The Yellow Prince

The Yellow Prince

Dec 01, 2022

Okay, so... I indeed decided to start translating The Yellow Prince. I think it is very important that more people read it. It's about 250 pages, and I know it's a great undertaking, especially in conditions like this, with 4 hours of power at a time. I also know that it is going to be a painful job. This book still gives me nightmares 17 years after reading it. Now that we are going through a similar experience, it is going to be double hard. But even more reason to do the translation so it reaches more people.

I realize it's a great undertaking, so to keep myself motivated and to give me a sense of progress I will be posting it here chapter by chapter, and I will appreciate it if those who read it give me feedback, so I have support through those 250 pages and don't get discouraged midway. But as much as I would appreciate your support, please be aware that it's a heavy-HEAVY read. It literally describes cannibalism, not in a horror-story way, but in an it-actually-happened sort of way. So please only do it if you are in a place emotionally where you can handle it.

I will also not stress too much about the translation being perfect. Even though I do speak English pretty well (if I do say so myself), quality text translation is a whole other skill/profession/art form. I do not have a lot of experience in it, but I will just do my best, and focus on quantity not quality for now because I believe that it is better to edit an imperfect text later than to drag your feet trying to make it perfect and eventually abandoning it.

So that's it. From now my blog will have a new category "yellow prince" so you'll be able to find all of it easily in one place.


Now a little bit about the book and the author and why I make a big deal out of it.

Vasyl Barka was born in 1908 (which makes him 24 at the time of Holodomor) in the Poltava region of Ukraine, or as it was called back then - Poltava guberniya of the Russian Empire. Yes, he witnessed the revolution, the Holodomor, and two world wars. He got a Ph.D. from Moscow university in 1940, in 1941 he joined the People's Militia, was injured in 1942, and strangers were taking care of him despite the risk to their personal safety as the German Nazis punished those who helped the soviet soldiers. In 1943 he was mobilized with the rest of the men to work in Germany and got separated from his family never to see them again.

Eventually, he fled to the USA in 1953. There he published his "Yellow Prince" novel in 1963, which is why it boggles me that a novel written in he USA was apparently never translated into English. He based the book on the diary of one of the victims that he got his hands on in 1958.

He was one of the first people in the world to raise the question of Holodomor, tried his hardest to draw the attention of the world community to this crime, and was convinced that the Soviet leaders had to be tried the same as Nazi Germany leaders.

He died in 2003 in New York at the age of 94. At the time when I read his book, he was still alive, and my teacher in school told us about him and said that he was living a hard life where he would work for a period of time some heavy-labor short-term jobs like a loader, would earn some money that would buy him some canned food for a while and would quit and continue his studies of the Ukrainian literature until he ran out of the food.

The Yellow Prince was nominated for a Noble Prize twice... but still not translated into English? Seriously, am I just blind? Can't I find the translation? Maybe it's just called something else? What the hell, people?

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