Reassembling Sacred Relics: Translation, Diaspora, and Andriy Chaikovsky's Za Sestroyu

The act of translation is intimately bound with migration: the Latin translatio, meaning "to ferry or carry across," was originally used to name the process of moving and transplanting sacred relics. A case study of the English translation and serialization of Andriy Chaikovsky's 1907 novel Za Sestroyu illuminates how cherished children's books move with, and are transformed alongside, migrant communities. Initially a Ukrainian nationalist allegory, Chaikovsky's novel took on new resonance with its 1941–42 serial publication in the American diasporic newspaper The Ukrainian Weekly, particularly insofar as it symbolically performed the conflict that young Ukrainian Americans faced between cultural assimilation and fidelity to a distant homeland.