#belarusian poetry

[pryjdzieviasna]

Мая малітва

Я буду маліцца і сэрцам, і думамі, Распетаю буду маліцца душой, Каб чорныя долі з мяцеліцаў шумамі Ўжо больш не шалелі над роднай зямлёй. Я буду маліцца да яснага сонейка, Няшчасных зімой саграваць сірацін, Прыветна па збожных гуляючы гонейках, Часцей заглядаці да цёмных хацін. Я буду маліцца да хмараў з грымотамі, Што дзіка над намі гуляюць не раз, Каб жаль над гаротнымі мелі бяднотамі, Градоў, перуноў не ссылалі падчас. Я буду маліцца да зорак і жаліцца, Што гасяць сябе надта часта яны, Бо чуў, як якая з неба з іх зваліцца, З жыцця хтось сыходзе на вечныя сны. Я буду маліцца да нівы ўсёй сілаю, Каб лепшаю ўродай плаціла за труд, Збагаціла сельскую хату пахілую, Надзеі збытымі убачыў наш люд. Я буду маліцца і сэрцам, і думамі, Распетаю буду маліцца душой, Каб чорныя долі з мяцеліцаў шумамі Не вылі над роднай зямлёй, нада мной.

Янка Купала, 5 ліпеня 1906

[viersy]

Алесь Гарун - "Ты, мой брат, каго зваць Беларусам..."

Ты, мой брат, каго зваць Беларусам, Роднай мовы сваёй не цурайся; Як не зрокся яе пад прымусам, Так і вольны цяпер не зракайся.

Ад дзядоў і ад прадзедаў, браце, Гэты скарб нам адзін захаваўся, У сялянскай аграбленай хаце Толькі ён незабраны астаўся.

Ў старыну Беларус, не падданы, Гаспадарыў, быў сам над сабою I далёка у свеце быў знаны За літоўскай і ляшскай зямлёю.

Але час прамінуў, і нядоля На народ, як бы камень, звалілась, Беларуская слава і воля Адышла, адцвіла, закацілась.

Не змяняючы шэрай апраткі, Працаваў ты, як вол, гаратліва, А у хаце тваёй недастаткі, А на ніве тваёй неўрадліва.

А чаму? Ты не здольны, ці хворы, Ці благі гаспадар, ці п'яніца? Мусіць, не! Бо і іншым у пору У цябе гаспадарыць наўчыцца.

Светлы розум твой, брат, але дзетак Ад цябе, як і ўсё, адбіралі I на бацькаўскі родны палетак Працаваць-памагаць не пушчалі.

Хто хацеў, той і смеў рабаваці, Без прыпросу з'язджаліся госці — Абдзіраць, аб'ядаць, апіваці I крышыць гаспадарскія косці.

Можа б, ты і памёр і загінуў, Каб не вешчая мова Баяна. Хто ж быў добры, яе хоць пакінуў? Як жа так, што яшчэ не забрана?

Бо што бачылі госцікі-герцы!* — I зямлю, і лясы, і кілімы, — Ўсё забралі. А мову у сэрцы, Ў сваім сэрцы хавалі-няслі мы.

Дык шануй, Беларус, сваю мову — Гэта скарб нам на вечныя годы; За пашану радзімаму слову Ушануюць нас брацця-народы!

1910

* Герцы - махляры, марнатраўцы.

[lady-forest]

achilles to distract myself from life's miseries

[unhonestlymirror]

"Агонь з вышынь — і дом твой, як свяча,

І мёртвай хмарай — попел над Гаморай,

І ўсё з нуля даводзіцца пачаць,

Бо ў тым былым нічога не гаворыць.

Калі ўжо давядзецца зноў пачаць —

Ідзі ад дымам пушчаных святыняў

І не шкадуй ні плуга, ні мяча

На новы свет, дзе ўсё пакуль — пустыня.

Там будзе грай сівога крумкача,

Сто бездарожжаў, соль і пыл на веях...

Калі ўжо вырашыў з нуля пачаць —

Ідзі!

Не аглядайся! Скамянееш!

***

Uladźimir Karatkevič, 1980

[sonjawarner]

Venus the Bright Star

Venus the bright star was up the whole evening...

brought me warm memories - full loving cup...

That magic night we first met, my sweet angel,

Venus the bright star was up.

Then I would look for that star every evening,

stars in the night sky all smiled from afar...

Silent affections for you started kindling

while I would look for that star.

Yet it is time we must part, my sweet angel.

Fate has its reasons for us from the start.

Strong was my love, so the parting feels painful...

Yet it is time we must part.

In distant lands, while apart, I'll be longing,

cherishing glimmers of love in my heart...

Yes, I will look for that star every evening,

in distant lands, while apart.

Please look at Venus some more, my sweet angel.

May our sights meet thereupon, as before...

May in such moments our love just rekindle...

Please look at Venus some more.

Maksim Bahdanovich, 1912

[syrenki]

love. i was wondering if you’ve read anything from the belarusian poet valzhyna mort before? i only just found out you’re from belarus while scrolling through your posts this week and it made me think of these poems i love. i think you might appreciate them too. you both have an eye for beautiful imagery and your words share the same kind of transparency. whether it’s love, anger or loss, you’ll commit to it. sending you love and daisies <3

it’s so hard to believe & belarusian i

oh my dear lord, those are so good. thank you darling! i had no idea about her, i only sort of know the polish poets, and the russian, but somehow the belarusian poetry has been spinning somewhere very far away from me. it's surprising someone outside of Belarus, someone from the great grand west even keeps an eye out for them, thank you for that. i especially like "it's so hard to believe", with the youth, the blue veins, the dog... the idea of a world turned away from some people not because it's inherently bad, but just because it doesn't know better. it's been taught differently. it wasn't born like this. oh, that strikes a chord i didn't know existed. i will read more from her, keep an eye out for random excerpts, once again thank you so so so much

[fioredistella]

Belarus has a vast array of hobbies. She is a skilled dancer, being rather graceful and with strong feet and legs. What she is most skilled at is ballet which takes a good deal of stamina and athleticism, but a a result her feet are in a rather poor looking condition being rather ugly looking with bent and gnarled toes and hard calluses with cracked toenails. She first learned ballet in the 1700s during the periods where she was taken to St Petersburg (she mostly did live otherwise in modern day belarus though), where she was taught to dance to entertain the nobliity and westernize her while she was there. 

She is also skilled as weaving, especially weaving flax and it is something she is quite proud of. She has even weaved a number of Slutsk belts, though she did not get to keep any.

She enjoys writing poetry as well, a hobby she started during the 1800's as she was inspired by many of the poets that arise in her land during that time which included Yanka Luchyna and Jan Czeczot.

A few more hobbies she has are playing video games like World of Tanks, which was developed in Belarus, and she is a skilled and beautiful singer. 

Finally she has always loved collecting mushrooms in the woods, even as a small girl. Every year during mushroom season she can be found in the Belarusian woods with a basket of mushrooms in her arms. She eats these but will sometimes give them to Russia and Latvia and sometimes "pranks" Lithuania by leaving many at his doorstep. 

[rutpu]

landscape #14

(recycled pieces of garbage, soil, starch, bones, paper mache, kombucha leather, bio-plastic, iron-coloured paper, human hair, animal fur)

as part of Beneath the Syzygy of Blisters, a duo show with Adam Kozický, Holešovická šachta, Prague, cz

curators: Noemi Purkrábková & Andrew Wilson 

photos: Bianka Chladek

2024

~

What body suffers “under the suppurating syzygy of blisters?” Aimé Césaire – poet, militant, and architect of the Negritude (“blackness”) movement – poses this question when faced with the subjugation of his Martinican homeland, an island “sprawled-flat” and pinned by the “geometric weight” of the distant French government and its colonial cartography. In his poetry, Césaire laments the trauma inflicted by the instruments of division and enclosure, the lines on a map which “measure” and “include [him] between latitude and longitude,” reducing his world to a “little ellipsoidal nothing.” Yet Césaire takes hold of the body of his homeland, tracing its lacerations and registering its pain, like an anti-cartographer crafting a “world map made for my own use, not tinted with the arbitrary colors of scholars, but with the geometry of my spilled blood… measured by the compass of suffering.” In his stanzas, a new, militant body is born, as these wounds come into alignment with those of others. Like a syzygy (the alignment of celestial bodies), the blisters on the hands of 20th century Martinican laborers join with the blisters on the feet of a refugee crossing the Polish-Belarusian border today, offering one rueful glimmer of hope living in “the age of the refugee, the displaced person” (in Edward Said’s words): while there may be a million blistered victims of the border, they share a common struggle…

This poetics of the border and its transgression inform the joint exhibition of Warsaw-based painter Adam Kozicki and Prague-based sculptor Ruta Putramentaite, which interrogates the boundary line transversally: at one scale, it figures as a social and geopolitical frontier to be crossed, opposed, or evaded, and on another scale, it announces the planetary transgression of borders between bodies, objects, and relations. As Earth warms and its raw materials enter into frenzied circulation, we are struck by the rate at which the “social” and the “human” dissolve alongside other organic and inorganic forms. Yet at the same time, we are struck by the way in which such mobility is matched by even more rigorous immobilities, how just as interior frontiers disintegrate in viroid, transmutative exchange, exterior frontiers are ever more rigorously expanded, enforced, and weaponized. It’s blisters all the way down.

Linking these two scales is the image of a swamp. Out from the friction of soil on chrome on plastic on flesh, heated and pressurized under the bubbling veneer of marshlands, swells a form shed of all instrumentality, value, recognizability. Putramentaite’s shapes speculate not only on a present shaded by extinction and collapse, but an ambiguous future in which there is no “wealth” nor an “immense collection of commodities” to actualize it: no borders between classes, hierarchies, species, geographies, materialities. Yet there is no assurance of utopia here, just a nagging suspicion that “we” may not be witness to this future at all. What we do witness in the present, depicted in Kozicki’s landscapes and figurations, is thus made all the more urgent: the stale, surveilled interior of a police detention center, a harsh, entrapping spotlight probing through the marsh, images of claustrophobia, paranoia, mobile immobility. Here the swamp reveals its contradictory nature: we encounter a zone of stasis and inertia teeming with perverse vitality, a possibility of shelter and certain danger, an inoperable terrain serving as a limit yet perforating the border winding through it. The swamp is an emblem of the types of zones that borders create: a logic of “expansion by expulsion” (as philosopher Thomas Nail writes) pulls refugees and migrants into a pattern of motion that holds them in states of suspension, pulling them in to extract labor, fines, or information only to cast them back out, tempting them to return only to track them deep into the territory and enclose them from within. Yet the swamp itself is also an emblem of James C. Scott’s “non-state spaces,” socio-geographical constructions that thwart the full control of the nation-state and act as a fortress against capture, coercion, capital. Sitting in this swamp, enmeshed in crawling vines, we are thus left with a singular view: billowing yellow skies peaking through darkening treetops, a political horizon barely perceptible through the underbrush, yet there if we will see it… 

What we see is that every form is unstable: human tissue, chicken bones, a plastic bottle, barbed wire. But this shared pull of entropy does not mean we should consider the human or social with any less urgency: rather, as we begin to perceive these forms in all their fragility and contingency, we can rid ourselves of the “eternal” truths, “traditional” values, and “historical” teleologies that serve so well to enforce xenophobic, racist, sexist, or otherwise oppressive divisions. What we see is what Césaire saw – lines on a map as mutable as the bones in a bog. Blisters and wounds like a new cartography, navigating us through the swamp, where all the “geometric weight” of the present state caves in on itself… 

~

Noemi Purkrábková & Andrew Wilson

___________________________________________________________

[yourlocaljobstealer]

Introduction! ♡

Hi! You can call me Kora, my pronouns are she/her. I'm polish and belarusian.

18<

°Something about me

I'm a physics student 🙃 and a figure skater.

Some of my interests include philosophy (phenomenology ♡), writing, poetry.

I enjoy ballet (Love Carmen)

Fav books Master and Margarita, Consciousness and the Absolute

°Fandoms

Naruto, PJO, Atla, LOK, toh, mha, Gravity Falls, Maruders

My DMs are always open♡

[venusthesapphic]

studyblr intro!!! :

× my name is venus and my pronouns are they/them! I'm an art, history, and english lit student (high school, minor!!) and I love making art and indulging in my special interests !! (baltic history, magical girl anime, and poetry)

× im also kind of a language nerd (know bits of spoken: french, spanish, estonian, lithuanian, belarusian, ukrainian, japanese; partially fluent in german and currently learning american sign language, course level 1b)

× my current hyperfixations r one piece and precure so they might show up a lot in posts ^^;

× making this acc bc. I have severe gifted kid burnout and need motivation!! also I just like the vibes :D

(if youve read this far, remember your daily clicks!! 🇵🇸)

× I'll edit w more stuff if I think of it along the way!!

× for now, love you all and fare thee well <3

[crater-lake]

83

3/11/24

Rain drops drip from my hair and I'm happy. My jackets are so moist and I'm happy. I cut my finger with an expo market earlier today and I'm happy. My backpack is completely wet and I'm happy. I'm headed to Lorenz's and I'm happy.

My full day was rife with gratitude. The letters I thought had become lost in the mail are just now being delivered. Don't ask me why. A worker saw them somewhere and sent them home. It's hard to think about where they were that long while.

I had four classes with Sperlgymnasium. I had 8B, which is my favorite class. That beautiful boy was in there being himself. I was being as real as ever. Talking about building a life. They trust my wisdom. My mentor teacher really liked my lesson- how I engaged with the students, how I provoked questions and thought, and was smiling. She likes my linguistics. I felt good.

Afterwards I texted my best friend and mom with gratitude for how their love for me let me connect with my students today and I do not take that for granted! What a life this is! My best friend tells me back she loves me the most and I know no greater honor!

There is no other way to mean it! I texted Dad later about this wisdom and thanked him for his patience and empathy and will to live. We don't have long and I am so okay. I swear I will live!

I met up with Julian, Liyuan and Christian and we went to lunch. It was okay. I knew German. I spoke to Liyuan about intelligent things and Julian wasn't sure how to parse the conversation which made me feel more special. He said he told her a bit about our past relationship which shocked me. I said I don't want to trespass your boundaries. I felt very wise and reasonable. He cannot undercut me. I am very beautiful and alive. We talked and talked and it was nice. She is very smart and real. I know a lot about many things.

I brought them to IKEA and I was soaking wet. I brought them to Thalia and we were laughing at Diary of a Wimpy kid in German. On top of IKEA, the city was hazy and misty and white bright. I live here.

Afterwards I left and went to Jochusgasse and got food at Wiki Wiki Poke. I was texting Lorenz. Our messages were pleasant. I am currently sitting in his room where he is singing along to music. Can anything be kinder? After Poke, I went to the same Der Mann where last week that old lady spoke for one hour on the phone hunched over. It was the same worker who was a little awkward. I ordered an espresso and a croissant. I was studying my Russian and did my homework. The class is so low stakes that it is a relief. I feel immense joy going there. I was speaking more German today.

I went to Russian class and the old people there were being especially kind. I look at the workbook with a girl named Stella. The old lady was impressed with my German and asked why I was studying Russian. I said for fun. I asked the teacher extra grammar questions. She is from Belarus and lovely. She talked about Belarusian. We were all laughing because we had to describe our clothing in this activity. She helped me with my descriptions in Russian. Everyone was talking after class and smoking. Laughing. They asked if I'm going and I said yes. And I left.

I went to Gugg and met up with Allison, Ziggy, and Ashley. It was a drag night. There were queer people everywhere and I was thinking of I belonged to them or not. I did towards the end. Watching the performers made me feel real. Like, watch me traverse this, trespass this identity into creation! Watch me burn brightly in the glory of being! It is interesting to me that it is lip singing and performing hyperfemininity. I love being a queer man and understanding the glory of just being fierce, and not even in a way that sounds stupid. I am invoking something more profundity- there are gender considerations beneath this that feel affirmed by drag. I feel nervous and excited by such acts. I am queer enough. I connected to the preformed with my poetry. The wet mouth of my pillow suffocated me. Seeing stars in my orgasm. The bright nothing of poppers. Shitting in my hand. I know about real life. I know about seeing your boundaries trespassed. I know about being fucked.

After the performances, I had Lorenz ask me if I had Netflix, which I do, and it was a suggestion for me to come over despite the fact that he had originally said Wednesday. So I left Gugg feeling chosen, and then took the 2, soaking wet. I was walking those streets feeling feeling feeling. I will share with my best friend the glory of this immune day. I was out all day and going and going and it didn't hurt. It wasn't too much love. The hotel of my heart is full. Everyone is staying up past their bedtime. No one pays for the mini fridge. Tonight everyone is asked to dance and no one goes home early.

If I could show this feeling to the version of me I assumed last year, I would bow to it. Thank you to everything bigger than me and thank you to everyone who confirms my belief in people and love. I will not let myself down easily.

Good night,

[szczekaczz]

so a few days ago we had this little meeting at uni and at one point we started reciting poems from memory and uh. belarusians did it, ukrainians did it, that one chinese guy did it and all of us poles are like. sorry poetry machine broke we can't recite anything lol it was so embarrassing i need to go back to memorizing poems

[cyberbenb]

New Belarusian poetry collection explores revolution, exile, war

When Belarusian author Hanna Komar brought the manuscript for her poetry collection “Ribwort” to a publisher in Belarus in the summer of 2021, she was told that their business would be shut down if th Source : kyivindependent.com/new-belar…

[theartisanalwriter]

Hanna Komar

Belarusian poet in exile Hanna Komar, talks to AW’s Hollay Ghaderi about her exile and poetry of resistance. HG: Your poems carry such darkness juxtaposed with the softness of childhood to create gut-wrenching vulnerability. Would you say the darkness or tenderness is more of the primary driving force in your work? HK: I myself have actually never considered my poems to have darkness in them.…

[worldpoetryday]

Recognize the value of poetry, the diversity of language as a cultural asset and the importance of oral traditions.

For the 24th time we celebrate the UNESCO World Poetry Day on March 21. Under the patronage of the German UNESCO Commission, five poets from India, Syria and Belarus will come together on this evening and read their texts in the original; in addition, they will be heard in German translation. Secretary-General Dr. Roman Luckscheiter will open the event with a welcoming address.

The UNESCO World Poetry Day recognizes the value of poetry, the diversity of language as a cultural asset and the importance of oral traditions. Since 2000, the House of Poetry and its partners have organized this central event in Germany.

This year's guests on stage are:

The Indian poet Maaz Bin Bilal (born 1986 in Delhi)

The Syrian poets Kholoud Charaf (born 1981 in Al-Mojaimr)

Hanadi Zarka (born 1974 in Latakia)

Belarusian poets Volha Hapeyeva (born 1982 in Minsk)

Zmicier Vishniou (born 1973 in Debrecen)

Marie Kaiser, journalist at radioeins, will introduce the authors and moderate the evening. The Ukrainian sound poet and performer Mavka will provide musical accompaniment.

[fontyk]

Up on North Stage is exiled Belarusian poet and translator Julia Cimafiejeva discussing her poetry with Jill Jones. Her poems are intensely personal and political, exploring language and its limits infused with her childhood in a Chernobyl zone, living in an authoritarian state and her guilt in fleeing. #MotherTongueMotherlandAndMotherlessness #adlww #adlfest (at Pioneer Womens Memorial Gardens) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpY6igkPeH5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=