Motherfield
Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary
Cimafiejeva, Julia
Vertaald door: Hanif Abdurraqib, Valzhyna Mort
Deep Vellum Publishing, 128 blz., paperback, 2022, ISBN 9781646052257
Cimafiejeva, Julia
Vertaald door: Hanif Abdurraqib, Valzhyna Mort
Deep Vellum Publishing, 128 blz., paperback, 2022, ISBN 9781646052257
A poetry collection where personal is inevitably political and ecological, Motherfield is a poet’s insistence on self-determination in authoritarian, patriarchal Belarus.
Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile.
But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield?
This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.
"A dual-language publication, Motherfield reads like a testament to the innate multilingualism of Belarus. And after all, what Belarusians say matters just as much as what language they say it in. In Motherfield, Cimafiejeva has proved herself to be a bad student of fear. She wields her flexed, forceful verses like that mightiest of muscles — the tongue." —Jennifer Wilson, The New York Times Book Review
"A devastatingly beautiful and essential read."
—Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
"Motherfield is a forceful diptych pairing the poet’s protest diary (spanning the period from Belarus’ 2020 presidential election to March 2021, after the poet has settled in Austria) with poems flowing from days full of fear and hope."
—Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Books (Poetry Foundation)
Julia Cimafiejeva was born in an area of rural Belarus that became a Chernobyl zone when she was a child. The book opens with a poet’s diary that records the course of violence unfolding in Belarus since the 2020 presidential election. It paints an intimate portrait of the poet’s struggle with fear, despair, and guilt as she goes to protests, escapes police, longs for readership, learns about the detention of family and friends, and ultimately chooses life in exile.
But can she really escape the contaminated farmlands of her youth and her impure Belarusian mother tongue? Can she really escape the radiation of her motherfield?
This is the first collection of Julia Cimafiejeva’s poetry in English, prepared by a team of co-translators and poets Valzhyna Mort and Hanif Abdurraqib.
"A dual-language publication, Motherfield reads like a testament to the innate multilingualism of Belarus. And after all, what Belarusians say matters just as much as what language they say it in. In Motherfield, Cimafiejeva has proved herself to be a bad student of fear. She wields her flexed, forceful verses like that mightiest of muscles — the tongue." —Jennifer Wilson, The New York Times Book Review
"A devastatingly beautiful and essential read."
—Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
"Motherfield is a forceful diptych pairing the poet’s protest diary (spanning the period from Belarus’ 2020 presidential election to March 2021, after the poet has settled in Austria) with poems flowing from days full of fear and hope."
—Layla Benitez-James, Harriet Books (Poetry Foundation)
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€ 23,95