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Valzhyna Mort

Elizabeth Wright

Factory of Tears: A Lannan Literary Selection (Byelorussian and English Edition) Paperback – April 1, 2008

Byelorussian Edition by Valzhyna Mort (Author), Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright (Translator), Franz Wright (Translator)

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"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." —The New Yorker

“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. . . . She is a true original.”—Cuirt International Festival of Literature

“[T]he searing work of Valzhyna Mort . . . dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her [and] to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity.”—The Irish Times

"(Mort) is most characterized by an obstinate resistance and rebellion against the devaluation of life, which forces her to multiply intelligent questions, impressive thoughts, and alluring metaphors, while her rhythm surprisingly arises as a powerful tool for the most dramatic moments of her verses....One of the best young poets in the world today."—World Literature Today

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic young poet who writes in Belarussian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language in the aftermath of attempts to absorb it into Russian. Known throughout Europe for her live readings, Mort’s poetry and performances are infused by the politics of language and the poetry of revolution, where poems are prayers and weapons.

when someone spends a lot of time running
and bashing his head
against a cement wall
the cement grows warm
and he curls up with it
against his cheek
like a starfish . . .

Valzhyna Mort is a Belarussian poet known throughout Europe for her remarkable reading performances. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she is the recipient of the Gaude Polonia stipendium and was a poet-in-residence at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany. She currently lives in Virginia.

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright earned an MFA in translation from the University of Arkansas. Franz Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book Walking to Martha’s Vineyard.

Print length

116 pages
Language

English, Byelorussian
Publisher

Copper Canyon Press
Publication date

April 1, 2008
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.4 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

9781556592744
ISBN-13

978-1556592744
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 26-year-old Belarusian Mort has made a big splash in Europe. With help from the popular, Pulitzer-winning Franz Wright, this thin, uneven, but decidedly exciting bilingual first U.S. edition shows how Mort's energies work. Some poems last just a few lines; others stretch out across pages of fast-moving prose, and the best bring into disturbing collision the difficult circumstances of Eastern Europe (crowds, relative poverty, bad weather) and the recent results of globalization (suicide bombers, teen culture, game shows with telephonic life lines). Mort says of her compatriots in Belarusian I, we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread and calls our future/ a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon. Later poems reflect her move to the U.S. (she now resides in Virginia), and contemplate those who have made the same move before: of Polish Immigrants, she asks, how do they break away from the land/ where even stones take root. At her best, Mort shows a ragged power Americans might not otherwise know: she writes in a crackling prose poem, I protest against everything: low-quality goods in supermarkets, pigs in the subway, and those who protest against pigs in the subway... this is the only way to survive. (Apr.)
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From The New Yorker

"Everything is from shit. Absolutely everything," Mort writes in her début American publication. "The thing is that there is good shit and bad shit." Its a difficult point to dispute in this argumentative collection. Mort, a young Belarusian poet living in America, 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. (All but one of the poems appear alongside their Belarusian originals.) The poems are driven by a tension between cynicism and patriotism: Belarus, for Mort, is a difficult obsession. Approaching Minsk, her birthplace, at dusk, she writes, "This is how brutally, / this is how tight / heart climbs out of the mouth / and strains eyesight."
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1556592744
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Copper Canyon Press; Bilingual edition (April 1, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English, Byelorussian
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 116 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781556592744
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1556592744
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.4 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,622,066 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,447 in European Poetry (Books)

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Valzhyna Mort
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Valzhyna Mort is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2011) and, most recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Granta, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry and many more. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press). She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Amy Clampitt Foundation, and the Civitella Raineri Foundation. She is a recipient of the Bess Hokins Prize from Poetry and Germany’s Burda Prize for Eastern European authors. Born in Minsk, Belarus, Mort teaches at Cornell University, and writes in English and Belarusian. She translates between English, Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. Valzhyna Mort received the NEA grant in translation in 2020.
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Elizabeth Wright
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natalia allende

A book of power and wit

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 2, 2011

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I have to start by saying that I am WAITING for Valzyna Mort to publish another book of poems. That is the best way to describe the impact that her work has on me. I've read Factory of Tears many times and love to go back to it often. It is a book where nostalgia, pain, fear, and sorrow are thrown onto the table without waiting to see what our reaction will be. But these emotions come through full of power, funk, and wit; unapologetic, as another reviewer states.

Mort opens to us her little world of childhood and of Minsk in contrast to a vast world of possibilities, both internal and external. Many of her poems show how dreams are intertwined with disillusion, but she still keeps a willingness to weave them. Some of my favorite poems are "for A.B.," "Marriage," and "In Memory of a Book."

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Language studies

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 10, 2010

Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort, poetry
Translated by Elizabeth Oehikers Wright and Franz Wright

Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian poet whose voice is unapologetic and smart. She doesn't mess around trying to beautify what is not...and yet, she finds beauty in unexpected places. Her poetry doesn't back away from the controversial. This collection is the first book of Belarusian/English poetry published in the US, for which Copper Canyon Press can be very proud.

Belarus has a rich and sometimes violent history as part of the former USSR, and a place where the matter of national language is still debated. Most residents speak Russian, and one source states that only 11% of the population actually speaks Belarusian. Proponents of each side don't appear to have any agreement in sight*. And yet, there are those, such as Mort, working hard to maintain the historical language of Belarus. In any case, Russian and Belarusian are similar and with additional borrowed Ukrainian and Polish words, the language of the country is rich. Mort even addresses such complexity in one poem, where she considers "how do two languages share one mouth/like two women in one kitchen"?

In this language that reflects history and culture, Mort writes equally reflective poetry. "In memory of a book":

books die

out of dark bedrooms
where the only road
paved by a yellow lamp
led to their pages
they are stuffed in every corner of a house
thus turning it into a huge book cemetery
those whose names do not ring any bell
are taken to the attic
where they lay-twenty books in one box-
a mass grave

books become windows

in empty apartments
nobody's heart beats above them
no one shares with them a dinner
or drops them into a bathtub

nobody watches them
lose their pages
like hair
like memory

books age alone

In one entitled "For A.B.", she paints a parallel between children and identity as well as heritage:

it's so hard to believe
that once we were even younger
than now
that our skin was so thin
that veins blued through it
like lines in school notebooks
that the world was like a homeless dog
that played with us after class
and we were thinking of taking it home
but somebody else took it first
gave it a name
and trained it stranger
against us

and this is why we wake up late at night
and light up the candles of our tv sets
and in their warm flame we recognize
faces and cities...

Somehow I picture the typical wornout world map, with its faded blue background and the mysterious lines, as a background for this poem. How strange to live in a place where the lines have moved, often inexplicably!

There is a moodiness to the poems that lends itself to topics of dreams, life, and death. Humor is sprinkled throughout and she uses images of tears, hair, and children to personalize the mysteries of belonging and believing. Her youth is evident in crisp words that are magnified by the enjambment so that we feel the anxiety and confusion.

5 people found this helpful

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