Julia
Cimafiejeva

“we couldn’t take you with us, / our legless houses. / we couldn’t carry you out on our shoulders, / our freshly ploughed fields”—anyone with an eye on the political developments in Belarus since the recently rigged presidential election might assume that these lines by poet and translator Julia Cimafiejeva—who came to Graz in late 2020 on a Writers-in-Exile fellowship with her partner, Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevič—speak about the loss of home in exile. But the poem was written before 2020; it is not concerned with the fallout of the dictatorship, but—as the title “1986” lets on—the fallout of another rootlessness: the Chernobyl disaster.

Cimafiejeva was born in 1982 as the child of so-called “resettlers,” whose dialect differed from the village in southeastern Belarus she grew up in after the family had been forced to leave their home in the contaminated region in the south. This initial uprooting was followed by others—including linguistic ones, which had a lasting impact on the author’s work and instilled in her the productive restlessness of a poetic “traveling circus.” After rural village life, where Trasianka was spoken (a mixture of Belarusian and Russian), came her high school years in the city, where one had to speak “competent and correct Russian.” This precipitated the subsequent uprooting that Cimafiejeva described in an essay as “having to eradicate the weeds of Trasianka from my head.” Belarusian, in turn, was seen in this realm as “cultureless” until the author, while studying English and literary studies in Minsk, discovered its evolution as a language of literature and knowledge exchange. Like many authors at the time, she made a conscious decision to write in this language. Around this time, she began translating poetry from English and Norwegian.

This linguistic outline does not advocate for a biographical reading of her work, but is directed instead at the heart of Cimafiejeva’s poetics, the “tent” of her dislocated, acrobatic word flourishes, where the tongue rages like “restless youth.” Her poems embody the poetic agility of a feminist, cosmopolitan multilingualism that calls into question the authority of the mother tongue and the narrow confines of origins. For even before 2020, the fatherland and its patriarchal, statesman-like poetic tradition had no use for “the body of the female poet,” as the eponymous poem wryly observes. And in the poem Mother Tongue the line goes: “You gave me life—I opened a school therein / for foreign languages.”

Since 2014, four volumes of poetry have been published in Belarusian, establishing Cimafiejeva as one of the most important voices of her generation. In German, the volumes Zirkus (2019) and Der Angststein (2022) from the esteemed publisher edition.fotoTapeta offer a representative selection; the protest chronicle Minsk. Tagebuch (2021), written in English in 2021, and the artistically designed photo book Minsk. Die Stadt, die ich vermisse (2022) bear witness to resistance and forced rootlessness. Cimafiejeva’s poem My European Poem, published in English at the height of the protests, became famous. The US English translation of her poems Motherfield: Poems & Belarusian Protest Diary (2022) was nominated for the American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation as well as the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry.

The houses left behind may be legless, but Cimafiejeva’s metaphors, which her powerful poems thrive on, are not: they rush through centuries like a “road that grows inwards” and “throws mountains under itself.” In the sediments, the poems decipher the legacies of ecological and political violence on the language, bodies, and dreams of those born thereafter. With the rhythm of the restless, they mine the “circus between the pages of books” so that we can read it up close.

Text: Uljana Wolf
Translation: Erik Smith