Why my songs come in pairs
I don't translate my songs. I write them twice.
Every piece I make lives in two languages — Ukrainian and English. They share one emotional truth, but each gets its own words, its own register, its own production. Two voices for one truth. Both audiences deserve their own door into the same room.
People assume the English is the Ukrainian run through a dictionary, or the other way around. It isn't. A translation tries to carry the same sentence across a border. What I'm doing is letting each language say what only it can say. Ukrainian carries my specific story — the names, the streets, the dates my people will recognize without explanation. English carries the universal shape of that same story, so a stranger can step inside it and find their own life there.
Here's a concrete example of the difference. In one song, the Ukrainian version can name a date on a calendar directly, because anyone who has lived my situation knows exactly what that date means and what it costs to wait for it. The English version of the same moment doesn't name the date. It says October waits for the call — and now it belongs to anyone who has ever waited on an answer they couldn't control. Same wound, two ways of pressing on it. Neither is the "real" one. They're sisters who grew up in different houses.
This is also why the English songs can't sound like anyone else's English songs. If a track of mine could sit on a Top 40 playlist without anyone blinking, I've failed. The Eastern European DNA has to survive the crossing into English — the unusual intervals, the modal turns, the weight underneath the melody. I'd rather my English songs live next to Aurora or Hozier than next to whatever is trending. The two cultures inside me are not allowed to flatten each other. The Ukrainian can't become folklore in a museum, and the English can't become generic pop. Both have to stay alive at full strength, at the same time, in the same body. That tension is the work.
I make them as a pair because I am a pair. I was born in Ukraine and I live in America. The Ukrainian in me and the English in me don't take turns — they're both here, all the time, and for years they fought each other. The diptych is how I let them stop fighting. I stopped asking which one was the real me. I let both speak, in their own language, about the same thing.
And there's a quieter reason. I'm not only making this for myself. Other diaspora Ukrainians need to hear their own language saying these things. People living in the in-between — waiting on a status, a document, an answer — need the version that gives them words. When the song exists in both languages, more of us can hear ourselves in it. Nobody has to translate their own heart to belong to the song.
Every pair ends the same way: in freedom. Whatever the song holds — fear, grief, the white-knuckle grip of holding on too tight — it has to arrive somewhere better than where it started. Not collapse. Opening. So when you find one of my songs, look for its twin. The full truth is never in one language alone. It's in the space between the two, where I actually live.