If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Minsk as you feel/see it? Minsk is not a city of moods. Rebuilt from the ground after World War II, it is measured out in perfect squares, with wide streets balanced out by long, tall buildings, and populated by gigantic statues and...

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus, and moved to the United States in 2006. She is the author of the poetry collections Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2012). She received the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and the Bess Hokin Prize, as well as the 2005 Crystal of Vilenica Award in Slovenia and the 2008 Burda Poetry Prize in Germany. She lives in Washington, DC.

To celebrate National Poetry Month and the #shelterinpoems movement this April, Words Without Borders is leaning into poetry's ability to fill the void of isolation. Idra Novey, Forrest Gander, Emily Wilson, Sholeh Wolpé, and Valzhyna Mort read you their own work or other favorites from the WWB archive in an effort to forge connection amid the solitude of social distancing. Check back each day throughout the week for an additional video reading from one of our...

The fifteenth annual PEN World Voices Festival kicks off today in New York City. From May 6–12, writers from around the world will participate in conversations, readings, translation slams, and performances on this year’s theme: Open Secrets. On Saturday, May 11 at 4:00pm at Albertine Books, we’re looking forward to hosting Voices of the Silenced. WWB executive director Karen Phillips will moderate a conversation with Idra Novey,...

If you’re heading to the Associated Writing Programs conference in Minneapolis next week, then you already know about the wealth of translation panels, events, and general buzz on offer. ALTA  has compiled a most useful schedule here.  We're sponsoring two panels and taking part in a third. On Thursday, April 9, Karen Emmerich, Bill Johnston, and Valzhyna Mort join our editorial director, Susan Harris, to discuss The Making of Originals: Translation as a...

Tuesday night WWB staff, board, contributors, supporters, and readers gathered at Tribeca 360, where the panoramic view mirrored the sweep of our content, to celebrate our eleventh anniversary and present the second James H. Ottaway Jr. Award for the Promotion of International Literature to Knopf editor and translator Carol Brown Janeway. After a convivial cocktail hour, host Saïd Sayrafiezadeh  welcomed guests, then introduced writers Valzhyna Mort, Yiyun Li,...

The 2014 Words without Borders Gala  Join us for the 2014 Words without Borders Gala on October 28, 2014 at Tribeca Three Sixty. We will honor Carol Brown Janeway with the 2014 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature, presented by Luiz Schwarcz. We'll also launch our new online education initiative, WWB Campus. Special guests include Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, Yiyun Li, Valzhyna Mort, and many more. Cocktails: 6:30 pm Dinner: 7:00 pm After-party: 9:00 pm...

They won't come at night and torture you in a dim cellar behind bars. Sleep, criminal! There's nobody to ask if you are guilty or not guilty. Your judge is sleeping, your guards are asleep, and your torturer is sleeping because it's his holiday, and he won't spend it thinking about your life, whether you are guilty or not guilty. Sleep, murderer! Law sleeps inside the books. State dust falls over the letters of law... Sleep! Nobody is going to disturb your...

A migrating bird has broken its wing against the wire of my father's house. Now it shrieks as if somebody were sawing iron: It's you! It's your fault! In response, the flock turns around. Our water buckets stand empty but I'm too scared to go to the well. It seems any minute now there would start a bombing. © Uladzimir Niakliayeu. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2013 by Valzhyna Mort. All rights reserved.

Before noon the sky grew dark and later it fell on the road as black fire. I leaned, picked up the fire, and tossed it from one hand to the other. The fire scorched my right hand, and blackened the left. So one hand asked the other: Why are we tossing the fire? And the other hand answered: For the fun of it. Just a game. © Uladzimir Niakliayeu. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2013 by Valzhyna Mort. All rights reserved.

READ Honors and Awards Kurt Beals is the inaugural winner of the German Book Office Translation Prize. Congratulations!  Check out the 2013 Longlist for the International Prize for Arabic Literature. Interviews, Articles, Reviews “Our old family wallpaper and curtains,” says poet, translator, and WWB contributor Valzhyna Mort about some of her major influences. She recently spoke to PEN America about Andrej Tarkovsky films, opera, and why the Belarussian...

Octavio Paz once wrote that the modern poet “extracts his visions from within himself.”  It is my hope that our comprehensive, aesthetically varied anthology of poetry from around the globe will allow American poets and readers a chance to extract such visions not just from “within themselves” but in conversation with a global poetic tradition. Reading an anthology of world poetry gives one a chance to overhear similarities, or what Anna Akhmatova once called...

Belarusian Poetry in Central Park: Valzhyna Mort will be reading with Laynie Browne and Cynthia Cruz on Thursday at the Arsenal in Central Park, as part of the Poetry from the Rooftops series sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. See Mort's poem "maybe you too sometimes fantasize,", translated from the Belarusian by Franz Wright, which we published along with three others from last year's collection Factory of Tears. As WWB poetry editor Ilya Kaminsky wrote, Mort's wild,...

I've just returned from New York where I attended the panel discussion 'Writing Sex and Sexuality', one of the many and varied events hosted by PEN as part of their festival of international literature. I was particularly interested in this event since my novel The Mushroom Man included some sexually explicit scenes which provoked quite a few comments from readers, and recently I had an essay on sex forthcoming in the upcoming anthology Behind The Bedroom Door until I chickened out and...

I'm almost like that dark hallway with a few framed photos and lamps on the walls. So many visitors have walked through me, dark and light, depending on the illumination. Copyright Regina Derieva. Translation copyright 2007 by Valzhyna Mort. All rights reserved. Read Regina Derieva's "Unity of Form"

I've always received kingly presents. I got worn-out pans and rusted teapots, patched up bedsheets and unstitched shirts, books, missing pages ripped out for rollies and a piano with knocked-out teeth on the keyboard, chairs without legs and burnt out light bulbs, writing paper from the times of the Chinese cultural revolution, whatever you write on it-- bloodstains appear through its tissue. People zealously granted me headless nails and spools without thread, clocks without hands,...

Poets must speak of their time, Czeslaw Milosz often told his students. And so they, in very different ways, do. Karim Fawzi, in a poem dated June 9th, 2003, speaks of berries and Baghdad, and of beating his present existence "with the cane of departure," while Valzhyna Mort tells us about the fate of her generation in post-Soviet (but still totalitarian) Belarus. As you will browse through the pages of this special "all poetry" issue of Words Without Borders you will discover many images,...

Men arrive like a date on a calendar they keep visiting once a month men who've seen the bottom of the deepest bottles kings of both earth and heaven and like the pearls from a torn necklace trembling I scatter at their touch their heartbeats open doors vessels respond to their voice commands and wind licks their faces like a crazy dog and gallops after their train and roams they undress me as if undressing themselves and hold me in their arms like a saxophone and oh this music these...