by Valzhyna Mort
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Justin Taylor
Monkey Business
In late April 2005, Valzhyna Mort had the best week ever! She performed her poetry at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature, and it must have been a knockout show, because three years later it’s apparently the only thing anyone wants to say about her. I couldn’t help but notice that two of the three quotes gracing the back cover of Factory of Tears seem to have been written not about the book in my hand, but rather about her performance (performances?) at Cuirt. The top one tells of the “incantatory quality” her work shares with poets such as Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg, and is attributed to the festival itself. Program guide, perhaps? Below that, The Irish Times rhapsodizes over how Mort “dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her.” Finally, Franz Wright declares “Valzhyna Mort is electrifying!”
Minsk-born but English-speaking (she lives in the U.S.), Mort writes her first drafts in her native tongue as a political gesture. Franz Wright, along with his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, are credited—along with Mort herself—as the co-translators of this bilingual Belarusian/English collection, which makes it not just a little bit tacky to have Wright’s accolade on the back cover. I know, I know, you shouldn’t judge a book by its jacket, but that’s not to say you can’t.
From Wikipedia I learned that Wright translates German, mostly Rilke. Oehlkers Wright also mostly translates German, but she does some Turkish as well. Now, I’m not saying the Wrights don’t know any Belarusian, but I am saying that I did quite a bit of internet searching and found no evidence to suggest that they do. Other than their names inside of Mort’s book, that is. As it turned out, though, it doesn’t matter whether the Wrights know Belarusian or not because they didn’t actually translate Factory of Tears.
The one item of note I turned up was a short essay called “Translator Notes,” appended to the bottom of a Mort poem on poetrymagazine.org. (Factory of Tears contains no notes or prefatory matter of any kind). The notes, attributed solely to Franz, begin with the story of how Mort and the Wrights met. Turns out they were introduced at—wait for it—the Cuirt International Festival of Literature. To Wright “it was clear to me from the instant she began that…I’d seldom witnessed a performance of such charismatic authenticity and power. Anyone who has had the good fortune to hear Valzhyna will know what I mean.” We might as well take our one opportunity to give Franz Wright some due credit. I saw Mort read last year at the New York Public Library. Though occasionally her impassioned delivery seemed to descend into hectoring, she was on the whole a marvel.
Then in paragraph two (of two) we get some insight into the Wrights’ “method” of “translation.” Here’s Franz: “we are grateful to have had a small part in making her work available to readers. Her English is quite good and getting better, so our role was merely to assist in polishing the English versions of the poems she provided, and as a result there is really nothing to say in terms of the technical problems of translation.”
Is he kidding? Reader, would that it were so. The Wrights weren’t the translators of this book so much as the proof-readers, copy-editors at best. To give them credit—for them to take credit!—as translators is ludicrous; absurd if not obscene. But here’s the thing. The Wrights, even in their extremely limited capacity as “polishers,” have failed Mort utterly. Tenses shift, metaphors and similes lose track of themselves, syntax is regularly mangled, clichés abound. Take this passage from “Music of Locusts,” for example:
god tossed a heart like a coin
inside me
as if I were a pond
he made a wish
and lingered in the air
and everything belongs to me but hope
The “he” in “he made a wish / and lingered in the air” obviously refers to the “god” from a few lines back, but why is god lingering in the air? He flipped “a heart like a coin,” not his own body. Right? Doesn’t Mort mean that the heart that god tossed is what’s lingering in the air? Moreover, shouldn’t “inside” be “into?” The way it’s phrased now, one could argue that god is standing inside of the Mort-pond, presumably underwater, tossing his heart-coin up out of the water and into the air. Does that sound like the image she was going for?
Here is the complete text of the poem “Fall in Tampa”:
it’s our blood that’s dried up
and crumbles through our fingers
like faded leaves
but there is no fall in here
and summer is standing stock-still
like a heron in green water
Nevermind the non sequitur about “our blood”—whose it is or how it got out of “our” bodies (violence? menses? self-abuse?). To what does the word “here” (line four) refer? I assume she’s talking about the city of Tampa, or perhaps Florida in general, but unless she’s talking about being inside of a building (and if so, whence the heron in green water?) what is the word “in” doing there? The answer, of course, is that it’s doing nothing. It’s another mistake. Mort’s English may be “quite good and getting better,” but I think I’m being generous when I say it still has a ways to go. Well, that’s what a translator is for, right? Too bad Mort doesn’t have one—or, rather, doesn’t have two.
Another short poem, “On a Steamer”:
at night from far away
the city looks like
a huge overturned christmas tree
decorated for a holiday
then thrown away
now
it’s lying
with its branches scattered
and its lamps
still glittering
in the dark
Christmas lamps? That may or may not be the literal translation from the Belarusian, but in this country we string our trees with Christmas lights, and the fact that nobody told Mort as much is beyond negligence, it is a form of betrayal. Reading Factory of Tears, one is frequently left with the impression that Mort’s translators were trying to make her sound like Balky from Perfect Strangers.
Another Florida poem, “From Florida Beaches,” begins: “The sun is jumping among the clouds like a yellow monkey.” Then, a bit further down:
The beach pours like an overturned jar of honey
and waves lick the shore with their watery mouths.
In the water—boys—future mages
painting suns with the brushes between their legs.
Future mages? This stuff would get rejected from a middle school literary journal. And for the record, humans lick things with their tongues. (I don’t know about you, but when I do it with my whole mouth I call it something else). Finally, how are those boys “painting suns” while also “in the water?” Isn’t the fact that it leaves no trace the whole point of peeing in the ocean? (Yes.) Soon enough the poem serves up a description of birds as “paper money above the law” who “even put the wind in the doggy position.”
Look. Every aspect of the production of this book is atrocious, and considered asa book, it fails. But the poet herself deserves only a share of the blame for that; hardly the lion’s share. If Franz Wright showed up at your house and kept telling you that your half-baked, barely translated stream-of-consciousness poetry was ready for the big-time, you’d probably start to believe it too.
So what, if anything, can we glean from this book about Mort’s poetry, or at least its potential? Without question, her work fares better aloud than on the page, but the printed versions are hardly flat, or even uninteresting. It’s just that without the rhythms and intonations of speech, and the intimacy of live delivery, an irreplaceable source of their energy is lost. What might through a microphone and speakers sound like delirious intuition, on the page just seems childish and sloppy. This isn’t Mort’s fault. It’s an inherent and irresolvable problem which accompanies all attempts to translate oral traditions into print media.
Also, for an American audience with limited (or no) working knowledge of Belarusian culture and/or history, there’s probably a substantial net loss of meaning. Mort’s hands-off approach to punctuation doesn’t necessarily help matters, but it has the singular advantage of elevating her stronger poems to powerful, hectoring rants that are vitriolic, unpredictable, and sometimes very funny. Take this great exchange from “maybe you too sometimes fantasize”:
your parents never came back
maybe they’re ashamed now
a boy from the neighborhood tells you they’re dead
he says look even the Beatles die
never mind your parents
besides who knew them except you
all their songs were written by other people
Of course, the joke would be funnier if someone had told Mort that the Beatles did write their own songs (one suspects it is the Monkees she was thinking of) but still.
Some of the best poems in the book are very short. Just a few lines long, they’re funny, sexy, playful and just melancholy enough to remind me of nothing so strongly as the better of Richard Brautigan. Most important, they know when to quit. Here is “the memory of you”:
the memory of you
is like a needle in hay
that cannot be found
but every time tumbling with another man
in that hayloft
I’m scared that it will sting me
I’m not sure why she chose “sting” in the last line, where the more familiar “prick” would have bought her an easy and relevant pun, but I say this is a good poem. Here’s another:
“Teacher”
if you are going to be my teacher
you will have to become a tiger
so that you can bite my head off
and i’d have to follow you everywhere
trying very hard to get my head back
When Mort’s intuitive, visceral, free-associative method is working, the results can be quite striking, but as a stream-of-consciousness poet she is hit-or-miss. (What stream-of-consciousness poet isn’t?) As a writer, she really only has two problems: first, that she can’t tell the difference between her hits and her misses; second, that nobody around her seems interested in helping her learn how to. If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion: the problems are directly related. The first thing Valzhyna Mort needs to do is distance herself from Wright Enterprises. The next thing she needs to do is everything else. For what it’s worth, I wish her the very best of luck.
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