A FEMINIST AND POSTCOLONIAL ANALYSIS OF NATALKA BILOTSERKIVETS’ POEM THROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Abstract

The article offers an in-depth feminist and postcolonial analysis of Natalka Bilotserkivets’ poem “A Hundred Years of Youth” in comparison with its English translation produced by the diasporiс translator Myrosia Stefaniuk. The study focuses how translation strategies shape the representation of female subjectivity, cultural memory, and the political sensitivity of a text rooted in the Ukrainian late-modernist experience. The analysis demonstrates how the translation conveys the poem’s symbolism of resistance, its corporeal-emotional metaphoricity, and its portrayal of youth as a space of simultaneous freedom, loss, tension, and quiet resilience. Special attention is given to the ways in which the translator succeeds in preserving or transforming the rhythm, intonation, and allusions of the original, which constitute Bilotserkivets’ poetic voice and its resonance with Ukrainian historical reality. The article emphasizes that translation functions not only as a means of linguistic representation, but also as a crucial interpretive act through which gender roles, political codes, and national identity are re-conceptualized. The English translation is examined as a mechanism for integrating Ukrainian women’s poetry into broader global and diasporic discourses, where the original text acquires new readings, contexts, and interpretive horizons. The study highlights the key challenges of translating culturally marked poetry and defines the translator’s role as a mediator between the national experience and an Anglophone readership with distinct cultural backgrounds. The author underscores translation as a mechanism for representing Ukrainian women’s writing within the global academic space and stresses that the translation-oriented analysis of poetic texts opens new possibilities for further research on contemporary Ukrainian poetry, particularly within the framework of feminist readings by women-translators.