ariel rosé
- Poland -
ariel rosé – transgender poet, essayist, illustrator, activist, 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). He has published poems and essays in many languages in journals in the US and in Europe. He is a member of PEN Berlin and Circolo Scandinavo in Rome, Italy. Twice a year he invites poets from underrepresented countries to Oslo, leads a conversation, and translates poems into Norwegian together with Aina Villanger. ariel has two books forthcoming: Ukraine–A Polyphony and Ways of Swimming. rosé is also co-editor and co-author of Both Sides Face East/Durable Words (Academic Studies Press, 2025), which is the first volume out of three within the project Both Sides of the Border Face East under the patronage of Marci Shore, with the support of Fondation Jan Michalski and the International Renaissance Institute. ariel lives as a nomad between countries and languages.
Between
ariel rosé is a transgender, androgynous poet, essayist, and illustrator from Poland. He leads a nomadic life and currently lives in Norway. He is the author and illustrator of the book the sea at night is a heart muscle (2022), which was nominated for the Orpheus Poetry Award. In 2019, still under the name Alicja, he published North. Parables. He has also been successful as an illustrator of other authors’ books, such as Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s The Cat Book and Magdalena Tulli’s That Forest. So far, he has translated poetry and prose from English, Italian, French, Norwegian, and Spanish into Polish, as well as into English and Norwegian. He is a member of the Polish Literary Union and the Association of Literary Translators in Poland, as well as PEN Berlin, Litteratur på Blå in Oslo, and Circolo Scandinavo in Rome.
rosé’s poems echo the work of great masters from whom he not only wishes to learn, but whose company he also wishes to join. Among these great figures, whose circle he aspires to enter, the most important is a teacher treated as a friend — though we know little about what this relationship looked like from the other side — namely Adam Zagajewski. The choice of this particular writer is not accidental: Zagajewski, so important for contemporary world poetry, had long practiced a nomadic way of life. A representative of the generation of ’68, also known as the New Wave, he was born in Lviv, but great history and politics determined that he would spend his life far from his birthplace and, in time, also far from his native language. During martial law he left for Paris, and in the late 1980s he began working at American universities in the United States. Despite his return to Poland — made possible after the political transformation — his ties with the international literary world did not weaken; perhaps they even grew stronger. Over time, in the twenty-first century, his influence and importance for literary life and poetry itself were greater in the West than in Poland. A poet, essayist, and academic lecturer, though connected with Kraków, he seemed above all to be a citizen of the world — of poetry.
rosé chooses him as his master — one among many, as more names appear here, always great ones — not only in poetry, but also in life. He treats not only Zagajewski’s work, but also his biography, as an important point of reference. In the poem “P.S. in memoriam Adam Zagajewski,” he constructs a vivid image of his relationship with the now-deceased Zagajewski, while consciously playing with the expectations of readers. As usual, after the death of the great and famous, the appetite grows for first-hand stories that reveal even the smallest details of life, the intimate and supposedly truer life. The direct address “Adam” in the opening line of the poem establishes the relationship between the speaker and the addressee as close — close enough to allow for shared readings, shared work with and on the text, the work of translation, of understanding and its absence, of constant movement between what is known and what is not.
It is difficult not to read this poem as a kind of challenge to the reader, who finds it hard to set aside her knowledge of the biographical context. rosé not only positions himself as a link between worlds, languages, cultures, and finally between life and death, but also reveals an ambition to save fragments of fleeting experience, some truth about a person who is no longer physically present. One might even see this poem as a record of a generational handover: rosé here becomes the successor to a tradition developed by an imagined Zagajewski, constructed from conversations, expectations, and readings. The poetic project of the author of the sea at night is a heart muscle assumes a dialogue with literary history.
rosé seems to be a castaway, a wanderer — breaking through the waves, or perhaps allowing himself to be carried by them, leaping onto those that will take him farthest. Can he not, or does he not wish to, find his Ithaca? “My home is my story, / says Odysseus and, as he leaves, greets / the guide dogs of Tiresias, who wants to know,” we read in the poem “Tiresias Is Looking for an Assistant.” Perhaps this is how rosé’s project should be read: the only passport a poet should care about is the one that grants the right to inhabit the territory of the poem. The only identity worth striving for is one that remains undefined, ambiguous, borderland — or even fluid. “Perhaps it is a cliché, ariel thinks, but in his next / life he would like to be water, the water of a sea whose / waves are a herd of horses galloping in panic,” we read in “Prospero’s Song.”
Everything here is constructed from references and allusions; rosé plays only in high registers, among great names. Everything here signifies, even “ariel,” the name adopted by the author in recent years. The airy spirit, the character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, enslaved and liberated, subordinated, works toward final freedom. What weighs upon ariel as he leans out from behind these poems? What does he strive toward? Ariel the nomad, in eternal motion, surely cannot bear attachment. But those bonds that are chosen freely — with predecessors in poetry, or in literature understood more broadly — become a friendly space, a territory in which unexpected yet desired alliances can be formed.
These are engaged poems; their classicizing character does not mean that they lose sight of current affairs. One can see in them a belief in the self, in one’s own agency. rosé’s nomadic poetic project gains weight in the face of catastrophe. It becomes a chance for preservation: it not only carries the memory of lost loved ones, but also resists the systemic extermination of an entire society, an entire nation. “Listening on Zoom as Iya Kiva Reads a Poem about War” is a bold presentation of the power of the poetic word. Russia’s attack on Ukraine, which began the full-scale war that continues to this day, was aimed not only at the biological destruction of Ukrainians. Bombardments, rapes, and the creation of ecological disasters are the visible part of the war. The less visible, but no less dangerous, part of the war waged by Russia was and still is intended to destroy culture, including Ukrainian literature. Works of art, museums, theatres, schools, and universities have all been targets of attack.
In a situation of threat, the newest technologies come to the rescue. The word, carried no longer by “radio waves” — though those would fit so well with the story of ariel-Odysseus — but through the internet and across the network, is able to travel far beyond the zone of shelling. The voice of Kiva, one of the most important contemporary Ukrainian poets, carries from Kyiv out into the world. The poet needs shelter; her voice escapes the endangered city and reaches those who are safe and well-fed. Poetry can be a shelter — but is it enough for those in real danger?
The stake of rosé’s poetic project is memory. In this project, the same solidarity and solitude meet that Zagajewski himself wrote about. Listening, in a dry, warm, safe apartment, to poems from beyond the line of fire costs little, if anything at all. Listening here becomes an expression of solidarity that may lessen the solitude of those who are dying. Will the poem itself, then, be written on the side of peace? rosé records a desire, but also at times a sense of transborder bonds made possible precisely by poetry. Such love, whose hunger Alicja once wrote out, remains important, but it is no longer enough. The practice of solidarity in a poem that is read, presented, and subjected to the test of understanding seems here to be an expanded version of feeling, reaching far beyond the boundaries of a relationship between two people. Poetry is meant to be a way of enduring, of preserving what has already been. It also seems to be an experiment outlining the possibility of non-binary, fluid modes of ethical, responsible coexistence, building the subject’s sense of agency. What its effects will be, rosé’s next books will show.
Anna Marchewka
Poetry
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OPPORTUNITY / MOŻLIWOŚĆ
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HOTEL DIEU / HOTEL DIEU
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P.S. / P.S.
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LISTENING ON ZOOM TO IYA KIVA READING A POEM ABOUT WAR / SŁUCHAJĄC NA ZOOMIE, JAK IJA KIWA CZYTA WIERSZ O WOJNIE
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PROSPERO’S SONG / PIEŚŃ PROSPERA
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TIRESIAS IS LOOKING FOR AN ASSISTANT / TEJREZJASZ SZUKA ASYSTENTA
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THE SONG OF TRANSIENCE / PIEŚŃ O PRZEMIJANIU
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MY SHADOW WILL COMFORT YOU / MÓJ CIEŃ BĘDZIE CI POCIESZENIEM
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EURYPIDES’ TALE / OPOWIEŚĆ EURYPIDESA
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ANGELUS / ANGELUS
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SIMONE WEIL / SIMONE WEIL
