Verbalization of the concept of “war” in English translations of contemporary Ukrainian poetry

The paper explores the multifaceted verbal representation of the WAR concept within contemporary Ukrainian poetic discourse following the 2022 invasion, critically evaluating the structural shifts that occur during its interlingual transfer into English. The relevance of this study is driven by the acute need to examine the traumatic wartime experiences reflected through literary mediums, alongside the high significance of accurately transmitting these core meanings into the global cultural arena to foster an adequate understanding of Ukraine’s national tragedy worldwide. The research material comprises selected poetic works from the bilingual anthology "Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine", representing a rich diversity of authorial standpoints, including direct combatants, civilians from directly affected areas, and displaced individuals. Employing a field model to map the concept’s internal organization, the study distinguishes between the military core (weaponry, combat terms), the near periphery (somatic and psychological traumas of violence), and the far periphery (domestic, natural, and linguistic categories recontextualized through warfare). The results demonstrate that the utmost emotional and axiological resonance of the poems resides within these peripheral zones, where the abstraction of military conflict is contextualized and embodied via representations of ruined households, human fragility, and linguistic fragmentation. A comparative investigation of the original verses and their English versions demonstrates that although the referential core preserves its structural alignment, the figurative and evaluative dimensions experience a distinct semantic flattening during translation.This erosion is caused by systematic logization, the neutralization of expressive lexical units, and the generalization of highly specific poetic metaphors. Cultural codes and the raw somatic intensity of the source lines are frequently flattened into conventional idioms familiar to the target audience, which alters the pragmatic and interpretive effect of the poetic text on the global reader