VALZHYNA MORT

POET

“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. But she is a true original.”
—Kevin Higgins, Cuirt International Festival of Literature

  “Valzhyna Mort is electrifying.” —Franz Wright

Valzhyna 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), cotranslated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize—winning poet Franz Wright.
Library Journal described Mort's vision as "visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark." 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." Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears "a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight."
Mort's English translations of Eastern-European poets can be discovered in "New European Poets" anthology (Graywolf Press, 2008). Her own collection has been translated into Swedish and German.
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. Valzhyna is famed for her remarkable reading performances, which display a talent not normally associated withn one so young. She has also been the youngest person to be on the cover of Poets and Writers.

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. In addition to poetry readings, Valzyhyna speaks brilliantly on The Politics of Language and The Poetry of Revolution.

Currently, she lives in Washington DC.

 

“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

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE & 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.

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 United States. There is an urgency and vitality to Mort’s poems, while intense moments of joy leaven the darkness. Set in a land haunted by the specter of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love. “Grandmother”—as person and idea—is a recurring presence in poems that question what language is, challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how, and fight to keep a mother tongue alive. 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 translation was in collaboration between Mort, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright. 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.

"maybe you too sometimes fantasize," Words Without Borders