Once, years ago, I asked to stay the night at a friend’s place in order to catch an early train—he lived in Market Square right behind City Hall. From there it was an easy half hour’s walk to the railway station (trams didn’t run that early), whereas from my place on the outskirts of Lviv, I would have needed to leave the house before sunrise, even though it was summer. I’ve lived in my share of apartments over the years, but this was my first night in a building like this, on City Hall’s doorstep.

It was late when I stepped inside; the sun had already expired above every roof, tower, and steeple, and the pre-autumnal August twilight was seeping through the streets and alleyways below. Beyond the ancient wooden gate through which I entered, it would have been pitch dark, but for a lightbulb dangling all alone from a wire. In its light, intensified by the shadows, the vaulted medieval ceiling carved itself out, and the gray stone slabs led to a wooden staircase, blackened and worn. Climbing from one floor to the next, through the staircase’s bizarre convolutions, so many squashed o’s, I kept looking down, as though into a well growing darker and deeper … Overhead, the gabled glass roof was just visible—the same kind that can still be found over some rural wells …

As I climbed higher and twilight descended, an indescribable feeling congealed in me—a state brought about by what seemed like time’s compression, its clotting or sedimentation: Beneath the slabs I’d tread upon entering through the gate were foundations and cellars, more than half a millennium old. So, though I was mounting the stairs, I felt like I was plumbing the depths of antiquity, inhaling its aromas—of worn-down stone, of wood, of silence, or rather of the quiet into which the kamyanytsia with its hushed inhabitants had plunged. Everything upheld the deepest of all earthly quiet—that of a well … Suddenly a jolt of electricity coursed through me. Stepping onto the top floor, I faced the lid of a coffin that lurked like a dark figure—waiting for someone who lay in the apartment next to the one where I was spending the night …

We chatted a bit before bed, but not for long since it was late, and I had to get up at dawn. After the customary tea and Lviv pastries, followed by the usual exchange of “Well, good night!” I settled into the sofa that had been made up for me, hoping to get a good night’s rest despite the unfamiliar place. But these hopes were in vain …

As soon as I got in bed, I began to count the time together with the City Hall clock. To say that I heard its voice every quarter-hour does not begin to describe things: I sensed the clock’s peal not so much with my hearing as with my soul, with my entire being, and in its every fiber. I became one giant ear into which the cast-metal words fired like projectiles from a catapult: “Vigilate, nescitis enim horam”—Take heed, for ye know not what hour … The medieval kamyanytsia seemed to be the ideal echo chamber for that clanging Latin imperative. But, strangely enough, it was not so much the voice that robbed me of sleep, as the person in the neighboring apartment who couldn’t hear it … I tried to imagine how it was possible, in the silence of the night, not to hear the clock’s peal. And yet again I understood the futility of such imaginings: Crossing that ultimate border, into the unknown, we bring our sensations with us—but sensations don’t exist there.

As I lay there listening to my friend’s measured breath (he’d fallen right to sleep), I started thinking of various tips for getting to sleep quickly: “Disconnect the brain from external stimuli” … But this advice immediately fell away, since I knew no way of “disconnecting my brain.” Nor did I know how to “relieve it of all imaginings”—the more I tried, the more clearly I saw the stairwell and the coffin lid, like a dark figure, leaning against the door. One other recommendation was more congenial: “Imagine total darkness. It subsumes everything—a calm, pleasant feeling. Even if some vision tries to surface, the darkness swallows it up, and … you fall asleep.” I didn’t have to imagine darkness, since everything was immersed in it, but those things that surfaced, again and again, preferred not to return to dark obscurity—they kept lingering before my eyes.

Then I turned to my own tried and true methods for inducing sleep. I recalled how, while doing archival work in      medieval cells like this one, I spent many months engaged in the highly sophisticated task of “sheet numbering,” getting through a few thousand per day. Back then, I’d experienced first-hand the utter futility of opposing sleep’s indomitable power. But now, no matter how many sheets I numbered in my imagination, sleep wouldn’t come. So, something different: I called to mind a scholar working on documents in the archive’s reading room. His research was apparently statistical in nature, and he flipped through piles of documents every day, transcribing numbers from them. He was getting on in years and as he took those numbers down, he whispered: “one thousand four hundred and eighty, one thousand four hundred and eighty-one,” etc. And because it was so quiet, that monotone whisper prevailed, pulling everyone else in the room beneath the veil of sleep. In that room, but not this one …

Feeling more agitated than relaxed by my efforts at sleep, I began once more to count the hours together with the clock in the tower: It struck one, two, three, four … The half and quarter hours sounded in a higher pitch, and the hours in a lower, more reverential tone. Each time it struck—the same admonition: Vigilate!—Take heed! As I listened to the alternating silence and ringing, the night trickled by, one minute at a time, seeming to me longer than the longest of winter nights.

In the early dawn before sunrise when, at last, the clock solemnly struck five, I set out for the station to meet my train. Cats roamed the streets between garbage bins—mostly black, as though emanating from the darkness of night. The city was catching a few final moments of sleep. Here and there, street sweepers pottered about with brooms … And just an hour later, the sun rose above the city, sweeping from its recesses the last lingering shadows of night …

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Andriy Sodomora is a Ukrainian translator, writer, and professor of Classics at the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine. His translation oeuvre includes an astounding number of volumes from ancient Greek and Roman authors. At the age of 85, Sodomora remains extremely prolific in many genres.

Roman Ivashkiv teaches Slavic languages, literatures, and cultures and translation studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. His research interests include translation, comparative literature, and language pedagogy. Currently, he is writing a monograph on transmesis (i.e., fictional representation of translation and translators) in contemporary Ukrainian literature and film. With Erín Moure, he published an English translation of the Ukrainian writer Yuri Izdryk’s poetry collection Smokes (2019). Twitter: @roman904

Sabrina Jaszi is a literary translator working from Slavic and Turkic languages. Her published translations include the fiction of Reed Grachev, Nadezhda Teffi, and Alisa Ganieva. With Ena Selimović, she runs Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. In 2023, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to translate Semyon Lipkin’s Dekada. She is also a fiction writer. Twitter: @sjaszi