Valzhyna Mort
Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk in 1981 and has lived in the USA since 2005. She writes in Belarusian and English. Both her own poems and her translations have received many awards. Her Selected volume, “Factory of Tears” (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) was the first Belarusian-English dual-language book ever. Her most recent collection Musik für Tote und Auferstandene was published by Suhrkamp in 2021. In these letters to the dead, the poet examines the history of her family and at the same time of her country. How is it still possible to mourn after a century full of propaganda? Can poetry turn individual suffering into something public? The great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski has written about Mort: “These poems are not just moving, but perform the most elementary work of human language. They experience wretchedness, barbarism and unfeelingness at the level of a universal idiom of wisdom and grace.”
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