They Invented a New Language for War

Opinion|They Invented a New Language for War

Odesa is to Ukraine as New York City is to the United States: a port city, a center of commerce and a place where languages, cultures and traditions collide, then meld into an instantly recognizable way of being. It’s vulgar. It’s dirty. It’s highbrow. Odesa loves its opera, its theater and, perhaps most of all, its poets, who since Russia’s invasion have written a chronicle of life in wartime.

They are doing it in regular posts on social media, as well as in more traditional publications and in live performances. They are recording war in a modern way, often in daily dispatches that draw immediate responses. Publishing on social networks, these poets are writing for one another, for their community, and for their city — and their posts tell us more about life during wartime than can any history book or newspaper article. In unprecedented breadth and detail, the poets of Odesa have spent the last three years investigating how war changes people and places. When the war stops, as it may soon, they will still be there, investigating whatever it leaves in its wake.

I have been reading these dispatches from the beginning. Last month, I went to Odesa to meet some of the poets I had been reading. What I found is that the war did more than change their city. It changed the language — the languages — they use to describe it.

One of the oldest of these chroniclers is Maria Galina, 66, who has posted near daily updates since the first day of the full-scale invasion. For two and a half years, she began her dispatches with the words “dobroho ranku” — “good morning” in Ukrainian. After her husband, the poet Arkady Shtypel, died in October, Galina took a short break. When she returned, she was using a different salutation: “New day, new morning.” Galina and Shtypel, who lived in Russia for most of their lives, had moved to Odesa just days before the full-scale invasion. She has said that, as someone who had also written science fiction, she was equipped to foresee the unimaginable. But maybe it was not science fiction but poetry, the art of intimations and intuitions, that enabled some writers to describe what had not yet happened.