Over two months, Scottish poets Christopher Whyte and Roseanne Watt translated entries from the “Dictionary of War” into two of Scotland’s languages — Gaelic and Shetlandic. These languages have their own history of displacement, struggles for visibility and preservation, the project website notes.
“Dictionary of War” is a book compiled by poet and translator Ostap Slyvynskyi, created on the basis of real testimonies collected in the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In Ukrainian, the book was published by Vivat in 2023.
The translated chapters are available on the project website.
The translation is the result of a partnership between the TRANSLATORIUM festival and StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, under which a translation of the Ukrainian collection of texts about the war into Scotland’s languages was commissioned. The project is being delivered with the support of British Council Scotland (Momentum Follow-Up Fund) in partnership with Creative Scotland.