Valzhyna Mort Reads Victoria Amelina and Wisława Szymborska
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Hi, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast.

I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to choose two poems from The New Yorker archive to read and discuss. My guest today is the poet and translator, Valjina Mort, whose collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected won the 2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Roca Prize.

Her other honors include a 2021 Rome Prize in Literature and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lennon Foundation, and the Amy Clampett Foundation. Welcome, Vagina. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

I'm really excited too, and I love that you picked two translations to read today, one being your own, which is the first we'll hear. This first poem you've chosen is your translation from the Ukrainian of the poem Testimonies by Victoria Amelina, which was published in our August 14th, 2023 issue. We'll hear you read it in a minute, but first, could you tell us a bit about Amelina and anything else you might want us to know about this poem?

Yes, I think that in this case, the context is very important. And we are recording right now at the end of June. And July 1st will mark a year since Victoria Milina's passing from injuries incurred during a Russian missile attack on the town of Kramatorsk, where she was having lunch with three Colombian colleagues.

Luckily, the three guests survived, but Victoria was injured heavily and she was put on life support and she never regained consciousness. When in February 2022, Russia started bombing Ukraine, Victoria Melina was already a published award-winning novelist.

author of a children's book and also an organizer of a somewhat ironic and fun festival in eastern Ukraine that was previously occupied by Russian military. It turns out that there is a very small town there called New York.

And when Victoria visited it, she thought that it would be a lot of fun to have the New York Literary Festival in this tiny town. That's how she arrived to February 2022 when she stopped writing fiction. And it's not that she picked up writing poetry. Instead, she received training from a group called

Truth Hounds, and it's a war crimes investigation group that sends its team members to very small towns and villages that had just been freed from Russian occupation in order to document people's stories, stories that usually get overshadowed by voices from the cities. And so I think that this poem is

is a kind of a byproduct of that work in some way. And when I read it, I imagined that it was written very quickly. It was not a labored poem. She was doing very different kind of labor in some small town. And this poem kind of wrote itself, maybe at the end of the day's work. Well, please, let's hear it. Testimonies by Victoria Melina.

Only women testify in this strange town. One speaks of a missing child. Two speak of the tortured in the basement. Three repeat what rapes and avert their eyes. Four speak of the screams from the military headquarters. Five speak of the executed in their own yards. Six speak but are incomprehensible.

Seven check food supplies counting out loud. Eight call me a liar because there is no justice. Nine talk on their way to the cemetery. I'm also on my way because I know them all in this town. It's dead are my dead. It's survivors are my sisters. Ten speak of a survivor, a man. He's returned from captivity. He could testify.

I knock on his door. A neighbor opens. It seems like he has survived all right, she says. Go talk to the women. That was Testimonies by Victoria Amelina, translated from the Ukrainian by Valjina Mort. So what a beautiful reading. And you really capture, I think, in the translation, and I confess I don't know the original, but this kind of shift in form in the poem from this...

numbering in the beginning to I'm also on my way because I know them all in this town and that shift and especially knowing sort of what you've told us about her and this small town but also this testimony that

is announced in the poem, that shift to then it's dead or my dead, I think that's really powerful and intuitive too. It feels very improvisatory and testimonial in that way that it's spontaneous feeling, but it feels also very crafted in a way and aware of tradition. And tell me what you think about that shift in the poem.

Indeed, I wanted to contradict myself, which I love doing, because while the poem has that feeling of that it got to have been written very fast, knowing what she was doing in these towns, but on a close look, it is beautifully crafted and intentionally crafted. And it has parts to it. For example,

First of all, she begins with a list, which is, you know, list is an ancient poetic device. It's a way of thinking through things of organizing chaos, which is life, and especially life in crisis. Also, because she's writing from inside this experience, I think that there is a sort of distancing that is created within

by this bureaucratic listing. It takes care of certain sentimentality that could overcome the poet writing this from inside the experience. And then I'm also on my way, it's dead, am I dead? I think that it's a slow turn, right?

And I say slow because it takes several lines, this turn. Usually turns, we're used to think of a volta as just requiring one stanza break or a line break. But I think that she does a slow turn that goes from I'm also on my way, it's dead, am I dead, all the way to where it truly finishes and it's I knock on his door.

Because here she gives us a scene. Yeah. And here this whole voyage of going from a person to a person finishes at the door where we knock and somebody opens. Right. But you were also quoting It's Dead or My Dead, It's Survivors or My Sisters. I connect this to the opening line, Strange Town. Yeah.

The town is strange because it's unfamiliar, because she's a stranger, everybody else is a stranger. What happened there is strange. But in this turn, strangers become sisters. And you brought up translation, and I'm a big believer in translation. And I love when the target language provides...

Right. Right.

And is that something you feel like you introduced or it was there and you were trying to capture it in English? For those of us who are barely proficient in one language like me, how do you approach that? Is it the sounds? Is it the sense? Yeah, I'm with you, Kevin. The only difference is that I am barely proficient in several languages. I don't know about that.

So I think that every poem has its rhythm and its music, and part of it is repetition here, the listing. But there is always repetition of sounds which form the poem's music.

And I think that there cannot be a good poem without that musical shape. It's what young readers of poetry call flow. It flows. Sure. Because a poem is never about a word by itself, but it's about ways in which words are connecting to each other and how they follow each other, in what order.

The connection is through repetition of sounds, through alliteration, through ossonance, and it destroys these firm borders between things and words. So there is this musical metamorphosis that is constantly happening in every good poem. And perhaps in Amelina's poem, it's different sounds that are repeated. And I do not...

intentionally sit and say, well, survivor and sister and stranger. I do not pick those words intentionally. Rather, I listen to English intensely. And I believe always that if you are patient and obedient, so if you're not trying to master language, but instead you come to language as its obedient servant, it will provide something

It will give gifts. And so English gives me its own musical shape here. And I hope that it's heard by the readers of that poem, that there is not only the repetition in the syntax and grammar of listing, but also among sounds.

And all of that leads us into I knock on his door into a scene. Yeah. And we are inside like a movie. We're also in a kind of fable, aren't we? I mean, there's a way in which...

Because the beginning, the catalog, let's call it, of horrors, really, and then naming and numbering of it, and the precision that just comes with saying one, two speak, three repeat, four speak. There's repetition, as you mentioned, but also not just of music, but of horrors. And then we have suddenly a moment, people, you know, testimony, an eye. And I think there's something powerful in that shift.

And for me, also, that ending is both blunt and musical. There's something about it to me. It reminds me a bit of Akhmatova and her moments of testimony and these kind of interactions she has in her greatest poems where people are surviving. They're in line for bread, you know, and they urge her to...

To speak of the horrors, and here it's almost playing with that. Do you think that's there too? Is she aware of that tradition? Yeah, she is. But also what I love about this ending, Go Talk to the Women, is that it's ambiguous.

We do not really know what is the intention of that statement. I wonder how you read it, because sometimes I think, is it positive or negative here? Go talk to the women. Is it go do your job, which is talking to the women, and you're doing the right thing, and we need you to do this?

Or you cannot somehow talk to a real survivor. Go talk to those who are witnessing for the survivors. Well, it also goes back to all right. It seems like he has survived all right. Does that mean he survived all right or he survived?

You know, throwaway line almost. Yeah, because the question here is what does it mean to survive? Yes. He has survived. He's alive. But nobody can talk to him.

So what does survival mean when somebody comes back from captivity? Yes. And that's a powerful word to use there. Like he has survived. That's what we call it because he's alive. But he hasn't really survived. And he hasn't really returned in a weird way. Yeah, yeah. He returned alive.

10 speak of a survivor, a man. He's returned from captivity. He could testify. And there's almost that sort of slippage, at least in your version here, captivity, he could testify. You know, there's a kind of turn there that's really beautiful, I think, but haunting. And there's also a level of there's more...

And the plurality of testimonies that it isn't one, but these are all kinds of testimony, both the list in the beginning, the man who could but can't, and the woman, of course, who answers the door. There's a kind of irony there, like go talk to the women, but I somehow am excerpting myself from that. That seems important too. Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with you. And there are two things that I would like to mention here. To return to the list, so to the first half of the poem, what makes this list the work of poetry is how many of its items resist the list. Right.

So the women are testifying. One speaks of a missing child, okay. Two speak of the torture in the basement. Then already the three do not want to engage. We understand that they were raped, but they do not want to talk about it. They avoid their eyes.

Then four, they talk about the screams. Five, talk about the executed. Then six, speak but are incomprehensible. So we're not sure what they're contributing to the list, the impossibility of the list because they are incomprehensible. And from there, we have other items, seven and eight, in which women resist.

Seven Czech food supplies counting out loud. So they do not want to engage with a poet who is collecting testimonies because they're doing something very real, right? They're rationing food supplies. And maybe to them, this young woman who is recording stories is superfluous, right?

And so they continue counting, which is she's also counting. So but but they're counting matters more to them. And then eight called me a liar. So, again, they do not want to be part of this testimonies. They don't want to be part of this search for justice.

Right. That the organization that Amelian is working for is doing. So there is this resistance to the least. I think that resistance is absolutely true. But then there's that nine. They talk on the way to the cemetery. And I confess when I read it first, I think I heard it as they were already dead. You know, that these people were not dead.

to pay homage to the cemetery, but that the cemetery is their life now. And maybe that's why it's dead or my dead. There's a kind of sense of, and especially perhaps by the context of knowing she had passed away, that there's this kind of speech from beyond that I feel like she really taps into. And maybe it's that line, maybe it's the stories, but there's also a kind of quality of her

of deep beyond the beyond speech that at least affects me in this poem. I agree that this line is special on their way to the cemetery. I think your reading is beautiful because mine, when I read it first, I think I missed it.

It's an understatement, this line, I think. Because while they are on their way to the cemetery, in Eastern Europe we come from the culture of honoring the dead and regular cemetery visits. So going to the cemetery is something pretty ordinary. Sure. But nine on their way to the cemetery, it's a fresh cemetery. Yeah. So this is not people visiting their ancestors. Right.

Right.

are talking of somebody else. None of them speaks about themselves and their own experience. They're all witnessing for somebody else. Yeah. So she knows them all now. It's dead or my dead. The turning starts here. It becomes very personal. Also, there is a tension in this man who could testify that,

Meaning that what all these women were doing is not real testifying. They're witnessing for the witness. But here's somebody with a firsthand experience, and that person in this poem is unable to speak for himself. But the second thing, because I said I want to say two things. Yes, yes. The second thing, and that's something you probably cannot know because it's a biographical detail.

And I just want to give tribute to men who do testify that it's not just women. There was a Ukrainian poet and children's book writer and victorious friend, Vladimir Vakulinko. That was a man who lived in his small village, and he was captured by Russians, and he was disappeared for a long time and was presumed dead.

And Victoria went into his village and she spoke to Vladimir's father who told her that Vladimir kept a diary. And that after he was captured, he buried, the father buried the diary under the cherry trees in the garden for the fear of being discovered. And Victoria was the one who went digging and undug it.

And later, Vladimir Vakulinko was found in a mass grave of about 400 people. Wow. And in this diary, he testifies about his encounters with Russian military, and also he testifies about hunger. And does this diary survive, or are we able to...

see it and read it? Yeah. So I don't think that it's in English, but Victoria Melina, who wrote this poem about only women testifying, she was the advocate for this diary and she brought this diary to the public and it was, yeah, it became available. Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted to redeem male voices here. Well, thank you. But, uh,

It's also a testimony to her and her persistence and her commitment. That's a really powerful story. When you were translating, did you translate others of her poems? And are they in the volume that you mentioned that's coming out next year?

No, the volume is of prose. And this is the only poem by Victoria I translated. First of all, I learned of her injuries. I knew that she was on life support. And I was checking you pretty much all the time. Sure. And on July 1st, I was at a writing residency. And when I learned that she passed, you know, I had this urge, as we often have,

to say some kind of a goodbye. And translating this poem, I think, was a way of doing it. And I was at a writing residency where we were supposed to go on an excursion that day, but I knew that I would not go until I'm done. And so in this way, the translation was also done fast, but it was a very intense process.

Also, it's a process that came after days of thinking about the poet and her work continuously.

Well, it's a very powerful homage, and you've done it beautifully and read it both aloud beautifully and also speak of it beautifully. I do want to turn to our other poem. It too is a translation, and maybe we can talk as we talk about the poem about the art of translation, the act of translation. But the second poem you brought with you is Map by Wiesława Symborska, translated from the Polish by Claire Kavanaugh.

What drew you to this particular poem while you were looking through the archives?

I found some similarities in the form that I would like to discuss with you to Amelia's poem. And I was interested in the way lyrical eyes used in both poems. And also, Vyslava Shimborska's birthday is on July 2nd. So this is just my way of creating some kind of an honoring ritual for her.

And of course, I love Vyslava Shimborska. Yeah, me too. I'm a Shimborska fan. And I love Claire Kavanaugh's translations of Shimborska. Before you mentioned that you didn't know how Victoria's poem sounds in Ukrainian. And I have to say that I like that for translation. There are people who insist on reading the original followed by the translation.

But I like for the translation to have its own ground to stand on.

And as a translator, I start working from the original, of course. But there is a moment where I start forgetting the original and distancing from it because I need to listen to English. I need to listen to the target language. And, well, I'm lucky because I'm Eastern European and I speak Slavic languages, so my English is accented so that foreignness perhaps is always in it.

despite very good editors. But I believe the translation of poetry is an art of its own, and it shouldn't be subordinate. It shouldn't be secondary to the original. I want a translated poem to function as a poem, to be read that way. All right. Well, let's listen to it. Map. Flat is the table it's placed on.

Nothing moves beneath it and it seeks no outlet. Above, my human breath creates no stirring air and leaves its total surface undisturbed. Its plains, valleys are always green. Uplands, mountains are yellow and brown. While seas, oceans remain a kindly blue beside the tattered shores.

Everything here is small, near, accessible. I can press volcanoes with my fingertip, stroke the poles without thick mittens. I can, with a single glance, encompass every desert with the river lying just beside it. A few trees stand for ancient forests. You couldn't lose your way among them.

In the east and west, above and below the equator, quiet like pins dropping, and in every black pin prick, people keep on living. Mass graves and sudden ruins are out of the picture. Nations' borders are barely visible, as if they've wavered, to be or not. I like maps because they lie, because they give no access to the vicious truth.

Because greatheartedly, good-naturedly, they spread before me a world not of this world. That was Map by Wieslawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Claire Cavanaugh, which was published in the April 14, 2014 issue of The New Yorker.

Hi, I'm Susan Glasser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene Podcast. For me, this is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in

the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes. No, that's so true because first of all, we are actually friends in real life, but I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps. I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on and I'm always smarter for it. If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago, often it can help you understand about what's happening today.

So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's Political Scene Podcast. I love how you read that. To be or not, that wonderful echo is really beautiful. And that ending, you know, she almost lulls us.

with the kind of beauty. You know something is going to happen. The other finger is going to drop, as it were. And here it is at the end. And we were talking about turns in the earlier poem. But here, I like maps because they lie. I mean, just...

bluntly sort of says the almost thesis of it. But then what happens after, I think, is just as important. They give no access to the vicious truth. Though there's hints of that before, of course, this mass graves and sudden ruins are out of the picture, or you couldn't lose your way among the ancient forests that aren't there.

How do you think about that structure and that turn? I mean, is this for you typical of her work or is it something this poem especially makes known to us? I think it is typical. I think that Szymborska is a poet of a sudden turn at the end that is very hard to pull off without being banal or gimmicky.

but she does it always brilliantly. And I wanted to parallel it with a turn in Amelina's poem, because where Amelina has this listing...

Shimborska has a kind of precise dictionary-like literal description of a map. So kind of one bureaucratic gesture is replaced with another bureaucratic gesture here. We're given this literal description and we do feel the strangeness of the literal. Mm-hmm.

And then where Amelina gives us a scene, we have this turn with I like maps because they lie. And again, we have no access to the vicious truth the same way that the poet in Amelina's poem has no access to the testimony that would be the vicious truth of captivity.

And one wonders how does one end a poem like that? And we see how she slows down with repetition. Because, because, vicious great good and world, world. Right. But you also emphasize the line with mass graves and sudden ruins. Yeah. It's almost like a fake ending here. Or a lesser poet could have ended it.

on this thought. Right, right. Because it's a striking thought. Sure. And it could end a poem, but she continues with that second turn, I like maps. Yeah. But I think that the whole literal and often not that interesting description, she tests our patience with naming these things

green and yellow and brown and kindly blue. She's really testing our patience. She's taking literal to kind of the most literal low level of the literal. And I think all of that she needs in order to deliver the line, mass graves. Right, right. I think even that has a level of kind of understatement or detachment, maybe that's the right word.

And I would say that what happens often if you have a turn in a poem like that is you're almost encouraged, I think, to read the poem again. There's a kind of pointing to the beginning and then you go, wait a minute, what did I miss? And flat is the table it's placed on. That tells you almost right away that we're not getting the world. We're getting a representation, if not a

Distant one, the world not being flat. And here then at the end of that first stanza above, my human breath creates no stirring air and leaves its total surface undisturbed.

That's a funny way to say I'm breathing, you know, because what it's saying is, by the way, there are disturbances. There are stirrings. There is both a human quality to a map and there is an inhuman quality and maybe even an inhumane one. And I think that quality...

is so subtle and beautifully done. So to me, understatement is loaded with irony in this poem, but also in her other poems, I think, too. Yeah, I agree. She goes for this self-evident description on the level of the literal to show the unreality of the ordinary, how unreal the ordinary is, how strange it is.

are things taken for granted. And I also love that my human breath part, and I read it almost as a self-irony because there is something very godlike in this position of overlooking the whole world from above and

And she's breathing into it, but unlike a biblical story, nothing comes alive out of her breath. Oh, well said. She kind of fails to animate, to create a world here. And that's why I think when I comes in at the end, I like maps because they lie. There is almost some kind of vengeance here.

on the detached being who oversaw. And, you know, it's also a kind of indictment of a deity that isn't involved, that is distant from the world and letting horrors happen if that's how you want to look at it. And maybe it isn't that it's an absent deity. It's more the human who is allowing this to happen, who creates maps. You know, it is a world not of this world. Yeah.

And there's more irony there, of course, because at least in English, this idea of, wow, it's out of this world is a kind of positive beyond understanding. But here it's almost like because it's not the world, that's why it lies. That's why it is less than the truth.

Yeah, and that's where the poem gets figurative. And I have to say that the figurative ending is maybe less surprising than the whole literal description from the very beginning. Maybe an impatient reader or a reader, naive somewhat and looking for big, splashy, dramatic kind of description would be betrayed by this.

and might lose that strangeness of the understatement. But it ends almost on the overstatement here. And the line, mass graves and sudden ruins...

It kind of glares from the midst of this poem, and I think it's a very special line that connects us here to Amelina's poem and sudden ruins too. So mass graves come in, and we immediately think, indeed, why aren't mass graves on the map? And then we realize that if mass graves were on the map, our maps would have been the maps of mass graves because...

What is a place where people live that is not a mass grave of things that happened there, sometimes recently, sometimes centuries ago? And then sudden ruins is again very Shimborsk-like story.

understatement. Yeah. What is sudden ruins? I'm thinking about that a lot. You know, if I'm quiet, it's because of that. Those in every black pinprick people keep on living. You know, we get those sounds of those P sounds, but also then that turn mass graves and sudden ruins, these pairings.

And looking back over the poem without going through it line by line, you almost see these kind of pairings that are incongruous. Volcano's fingertip, the poles without thick mittens. You know, there's this kind of dance almost that I do think also is a kind of...

And ordinariness that also is extraordinary. It's pairing these things or maybe almost metronomically moving back and forth this and that, this and that. And then it lets it have that just straight up and stopped. I like maps because they lie, period. You know, and another poet, as you point out, would end there. But what it allows her to do is then become both literal and figurative again. Yeah.

Yeah, and so she kind of slows down and grounds herself at the ending with repetition, which is what I was saying, how does one end a poem like this? And repetition here helps her do that.

Because obviously sudden ruins and nations, borders and mass graves is a commentary on the fact that human history, the history of people living and keeping on living is the history of violence. But also there is, I think, an ecological reading here. Yeah, absolutely. I was just looking at the tattered chores. You know, there's a sense of ruin, more broadly speaking, sudden ruins, destruction.

feel like they could be human made. And yet at the same time, there's this tattered shore and the disturbed surface that is there because she says it's undisturbed. Oceans remain a kindly blue. Hmm. They're not, you know, she's saying they, they, they aren't enough. And there's something about that, that, you know, I,

I think she's so one of a kind and just going back over her work, which I've done recently, I'm always struck by the way she's able to get so much out of what can seem like straightforward speech. Yeah.

That I like maps because they lie. The voice changes here. Yeah. I was talking about repetition here, how the final stanza relies and grounds itself on repetition. And there is that grammatical repetition here. I like, they lie. Connecting word is because, and then there is because, because, and then world, world.

And we feel her grounding herself in this. And now we want to immediately reread the poem. Well, and I love that circular quality of a poem about flatness in some way. That really, I think, is not about that. Yeah, that flatness lies. Yeah, and I think sometimes I encounter problems

and I think we all do this in some respect, but writers, young writers, young writers of any age, they want a title that's going to tell you all of that stuff. And there's something more powerful about, for me...

in this moment, Szymborska just sticking with map or, you know, I love Elizabeth Bishop's large bad picture. You know, like she's able just to say, I'm not going to gussy it up. This is just, you know, filling station, like a kind of placement of you right away and,

And it does so much. It, in a way, locates us even as the poem itself then can be about dislocation or the lack of beauty or what is interesting and ugliness, which both of those Bishop poems, I think, are invested in. And I think you are leading to another very characteristic feature of Shimborska's work is that there is no moral passion here.

Right. She's not saying that people are bad or that violence is bad. There is no moral to be drawn out of it. And in fact, there are some very beautiful things on the map and some people live beautifully. But to her, it's all a kind of a lie. Everything is on the same level and she doesn't take sides.

Because, you know, there was something that Shimborska was always ashamed of. Her first book did not pass censorship. And she wrote her second book, which became her debut. And it was a book along the party lines. Like there was a poem called Lenin in it.

And we know that she was extremely ashamed of this later on. And she made a promise to herself and to poetry that she would never align herself with any kind of politics while keeping writing very political poems. Well, that's powerfully said. And I think you see it here in the understatement, but also the bluntness at times and the

The ironies. And it's amazing what irony can do. And as we were talking about both these poems, I mean, maybe that's one of the... I'm not going to take a moral way either, but also how do we keep writing in the moments of...

crisis or disconnection. Indeed, a moral way would have been writing, I hate maps because they lie, right? I dislike maps because they lie. But Szymborska is, of course, Szymborska, so she's not going to give that to you. She does the opposite. I like maps because they lie. And that's her avoiding that kind of sentimental moralism. Yeah.

in this moment. Well, that's so beautifully said. Thank you so much for talking with me. I could talk with you all day. I love that. I would like to continue. Well, we'll take it up soon, I hope. Valjina Mort's translation of Testimonies by Victoria Amelena, as well as Claire Kavanaugh's translation of Map by Vislava Simborska can be found on newyorker.com.

Wieslawys and Borska's book, Map, Collected and Late Poems, translated from the Polish by Claire Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baracek, was published in 2015. Bojana Mort's latest collection is Music for the Dead and Resurrected. You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction Podcast, the Writer's Voice Podcast, and the Politics and More Podcast by searching for The New Yorker in your podcast app.

You can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is The Corner by Christian Scott Atunde-Ajua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope-A-Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Michelle Moses, with help from Hannah Eisenman. I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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