Valzhyna Mort's new book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, continues to draw praise. There is a piece on Mort in The New Yorker, "A Poet Reflects on Europe’s Last Dictatorship:"
"Growing up in Minsk, in the nineteen-eighties, the poet Valzhyna Mort spoke Russian at home and studied Belarusian in school. Now she has written a collection of poems, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, in English. All the same, Mort insists that she does not know any of the three languages particularly well. 'Luckily, I very strongly hang onto the idea that poetry does not come from language, but rather from the unsayable, from the untranslatable,' she told the Guardian last year. 'It only makes sense for me that I am trying to say it in a language—in any language—in which I know I would fail ultimately.'
"That a bard of the unsayable would emerge from Belarus is not an accident. Given the suppression of artists and intellectuals under Stalin, in the nineteen-thirties, and the current censorship of journalists, under President Alexander Lukashenka, Belarusians have been warned for the better part of a century not to tell anyone what happens there. Mort recalls, as a child, listening to her grandmother tell stories about growing up as part of a class of well-off farmers, kulaks, who were forcibly dispossessed under the Soviet regime. After these chats, Mort’s mother would always remind her, 'Valzhyna, you cannot tell this to anybody.' Mort dedicated her first book of poetry published in the United States, Factory of Tears, from 2008, to her grandmother."
Read the full article here.
Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG 2020). Mort is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University.
