The Circle

Issue date: 10/5/06 Section: Entertainment

Valzhyna Mort's deep and soulful Belarusian accent draws you in. Even in a language unintelligible to me, her poetry has rhythm and beauty. Her first poem of the evening is in Belarusian and the audience is captivated. The language barrier is overcome with passion.

This Wednesday, Sept. 27, Mort came to Marist to read some of her work. The poet was born in Minsk, Belarus and has been taking the literary world by storm with her witty prose and musical lyrics. She started writing in high school but "desperately want[ed] to be an opera singer." She remembers spending the best years of her childhood in an opera hall, playing hide-and-go-seek. Mort now mixes her two passions, music and writing, while combining her education as a linguist. At the young age of 24, she is releasing her first book of poetry in English and is already an accomplished author over seas. Her book, Factory of Tears, will be released in the spring of 2008.

Mort's poetry is based on her life experiences and her surroundings. She tells the audience of her childhood breakfasts, watching the lottery wheel every morning. This memory is the inspiration for her poem, aptly called, Lottery Wheel. She notes that her poems are usually sad; she announces, "And now a love poem. I don't have many, that is why I always announce [them,] so [they] seem special." The audience is alert and laughing at Mort's unexpected witticism.

Her poems are never the same in different languages. She respects the music of the words and does not try to translate her poems directly. In one of her poems Mort decided to keep only two lines of the original and created the rest from scratch. Mort respects her work by taking the time to value each line and because of this meticulousness it sometimes takes her years to finish a poem. Her poem Musical Locusts took one full year to complete, having started in the summer and then waited until the next summer to finish it. She said by the end of the first summer the feeling was gone and it became "an autumn poem" or a sadder poem. Mort's words are bare and real. She says: "It is the rhythm of the music. My poems have changed since I am here. I am more tranquil."

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