On October 22 and 23, 2014, Harvard University had the pleasure of hosting Belarusian-American poet Valzhyna Mort.

Mort, who currently teaches creative writing at Cornell as Visiting Assistant Professor, gave a reading in the Woodberry Poetry Room, visited Prof. Sandler’s Gen Ed course “Poetry without Borders,” and was the guest speaker at the “Rethinking Translation” Seminar. 

Her visit started in a rush — after a long day of bad weather and flight delays, she came to the Woodberry Poetry Room straight from the airport, and thanked her audience: “Now I’m going to pay you back by reading my long tragic poems. I’ve been practicing on the twenty-minute drive, and my taxi driver started sharing his grievances too.” She read a selection in both English and Belarusian, poems “both gentle and rowdy” (as Prof. Sandler’s introduction had promised) that showed her commitment as a reader and performer of her work. 

The following day, Mort discussed her poetry with undergraduates who had just read her first collection, Factory of Tears. She talked about her choice to write in Belarusian, rather than Russian, her transition to writing in English, and the quandaries of poets working in multiple languages. She compared working within an existing tradition to having a trust fund, and described some of the new possibilities for contemporary Belarusian literature: the freedom to talk about bodies and intimate experiences, to examine how language is politicized, and to borrow from other traditions through translation. 

Later, Mort gave a lecture “In the Mood for Language” at the “Rethinking Translation” seminar, during which she compared the language of rural landscapes in poems by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney to the work of Belarusian novelist Vasyl Bykau, and discussed different translations of Osip Mandelshtam’s poem “Возьми на радость из моих ладоней,” concluding that “even a bad translation cannot ruin him.” 

Valzhyna Mort is the author of two collections of poetry: Factory of Tears (2008) and Collected Body (2011). She is the editor of the anthology Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern European Poets, and is co-editing an upcoming anthology of Russian Modernist poets.

Valzhyna Mort's visit was  made possible thanks to the generous contributions of the Harvard Slavic Department, the Rethinking Translation Seminar at the Humanities Center, the Provostial Fund in Arts and Humanities, the Program in General Education, and the Woodberry Poetry Room.