'Six Poems' translated by Oksana Maksymchuk

Translated from the Russian by Oksana Maksymchuk

Max Rosochinsky writes: I was born and raised in Crimea, in a Russian-speaking family, where Ukrainian – which would have been my mother tongue under slightly different historical circumstances – had long been repressed for the sake of career advancement within the Soviet system. Thanks to my wife and translator Oksana Maksymchuk, I learned Ukrainian in Lviv and began speaking it again – somewhat paradoxically ‘adopting’ it as my native language. I stopped writing in Russian soon after the annexation of Crimea, experiencing a whole spectrum of emotions: from a feeling of rage and a sense of muteness grounded in an inability to continue writing in the language of an enemy that had once been my own, to reflections about intended audience, cultural context, poetic identity, and the literary tradition into which Russian-language writing automatically gets inscribed. A language is never entirely neutral; it carries within it a charge of historical and ideological meanings; it has a history and a criminal record. To its speakers and writers, privileges accrue, as do duties and burdens.

The cycle is titled Tapestry. It is inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Norman invasion of England. The association is not accidental: writing in the language of the invaders while identifying with the invaded recalls the strange perspective embedded in that work. Tapestry reflects on techne, on the craft of arrangement and composition, but it also becomes a metaphor for history itself – commissioned, cinematic, shaped by those who may resist or even detest what has happened, yet have no choice but to recount it. Truth itself may be unattainable; what remains possible is truthfulness: the gathering of fragments of evidence, in a Thucydidean spirit, towards an account that still carries the experience of the event – what it means to record it without having witnessed it.

The composition of the Russian-language originals dates from 2014.


Cargo

He keeps bodyguards under his pillow.
His smart little toy tank’s always at the ready.
Victory is an outdated computer programme.
It’s been loading for years.

He’s not one to be taken in by metaphors,
the ever-youthful dictator.
His people’s language weaves cosy nests of pauses
to make room for him.

As in Eisenstein’s montage, he yawns –
and a child dies in another country.
Count the days. Soon victory will be ours.
The fruit of greatness sits ripe on the bleeding map.
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