Oleksandr Gon is a professor of translation and interpretation at Foreign Languages Department, Educational and Scientific Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. He received his degrees of Candidate of Sciences (Philology) in 1995 and Doctor of Sciences (Philology) in 2018 from the Institute of Literature, Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. His two dissertations have been published as monographs in Ukrainian: Svinbern u poetychnomu konteksti kintsia stolittia (Swinburne’s Poetry in the Context of Fin de Siècle (1996) and Paradyhmatyka lirychnoho y epichnoho v «Kantos» Ezry Paunda (Paradigmatics of the Lyric and Epic in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (2017).

His sustained pedagogical effort is the development of an interdisciplinary curriculum that harnesses and taps into the multimedia resources of teaching to facilitate and shape linguistic, cultural, and translation-related competences of would-be Ukrainian diplomats. He has co-authored five textbooks on English-Ukrainian trnslation and interpretation.

Prof. Gon’s academic interests encompass XX-century comparative literature, politics of translation, and intermedial study of the narrative in fiction and music.

His Fulbright research project Ezra Pound and Yurii Klen: Contexts of Two Modern Unfinished Epics focuses on the comparative analysis of two consequential texts in American and Ukrainian poetic modernisms, The Cantos (1917–1968) and Popil imperii (The Ashes of Empires, 1943–1947). Contextualized both synchronically and diachronically, these works display a significant structural affinity in artistic concepts, poetic idiom, and tropes as well as a sharp divergence in Klen’s post-Romantic millennial and teleological as opposed to Pound’s cyclic and mythologic poetics and ideology.

This project attempts to suggest a tangible and coherent comparative approach to Pound and Klen identifying the specifics of national poetic modernisms as reflected in the relationships between the interiority of the lyrical self and the epic tradition. The Cantos and The Ashes of Empires are indicative of the search for relevant subjective ways to represent the human condition that resulted in the narrative technique of a versified history. Gon’s core argument is associated with the concept of a poetic ‘ver(s)ification of history’ to fathom multivalent creative practices in modernist long poems. In it, refrains of formes fixes foreground condensation of semantic energy of historic discourse and highlight the continuum of culture against the backdrop of artistic geographical and temporal discretion. This critical strategy provides a viable approach to examine and appreciate the transatlantic cross-cultural exchanges in the XX-century national literatures.