A risen star of the international poetry

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort was born in 1981 in Minsk as Valzhyna Martynava. The adjustment of her surname to Mort stems from the student culture there. She subsequently realised what connotations ‘Mort’ could have, and decided nevertheless to retain it.

In the searing work of Valzhyna Mort, marvelously different in form and in delivery...dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her translations, and to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity.” —The Irish Times

“A risen star of the international poetry world,” declares the Irish Times, about Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, who is famed throughout Europe—and now the US—for her vibrant reading performances. Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), co-translated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright

There is an urgency and vitality to her poems; the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love—while many poems question what language is and challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how. The New Yorker writes, “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.” Library Journal described Mort's vision as ”visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark,“ and Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears ”a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight.“ Valzhyna writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished. She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English.

Mort received the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and has received a fellowshiip at Gaude Polonia, Warsaw, Poland. Her English translations of Eastern-European poets can be discovered in the anthology, New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Factory of Tears has been translated into Swedish and German.

Mort has the distinction of being the youngest person to ever be on the cover of Poets & Writers magazine. She lives in Washington DC.

About FACTORY OF TEARS (2008) Factory of Tears is the American debut of Valzhyna Mort—and the first bilingual Belarusian-English poetry book ever published in the US. Set in a land haunted by the specter of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, intense moments of joy leaven the darkness. “Grandmother”—as person and idea—is a recurring presence in poems, and startlingly fresh images—desire as the approaching bus that immediately pulls away or pain as the embrace of a very strong god “with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you”—occupy and haunt the mind.

The music of lines and litanies of phrases mesmerize the reader, then sudden discord reminds us that Mort's world is not entirely harmonious. “I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the heroic Factory of Tears”, she writes in the final stanza. “I have calluses on my eyes...And I'm Happy with what I have.” Engaged, voracious, and memorable, Factory of Tears is a remarkable American debut of a rising international poetry star. The translation was in collaboration between Mort, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE & THE POETRY OF REVOLUTION

Valzyhyna also speaks brilliantly on The Politics of Language and The Poetry of Revolution. In these energetic and dynamic talks, Valzhyna Mort addresses the poetry of anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe from the 1970s to the 1990s, the time in the twentieth-century when poets became prophets for their nations; when a poem was the only voice of freedom—in such cases, poems were learned by heart and repeated like a prayer or rewritten many times and carefully hidden, because poetry was considered a sin and when a poem was also a weapon, in many cases the only weapon available.

In a humanizing and expanding view of history, Valzhyna looks at poems written at the times of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Solidarity movement in Poland, including the work of poets Adam Zagajewski, Ryszard Krynicki, Julian Kronhauser, Leszek Moczulski, Ewa Lipska, and others. She talks about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the current situation in Belarus, both the political and the poetic scenes—and how the two overlap in the politics of language.

Her first collection of poetry, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes, appeared in Belarus in 2005. At that time, she was studying at the University of Minsk. She was not only a poet but also a translator from English and Polish. It was not Valzhyna’s intention to leave Belarus. However, having met her American husband there, she decided to go with him to the United States, where she has experienced considerable success as a poet and performing artist – and has also been granted American citizenship.

Her American debut was the collection The Factory of Tears, which she wrote in collaboration with the married couple Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright (winner of the Pulitzer Prize 2004 for poetry). Until she was sixteen, Mort had envisaged a musical career – as an accordionist – but poetry was her final choice. She comes from a Russian-speaking family and studied Belarusian at school. Because of its musicality, this language became a means for her to create “music in a different form” and to write poetry.

In the course of history, the Belarusian language area has completely or partially been part of Poland on several occasions, and Polish has left behind distinct lexical and phonetic influences in its language. In 1918, White Russia (as it was then called) declared itself independent, but in 1921 the country became a Soviet Republic and a large proportion of the intelligentsia was liquidated. Many Belarusians tend to see themselves as Russians who are part of the great Russian cultural traditions.

In Belarus, such Russian authors as Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva are much read, but many Polish writers such as Szymborska, Miłosz, Zagajewski and Barańczak are also extremely popular. According to Mort, present-day Belarusian poetry is conservative and formal in nature, with roots in folklore. There have never been any avant-garde, surrealist or futurist movements. There are, however, no traces of conservatism and formalism in Valzhyna Mort’s work. It deals with sex; war; skyscrapers; becoming acquainted with the internet for the first time; lack of freedom; repression and corruption; the status of Belarusian; the traditionally awkward position of Belarus between Poland and Russia; and the troubles, sorrows and deficiencies of everyday life. Typical of the repressive atmosphere is the following fragment from the poem ‘Belarusian I’:
completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no And in ‘The Factory of Tears’ we read as a consoling conclusion:I’m a recipient of workers’ comp from the heroic Factory of Tears.
I have calluses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I’m happy with what I have.

In 2004, Mort was one of the three winners of the Crystal of Vilenica, the prize for the best poets during the international literature festival in Slovenia. In Germany, she was awarded the Hubert Burda Preis für junge Lyrik in 2008. For a time she was visiting poet at the Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, and she has also been awarded a work and residence scholarship by Gaude Polonia in Warsaw.

Roel Schuyt (Translated by John Irons)

Some of her poems

BELARUSIAN I

even our mothers have no idea how we were born
how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world
the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing
we couldn’t tell which of us was a girl or a boy
we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread
and our future
a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon
was performing there
at the highest pitch
bitch
we grew up in a country where
first your door is stroked with chalk
then at dark a chariot arrives
and no one sees you anymore
but riding in those cars were neither
armed men nor
a wanderer with a scythe
this is how love loved to visit us
and snatch us veiled
completely free only in public toilets
where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing
we fought the summer heat the winter snow
when we discovered we ourselves were the language
and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes
when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands
when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes
when we were shot in the legs we nodded our head for yes
and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive
we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers
as if into bomb shelters
to be born again
and there on the horizon the gymnast of our future
was leaping through the fiery hoop
of the sun

Grandmother

my grandmother
doesn’t know pain
she believes that
famine is nutrition
poverty is wealth
thirst is water
her body like a grapevine winding around a walking stick
her hair bees’ wings
she swallows the sun-speckles of pills
and calls the internet the telephone to America
her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do
is smell it
pressing yourself to her chest
there’s nothing else you can do with it
only a rose
her arms like stork’s legs
red sticks
and i am on my knees
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your skull
grandmother
i’m telling you it’s not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that prickles when he kisses you.

In the Pose of a Question Mark

How hard it is to draw ourselves up
from the pose of a question mark
into the pose of an exclamation.
The left labia of Poland and the right labia of Russia part
and our heads emerge out of . . .
what?
By now we have sixteen names for snow –
it’s time to come up with sixteen names for darkness.In the pose of a question mark –
with our whole bodies we call ourselves into question,
confirmed by a urine dot.
Is it really us calling into a question?
Or adolescence has just birthed
a rumpled beach towel.So blunt were
the midwife’s scissors
which with time turned into
brightly-polished avenues
jointed by a military obelisk.
A tractor plant started manufacturing hair-rollers
and every Sunday sent mother
a gift basket.
Her head in rollers –
the ideal reconstruction of the solar system –
was photographed for albums and calendars.
The principle of rollers clenching hair
underlay the national production of harvesters.
This became my first metaphor
which I gobbled till my mouth foamed
as if I had swallowed the whole Swan Lake.
My body didn’t belong to me.
Bent with pain,
it was making a career out of being a question mark
in the corporation of language.
The bureaucracy of the body drove me to the wall:
head didn’t want to think –
let the eyes watch
eyes didn’t want to watch –
let the ears listen
ears didn’t want to listen –
let the hands touch
hands didn’t want to touch –let the nose smell the body
which blooms with linden flowers of pain.Where are my bees?
Aren’t I sweet enough for them

MEN

men arrive like a date on a calendar
they keep visiting once a month
men who've seen the bottom
of the deepest bottles
kings of both earth and heaven
and like the pearls from a torn necklace
trembling i scatter at their touch
their heartbeats open doors
vessels respond to their voice commands
and wind licks their faces like a crazy dog
and gallops after their train and roams
they undress me as if undressing themselves
and hold me in their arms like a saxophone
and oh this music these endless blues
like milk from breasts
those notes too high for human ears
too low for gods'
men who teach children to laugh
men who teach time how to run
men who love other men in club toilets
men who've kissed the hand of death herself
men who've never paid attention to my threats
nightmares which bound me to a chair
mama their lips fall on me
like burning planes
they are powerful patient
and when the world crashes
everyone runs for the shelters
they pause to pluck one of my lashes
mama not even mine
just anyone's mama
come back
rescue me find me
in this place wreck