Valzhyna Mort
Belarusian Poet
“Valzhyna Mort is electrifying.” —Franz Wright
“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. She is a recipient of a 2009 Lannan Literary Fellowship. 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. She is happy to speak about Translation and Eastern European Poetry.
Mort has the distinction of being the youngest person to ever be on the cover of Poets & Writers magazine. She lives and teaches in Baltimore, Maryland.
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.
