Anna Malihon / Photo by Anastasia Telikova / PEN Ukraine

In June 2025 I had the pleasure of interviewing Olena Jennings at the Us&Them writer-translator reading at Molasses Books in Brooklyn, where she shared her translations of Anna Malihon’s poetry collection Girl with a Bullet.

Daria Knurenko: Hello, Olena. I admire your work with Ukrainian literature, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to interview you today.

Olena Jennings: Thank you. I’m really honored.

Knurenko: I’d like to ask how your experience translating Ukrainian literature been influenced by the underrepresentation of both this language and literature in the English-speaking context?

Jennings: I first started translating Ukrainian literature back around 2003. I want to say it was after I had been to the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, and my roommate, who was Ukrainian, sent me some books in Ukrainian, and one of them was by Natalka Bilotserkivets, whom I really admired, and I loved the book, so I started translating some of her work, mainly because, even though I understood Ukrainian, I wanted to understand it better. I wanted to understand the poems better, so I thought if I looked up the words and carefully went over the poem and translated it myself, that I would understand it in a way that I wouldn’t have understood just by reading it. 

So, that was my first translation, and I wasn’t really thinking about whether she was underrepresented in the English language or literature at that time. Definitely, with the full-scale invasion, I decided it was important to start translating more Ukrainian literature, so that’s when I started translating more work than I had been. I was always working on something, whereas before I would just work on something when I had time or when I had the inspiration, but here I felt like it really needed to be done.

With the full-scale invasion, I decided it was important to start translating more Ukrainian literature.

Knurenko: What made you interested in Ukrainian literature in the first place?

Jennings: Well, I grew up speaking Ukrainian, and my grandparents were from a town outside of Kharkiv called Derhachi, which is actually mentioned in a poem that I’m going to read tonight. My mom used to read Ukrainian stories with me when I was growing up, so I was always interested in Ukrainian literature and in literature in general. Then, during my experience at Harvard’s Summer School, when I took a class with Professor George Grabowicz, he went over the history of Ukrainian literature, which I found really fascinating, and I found it more important to translate as well because of movements like the Executed Renaissance, and I feel that now we have our own Executed Renaissance with what’s going on in Ukraine, sadly.[i]

I feel that now we have our own Executed Renaissance with what’s going on in Ukraine, sadly.

Knurenko: I was wondering, as a writer and poet yourself, how has your experience of translating Anna Malihon’s (b. 1984) work influenced by your own understanding and relationship with language?

Jennings: She has a lot of interesting images that are put together into a poem that sometimes don’t seem connected, and I feel like it became my job as a translator to connect them, maybe for myself only. That was similar to my poetry writing because, when I write, I take images that are very distinct and try to connect them, and I feel like that’s what makes the poem. It was in this way of translating Anna’s work that the images were very different, but I tried to connect them in my line and in my translation, and that’s what rolled the translation.

Knurenko: The collection Girl with a Bullet (World Poetry, 2025) is speaking to a very specific cultural context and experience. How has your translation work been informed by the understanding that some of those references and experiences might not be as familiar to an English-speaking audience?

Jennings: I think that came through in our selection of the poems because we didn’t use all the poems in all the collections, just ones that she and I thought would speak more to an English-speaking audience, so they were carefully curated to make the cut.

Knurenko: And how would you estimate the reception of this collection of poetry?

Jennings: It came out in October 2025, so I haven’t thought about the reception too much, but I had a reading at Within Pattern Bookstore, which is in Milwaukee, and people that I didn’t know were very excited about it, so that made me feel like, okay, it’s off to a good start on its journey as a book.

Knurenko: Are you planning on translating any more of Anna’s work in the near future?

Jennings: Not in the near future, but it’s definitely a possibility. I’ve been working with another poet, Oksana Lebedivna, and we applied for a grant, so now I’m wondering what happens next. I feel like my selection of who I translate is a bit serendipitous. I met Anna in 2016, and this other poet, Taras Malkovych, suggested that I translate her work, and I translated a small selection for a chapbook that we published for the New York City Poetry Festival, and then we happened to meet in person in Ukraine and continued to work together. She continued to send me poems, and everything came together so that we could do this book; everything worked together to make the book possible.