What remains

Illustration by the author of Ukrainian poets: from top left corner clockwise: Daryna Gladun, Yuri Andrukhovych, Ilya Kaminsky below: Marianna Kiyanovska, Iya Kiva, Natalia Belchenko, Ostap Slyvynsky

Why does Arendt and this interview come to mind? While in Paris I found a book of Arendt’s poems in French translation called Heureux celui qui n’a pas de patrie [Happy is the one who has no country], an almost exact borrowing of the phrase by Nietzsche, so it seemed to that immigrant thinker. However, Nietzsche meant the opposite: “Wohl dem, der eine Heimat hat” [Happy is the one who has a home]. This seemingly minor mistake saves Arendt or is a source of liberating irony for someone who found her refuge first in the German thought of Martin Heidegger and then Karl Jaspers. After emigrating to France, Arendt then found herself in New York and spoke English with a strong German accent for the rest of her life. Despite everything, the German language forever remained her “home”.

Closer to the heart

It was similar for the Jewish poets Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer. Both were from Chernivtsi, a town that changed owners many times. When they were born, Chernivtsi belonged to Austria-Hungary, a great multinational state that had many Muttersprachen. Later Romanian and then Soviet hands grabbed it. Ausländer, like Arendt, found herself in New York. She also wrote in English. There is a certain affinity between Ausländer and the Ukrainian poet Iryna Vikyrchak, who currently is writing her doctorate on Ausländer.

On my laptop screen I see Iryna’s dusky face, brown eyes and gathered-up dark hair. She tells me about her linguistic background. She is sitting in an armchair in a room with an enormous dark red curtain that is probably supposed to stop the insistent Calcutta sun from coming through the window. However, the curtain is unable to stop the choking air and pollution, likely the source of Iryna’s cough. Coughing, she tells me how her paternal grandparents came from a small town on the Romanian-Ukrainian border. Although they spoke Romanian themselves, they did not pass the language on. They taught Iryna’s father to speak Russian, as they regarded it a more prestigious language, which in turn her father did not pass on. Thus this was a relay à rebours. Iryna grew up in a home where Ukrainian was spoken. Her father had a dual identity: he was Alexander in Russian, and Oleksandr in Ukrainian.  

The Ukrainian town of Zalishchyky, where Iryna was born, has strong ties with Poland. The prominent Polish interwar writers Stanisław Stempowski and Maria Dąbrowska spent summers together there. It was a spa town. “There was a luxtorpeda [express] train going straight from Gdynia to Zalishchyky,” Iryna recounts, wearing nothing more than a sleeveless dark top, sipping water every now and then, while I wrap myself more tightly in a blanket, also sitting in an armchair, but in an unheated Roman villa at my writing residency.

Although Iryna was wrapped in the Ukrainian language like I with my blanket, and even attended Ukrainian school, the cold air of the Russian language was present. At summer camp Ukrainian-speaking children were bullied by Russian-speaking children. When Iryna was 16 she left for the United States. Upon her return she noticed that Russian had taken over the television, like a fog that crept silently into the air. Her mother, who always protected her Ukrainian identity and responded to Russian inventions rhetorically – “Why do we need this? From Moscow?” – sent her daughter to extra Russian classes, saying, “You’ll find it useful.”

Iryna alternates mainly between Ukrainian, Polish and English. What did that Russian ever do for her? But Iryna asks herself a different question. Instead of asking what she can do for poetry she asks “What can poetry do for me?” It is as if she wants to turn one of the bridges over the Tiber upside down. For her poetry becomes a bunker, an asylum, a shelter. It provides her with a possibility for painful expression, however, not in Ukrainian, but in English. Iryna wants to speak about the tragic events of the war directly to the world, hence the poem I chose for an evening of Ukrainian poetry in Warsaw. She wrote in English, “Luckily, I have no one in Mariupol / fortunately / otherwise my heart would blow up / it is not big enough / to ever contain Mariupol.” But later, after she read the poem in Ukrainian at a festival in Athens where it brought her to tears, she realized that English was just a buffer. She concludes our conversation by stating that “The mother tongue is closer to the heart.”

Intimacy of language

I log off and go for a run. I run along the Tiber which in Rome is grasped by one word in Italian, Lungotevere. I count the bridges. Five. Six. Behind the seventh hanging on the wall are plaques with poems by various poets who paid homage to the city called eternal (for the time being). Rose Ausländer’s German poem “Rom” (“Rome”) from the volume Italien mein immerland is barely visible underneath some graffiti in a different language. The artist spared Nora Moll’s Italian translation. How did this Jewish poet from Chernivtsi, author of the volume Denn wo ist Heimat? feel on the Tiber river? I recall Iryna’s words from our recent conversation: “You know, for the first time in my life, here in Calcutta, I feel at home.” But perhaps it is the sense of security and her 16-month-old son Alexandre that give her this force of gravity.

I return to my hilltop. I walk through the Giardino degli Aranci where I hear the murmur of words in various languages spoken by tourists. “A las cinco.” “Nie tamtędy.” “Vorrei sedermi lì.” “Ost til lunsj.” “I wanted to go to Saint Peter’s, you know, but it was so crowded, there was a line all the way around the square.”

What is the intimacy of language? The trees have crowns filled with flowers and only occasionally do bitter oranges show up like jewels. I enter the residence for Scandinavian writers, where I work as a Norwegian poet. The Finnish composer Eero Hämeenniemi greets me in the kitchen and recalls how the Swedish language used to push out Finnish. Few people know that the former Finnish prime minister speaks a rare dialect from the Tampere area, but Eero knows because he speaks the same dialect. This is like Jean Améry, about whom Sofia Andrukhovych later tells me while sitting with her short hair and mop of bangs on the bed in her daughter’s room in Kyiv, complete with a poster of “Fantastic Mr. Fox” on the blue walls. When Améry was imprisoned in Belgium and a Nazi officer entered his cell speaking his dialect, a tiny, almost microscopic dialect, for a moment this Jewish Austrian writer felt at home, as if he had met a relative with whom he shared a common, intimate language. But this was an enemy, one of those who tortured the writer, who “hated brute force”, as Adam Zagajewski wrote. Now Russian soldiers who speak the same Russian as many of the residents of eastern Ukraine are coming to “liberate” them by killing them.

For Sofia, Ukrainian is an intimate language. Ukrainian is “a territory where I feel fully myself,” she adds. According to Deleuze and Guattari, territory is a semiotic structure, “a regime of signs”. Therefore, language is one of the most effective tools to constitute a territory. Consequently, language plays a pivotal role in the formation of politics and the objectification of others. Canetti saw language as an instrument for imposing power and subjugating others by dictating orders to them. Very often it is an order to escape – to escape death, as the one who has power has the ability to take another’s life. For Canetti this does not constitute the essence of language (after all, he himself used this instrument for completely different purposes), but he paid attention to the power of command and authority that lies in language. The only way out is de-individualization or de-territorialization, as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari wanted. This is a kind of linguistic nomadism. The Ternopil poet Yury Zavadsky sees the situation similarly. He recognizes the dependence of power based on language and the trauma associated with it, but at the same time he imagines the creation of a federation in Ukraine where multiple languages would exist side by side, not just Russian and Ukrainian.

Element of identity

Sofia’s linguistic background also is not uniform, although she identifies most strongly with Ukrainian. Her maternal grandmother came to Ukraine from Russia with her husband, and she never learned Ukrainian. Today she is 93 years old and still cannot pass a Ukrainian language test, unable to say correctly, palyanytsa (паляниця), which means bread with a burnt crust (пали́ти, palyty, meaning “to burn” or “to scorch”). Sofia was five years old when she visited her grandparents in Chernihov (Чернігів) and was speaking Russian when she returned home. “Why are you speaking Russian?” her paternal grandfather asked her. “After all, you are Ukrainian.” That was the moment when she understood that language was an element of identity. This situation repeated itself between her husband and her seven-year-old daughter, who attends Ukrainian school. Even though the lessons are conducted in Ukrainian, at recess and outside of school the children speak to each other in Russian. “Why are you speaking Russian?” Sofia’s husband asked. “Are you ashamed of Ukrainian?” Despite acquiring this linguistic awareness, her daughter was unable to express what she saw in the photos from Bucha. “Describe to me what you saw,” Sofia asked her daughter in order to free her from the trauma of witnessing it. “It’s too horrible to name, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” For some experiences, there is no language…

“Colonization was in many regards a co–production of colonizers and colonized,” Achille Mbembe writes in his new book Out of the Dark Night. What does he mean by this? “Both sides together, but from different positions, they forged a past. But having a past in common does not necessarily mean sharing it,” he says. In the case of Ukraine, the colonizer was the Soviet Union (and earlier the Russian Empire). Zavadsky was 15 when he realized that the Russian literature surrounding him was that of the occupier, and he rejected it.

“In school they tortured us with Pushkin,” he tells me over the phone, sitting in his hometown of Ternopil. I am in Berlin, and every day I cross the eastern and western sides whose past was divided by a wall. Before Ukraine gained independence in the 1990s, “I lived in a state that was not very independent,” Yury admits, adding that “Ukrainians felt like indigenous Americans on a reservation.” The comparison is probably rooted in Yury’s reading. The books on his shelf are mostly in Ukrainian, but also a few in Polish, including one by Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian ethnographer and traveller who sailed to Polynesia on the famous Kon-Tiki raft.

I sometimes took the ferry past the Kon-Tiki Museum between my former home on the Nesodden peninsula and Oslo, and I was puzzled by this need to reconstruct someone else’s existence. Was it an attempt to capture a classification, or an approximation of a classification? Was it done for our need or theirs? Can we truly touch someone else’s feelings or experience? Between history written in Russian and history written in Ukrainian, Yury chose the second option. He had a weakness for Mayakovsky until his teacher introduced him to Ukrainian Futurism.

Yury was always closer to Polish than Russian. In 1998 he could choose a second language to study. “And what did you choose?” asked his grandmother, to whom he admitted, “Polish”. “What for!?” she cried. Russian was the official language and the language of television. One needed to know Russian. It was good manners. Yury tells me about a Russian-Ukrainian dictionary that was going around at that time. It was supposed to prove that the two languages were so similar that it was not worth using Ukrainian. Or better yet, one should use Russified Ukrainian, and say “spasibi” instead of “dyakuyu”.

“It was difficult to keep the language clean,” Yury says. I imagine the language as a stone path through a garden, like the one at my residency which the gardener sweeps clean daily from dry, fallen leaves and twigs with thorns, one of which I once stepped on when returning home.

Essence through language

The Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy sees the mosaic nature of the legacy of Ukraine as being a borderland from the very beginning. This borderland included Ottoman, Polish and Ruthenian territories. “Modern Ukraine includes lands that were well beyond the reach of ancient Rus’,” as Timothy Snyder opens with during his 11th lecture on the formation of Ukrainian identity, “but well within the ambit of ancient Greek, Byzantine, Ottoman, and perhaps most importantly Crimean Tatar power”.

At the same time, the borders were not stationary; they moved like vipers. For example, Yuliya Musakovska’s family lived in Poland until the Second World War, only to later “switch places” with my family, who then lived in and around Lviv. Until the war, Yuliya’s family spoke Polish. After being resettled into the Ternopil region, they began speaking Ukrainian, “and of course Russian”, she points out. On the other hand, her maternal grandfather came from a large Armenian community that lived in Baku and arrived in Lviv with the Red Army, where he met the woman who became Yuliya’s grandmother, and stayed. They spoke Russian at home, but Yuliya adds that he had a decent command of Ukrainian.

So Yuliya learned three languages at the same time: Ukrainian, Russian and Polish. She moved seamlessly between them, as if they were rooms. However, she regrets that her grandfather did not teach her Armenian, claiming that it would be of no use to her. Russian literature was present in the house but Yuliya tells me that she never connected with it. She preferred Pavlo Tikhina and Lesya Ukrainka to Dostoevsky and Akhmatova. She never established a real relationship with the Russian language, like a person to bond with for life, and there was never any spark between them. The few poems in Russian she wrote when she was still at school were pale and artificial. She feels that in Ukrainian they are real.

It was different for Iryna Shuvalova, who joins me from China, sitting in her high school office where she is a university counselor, guiding students with their post-secondary choices. On the wall behind her hang postcards from all over the world, including several from Ukraine. One is from Odesa, and one is of the Dnieper river. And there is a photo of three open hands with heart-shaped radishes cut in half. The hands belong to Iryna, her mother and her daughter. The hands form a triangle. Iryna’s mother is from Kyiv, while her mother, on the other hand, was from Sumy in Eastern Ukraine and was in a labor camp in Germany. Then she was in Poland with the Soviet army and learned Russian. Actually, she spoke a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, which is called surzhyk in Ukraine. And so Iryna spoke Ukrainian with her grandfather, and surzhyk with her grandmother.

“How’s your Surzhik?” Iryna recently challenged her daughter Mariana, who learned Russian from other kids in kindergarten because that’s what the other children expected of her. Such memories can be traumatic. But trauma can be covered by a dream in which…

so we too

forget to hate as we sleep

and simply grow like grass

covering the earth

with our clinging brittle

superfluous

love,[1] 

… as she writes in the poem “Vesper”. I would like to ask Artur Dron, a young poet who is on the front lines, about the language of love. But he has not responded for several days to my Facebook message. Love, in his poem “after a long battle, vomits under a tree”:

Sometimes love 

closes dear friends’ eyes.

Wraps friends in sleeping bags 

and carries them out.

Love never fails,

like prophecies that end,

like the gift of language

that will perish,

like knowing that will fail.

When the artillery goes silent,

friends will close love’s eyes.

They will wrap love in a sleeping bag

and carry it out.

We will meet love

face-to-face. [2] 

I worry that he is not responding. I send a message to his mother, who added me on Facebook, but I do not hear back from her either. I am anxious. I get a message on Tinder instead. So I go on a date with an Italian theatre director. We speak a little English, a little Italian. Like a couple from J. M. Coetzee’s new book – a Polish composer and a Spanish fan talk in global English. Coetzee published the book first in Spanish to break the global monopoly of English. Sara sits across from me and records a message with her phone to a friend: “ho lasciato il mio grosso orecchino a casa tua” [I left my ugly earring at your house] and shows me the earring mark on her left earlobe. Maybe the right words are earring holes?

Man is the main content of language as long as his spiritual essence and, language itself, meet, and man expresses this essence through language. Thus argued Walter Benjamin, an advocate for the possibility of spiritual translation between languages. His younger, yet no longer so young, colleague Giorgio Agamben sees in language the power of the sacred, provided we assume that the word is an oath between us and God. Today, this oath often loses its force, which Agamben notes. However, it is possible for the intellect to do the work to bring the edges of metaphysics and physics together, Styx interfusa. I am looking at the brisk current of the Tiber when a message from Olga Dron comes in: “Yes, Artur is in position.”

Postscriptum: Listening on Zoom to Iya Kiva reading a poem about war

Yesterday we listened on Zoom as Iya Kiva

read a poem in Kyiv where the golden

caps of the Orthodox churches did not run to the shelters,

we listened from our homes,

nearly everyone, listened,

and we were all eyes, as if there was

nothing else, just eyes, as if we wanted

to protect her with our eyes with which we absorbed

every word while Babyn Yar burned in the background,

but memory does not burn, we trust, memory is rustproof,

memory will survive, hibernate like a mole,

all of us, a thousand people on Zoom,

two thousand eyes, wanted to hold

an umbrella of air over Iya,

shield her with our gaze,

when she finished reading, I raised my head,

on the table was a book from the library,

Emil Cioran’s La Tentation d’Exister,

the hills held Bergen in their lap,

the first crocuses were in bloom, everyone

was looking forward to spring.

Translation from Polish by Frank L. Vigoda

ariel rosé is a poet, essayist and illustrator who is originally from Poland, a resident of Norway and based in Berlin.

[1] Translation by Uilleam Blacker

[2] Translation by the author

language, poetry, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian