Kyiv Desk.

To mark the release of Ukraine – A Polyphony, Kyiv Desk sat down with poet ariel rosé to discuss poetry, “the body of the language”, and Putin’s inevitable defeat.

ariel rosé, by Fiona Greenland, Odesa, 2025

O.R — In your new essay, Ukraine—A Polyphony, you tackle an issue that is both essential and formidable in the context of the war of colonisation waged by Russia against Ukraine: “what do we inherit with language?”. But you do so in a very original and lively way. Your book feels like a road trip, following the rhythm of your conversations with the Ukrainian poets you have met, blended with your own observations and questions along the path. Had you been carrying this question of language within you for a long time before you embarked on writing this book?

a.r — Thank you for this question, Olivia and for your support for Ukraine and its culture. We would like to think of language as something neutral, as a tool that you can just use as you please, and it does not matter in which language you express yourself. We could think it is like a spoon or a chisel, you can eat a delicious meal with a spoon, you can shape a sculpture with a chisel, but at the same time, you can harm someone with the same tool. I remember Ostap Slivinsky telling me a year ago, when we were sitting at a nice cafe in the center of Lviv, the same center which has been recently shelled, at 4pm daytime, that he sometimes feels as if language was like this small spoon he received from his parents: it is smooth on one end and sharp on the other hurting him. 

Language is essential to our existence, we cannot make a living without communicating. This is maybe a cliche and language can take many forms, it can be a sign language, but still, it is a language. 

I grew up surrounded by a few languages and even though Polish is the language that was prominent and the so called mother tongue (which in Polish is termed qs fqther tongue, a German Romantic concept, with which i would not fully agree), i also heard Russian and French at home as my mother read to me Mandelstam and Akhmatova in original, i heard Russian bards singing from LPs, and my mother would also sing some songs in French. She would also use Russian words and expressions that i keep using unaware they are in Russian. Until now, i keep learning that some of the words i have been using are not actually Polish, to my surprise. I started learning English when i was 4 years old thanks to LPs my father brought from East Germany in the early eighties. There was Leonard Cohen –-i loved his voice and the music. The vinyl came along with lyrics that i deciphered word by word with a dictionary. I started learning French and German at primary school. Later, i studied Spanish and learnt Italian by reading Agamben basically. Much later, i left for Scandinavia and the Baltics and learnt Norwegian, i understand Swedish and Danish too.

I collect languages, i love expressing myself in various ways, it is like having various personae, like Pessoa and his imaginative figures. Still, i am a poet and poetic language is the most vulnerable one, the most intimate one. I believe it is impossible to decide that from now on i will compose my verses in French. I would not be able to do this. The poem takes me over not the other way round. 

And here is the thing: with the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, i realised i was terribly ignorant of the culture and literature of the neighbouring country. I was shaped by the culture from the West, i was well-read in poetry and prose from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. I knew some poems by heart. And i had no idea about any writer or poet from Belarus or Ukraine. This is when i realised that this was a common situation in Poland. When i was visiting my friends, i could see the same set of books on their shelves as my parents had: the entire Russian literary tradition was there and i knew it well but none of my friends had a single Belarusian or Ukrainian author in their collection. I decided to educate myself and this was the first time i went to Ukraine and started reading Vasyl Stus and Taras Shevchenko. 

With the escalation of the war, i learnt about poets, like Iya Kiva, who switched from writing in Russian to Ukrainian, even though it was not her first language. And it moved me deeply. I could not understand how it was possible to “switch the language”, in which you write poetry. You could maybe learn to speak in some decent way but composing verses is a different thing. This is when i began researching the subject and understanding that language conveys more than just vocabulary and grammar. We are being shaped by certain traditions. The curious thing about language is that it has a body and sound, and some words sound pleasant, some sound terrible. Some words just get along together, others never will. Dante was brilliant with the use of the early Italian dialect and shaping it into verses. In Poland, Jan Kochanowski made the first matrix for verses, even though he also wrote in Latin. He managed to find a way of writing also in Polish. All other poets have to learn his verses and understand what he did. 

I myself even though i grew up in Poland, i absorbed the English, Irish and American poetry like i eat honey. I have an intimate relationship with English, it was my refuge. Still, Polish has a very strong place in my body and i can feel it especially when i read poems aloud, something moves through me. What if i was deprived of speaking the language and writing in it? What if i had to “switch” entirely to English for the rest of my life? What if i could never speak to my mother in Polish but we were forced to use another language? That was the case in Poland under the Russian tsarat in the 19th century. That was the case of many Ukrainians in Ukraine. They were not even able to fully develop their verses and ideas as there were Russian laws suppressing the writing and publishing. Many poets and writers were executed.

All that made me begin interviewing Ukrainian poets about language. I was devastated when Russia invaded Crimea and later Donbas, and with the escalation of the war, when Russia invaded Ukraine on full scale, i was depressed. My motivation was basically to somehow testimony to poets’ current situation and with every conversation i had with every single poet, i was learning more and more. I could not settle and at some point, i realised i was writing a book. I realised this subject needs more attention and a broad approach.

O.R — Some conversations took place in Ukraine, others were online. Each time, I am impressed by how your writing focuses on details, sensations —in short, the specific physicality of the moment. You don’t separate this aspect from what is said and discussed with the poets. I think this really connects with what you have just formulated about the body of the language. Can you tell us a little bit more about the circumstances of the meeting with the Ukrainian poets? Was everything planned, or, due to the unpredictability of war, was it more a question of opportunities along your journey across the country?

a.r — Many people asked me about my methodology and i have to admit, i have had none. I did everything intuitively and spontaneously. Just like many people at the very beginning of the escalation of the war, i felt depressed. I was not able to do anything for a few months. I took up therapy. What i understood with time, and what we talked about with Marci Shore at the seminar i co-arranged in Lviv in 2023, is that the Russian regime instigated a total annihilation of another nation–Ukrainian–and the way to oppose this nihilism, even if it feels painful, is to act, to be an agent in this situation. Putin would win if he terrorized us. Terror and induction of fear make me angry. Whatever positive act can be aimed against it. I began interviewing Ukrainian poets also because i wanted to understand something for myself. Not from the books or scholarly academic papers, but in situ, in real meetings, in real conversations. I would sometimes travel to places where i could meet one or two poets, like Paris where i could invite Anna Malihon and Ella Yevtushenko to lunch. In Berlin, i could spend some time with Daryna Gladun. While in Lviv (thanks to INDEX and IWM scholarship) i could talk to Yaryna Chornohuz and Iryna Tsylik. While i was at the bookfair in Kyiv, where we had a decent time to talk with Halyna Kruk. Sometimes, i would have to arrange a meeting on Zoom, like with Yuri Andrykhovych or Iryna Vikyrchak who was at that time in Calcutta. 

I wished to convey the reality of each meeting, so that the reader also feels the character and nature of each poet. Even a tiny detail was important. Like Natalia Belchenko (who also translated my poetry collection to Ukrainian for Duh i Litera, which highly moved me) who was wearing this incredible polka dot dress and was smiling so cordially. Or spending some time with Maria Galina in Odesa was a bliss. I love her personality. She is so sincere and has this beautiful twist within her. She showed up at an opening to one exhibition in tight leather trousers, i loved that. It says a lot about a person, about their personality. So that we feel them a little but more, so that it gains gravity. Poets are not just their texts. Again, a cliche, right? But what does it mean? It means their brothers, fathers, husbands are at the frontline. It means some of them were killed, like Marianna Kiyanovska’s brother and husband. It is devastating. I still do not know how to write about it but i obviously will.

I also understood it rather intuitively that i need to take the reader on a journey and i have to speak from my position. It took me a long time. It was a huge ethical question for me: do i have the right to talk about it? I have had plenty of conversations about it. Finally, i have to say it, writers and editors Natalie Nougayrède and Maria Tumarkin helped me understand that i had to be visible in the book and my position needs to be stated. The narration gets grounded then. My intentions must be clear.

O.R — I couldn’t agree more with you on this ethical question. It is a truly haunting one. Regarding your position, the doubts and necessity of finding how to define it clearly: did the elements you gathered through your conversations with the Ukrainian poets sometimes take you in surprising, disturbing, or even conflicting directions? Did they make you reconsider your own convictions on language and poetry?

a.r — All these conversations and encounters have introduced me to a world of possibilities and at the same time, revealed to me new dimensions of language. It was also a journey into history. There are a few important aspects here.

First and foremost, it became clear to me to what extent any empire uses language and culture as another capital for propagating its ideas and presence. In one of his lectures, J. M. Coetzee reflected how as a small boy, he got engaged reading a book for children in English. It was one of his introductions into reading. Only later, he gained awareness that the book came from Great Britain and was very British in its quality and essence. While he himself grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and descended from germanized Poles on his mother’s side and Dutch-speaking settlers in South Africa on his father’s. English became the language of the family, even though they were surrounded by Afrikaans. He would continue writing in English with this awareness. Recently, he has written a new book The Pole, which he decided to publish first in translation to Spanish as El Polaco, about a couple, a Polish pianist and a Catalan woman who speak in “European English”. This was his way of opposing the imperial Englishness spreading around like fungi. Yet, foreign publishers waited for the English version to be published so that they could buy the copyright and let their translators translate from the “original” language. This made Coetzee and his translator to Spanish Mariana Dimópulos write later another book Speaking in Tongues, in which they elaborate on language and translation. Coetzee aimed at writing in a rootless language and wished to encourage English speaking readers to learn other languages and nurture their curiosity for other literatures.

I am referring to him and his ideas as i was similarly unaware to what extent i was not only shaped by the Russian tradition, but also Western. And how much Russian literature was present in the West and other Eastern European voices were not. Not because they were unworthy of it. But simply because these countries did not have such resources to promote themselves and were undergoing continuous oppression and humiliation from the first tsarist Russian and later the Soviet Union, which did not end up with its collapse. My education and the education of many Polish people (but not only) was very much impacted by this too. Poland was partitioned in the 18th Century between Russia, Prussia and Austro-Hungary. Polish language was forbidden in the Russian part. The memory of it still lasts in Poland. My generation was exempt from studying the language the way that the former generations were forced to. I had to study Russian writers and poets at school though. This is just as a matter of fact. It has taken a long time for some of my friends from the generation of my parents to acknowledge that there have been excellent writers and poets in Ukraine and Belarus. Russian propaganda worked so strongly that it is engraved in people’s psyche that Anna Akhmatova was the most excellent poetess. And it is not to diminish her talent but to give accordingly valid space and voice to Maik Yohansen, Vasyl Stus, Lesya Ukrainka, among others. This is what we now colloquially call “to decolonise our mind”. 

Another aspect of your question is the way we, poets, construct our poetic language and what we write about. With the escalation of the war, some Ukrainian poets admitted that their ways of writing changed dramatically. They no longer were interested in ornamenting their poems, they abandoned elaborated metaphors. They aimed at saying the naked truth about the most unspeakable crimes. You might think there is no language for that. And yet, we have to testify. “Your silence will not protect you,” wrote Audre Lorde in Cancer Journals. Our speech, our testimony is an act against nihilism and documents it. For this reason, i personally struggled. Many years ago, i embarked on a long journey writing a creative non-fiction book on landscape: it is my journey through Scandinavian and Baltic countries and a particular landscape i encountered on my way serves me as a metaphor for a philosophical and political reflection. I would go at great lengths to describe the landscape in the most inspiring way. I was very much encouraged by Adam Zagajewski and Karl Ove Knausgård to continue writing. When Russia invaded Ukraine on a full scale i dropped this project and i believed i would never get back to it. It made no sense to me. Watching my Ukrainian friends and colleagues struggling every day in Ukraine which is being shelled by Russia day and night, i felt humble. I cannot even express the pain, the anger i have felt. And even though i stayed in Ukraine at various times for several months, i could always leave. I am in a different position. Why should i be writing a nice book on landscape, i kept asking myself? And in what language?

I admire so many people in Ukraine today: Sasha Dovzhyk establishing and leading INDEX, first under the auspices of IWM in Vienna and now continuing their way as such in Ukraine, in order to document the war by means of art and literature. At the same time, Sasha edits the “Ukrainian Institute Review” in London and publishes her own book about the war soon. While her country is being shelled, everyone is deprived of sleep due to shelling and air raids, while their loved ones are being killed by missiles, shaheds or on the frontline fighting. What we can do is to listen to Ukrainians, read their texts, poems, and essays. Learn the language. I have managed to learn to read and listen with comprehension. I wish to learn to speak too.

ariel rosé, Jumping into the abyss, Odesa, 2025.

O. R —You’ve just mentioned a previous project on landscape, and I’m not really surprised to hear about it. You are a nomadic writer and a swimmer. In your case, this is far from incidental. There is a moment in your book when you describe a trip with PEN Ukraine to visit libraries and schools in Odesa. There, just before leaving and while an air raid is still on, you managed to have a swim in the Black Sea. Would you draw a parallel between this physical immersion in the Ukrainian landscape and meeting Ukrainian poets and people ?

a.r — You are such an empathic and wise reader, Olivia, your questions are to the point and very moving. You are right, this is not incidental, i am very sensitive to landscape. Parallel to the book Ukraine–A Polyphony, i have completed another book on landscape: Ways of swimming. The starting point was the landscape as a painting, in reference to my readings of the work by John Berger and a Polish exiled writer and painter Józef Czapski (to whom, as i have learnt recently, i am related). What was interesting to me though, to a person who grew up in the proximity of woods and lakes, was the landscape regarded as an experience, a place you habitate, a place with history which has its influence on the inhabitants. Following the “extended mind” thesis of Andy Clark and David Chalmers, i wished to understand, whether places and landscapes are part of our consciousness.

In this regard, my stay in Ukraine and my travels through Ukraine (and this was not my first visit, i have traveled to Ukraine many times, beginning with the Orange Revolution), have been enriching also in the sense of learning its topography, its plants and animals, its waters. We are related to landscape, it shapes us and we re-shape it. The fact that Mariupol was invaded by Russia and cut off from Ukraine is a huge tragedy, it is an amputated arm, the same with Donbas–two different places, as one is very water-oriented, the other is earth-oriented. I have seen the refugee center for refugees from Mariupol in Lviv and it has left a mark on me, i keep returning with my thoughts to this visit–thanks to the INDEX Team. It is the only city (as far as i know) that has organised throughout Ukraine a network of refugee centers for its citizens, which says a lot about the community from there. At the center in Lviv, we could see pictures made by kids from Mariupol: all were filled with sea and sea animals. There was also a huge mural on the wall vis a vis the entrance: the defenders of Mariupol and the theatre with “дети” written on the ground in front of it, the image we know so well, an unforgettable image that will forever tear our hearts. 

When i hear ideas about Ukraine giving up parts of its land for the sake of so-called peace with Russia, i am infuriated and saddened. If anyone had taken away my Warmia region, i would have lost my Heimat, my anchor. 

The specific estuary, which turned out to be an inland sea-lake–liman–that executive director of PEN Ukraine Maksym Sytnikov showed to me and the Black Sea itself–are incredible imagery reservoirs of a common, bonding experience. Liman is a special kind of water–brakish water of a lagoon or a very wide estuary at the very lips of rivers (there can be a few flowing inland). The lips are salty and sweet at the same time. There are not that many limans in the world, we will find a few growing like water bubbles from the rivers: Dnieper, Dniester, Bug. The fluvial and maritime currents mingle. It is a rich reservoir for imagination and becomes part of our psyche. I could sense it in the writing of Diana Delyurman who comes from Odesa. I could also see it in her eyes while we were there. One can also sense it in the writing of Kateryna Yakovlenko who originally comes from the Donbas region (her home is lost) and who has also developed a special bond with the sea tangible in her wonderful writing. I believe we become the land we live in.

O.R — Does Ukrainian poetry have the power, today, to make these inner and outer lands mingle, channeling different currents of the same reality against the invader’s falsifications? Russian propaganda claims that Ukraine as a distinct nation doesn’t exist — no real land, no real language.

a.r — Ukrainian poetry has already proved to stand against falsifications and manipulations of Russian propaganda. The power of poetry is in its vulnerability, honesty. It is a message made of snow.

It is the most heavy experience taken inside without protection and displayed to the outside world as a transparent openwork. This is not a press release. This is an individual record, testimony and at the same time, a refined sagacity, epiphany, profundity and acuity of vision–inner vision of what has happened. Czesław Miłosz wrote that poets are like barometers: they tell you what’s the weather. They cannot change the weather but barometers cannot lie. You cannot accuse a barometer. Russian authorities have no access to this kind of knowledge. 

When i have been researching the war archives from Ukraine, i was stunned when reading testimonies of people who witnessed the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and its aftermath. The archives also include press releases of Russian media covering the same event but in completely different words and images. It is a terrible mixture of lies, propaganda, grotesque Soviet-like fables, that are just ugly and made me feel sea sick while reading it. No reasonable person would believe it. This is their certificate. 

What is dangerous in their mechanism are their soft power tanks, as we could observe in Venezia at the recent Biennale: the penetration of their ideas into the general psyche of people from the outside. How to dismantle this colonisation? I believe Ukrainian poetry is doing very well in dismantling it. I am glad to see Ukrainian poets being invited to poetry festivals around the world, being translated to world languages. This is no mirage. Putin’s false ontology is a laughing stock, he has already lost.

Interview conducted by Olivia Resenterra on May 20, 2026

ariel by Dirk Skiba

ariel rosé (he/they/them) –poet, essayist, illustrator, author of the books morze nocą jest mięśniem serca, PIW 2022 (the sea at night is a muscle of the heart) and Północ Przypowieści, Znak 2019 (North: Parables), and forthcoming Ukraine–A Polyphony and ways of swimming; co-editor of Both Sides Face East/Durable Words (Academic Studies Press 2025), Borders De Todos Lados / Fronteras from all Directions (ibidem 2026). ariel is a member of PEN Berlin. Twice a year they have been inviting poets from underrepresented countries to Oslo for a reading–the fruit of which is an anthology Sammenvevde stemmer to be issued by HOF, Norway 2026. Recently, they have been working on an opera on Paula Rego at the Watermill Center.

ariel is originally from Poland, a resident of Norway, living as a nomad between languages and countries.
https://www.arielrose.art/
instagram: @arielrosepoet
fb https://www.facebook.com/rosealeira

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