make the reader consider space and time in new ways, not as an endless progression from one point to another, but in a fractured way that is closer to real memory and experience.
Eternal Calendar was the winner of the 2020 Encounter: Ukrainian-Jewish Literary Prize.