HAUS FÜR POESIE

The poet Valzhyna Mort (born 1981 in Minsk) writes poems in two languages: in Belarusian, which she compares to hissing in a field of vipers, and in English. Her texts are a “civilized form of screaming,” they are lullabies, songs of the night, and pocket knife songs, scores “for loud voices and screwdrivers.” Their rhythm is drawn from the “piss-stained hiccups of elevators / and the battered blinking of traffic lights.” In them, Mort conducts a radical, poetic form of ancestral research, while processing the experiences of war and dictatorship, and eavesdropping on stories about “hunger, bombings, displacement, illness, or death.” Her most recent collection Musik für Tote und Auferstandene was published by Suhrkamp in 2021. For this afternoon, she will be reading, amongst other things, poems especially translated for this event by Katharina Narbutovic and Uljana Wolf, poems that are taken from a previously unpublished manuscript with the working title Winter in Monteverde. The tone of the texts is one of despair, always sensual and direct in their imagery that is at times brutal and others tender, even offering the occasional glimmer of hope that, nevertheless, remains ambivalent:

Despite the speech-made wind, summer came,

by the sweat of crickets, the spin of drones,

by the spat of stomachs, by toot, by the ratatat,

despite the sore throat roosters, summer came.

Moderation: Uljana Wolf

The event will be interpreted into English and German.
The event takes place in the Atelierraum.