The New Yorker:

Growing up in Minsk, in the nineteen-eighties, the poet Valzhyna Mort spoke Russian at home and studied Belarusian in school. Now she has written a collection of poems, “Music for the Dead and Resurrected,” in English. All the same, Mort insists that she does not know any of the three languages particularly well. “Luckily, I very strongly hang onto the idea that poetry does not come from language, but rather from the unsayable, from the untranslatable,” she told the Guardian last year. “It only makes sense for me that I am trying to say it in a language—in any language—in which I know I would fail ultimately.”

That a bard of the unsayable would emerge from Belarus is not an accident. Given the suppression of artists and intellectuals under Stalin, in the nineteen-thirties, and the current censorship of journalists, under President Alexander Lukashenka, Belarusians have been warned for the better part of a century not to tell anyone what happens there. Mort recalls, as a child, listening to her grandmother tell stories about growing up as part of a class of well-off farmers, kulaks, who were forcibly dispossessed under the Soviet regime. After these chats, Mort’s mother would always remind her, “Valzhyna, you cannot tell this to anybody.” Mort dedicated her first book of poetry published in the United States, “Factory of Tears,” from 2008, to her grandmother.

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