Tears and Smiles of Things

An evocative collection of vignettes and essays from Ukraines voice of classical antiquity, now available in English for the first time.Inspired by Virgils 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 trees 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 Sodomoras 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 Garca Lorca.This book has been published with the support of the TranslateUkraine Translation Program.