Who am I?

I was born in 1954 in Ardeer, in the working-class western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. I read avidly as a young lad and a teenager, tried my hand at writing, but despite some success with a few short stories, never felt I had anything original to say. I did translate a story or two and enjoyed it very much.

Graduated (just) from the University of Melbourne as an Electrical Engineer in 1975 and took a year off working as a telephone repairman, which I enjoyed immensely, in the Dandenong Ranges, until they made me apply for an engineering job with Telecom Australia. Very quickly I realized engineering was not for me, but I bumbled my way through long enough to pay off my house. I started translating full-time in 1979 and was soon off to Canada in the early 1980s, with dreams of translating and publishing in a country with some 800,000 people with Ukrainian roots. I did manage to translate a few books there, but they still have yet to be published. I also found the Canadian Ukrainians were not really interested in novels translated from Ukrainian, and after several years returned to Melbourne for a second stint at engineering.

In 1988 I went off to Kyiv, Ukraine for several months to study translation, but really spent more time meeting people and writers – the course was very basic, designed for future teachers. In 1989 I left my job as an engineer a second time and “emigrated” to Kyiv, translating books and editing texts for Mystetstvo Publishers. I also worked as an English language editor for a business newsletter “Window on Ukraine” and a US news agency publishing a news-sheet for expats living in Ukraine. In 1993 I returned to Melbourne and was joined shortly thereafter by Victoria, with whom I had worked in Kyiv. We married later that year and I am grateful to her for being supportive of my bookselling, translation, and publishing business.

Many of the books I have translated have not been funded by grants. I have been driven by a desire to present to the English-speaking reader the great wealth of Ukrainian literature, and in a language that is easy to read and yet reflects the author’s style. For example, Kaczurowsky’s Because Deserters are Immortal contains simple short sentences. At first my editor tried to combine the sentences, until he realized that having been a poet as well, the author’s characteristic style was the short unburdened sentence. The exact opposite of this was Antonenko-Davydovych’s Behind the Curtain, with very long, cumbersome sentences, which sometimes needed to be broken down.

There is also a story behind every book I have translated and each has been a learning experience for me. I have never been much into the classics, but after I reluctantly took on Ivan Franko’s Boryslav in Flames, I felt like I had made friends with the author, and when I translated his short stories Down and Out in Drohobych, it was without the apprehension of the previous title of his. 

I have always been fascinated by Vynnychenko’s play Black Panther and Polar Bear, for it highlights the struggle a creative person faces, when trying to create a masterpiece and being confronted by the material needs of everyday existence and family. I started to translate it after an email from some academic in Ukraine, who claimed they wanted to stage the play with famous foreign actors and needed a good text to work with. There was talk of money being able to be found for this project, but the more I translated, the cooler the fellow became, and soon I realized that I would be translating it for the sheer pleasure alone.

Pot-boilers are the worst – you get paid well by people with little or no talent to translate their work, and usually they never get published or if they are, the surviving descendants throw away the books as soon as their well-meaning relative dies. They do however give you the funds to be able to translate good literature that no one is prepared to fund.

Translation pays very little for the time you spend, but it gives enormous satisfaction, at least to me, and has enabled me to meet and get to know such great writers as Ulas Samchuk, Anatoly Dimarov, Maria Matios and many others.

As the sphere of book publishing has drastically changed with “Print on Demand” and free publication platforms such as Amazon and Lulu, thanks to the help of my son Anton, I have been able to pull out of the long drawer books that I translated many years ago which were never published for lack of funds, and am gradually making them available to a world-wide audience.