HAUS FÜR POESIE

The Belarusian poets Maryja Badziej and Tania Skarynkina will be guests at the Haus für Poesie this evening and will talk with Katharina Narbutovič about their poems.

Maryja Badziej (born in 1997 in Vaŭkavysk, Belarus) is a poet and translator. Her debut collection Miod i dym (“Honig und Rauch”) was published in 2023 by Pflaŭmbaŭm in Lithuania and was celebrated as one of the best poetry books of the year — “ein Buch wie eine Kantate” (Hanna Šakieĺ), “Honig für die Ohren und Rauch für das Herz” (Volha Hronskaja). In it, the poet describes the “Grenzland” in western Belarus near Vaŭkavysk, her hometown, “ein Land, so stechend, aus der Luft wachsen Kreuze und Disteln.” The poems are highly sensuous and at the same time charged with myth. They taste and smell this landscape, they read the “Handschriften der Gräser,” feel the “Puls der Bäume im Rindeneinband,” recall names and old fates “im Nachhall, im Hauch, im Widerhall.”

Tania Skarynkina (born in 1969 in Smarhoń, Belarus) writes prose in Belarusian and poetry in Russian. Her most recent works include the essay collection Rajcentr (Pflaŭmbaŭm 2021, “Kreisstadtparadies”), about her multilingual hometown Smarhoń in western Belarus — a place marked by historical ruptures and shifting allegiances — and the poetry collection Yesmomochka (Pflaŭmbaŭm 2022, “YesMom”). In her poetry, Skarynkina captures everyday observations with seismographic sensitivity, collecting and preserving them within the poem itself: the butterfly that fans air toward the figure of Jesus in the church at late summer, the six-pawed cat “die auf Polnisch zwischen den Zähnen zischelt,” or “die Regungslose” on the suburban train, her hands clenched into fists, to whom the speaker does not offer a glance “um die Regsame in mir nicht preiszugeben.”

The event will be interpreted in Belarusian and German.

Reading & Conversation: Maryja Badziej, Tania Skarynkina
Moderation: Katharina Narbutovič