Blutkreislauf (Bloodstream)

‘i weave my story out of rags, / out of tatters, out of scraps, out of lopsided patches of memory’—written in exile, Julia Cimafiejeva’s poem cycle is a formally open-ended project of memory that traces the history of her Belarusian family, stretching across a whole century from Belarus to Western Europe and Canada. Cimafiejeva uses various genres including letters, photographs, questionnaires, and prose poems to address experiences of forced labour, displacement, the Chornobyl disaster, and the stations of her own exile and linguistic deracination. She sews up the gaps in the story with ‘the needle of the poem’, rethreading trajectories over and over, interweaving times and places. However ‘worn out, ragged and faded’ memory may be—in Blutkreislauf, the Belarusian poet questions individual and collective memory of the twentieth century and makes a many-voiced stand against forgetting, sensitively and precisely translated by Tina Wünschmann.
—Cia Rinne

Julia Cimafiejeva (born 1982 near Brahin in Belarus) is a poet and translator. She has published several volumes of poetry, a diary about the uprising in Minsk, and books combining photography and collage. She has been translated into Polish, English, German, Dutch and Swedish). edition.fotoTAPETA has published her poetry (Zirkus, Der Angststein) as well as Minsk. Tagebuch. She has been living in exile in various places since 2020, most recently on a DAAD scholarship in Berlin. 

Tina Wünschmann (born 1980 in Freital) is a Slavicist and translator from Belarussian, Polish and Russian. edition.fotoTAPETA has published her translations of poetry by Julia Cimafiejeva and essays by Alhierd Bacharevič and Tania Arcimovich. She lives and works near Dresden.