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"Mort...strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language." --The New Yorker "Valzyhna Mort . . . can justly be described as a risen star of the international poetry world. Her poems have something of the incantatory quality of poets such as Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg. . . . She is a true original."--Cuirt International Festival of Literature "[T]he searing work of Valzhyna Mort . . . dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her [and] to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity."--The Irish Times "(Mort) is most characterized by an obstinate resistance and rebellion against the devaluation of life, which forces her to multiply intelligent questions, impressive thoughts, and alluring metaphors, while her rhythm surprisingly arises as a powerful tool for the most dramatic moments of her verses....One of the best young poets in the world today."--World Literature Today Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic young poet who writes in Belarussian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language in the aftermath of attempts to absorb it into Russian. Known throughout Europe for her live readings, Mort's poetry and performances are infused by the politics of language and the poetry of revolution, where poems are prayers and weapons. when someone spends a lot of time running and bashing his head against a cement wall the cement grows warm and he curls up with it against his cheek like a starfish . . . Valzhyna Mort is a Belarussian poet known throughout Europe for her remarkable reading performances. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she is the recipient of the Gaude Polonia stipendium and was a poet-in-residence at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany. She currently lives in Virginia. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright earned an MFA in translation from the University of Arkansas.Franz Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his bookWalking to Martha's Vineyard.… (more)
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Translated by Elizabeth Oehikers Wright and Franz Wright
Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian poet whose voice is unapologetic and smart. She doesn't mess around trying to beautify what is not...and yet, she finds beauty in unexpected places. Her poetry doesn't
Belarus has a rich and sometimes violent history as part of the former USSR, and a place where the matter of national language is still debated. Most residents speak Russian, and one source states that only 11% of the population actually speaks Belarusian. Proponents of each side don't appear to have any agreement in sight*. And yet, there are those, such as Mort, working hard to maintain the historical language of Belarus. In any case, Russian and Belarusian are similar and with additional borrowed Ukrainian and Polish words, the language of the country is rich. Mort even addresses such complexity in one poem, where she considers "how do two languages share one mouth/like two women in one kitchen"?
In this language that reflects history and culture, Mort writes equally reflective poetry. "In memory of a book":
books die
out of dark bedrooms
where the only road
paved by a yellow lamp
led to their pages
they are stuffed in every corner of a house
thus turning it into a huge book cemetery
those whose names do not ring any bell
are taken to the attic
where they lay-twenty books in one box-
a mass grave
books become windows
in empty apartments
nobody's heart beats above them
no one shares with them a dinner
or drops them into a bathtub
nobody watches them
lose their pages
like hair
like memory
books age alone
In one entitled "For A.B.", she paints a parallel between children and identity as well as heritage:
it's so hard to believe
that once we were even younger
than now
that our skin was so thin
that veins blued through it
like lines in school notebooks
that the world was like a homeless dog
that played with us after class
and we were thinking of taking it home
but somebody else took it first
gave it a name
and trained it stranger
against us
and this is why we wake up late at night
and light up the candles of our tv sets
and in their warm flame we recognize
faces and cities...
Somehow I picture the typical wornout world map, with its faded blue background and the mysterious lines, as a background for this poem. How strange to live in a place where the lines have moved, often inexplicably!
There is a moodiness to the poems that lends itself to topics of dreams, life, and death. Humor is sprinkled throughout and she uses images of tears, hair, and children to personalize the mysteries of belonging and believing. Her youth is evident in crisp words that are magnified by the enjambment so that we feel the anxiety and confusion.