Elena Mikhailik’s poem “From tundra woods” deploys a variety of sources: the song referred to in the first line, dating from the Russian Civil War that followed the 1917 October Revolution, is surely not familiar to many Anglophone readers, so we took the liberty of adding a footnote to identify it. At least the footnote contains a stanza from a song! in Russian and in my quick and dirty translation—so those who feel allergic to footnotes in poetry may forgive us.

Russophone poetry, like Eastern European poetry in general, offers untitled poems much more often than does Anglophone poetry; such poems go by their first line, with only the first word and any proper nouns capitalized. Other references here—to early verses of the Judeo-Christian Bible (“the daughters of men”) and the Gospel (Mary, unnamed but clearly identifiable at the end)—should be easy for educated Western readers to recognize. The boiler oil, subway (metro, underground) and glass are also only too familiar to modern readers, as is the molecular composition of bones, ideas and swans.

Mikhailik emigrated with her family from the former Soviet Union not long after it broke up and Ukraine declared its independence, shortly after receiving her undergraduate degree in Odesa. She completed her PhD already in Australia, in Sydney, where she now teaches. Her witty, multi-referential poetry is strongly marked by literature, especially the biography and writings of Varlam Shalamov, an author who wrote about the Gulag camps of Kolyma—a far northeastern part of the continent of Asia, where he was imprisoned for many years—in stories that are simultaneously heartrending testimonies to suffering and absurdity and finely crafted, striking works of art. Shalamov consistently said that NO GOOD came from the Gulag, that it perverted everyone involved; Mikhailik’s study of his work nevertheless emphasizes the many aesthetically powerful parts of his prose tales. Her own poetry instead tends to refer to his biography and to tie it together with the fate of everyone in the Soviet Union.

Mikhailik’s natal city of Odesa was founded on the shore of the Black Sea and quickly became an important port. Its history has always been multinational, bringing together Jews and Ukrainians, Romanians and Armenians and Russians. The Soviet period solidified its reputation for humor (often Jewish-inflected: Isaac Babel and the witty duo Ilf and Petrov were all from there) while pressuring everyone to speak and work in Russian rather than the other possible languages. Mikhailik has continued to write in Russian in emigration, and her published work in Russia has garnered praise and prizes. Her poems are often set nowhere and nowhen, not merely cosmopolitan but participating in multiple universes. Translating them is a challenge and a pleasure.

Her poems have appeared in four books, mentioned in her brief biography, and in numerous journal selections. Mikhailik also frequently posts her poems old and new on Facebook. For the Russophone diaspora (as well as writers from other countries) Facebook functions as a way to stay in touch with readers as well as with friends and former neighbors, especially if those posting and reading are “of a certain age.” Mikhailik’s poems there will garner hundreds of “likes,” “loves,” and “cares.” I am particularly fond of the two echidnas, symmetrically posed beside what seems to be a vase of food, who grace the cover photo of her Facebook page.

I’ve had the pleasure before of working with a poet who has good English, but Mikhailik—living in an Anglophone country for decades now—knows enough that she could really translate her own work, except that she is busy writing in Russian. I constantly appreciate her advice when I’m decoding less evident references, and she offers brilliantly creative suggestions when some part of the alloy is not yet ringing.

Many Russophone poets and writers in Ukraine have switched to Ukrainian, and Mikhailik got good grades in Ukrainian classes in school, but I’m sure it is harder to switch with confidence if you don’t live in the milieu. And of course one is welcome to assert that one’s own language, the language in which one make art, is not the property of others, whatever they might claim.