Alhierd Bacharevich (Belarus)

Belarusian writer and poet. Was born in 1975. Author of many novels and essay collections. In 2018 he published a novel Dogs of Europe. It was translated into Russian by Bacharevich himself and was on the short list of the Russian literary prize Big Book. In 2020, The Belarus Free Theater made a theatrical adaptation of the novel. The second Belarusian edition, printed in Lithuania, has been arrested at the border by the Belarusian customs service. Since April 2021, the book has been examined by the authorities for the expression of extremism in it. He received the Book of the Year literary prize in Belarus twice and was the winner of the second Jerzy Giedroyc Prize awarded for the best book of prose in the Belarusian language for four times. He is the member of the Intellectual Club of Svetlana Aleksievich in Minsk (2019). Together with his wife, poet Julia Cimafiejeva, he took an active part in the 2020 protests in Belarus against the falsification of the presidential elections and the dictatorship.

 

RESISTANCE

 

Max Vasmer

The famous linguist

Went to work

Always with two briefcases

One briefcase in each hand

So that neither of them

Could be raised in a greeting

Known as Hitlergruss.

Neither the right nor the left one.

 

It was probably in 1941

In the east and the south

The students of Mr. Vasmer

Practiced Slavic languages

Under field conditions far from Berlin

Pardon,

Professor Fasmer apologized

When meeting his colleagues

In the streets or corridors

Filled with smoke as it used to be

Common at universities.

 

An they greeted him in a new language

Of the new Europe

The newest language of gestures

The language of the victors

 

There were so many cities in their hands

And only one briefcase.

One people.

One empire

And Fuerer —also one.

Lonely and invincible.

 

But there were two briefcases

in the professor’s hands

Always two.

That was the resistance

Of the linguist Max Fasmer,

The man without hands.

It shined

In the cowed Berlin

In the field of Slavic studies.

Then blackouts began.

 

Translated by Jaroslaw Anders