HAUS FÜR POESIE

This evening brings two Ukrainian voices onto a shared stage whose poems are being written from an ongoing present of war, poems that often owe their great clarity and precision to their fearlessness in imagery and their necessary harshness. Despite this harshness, and with each poet asserting her distinct individual voice, Yaryna Chornohuz and Kateryna Kalytko are united by a pronounced humanism, an attention to vulnerability, to that which is the first to disappear under brutality and violence. Their poems do not shy away from naming terror in detail, yet at the same time insist on proximity, tenderness, and the dignity of the individual. Language here is neither meant nor able to console, but leads further, often beyond what might seem endurable. The readings are accompanied and framed by music by Mykola Lebed, whose sonic interventions operate between presence and restraint, opening an acoustic space for both the poems and the audience.

Yaryna Chornohuz is a poet, writer, translator, and soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She volunteered as a combat medic as early as 2019, joined the Marines the following year, and has taken part in heavy fighting in defense of Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. Her first poetry collection, How the War Circle Bends, was published in 2020. Many of its poems were written during her deployment at the front. Her second volume, Dasein: Defense of Presence, appeared in 2023 and continues her poetic engagement with war, death, and presence. In 2024 she received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize for Literature as well as the Women in Arts Prize in the category Women in Literature.

Chornohuz’s poems insist on naming concrete experience and refuse excessive aesthetic distance. Pain becomes a form of knowledge and a condition of truth, as one poem states: “in this country everything lies / except pain.” At the same time, the texts consistently affirm the dignity of each individual life and work against any disappearance into abstraction. Even where a sense of future emerges, it remains bound to extreme caution: “I’ll try to plant a seed / in an unmined field.”

Kateryna Kalytko is a poet, novelist, and translator. She has published six poetry collections and one novel and is a member of PEN Ukraine. Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies of Ukrainian literature and have been translated into, among other languages, English, German, Polish, Hebrew, and Armenian. Kalytko translates Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian literature into Ukrainian, including works by Adisa Bašić, Nenad Veličković, and Miljenko Jergović. In 2014 she received the Metaphora Prize for her translations. Further honors include the Taras Shevchenko National Prize and the Joseph Conrad–Korzeniowski Literary Prize. Her short story collection Land of the Lost, or Little Scary Tales was awarded the BBC Book of the Year Award in 2017.

Kalytko’s texts combine precision with narrative richness, exploring ways of continuing to live in a damaged world. Her poems work with narrative movement and with powerful, often difficult-to-bear images, as well as with mythological and religious resonances, for instance when a war-torn version of the Lord’s Prayer emerges: “And forgive us nothing, even if you wished to— / for we too forgive not our debtors, / we stand before your Last Judgment / like schoolchildren at the blackboard, / souls laid bare (…)”. Violence and loss are deeply inscribed in body and language in these texts, when, for instance, one poem speaks of “scars like embroidery on living flesh.” Injury and memory appear inseparable, and again and again the everyday shifts into something threatening, as when “the sound of a dress zipper coming undone / resembles the dry rattle of a machine gun behind your back.”

Mykola Lebed (born 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist with a focus on music and sound. Drawing on a classical training as a pianist and saxophonist, he works at the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, bringing together minimalism, improvisation, free jazz, ambient, and field recording. His artistic practice is shaped by an open, exploratory engagement with material, place, and situation; it evolves from experiences across diverse musical scenes as well as from an ongoing engagement with migration, memory, and cultural displacement. Lebed’s work has been presented, among other venues, in Berlin, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Lviv, Dnipro, and Ivano-Frankivsk; he has also composed music for theatre, film, and video works. In his live performances, fragile sound spaces emerge that make audible what lies between presence and loss, between language and silence.

The event languages are Ukrainian and German.

The participation of Yaryna Chornohuz is made possible thanks to the support of the Ukrainian Institute in Germany within the framework of the NUMO-Mobilitätsprogramms.