Valzhyna Mort

One summer night, when I was about four, I had a fever. I was in a village house with my grandmother. The Chernobyl explosion had happened a few months earlier, but we didn’t know it. The house was falling apart and the land around it was all labour: every inch was cultivated by my family to provide marinaded produce for the winter season. I couldn’t sleep, and my grandmother said: ‘Would you like to see the night?’ She carried me to the window, moved the gauze curtain, and there it was, my first darkness and my first full moon, neither Chernobyl nor communist. I responded with a sing-song quatrain. Like all inspired things in this world, it had no purpose.

Valzhyna Mort

My experience in a Soviet school was disheartening, and now my heart refuses any dogmas, it desires to be set at large, intuitive, immoral. This is why I find fairytales so helpful: unlike my troubled self, the characters in fairytales have no interior lives. They don’t brood over decisions. They break simple rules without a shade of guilt or doubt. When trees and bones talk to them, they listen and talk back and don’t make a big deal out of it.

In the beginning, I listened. Every single day for over 10 years, my grandmother would sit me down and retell me the story of her life. Her stories were unbearable, but the radio was always on and the music – baroque, classical – saved me. The radio was like a family member. It was my grandmother’s ‘cell phone’ that never left her hand. Wars are announced on the radio and wars bring hunger and death. She was marked by her experience, a girl in the eye of the catastrophe that was the twentieth century. This is what I’d say to Helene Cixous about my experience with a female body: a woman who survived the twentieth century wiped my little ass, shampooed my hair, buttered my bread. When she died, I tried to write down her story, but I couldn’t. Her story is impossible without her body, her voice, the sighing, her off-key singing, her weak heart, her blind eyes, her one unbending leg. I don’t write about her life. I write about myself surviving her stories of survival in the kitchen of our apartment in an ugly, yet beautiful, Soviet micro-region, where Mozart is on the radio and Tchaikovsky is on TV as the empire finally collapses. I was poised between violence and music, and music has taught me that, if you listen long enough, everything eventually becomes music.

Valzhyna Mort

In the Soviet Union, public speech was strictly regulated and derived from a rich vocabulary of approved clichés. In my formative years, private speech was non-existent. My parents didn’t read samizdat banned literature clandestinely distributed across the Soviet Bloc], they didn’t talk about politics in the kitchen. They didn’t talk to me seriously. Books did. I believe in the preface to The Unwomanly Face of War (1985) Svetlana Alexievich writes that the women who spoke to her about their experience of the Second World War didn’t feel like they had the right to use the male language of war: the public language of heroism, courage, sacrifice. To speak about themselves in the war, women had to create a new language from scratch.

To speak of a private experience, I feel the need to learn to shut up, search for speech where nobody goes for speech, yet language is there, speech there is possible. If the male language of war concerns the question, ‘how to reconcile with being dead before death?’, then the female language of war asks, ‘how to find life amid death?’ This is how I read The Unwomanly Face of War. I’m born out of these women, taught by them, beaten by them, loved by them.

Valzhyna Mort

The country of ‘Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison’ has its own angel of history, its own monster, its own pope, its own Zeus: the Bialowieza bison. I remember reading that Greta Garbo watched Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (1946), and at the end of the movie, when the Beast turns into a prince, Garbo threw her hands up at the screen and screamed: ‘No! Give me back my beautiful beast!’ Perhaps in ‘Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison’ I want to turn the monstrosity of the state cliché into a beautiful beast, my private beast.

Valzhyna Mort

The bombings in Ukraine have been going on for four weeks now, and I, a poet from Belarus who lives neither in Belarus nor Ukraine, have already been asked to ‘send a quick submission with topical poetry’. During the violent detentions in Belarus, I was asked to submit many a ‘short poem about violence that won’t be too upsetting for audiences’. I hate poetry in moments like that. This morning I wrote to a Ukrainian poet: ‘Lyuba, I want to say something to you but I don’t have words’. I, who grew up reciting poems about war, singing songs about war, listening to veterans talk about war – war plays on the radio, war movies on TV, war parades, war monuments – have no language for this unfolding war. I don’t even know whether it’s okay to say ‘hello’ to a person in Ukraine right now, or in Belarus for that matter. Literature doesn’t prepare us for our reality.

During atrocities, many poets are people doing ordinary things, like coordinating arrivals and departures, putting people in touch, delivering diapers and water, delivering information, organising fund-raisers, driving people to safety, finding safe apartments, listening, recording. Some places, like Myanmar, have a long and tragic tradition of revolutionary poets. Sometimes poets are people leading protests. Sometimes poets are people shot at in city squares. Poets are people who bear weapons in street wars and are shot dead. Poets are also people who spend the rest of their lives fighting off guilt or capitalising on it, trying to understand what it is exactly that has happened to them. History is not enough because it gives facts without giving any understanding of what these facts mean to a private person.

I wonder about a war book for a person who is tired of war books. My favourite one was written 30 years after the war described in it: Building the Barricade (2016) by Anna Swir. It’s a book that works through understatement. It’s a speech by a person who is possessed by an incredible clarity of vision and extreme fatigue of speech. Today, as Kharkiv is bombed, I feel Czeslaw Milosz’s line ‘there is in me no wizardry of words’ from the 1945 poem ‘Dedication’] on a physiological level. I’m afraid that if I tried to write a poem, I’d throw up. I reread Lydia Ginsburg’s Notes From the Blockade (2017) as I was translating Polina Barskova’s Air Raid (2021). It’s a fascinating testament of survival. There is such clarity in it, such composure, such will to find proper words. I also read Ales Adamovic’s The Punitive Squads (1988), a book about the genocide of Belarusian peasants during the Second World War. There are dragged out scenes of murder and death, described with the literary sadism of a writer who saw what nobody should see as a young man and now wants you to see too. I read it slowly, disgorging everything I read, trying to leave the book with clean hands, a clean mind, but no, it’s impossible. It’s not a book that will come ‘highly recommended’ on any list. It is an unacceptable book. Every good war book is an unacceptable book.

Valzhyna Mort

Rome makes me feel small, powerless, which is exactly how I feel in Minsk. I don’t feel that I’m in control of my life. Rather, I’m part of some great narrative that can sweep me away at any moment. There are little soldiers who constantly watch you, telling you ‘don’t sit there’, ‘don’t stand here’, who ask ‘are you allowed to be here?’ That said, they might be a voice inside my own head.

What Minsk is like today is not a paragraph amid other paragraphs, not a sound bite, not a scary story. People are being arrested every day. The 2022 sanctions against Russia which include Belarus mean that many crucial anti-regime projects that support vulnerable communities in Belarus have lost their funding. When Russia started bombing Ukrainian cities, a group of neighbours went into the cellar of their apartment building – their bomb shelter – to clean it. They were all detained for this. There are prisoners in jail right now whose letters do not arrive home for months, there’s no way of knowing how they are doing, what is being done to them. This month April 2022] my book came out in Minsk, in Belarusian, with Plaumbaum, a press initiated by Svetlana Alexievich. Plaumbaum was refused proper publishing status by the censors, so another publisher, Januskevic Books, helps them print books. This week we’ve learned that Januskevic Books are being evicted from their premises without a reason. They were told to move out. Where? Nowhere. Thousands of books need to be picked up by whoever agrees to store them. And you know what? People stand in a long line for hours waiting to buy books.

But I write neither from Rome, nor from Minsk, nor from the US. I write from inside Valzhyna Mort. What am I like? Why is it so hard for me to understand myself? What is all this inside me? What is all this inside the people who brought me up? Can I describe the intimate situation in this city of myself?

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

My adolescence was spent with Tsvetaeva. We had two volumes of her selected poems at home, a Soviet edition that everybody else had. The poems in it were organised in a chronological order which meant that you could follow the poet day by day. You watch her wake up, make coffee, go to the window and say something to you from the page. You could live through her month in one day, her year in one day, a whole life in one day of reading. It was a lyrical biography of a poet doomed to burn to death, setting herself on fire, little by little, daily, a hair at a time until she was completely engulfed inside it. It’s the fire of language. Language for Tsvetaeva is sound and rhythm, and sound and rhythm for Tsvetaeva are truth. Language is its own element, a force of nature. She is a listener. The poet’s will is one listener’s extraordinary patience. She is categorical, argumentative, ‘toxic’ as we would say today. Her language is a synonym for her imagination, it takes huge leaps and when it lands on a final word in a line or completes a metaphor, the reader’s stomach tightens. Her pitch is pure tension. She is all form, intuition, freedom, obsessed and possessed. Tsvetaeva makes a big impression on a young person. At 40, I’m afraid to open her book. I feel ashamed. She exposes everything.
When I feel ashamed and exposed, when I feel the vapidness of emotions that stick to me like catchweed, I read Wisława Szymborska. Cold-blooded, direct, economical, she uses the language of reason to write about things beyond reason. She uses irony not to flaunt her intelligence but to be humane. My favourite poets do that: Adam Zagajewski, Fernando Pessoa, Adélia Prado. She herself was the number one target of her own irony. She wrote self-deprecating epitaphs for herself and for her living friends, and, although French and German were her foreign languages, she did enjoy English limericks. Her philosophy is the ‘as you don’t know – so you don’t know’ of Ecclesiastes. She often opens with a paradox that annuls both sides of some argument. She often does this by showing a larger picture, yet without pathos or moralising. Most contemporary poets must teach in order to have a pay-check, myself included, and yet the poets I love are, like Szymborska, without a drop of a teacher in them. In fact, teachers are often evoked in Szymborska’s poems as most helpless creatures. But Szymborska’s genius is in her last stroke: an unexpected ending, ‘puenta’. Szymborska’s poems are described as translatable and give an illusion of being ‘craftless’. In fact, the opposite is true. Szymborska is polished. In her work, everything is held together firmly, nothing is accidental or superfluous. Her own statement on craft: ‘The most important instrument of a poet is a garbage bin.’ She was a slow poet and didn’t write for two years after receiving her Nobel Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966].

Poets like Tsvetaeva and Szymborska are absolutely themselves, and they can influence somebody only into bad imitation, so I’m bowing out of their influence. They’ve taught me a lot because I’ve been reading them, trying to understand them. As for influence – ‘If you only knew what garbage poems grow out of’, the Odessa-born poet Anna Akhmatova famously said. I was influenced by public buses, by long corridors of Soviet schools, music lessons, jars of marinaded mushrooms, opera, linden trees, my grandmother’s stories, Mozart, fear of torture, grass, snow. All kinds of garbage.

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort

Polina’s book gave me speech when I lost it, after rereading Belarusian-Soviet writer] Ales Adamovich. He describes the massacres – by fire – of the Belarusian rural population during World War Two in several of his books, most notably Out of the Fire (1980) and Katyn (2012). The Nazis destroyed over 5,000 Belarusian settlements as punishment for collaborating with partisans.] The image of a village-full of people locked in a barn – women, children, grandparents… The sun is shining through the cracks in the walls, at first they don’t know why they are there, the children are crying, asking to leave, there’s confusion, patience, fear, then they smell the smoke. Now they know that the barn is on fire. If they don’t scream and bang on the doors and walls, they are all going to burn together like they lived together in one village, grandparents and grandchildren, nobody would be left. Only screaming and banging doesn’t help. People on the outside, with automatic weapons over their chests, know that the barn is on fire, and they hear the children scream and they know that the barn is full of people, who are suffocating and screaming next to each other. They won’t let anybody survive. I didn’t know how to move on from this image. You are born and live and then suddenly you realise that this place you’ve been born into is a post-death. What does it mean to be alive in a post-death? After thousands of people burned to death screaming in the barns all around you, how do you speak? When?

Polina is a scholar of the Leningrad Siege and a poet who asks the same questions about her native city. My head shifted from fire to ice, a kind of a cooling down. I understood that her answer to how we speak after the catastrophe is in her language, in its soundscape, in its deep music: when we speak our awkward post-death words, language fills with echoes of rhymes, with their irregular music. These irregular rhymes and puns are like a hand stretched out from a word to a word, each word pulls another word up. But these groupings are not sentimental, not obvious. In most cases, the pairings are quite obscene on closer look – offensive – but the poet moves through the shame of speech. It’s the shame of discovering that speech is possible and that you speak despite knowing full well that it’s best to be silent.

For the sake of people who think of translation with suspicion, we call my translation a ‘creative translation’. Of course, it’s a tautology. All literary translation is creative. And poetry can be translated the way Polina and I did it: instead of copying information, I follow the sound of the target language, just the way the original text follows the sound. The horror and the joy of these poems is that the information is in the music. It’s only when we access the information through the music, we understand why this is a poem and what it does.
Translating a poem is freeing, the way writing in strict form, say a sonnet, can be much more liberating than restricting. From time to time, working on Polina’s book I wondered, what am I doing, a Belarusian poet translating from Russian into English? That’s exactly where my agency as a creator was important. What was I doing? Anything I wanted to do. Anything that my Belarusian ear heard and wanted to hear, anything that felt right all through my body. What did I do then? I created my own English. It’s a non-native speaker English, immigrant English, Belarusian English. I’m very proud of Air Raid. When I read it, it’s obvious to me that it’s a space of liberated speech.