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'I will never hear my father's voice': Ilya Kaminsky on deafness and escaping the Soviet Union

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Until his family migrated to the US when he was 16, the Ukrainian-born poet lived without sound. He discusses his family’s persecution and his first collection in a decade

Ilya Kaminsky has only published two poetry collections in 15 years, but his second, Deaf Republic, has been hailed as “a contemporary epic”, “a perfectly extraordinary book” from a poet described by the writer Garth Greenwell as “the most brilliant of his generation, one of the world’s few geniuses”. The man who has attracted all this hyperbole has a wraparound smile, and responds to a photographer’s demand to look more animated by reciting poetry in Russian and English. “Here is some Mandelstam,” he says. “Now I am going to give you some Emily Dickinson.” His speech drags slightly and he is apologetic about his accent: “After all this time, it should really be better,” he says, “but I only hear what the hearing aids give me.” For Kaminsky is hard of hearing – so, if you count sign language alongside Russian and Ukrainian, he is speaking in his fourth language.

Deaf Republic is an investigation into “what happens to language in a time of crisis, how we carry on and how we try to remain human,” he explains. “It’s something I’m trying to find out in my book and in my life.” In just under 60 lyric poems, some only two lines long, it tells the story of a fictional town whose inhabitants react to the murder of a deaf child by shutting their ears. Little Petya’s crime is to spit at an army sergeant who has arrived to break up a public gathering in a time of martial law. “Deafness passes through us like a police whistle,” say the townspeople of Vasenka, who are described by the author as “the ‘we’ who tell the story”.

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He removes his hearing aids on trips back to Odessa, because only through lip-reading can he experience its familiarity

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