An evocative collection of vignettes and essays from Ukraine’s “voice” of classical antiquity, now available in English for the first time.

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.

This book has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program.

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.

Markiyan Dombrovskyi is a Ukrainian classical philologist at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. He researches classical literature (works on Latin elegy, especially Tibullus, Greek epigram etc), as well as Neo-Latin epigraphy in Ukraine. He also translates early modern Ukrainian historical sources written in Latin.

—Nicole Yurcaba, The Los Angeles Review

“Sodomora's genius lies in capturing the spaces in between. Sodomora's interest in places in between points to a desire for stability in a world of shifting borders and unstable dictators. Sodomora's references to classics throughoutThe Tears and Smiles of Thingsanchor the writing in an ancient literary tradition. Sodomora’s Ukraine is not the country fighting for its existence but the country that has always existed, a place of strawberries that smell 'as they once did, in dizzying prehistory, when there was no man to inhale their fragrance, when the ferns were colossal, when dinosaurs trampled the grasses.'”

—Ada Wordsworth,Literary Review,June 2024