POESIEGESPRÄCH: MARIANNA KIJANOWSKA UND OKSANA MAKSYMCHUK – so that tomorrow they be not all forgotten

In the organizer's words:

Studio space

Marianna Kijanowska and Oksana Maksymchuk are two Ukrainian poets who write about violence and war in different ways.

Marianna Kijanowska (born 1973 in Nesterow, now Shovkva, Lviv Oblast) is working on a trilogy, the first two parts of which deal with historical and current war crimes. In Babyn Jar. Stimmen (Suhrkamp Verlag 2024, German translation: Claudia Dathe), she writes from the perspective of the victims who were murdered by the German Wehrmacht in a ravine near Kyiv in 1941. A chorus of the dead resounds, voices that separate from and reconnect with each other and which are permanently recalled by the reader. The second volume, Lightning meets Wind and Water, focuses on the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The final part, which is still in preparation, will deal with war in general as a phenomenon of radical borderline experience.
Oksana Maksymchuk (born 1982 in Lviv) translates Kijanowska's poems into English. As a poet herself, she has published two award-winning volumes in Ukrainian: Xenia and Lovy. She is also co-editor of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press 2017), an anthology that caused a stir internationally. It also includes poems by Marianna Kijanowska. Oksana Maksymchuk's third volume of poetry, Still City (Carcanet Press 2024), was written in English. It is a kind of diary in the form of a poem, in which she reconstructs the time of the Russian attack, a breach of civilization with an announcement, with the help of various sources (social media, news, witness statements, photographs, etc.). She herself says: "In the months before the large-scale invasion, I recorded how ways of life, ways of thinking and feelings changed as a result of a catastrophe and gave everyday rituals an air of finality."

Marianna Kijanowska and Oksana Maksymchuk in conversation with Irina Bondas

The event will be interpreted into Ukrainian-German. With the kind support of ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen.

Project management: Alexander Gumz

Supported by: Goethe Institute in Exile. The poesiefestival berlin is a project of the Haus für Poesie in cooperation with silent green Kulturquartier and the Akademie der Künste and is funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.