Pylyp Yasnowskii Internee No. 1198 Kapuskasing Camp: Canada First World War Internment Operations is an English translation of the internment section from Pylyp Yasnowskii’s memoir Pid ridnym i chuzhym nebom (Julian Serdiak Press, Buenos Aeries, 1961), translated from Ukrainian by Gordon Gordey with additional notes on the internment of immigrants and a brief biography from the memoir.
“During Canada’s first national internment operations of 1914 to 1920 thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans were branded as “enemy aliens”, forced to work for the profit of their jailers, disenfranchised, and subjected to other state-sanctioned censures, not because of anything they had done, but only because of who they were, where they had come from. (The Banff Craig & Canyon. June 19, 2013).”
As a theatre director and academic my goal was to revisit Pylyp Yasnowskii’s memoir and create a translation of his time as an internee in what I call: “Pylyp Yasnowskii’s voice”.
I wanted his character to come to life for the reader through the words that he actually wrote and in the distinctive style of his Western Ukrainian syntax.
I wanted Yasnowskii to be heard as if he was in the room with the reader – either in conversation or doing a one-man stage presentation.
This commitment to ‘the voice of the character” is one I made in my play script work starting 50 years ago when I first translated Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths and later Mykola Kulish’s The People’s Malachi.
- Gordon Gordey, Translator
There are 5 main sections of the book:
- Pylyp Yasnowskii – Internee No. 1198, Kapuskasing Camp
- Alien Rioters Given Quietus
- Canada Sets Aliens Free
- Note to the Translation
- A Brief Biography from his Memoir
