Current Issue: July - August 2026
PN Review 290

In this issue:

Stav Poleg - Three Nights in Rome
Max Rosochinsky - 'Six Poems' translated by Oksana Maksymchuk
Victoria Moul - Poems
Malgorzata Lebda - in conversation with Mira Rosenthal
Rachel Hadas - Diaries of Exile: Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries 1948–50; 2013; 2026
Frederic Raphael - Homage to Giacometti
Isobel Williams - Callimachus Versions

Current Issue: July - August 2026
PN Review 290

Three Nights in Rome Stav Poleg There is a kind of pain that arrives from nowhere. You walk in the streets of an unfamiliar city, and suddenly the way a tall pine tree holds its rebellious crown against the sky brings you close to tears. You know it must have triggered something, a distant memory, but you have no idea what it is, and you don’t have time to get lost in your thoughts or in the narrow alleyways of this infinite city. So you go back to your map, restudy the stubborn streets, attempting to restore your sense of direction. And then there is another kind of pain, a simpler one, the one you recognise the instant it happens, knowing precisely why it hurts. It was one of those days. First, the line of tall pine trees on my way, as I was trying......
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Current Issue: July - August 2026
PN Review 290

'Six Poems' translated by Oksana Maksymchuk Max Rosochinsky 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.
......
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Current Issue: July - August 2026
PN Review 290

Poems Victoria Moul Kikajon

Come not to me for calm or cosset
    Nor from the busy look for ease
Labour we have, but no profit
    And no such bud of no such trees
       As Jesse grew
       Or Jonah knew
......
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