The Tears & Smiles of Things by Andriy Sodomora Translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi, Review by Nicole Yurcaba

The Tears & Smiles of Things by Andriy Sodomora

Translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi

Review by Nicole Yurcaba

Publisher: Academic Studies Press

Publication Date: 02/13/2024

ISBN:  979-8887194387

Pages: 132

Time Well-Spent with the Philosopher of Western Ukraine: A Review of Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears & Smiles of Things

Andriy Sodomora’s The Tears and Smiles of Things arrives to English-language audiences thanks to the collaborative translation efforts of Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jaszi. Like Lviv, the city so integral to Sodomora’s stories and reflections, these prose pieces  are philosophical gems rooted in world literature, ancient Greece, and the many interconnections which make this world truly wondrous. Sodomora’s vignettes and essays explore the heavy, emotionally-laden “big things:” loneliness, happiness, and aging which determine an action an individual takes in their everyday life. Simultaneously, the “small things”—like a stranger’s passing glance while walking down the street—which people disregard or take for granted, also receive careful celebration and preservation. The collection’s portrayal and contemplation of materialism—and its influence and necessity— in one’s society adds yet another layer to Sodomora’s philosophical depth

“In Lieu of a Preface: People Amidst Things” opens The Tears & Smiles of Things. In this essay, Sodomora examines humanity’s relationship with the materialistic trappings ensnaring individuals in their everyday lives: “There are people’s tears for things that disappear, but also the tears of objects for people who are shorter-lived than things themselves.” Sodomora asserts that these objects belong not only to individuals, but also to an individual’s memories. Therefore, the objects shape one’s soul. Sodomora dissects this relationship even more by dividing the material world from the spiritual world, saying that the current world—the “man-made, virtual one”—blurs and people “seem to have disconnected themselves from the living world of nature.” Sodomora affirms, “But we have to live in that world.” This brief acceptance is a call for a new pursuit of beauty and a reimagined lyricism to convey such beauty.

Sodomora’s evocative story “The Mitten” follows a mysterious narrator as they follow a woman after finding what they presume is the woman’s mitten. The woman seems to not realize that she has lost the mitten, and the speaker hesitates to approach the woman and offer her the mitten. Most profound in the story is the speaker’s indecisiveness, which, as readers learn, causes them to not return the mitten after all. Reinforcing the speaker’s behavior is the story’s concise, brief structure. Each word, each sentence holds and creates emotional weight. The story’s turning point occurs when the speaker states, “Maybe I did in fact return the woman’s mitten, for the line between reality and fantasy is so tenuous.” The story’s structure and image-filled language helps create the sensation of the blurring between reality and fantasy, and this compression parallels the personal change the speaker discusses as the story concludes. They are not the person they were formerly, that only “the heart’s memory, a delicate thread that binds us to eternity, tries to recover the unrecoverable.” Thus, the story tightly knits regret, indecision, and the failure of memory into a story about human failure. 

In “A Room with Shadows,” an angry winter pierces the streets of old Lviv where a speaker discovers a bare window where an old woman “wrapped in some garment, her head covered by a dark kerchief” sits. Again, society’s materialistic trappings merge with human existence. The woman sits by a “pile of stuff—old clothes.” Nature enters the story in the form of snow, which becomes its own character. The snow creates an illusion, and once again the concept of reality blurring with fantasy and what is imagined emerges: “And it seemed like the snow was falling not only outside the window but there, inside the room, landing heavily on the shoulders of that solitary woman.” The speaker continues, contemplating the snow’s “unvaried descent and the unearthly silence” which has “always existed.” The snow acts as a force which compresses time and space. The speaker concludes the story by describing the snow “heavy on the shoulders of that recluse,” and it becomes oppressive, fortifying  the woman’s—and the speaker’s—isolation from society.

In “The Silver-Haired Wind,” Sodomora’s writing resonates with contemporary Ukrainian writers like A.D. Sui and their story “Svitla,” because of the focus on how returning to nature heals an individual. The speaker’s personification is respectful, as though the wind is an elder whose wisdom is scared. The speaker’s tone about the wind is affectionate: “And now when each year is newly touched by autumn, I listen for the wind’s voice.” “The Silver-Haired Wind” returns to the concepts first established in “In Lieu of a Preface: People Amidst Things.” The speaker establishes the juxtaposition existing in the modern world between natural places and the virtual realm in which humanity thrives: “And sometimes I get the feeling that someone is talking to me, no longer from rustling pages—from leaves of paper—but from the massive worldwide web with words illuminated on a monitor.” The speaker’s description underpins the isolation separation from nature fuels, not only for the speaker, but also for “the silver-haired wind,” which they describe as feeling “loneliness.”

“The Garden” is another story in which an attentive speaker personifies. The personification reminds readers of nature’s necessity in a world in which nature is swiftly disappearing. “The Garden” is powerful because its speaker advocates that each individual has their own garden. The garden is not so much physical, per say, as it is spiritual: “It’s true in the end: wherever the soul finds itself and no matter how good it feels there, a time comes when, before moving onward, it rushes home—to its garden.” The garden in Sodomora’s essay becomes a place of literal and figurative sustenance. Bera pears thrive, and “two sprawling cherry trees” offer cherries whose “acidity was perfectly balanced by sweetness.” The focus on the balance of the fruit’s piquancy is brief but significant. After all, the gardens portrayed in the essay are as much places of balance as they are places of healing. They are places in which life’s cycles unfold, season after season, including seasons of war. The speaker nonchalantly alludes to the horrors of World War II, which ravaged Ukraine: “Nor is there any trace of the deep caterpillar tracks of German tanks.” The allusion is important, given the images of heavily mined fields and farmlands which have emerged in the media since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, the image is not only important because of its resonance with current events; it is also a dynamic aide-memoire that just as Ukraine healed itself from previous wars, it will eventually heal itself from the current one as well.

“For a book is a physical body, not just some letters on a screen,” states the speaker in “The Credenza.” The Tears & Smiles of Things is the type of book that should be held in one’s hand and read slowly. Reading Sodomora’s texts is not only an enlightening intellectual and philosophical experience; it is also a physical one. Its poesy resounds loudly in a world where poetics seem to be lost and forgotten. Its erudite observations of nature, human behavior, and human existence establish Andriy Sodomora as western Ukraine’s—and one of the world’s—extant, needed philosophers.

Andriy Sodomora is a Ukrainian translator, writer, and professor of Classics at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. His translation oeuvre includes an astounding number of volumes from ancient Greek and Roman authors. At the age of 85, Sodomora remains extremely prolific, successfully combining translation and creative writing.

Roman Ivashkiv is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Alabama. He researches transmesis (i.e., fictional representation of translation and translators) in contemporary Ukrainian literature. With Canadian writer Erín Moure, he published an English translation of the Ukrainian writer Yuri Izdryk’s poetry collection entitled Smokes (2019).

Sabrina Jaszi is a writer and literary translator. She co-founded Turkoslavia, a translators’ collective and journal of Turkic and Slavic literature. Her translations include the works of Reed Grachev, O’tkir Hoshimov, Nadezhda Teffi, Alisa Ganieva, and Semyon Lipkin.

Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Lit Gazeta, Chytomo, Bukvoid, and The New Voice of Ukraine. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books. Her poetry collection The Pale Goth is available from Alien Buddha Press. 

19 March 2025