POET VALZHYNA MORT VISITS AMERICAN UNIVERSITY
By Jack Hawkins
Valzhyna Mort is an award-winning Belarusian poet and translator who has authored three poetry collections in English: Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011), and Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), which won both the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. She is one of the youngest individuals ever featured on the cover of Poets & Writers Magazine, teaches at Cornell University, and is a graduate of American University’s MFA program in Creative Writing.
Valzhyna Mort joined American University students and faculty in conversation with David Keplinger, reading from her 2020 collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected and her translation of Polina Barksova’s Air Raid (Ugly Duckling 2021). The selected excerpts were fiercely intimate, reminding listeners of what it means to be human amid war and tyranny. In answering one attendee’s question regarding the poet’s capacity to make peace, Mort replied that while no poem can administer justice, poetry does permit one to speak ritualistically to the self. “I’m just writing prayers, really,” she said.
Mort’s poetry stems from a desire to create rhythmic spaces out of her personal obsessions. To that end, she oftentimes incorporates allusive fairytale elements into her work, furthering their inherently surrealistic quality. She also describes poetry as “a musical form in [her] gut.” Through every line, she performs a delicate dance, balancing her somber political meditations with play while entertaining enthusiastic MFA students during the pre-reading session by relating several humorous anecdotes about her childhood musical studies. Her love of the accordion at age six, a seven-year stint at the Minsk Opera House spent mouthing librettos – her stories emphasized how our pasts never cease coloring the present.
On translation, Mort – who can translate between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish – spoke at length about her deep appreciation for the art, extolling it as “the biggest gift.” The skill of the translator is paramount, for it is sometimes easy to forget that there is much more to translation than merely plugging in one word for another. Translatory work requires one to understand the nuances of a given language, cultural context, dialect, and equivalents to words that are simply untranslatable. Mort’s co-translation with Hanif Abdurraqib, Motherfield: Poetry and Belarusian Protest Diary by Julia Cimafiejeva released in 2022 from Deep Vellum Press and was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize.
The American University community thanks Valzhyna Mort for engendering an evening of profound discussion!
