WHITE APPLES, GREEN APPLES, THIEVES

On of the books I slept with last month is Factory of Tears by Valzhyna Mort, a bilingual text translated from the Belarusian by the Wrights (Franz and Elizabeth). 

Belarus, if you don't know, was part of the Russian block, and it has a volatile political history. It has been a "part" of Russia ("White Russia") Lithuania in the 13th century, and Poland. It's been split between Poland and Russia, and in WWII the Nazis occupied it. Most of the fallout of the  Chernobyl explosion of the 80's blew into it and since its independence in 1991, it's had a terrible time with the corrupt authoritarian leader, Lukashenka, who has cancelled elections, run a police "death squad", and been criticized by the EU and US for human rights violations.

That's a little history. 

The author has published a single volume of poetry in Belarus in 2005, I'm as Thin As Your Eyelashes, a title that I find curiously confusing. Is it a problem of the translation or an abyss between us culturally? The poem itself is without title, a mere four lines, just the phrase. I'm not sure what it means, and though it feels provocative, it also feels melodramatic. Delicate, but dangerous. Vision, but with the silken threat of pain. Is it related somehow to the political history of the place? Despite my difficulty with her original title, and in contrast to my small frustration, here's the opening poem to this English translation, both morbid and archetypal:

Belarusian I

even our mothers have no idea how we were born

how we parted their legs and crawled out into the world

the way you crawl from the ruins after a bombing

we couldn't tell which of us was a girl or a boy

we gorged on dirt thinking it was bread

and our future

a gymnast on a thin thread of the horizon

was performing there 

at the highest pitch

bitch

we grew up in a country where

first your door is stroked with chalk

then at dark a chariot arrives

and no one sees you anymore

but riding in those dark cars were neither

armed men nor

a wanderer with a scythe

this is how love loved to visit us

and snatch us veiled

completely free only in public toilets

where for a little change nobody cared what we were doing

we fought the summer heat the winter snow

when we discovered we ourselves were the language

and our tongues were removed we started talking with our eyes

when our eyes were poked out we talked with our hands

when our hands were cut off we conversed with our toes

when we were shot in the legs we nodded our heads for yes

and shook our heads for no and when they ate our heads alive

we crawled back into the bellies of our sleeping mothers

as if into bomb shelters 

to be born again

and there on the horizon the  gymnast of our future

was leaping through the fiery hoop

of the sun

. . . . . . .

I don't know much about V., whose name is vampiric and lovely, except that her bio says she lives in the states and a few of these poems reference U.S. cities: "Fall In Tampa" "Florida Beaches" and "New York". She's won a number of awards overseas and this collection is published by Copper Canyon.  Thankfully this bilingual collection fares with a better title, one that reflects her work, or at least this collection of translations, to a much more satisfying degree. A work in which human suffering is partially the work of governments, human bureaucracies. I wonder, incidentally, what an "American" poem would look like, a brother to this poem, in which an American author attempted to mythologize the American experience. (In the peripheries I'm thinking of a line or two by Ai. . . ) 

What I love about this book: it thinks politically without serving up a "political" poem. I'm thinking of those poems with cities, or countries, or types of people as titles: those mentioned above and "White Trash" "Berlin-Minsk" "Polish Immigrants" and "Belarusian II". These are poetic portraits in which we get a sense of both being part of these places/people as well as the mythos of our experience there.  Take these stanzas from "New York":

a gigantic pike

whose scales 

bristled up stunned

and what used to be just smoke

found the fire that gave it birth

champagne foam

melted into metal 

glass rivers 

flowing upward,

things you won't tell to a priest

you reveal to a cabdriver

What we find in this stanza is true of most of her poetry--her sense of metaphor is energetic, a motivating force of the language. In fact, her best poems are lyric and satisfyingly difficult in their use of abstraction. We might call this surrealist technique, though it seems to me a way to pursue an archetypal truth about places and people. If poetry is a way to express the hidden experience, the experience hidden beneath the dull journalism of even our most difficult experiences, our politicized lives, then here is V. Mort pillaging the depths: 

Hospital

when someone spends a lot of time running

and bashing his head

against a cement wall

the cement grows warm

and he curls up with it

against his cheek

like a starfish medusa

and senses

how the body uses memory

to bind it to the earth

and he waits there for the moment

when his eyes turn

into wobbling tops

and the whole colorful universe

appears like the deep

hole in the sink

. . . . . . .

Friends and Strangers, steal it if you can!