Poetry talk - 25. poesiefestival berlin Literatures in Exile: Marianna Kiyanovska & Oksana Maksymchuk

so that tomorrow they be not all forgotten

 

This meeting between Marianna Kiyanovska and Oksana Maksymchuk brings together two Ukrainian poets who write about war and violence in distinctly different and powerful ways.

Marianna Kiyanovska (born 1973 in Nesterov, today Zhovkva, Oblast Lviv) is working on a trilogy, the first two parts of which deal with current and past war crimes. In The Voices of Babyn Yar (translated into the German by Claudie Dathe as Babyn Jar. Stimmen Suhrkamp Verlag 2024), she writes from the perspective of victims who were murdered by the German Wehrmacht in a ravine near Kyiv in 1941. A chorus of the dead resounds, voices that detach and reconnect with one another, leaving a lasting impression on the reader. The second volume, Lightning Meets Wind and Water, focuses on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The concluding part, which is still in the works, will address war in general as a phenomenon of a radical threshold. 
Oksana Maksymchuk (born 1982 in Lviv) translates Marianna Kiyanovska’s poems into English. As a poet, she has published Xenia and Lovy, two award-winning books in Ukrainian. She is also co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press 2017), an anthology that gained international recognition. Oksana Maksymchuk’s third volume of poetry, Still City (Carcanet Press 2024), was written in English. In the form of a poem, it is a kind of diary where she reconstructs the moment of the Russian invasion, a breach on civilization that came with a warning, by using various sources (social media, news, witness statements, and the like). She herself suggests: “In the months leading up to the full-scale invasion, my writing has been registering how ways of living, thinking, and feeling have been changing due to the anticipation of catastrophe, imbuing the everyday rituals with the sense of finality and precarity.”

The conversation will be moderated by Irina Bondas.

Guests

Marianna Kiyanovska, born 1973 in Zhovkva, Ukraine, is the author of over a dozen poetry collections, most recently Живі перетворення (Duch i litera 2020, Eng.: Living transformations) and Блискавка зустрічає вітер і воду (Duch i litera 2023, Eng.: Lightning Meets Water and Wind). She published short story collections and several books of translations, mainly of Polish, Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Czech poetry. Kiyanovska is a member of Ukrainian PEN and National Union of Writers of Ukraine. She was awarded most recently with the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2022) and the Stanley Peterson Literary Fund Award (2023). The Voices of Babyn Yar (2022) was published in the USA by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Marianna Kiyanovska lives currently in Krakow.
  Oksana Maksymchuk, born 1982 and raised in Lviv, Ukraine, is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. She is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, „Xenia“ (Piramida Publishers 2005) and „Lovy“ (Smoloskyp Press 2008), in the Ukrainian. Her debut English-language poetry collection „Still City“ is the 2024 Pitt Poetry Series selection, forthcoming with University of Pittsburgh Press (USA) and Carcanet Press (UK). Maksymchuk co-edited an anthology “Words for War: NewPoemsfrom Ukraine” (Academic Studies Press/Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute 2017) and co-translatedseveral poetry collections. She is a recipient of the National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Maksymchuk holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

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This event is a cooperation between the Haus für Poesie and the series "Literatures in Exile" by the Goethe-Institut in Exile, funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion of the State of Berlin. The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with the silent green Kulturquartier and the Akademie der Künste and is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
 

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