Yaroslava Shekera

Sinologist, poet, artist Years of life (1982–2019)

Born into a family of researchers, Yaroslava grew fascinated with the folk art of vytynanka (paper cutting) when she was only eight years old. While she was still at school, her works were exhibited all over Ukraine and beyond. In 1995, Yaroslava was admitted to the National Union of Artists. She was a talented pysanka painter, played the flute, drymba, and ocarina, and was a gifted singer. But it was literature that occupied a central place in Yaroslava’s life. She got passionate about translation. In the spring of 2000, the first of her translations of classical and contemporary Chinese poetry were published. They became part of her collection titled «The Sky Embroidered with Cranes». In 2003, a collection of Yaroslava’s translations of the Tang era poetry, «The Tang Sky», was published. The poems from this book became part of secondary school literature textbooks.

In 1998, Yaroslava enrolled at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University, majoring in Chinese language and literature. She participated in the fellowship programs at Changchun Normal University and Beijing Language and Culture University. Since 2003, she worked at the department of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese philology at her alma mater, Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University—first as an assistant lecturer, and since 2010 as an assistant professor. Yaroslava defended her PhD thesis «On the Genesis and Functioning of Artistic Images in the Tang Poetry (7th–10th centuries)».

Her research interests ranged from translation studies and poetics and hermeneutics to the psychology of language, linguoculturology, literary theory, religious studies, cultural studies, depth psychology, and other disciplines.