autumn/ winter 2007 | no 22 the vilnius review autumn winter no

Transcription

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I gave myself up not to his will. I gave myself up to myself. On the balcony covered
with snowdrifts, my bare feet sunk into the snow. I held on to his shirt against the
cold, sowing his buttons to the wind, his shirt as white as the snow, while he lifted
me up, holding me tightly with his warm hands. He grabbed me around the waist
and propped me up against the black concrete wall.
Crushed against the concrete wall, like a huge butterfly, I gazed into his eyes,
licking the snowflakes off his lips, and there was nothing in the world that could
frighten me. What was there to be frightened of? Death? Whats death if at least
once youve experienced the blessings of the highest being. I immediately understood: I would be allowed to love. And now I would come to life.
the vilnius review | autumn / winter 2007 | no 22
autumn / winter 2007 | no 22
THE
VI LNIUS
REVIEW
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NEW WRITING FROM LITHUANIA
Dalia Jazukevièiûtë in Anarchistës iðpaþintis (Confessions of a Female Anarchist)
A friend once told me the story of when she figured out that she really loved her
husband. She had been brought to the third-floor recovery room after a difficult
operation, bundled up in a winter coat because they had brought her to the hospital
in January but released her in February, and, confused about time and place, she
was being escorted by her neighbor. On the second-floor landing she felt sick. She
leaned against the wall, and instinctively put her lips to her sleeve. That was when
she saw that her husband was holding out under her lips his large construction
workers palms, with white plaster crusted into his wrinkles, in case she had to
throw up on the stairs
Giedra Radvilavièiûtë in Nekrologas (Obituary)
ISSN 1648 -7354
Cover illustration
from Romas Daugirdas
Laisvas kritimas
by Romas Orantas
Vilnius_Magasine#10-COVER.p65
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Eugenijus Aliðanka
ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITOR
Joseph Everatt
DESIGNER
Jokûbas Jacovskis
TRANSLATORS
Eugenijus Aliðanka, Jûra Aviþienis, Diana Bartkutë, Joseph Everatt,
Kerry Shawn Keys, Aldona Matulytë, Darius James Ross, Laima Sruoginis,
Ada Valaitis
THIS PUBLICATION IS SUPPORTED BY
The Lithuanian Media Support Foundation
The Lithuanian Culture and Sports Support Foundation
© 2007 The Vilnius Review
Public institution Vilnius
Mësiniø g. 4, LT -01133 Vilnius, Lithuania
Tel: (+370 5) 2613767
E-mail: [email protected]
www.culture.lt/vilnius
I S S N 1648-7354
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contents
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EDITORIAL
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BOOKS AND AUTHORS
The Rage of Fantasy and a Precise Form by Laimantas Jonuðys | 7
Kazaðas by Donaldas Kajokas | 10
Fumigation of the Nidus of the Disease by Nida Gaidauskienë | 21
An Album of X-Ray Photographs by Arnas Aliðauskas | 24
A Rebel from Birth by Giedrë Kazlauskaitë | 31
Confessions of a Female Anarchist by Dalia Jazukevièiûtë | 33
Restrained Free Fall by Vaiva Kuodytë | 43
Free Fall by Romas Daugirdas | 46
To Become a Metaphor by Giedra Radvilavièiûtë | 51
With Rain against the Sun by Dalia Staponkutë | 53
THE VIEW FROM HERE
Literary Quality in Documentary Literature by Elena Baliutytë | 62
ESSAY
Obituary by Giedra Radvilavièiûtë | 69
NEW BOOKS
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RECENT EVENTS
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editorial
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El Dorado is Round the Corner
Literature is the art of the journey: wandering, delirium, roaming. Clearly, the
map of the imagination rarely coincides with the physical. Some lands draw us in
more than others. The colours of El Dorado are brighter in one land; in another
they are indiscernible. I have in mind firstly the movement of the imagination,
journeys through literatures. However, I do not want to isolate them strictly from
physical journeys. A writer, especially a poet, is often like a mother giving birth on
the roadside, unable to wait until she reaches a sterile hospital ward. On the other
hand, physical journeys are not a necessary condition for approaching your own El
Dorado. A deeper contact with one or another land or region is usually found through
studying, reading, translating and learning languages, without ever leaving the house.
Physical journeys are more like complements that strengthen our sight and our
hearing. They cannot be used as a substitute for everyday nourishment.
Do there exist lands in Lithuanian literature where a glimmer of El Dorado might
be discovered, where literature is pulled, tempted, woken? Just as there is not one
El Dorado, there is not one Lithuanian literature. Therefore, in order to elaborate on
this question, we should talk about individual writers and their preferences. In the
Soviet era, some of the most potent areas of attraction were Eastern cultures. Even
today, their influence is felt in the works of several writers, namely Donaldas Kajokas,
Vytautas P. Bloþë, Jurga Ivanauskaitë and Birutë Mar. Oddly, though, they were all
drawn to, and are still interested in, traditional cultures, instead of literature. With
this interest in ancient Japanese and Chinese poetry, the haiku and rengu erupted
in Lithuanian poetry, though truly contemporary Eastern poetry was largely ignored. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with crossing paths historically; in terms of
the imagination, this is not an obstacle. What is important is that the East remains,
for Lithuanians, the furthest and most exotic El Dorado, which, in these times of
cheap airline tickets and the Internet, is becoming more attainable and less exotic.
Nevertheless, as of late, the search for El Dorado is becoming shorter. The illusions are more rarely sustained that princesses live over the sea, that literature,
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like fashion, is created only in New York, Paris or Milan. The comparison with
fashion is not just incidental: the diverse nature of fashions dictates becomes more
exposed and much brighter. The mythologising of the consciousness is shown by a
perfect example: at first glance this is an innocent advertisement: If youre not on
the Internet, you dont exist. Globalisation and advertising genocide forces writers to search for resistance in nearer regions. Undoubtedly, attention is growing
towards neighbouring literatures, Polish, Latvian, Ukrainian and Belarusian. The
recently created Magnus Ducatus Poesis literary movement, which draws into its
orbit poets from these countries, uniquely symbolises the rebirth of a regional
mindset. This turmoil is paved not just by the historic experience, it is also very
meaningful. Literature is always more concerned with community, and not with
universality. The desire to be with and communicate with those similar to you is
totally understandable, though therein lie insularity, provincialism and the danger
of complacency. Still, it is evident that this is not yet El Dorado, it is only one of the
roads, and these dangers do not threaten the traveller.
Perhaps that El Dorado is even closer, around the corner? We usually look for it
there, surrounded by our own literature, among close friends, pine forests and lakes,
love and hate. It seems to me more and more that the land of El Dorado extends out
there, where I will reach it very, very soon. Tomorrow, I will wake up in the morning, get dressed, brush my teeth, walk through the door, go round the corner, shoot
past the gate, and will arrive there. As if I had not lived more than 40 years, had not
suffered El Dorados tricks, to be everywhere and nowhere. As if I dreamt with my
eyes open.
EUGENIJUS ALIÐANKA
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PHOTOGRAPH BY ARÛNAS BALTËNAS
DONALDAS KAJOKAS
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books and authors
The Rage of Fantasy
and a Precise Form
BY LAIMANTAS JONUÐYS
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The first novel by a recognised poet predisposes the reader towards a prudent
assessment: will it not seem insipid and artificial beside his subtle lyrics? Donaldas
Kajokas, 54, scaled the heights of Lithuanian literature with his intimate, soft poetry, in which the influence of traditional Lithuanian lyrics and of classical Chinese and Japanese expression is clearly felt. He also wrote poetic prose and essays,
in which motifs of an oriental world outlook and wisdom are clear.
Though the same motifs can be found in his novel Kazaðas, the author reveals
himself as a master of versatile prose. At the beginning of the novel, the main
storylines are formed, which can be understood on a realistic plane, though signs
of magic, unreality and all kinds of innuendo are already creeping in. The main
character, an artist, the former businessman Izidorius Ðalva, in Sweden, on the
island of Gotland, becomes acquainted with a young Swede of mixed race and
another two Lithuanians, the elderly writer Rojus Ruduo and a young girl by the
name of Elena.
Later in Lithuania, the latter becomes his wife, or maybe not. Here we enter a
sphere where reality falls to pieces, dissipates into alternative versions, and the
world that we are familiar with becomes scattered like the beads of a kaleidoscope,
which later form into colourful and impressive new combinations, and change and
transform themselves again.
In part, we can imagine the novel as a beautiful, and at the same time a spinechilling, fairy-tale, as a masquerade of phantasmagoria, as a game of mystical fantasy
with elements of the absurd, as a labyrinth of dreams, or as a string of hallucinations
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From the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493
of frayed consciousness. Critics have discovered in it parallels with Alice in Wonderland, with Hermann Hesses Der Steppenwolf, and with Mikhail Bulgakovs The
Master and Margarita. In some places it recalls the sophisticated changes in Milorad
Pavitchs perception: The well was filled to the brim with some colourless substances rather than with water, which recalled lazily circulating air. The idea flashed
across the mind that it was not air, it was stagnant wind.
Twists and turns of wild fantasy intoxicate the reader, and sometimes even unsettle him. On the other hand, the author manages to control this realm of fantasy
effectively. There is an abundance of realities and allusions, especially elements
from the history of Christianity and East Asian philosophy, art and literature. Furthermore, many motifs expressed at the beginning of the book later repeat themselves in other contexts, in other shapes, with new meanings. Dozens of bonds link
the large and small elements of the novel.
One of many starting points is Marguerite Yourcenars short story about the brilliant painter Wang Fo who saved himself from the wrath of the Chinese emperor by
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painting a picture of a small boat which he boarded with his faithful pupil and
disappeared. Such layers of different realities correlate differently with each other
in Kajokas novel. The hero, Izidorius Ðalva, at one time also finds himself in that
small boat together with the Chinese.
Another idea that runs through the book is a story of incest. The writer Rojus
Ruduo recounts the story of his teenage brother and sister who, unexpectedly filled
with great passion, make love in some hay in the country on a summers night. But
later neither of them ever referred to it as if some force had cut the stars, the
smell of the hay, and the chirping of the grasshoppers out of their memory. When
it is suspected that Rojus has probably made up this story, he admits: I have
mentioned that they both never let on about it to anybody. But later, when he
forcefully develops the story further, Ðalva says: The story does not seem to have
been invented, and the writer answers back: Are there any invented stories?
One more variation follows: complicated twists and turns of the plot seem to
lead to the fact that Izidorius and Elena are brother and sister, though they themselves do not know it. Kazaðas questions the contraposition of reality and fantasy. It leads the reader to a world where these planes interlace into a complicated
but suggestive composition. The author has mastered not only the forms of poetic style but also the spoken language, the plane of the absurd and the comic
element.
Donaldas Kajokas
Kazaðas
Vilnius: Lietuvos raðytojø sàjungos leidykla, 2007, 201 p.
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an extract from the novel
Kazaðas
BY DONALDAS KAJOKAS
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Erased
1
And so, two days after Christmas Eve, spent with a woman who called herself Maria
Magdalene, Izidorius Ðalva decided to return to the city. As was his custom, he
put on his old velvet jacket. Six years ago hed sewn a sheet of paper, yellowed
with age, into the jacket lining. It was the only relic he had of his parents existence.
Not far from him, not far from the stillness of the fir forest where he was standing,
waiting for the bus, he spotted a tall, boney man wearing a black coat and a long
white scarf, with a scythe slung over his shoulder. The man stood on the island in
the middle of the road, staring down at his feet as though he were about to trim the
grass. Three times he took the scythe down from his shoulder, even lifted it once,
however, did not lower it. For a few minutes he shuffled his feet beside the guard
rail; then he pulled a glimmering green bottle from his inside pocket. He took a
swig, tossed the scythe over his shoulder, and, as though nothing at all had ever
happened, strode along the snowy road towards the fir forest.
A long-legged yellow dog trailed after him. In the foreground of the white field
the dogs fur took on the color of red embers flickering in the wind.
As the man with the scythe disappeared among the firs, Izidorius head began to
ring.
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On the bus he felt even worse. The bus was filled close to capacity. Izidorius sat
squeezed against the window by a red-faced country woman with a massive rearend. Unexpectedly, through his peripheral vision, he saw that the woman was naked.
No, it wasnt quite like that.
She was not naked. Somehow Izidorius had gained the ability to see through the
womans clothing. He saw her large breasts, wrinkled in places, pressed in by her
bra. The sight made him shudder. Lifting his eyes, he realized that his vision
allowed him to undress the other passengers on the bus as well. He was surprised
to see that the naked men seemed to him less vulgar than the naked women. Even
the young womens bodies beneath their clothing seemed to him somehow unnaturally squeezed.
The bus jerked forward. Izidorius opened his eyes.
It appeared hed dozed off.
3
However, that was only the beginning of the unusual things happening to him.
When he made the turn onto Chestnut Street, Izidorius saw that his house wasnt
there. To be more exact, in the place of the little blue house with the mansard roof,
stood another building, a two-story building.
At first he thought it was a hallucination. He shook his head and when the image
didnt disappear, for some reason he slowly continued walking down the street. He
came back even slowerin his yard he saw that same ugly building. He pinched
his hand. It hurt.
The following events played out like a bad dream. Strangers lived in the new
house.
His closest neighbor, whom Izidorius had a good relationship with, didnt recognize him. All his attempts at explaining himself were at first interpreted as a misunderstanding, then as a New Year joke, and finally as the ramblings of a psychiatric
patient.
For an hour he wandered the neighboring streets confused. The idea came to him
that he should go to Elenas apartment. No one opened the door. The elderly neighbor
explained to him: That disheveled fake left to go live in Sweden a long time ago.
Towards evening, shaking internally, he went to visit a few old friends. They also
looked at him as though they didnt know him, as though theyd met him for the
very first time.
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He asked one of them asked about Èernius.
Èernius they knew.
He was in jail.
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What is this? Izidorius thought, walking in circles around his citya hallucination, hypnosis, a cold, or the vision of one more psychiatric patient?
Hey, what was it Maria Magdalene had said? Someone wanted to kidnap him.
Someone? Yes, it was she, who had mentioned Kazaðas. Who was he? What kind of
a joke was this? What kind of a game was he playing? After all, what was he after?
Or maybe it was the work of Èernius? Revenge? Former business partners always had old scores to settle.
No, this kind of a trick was beyond Èernius. The ties were too weak. He never
had much imagination. Besides, he was in jail.
In the small Flaming Giraffe Café, Izidorius ate his dinner through clenched
teeth. There was no way he could explain to himself logically what was happening.
He hoped that he was dreaming after all.
Beyond the window, the city was frantically preparing for the millennium festivities.
All he could do was wait. Wait until he woke up from this horrific illness or until
this absurd situation took on some clear shape.
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Once it got dark, it dawned on him that he didnt have anywhere to sleep. He
remembered Mote. In the evenings half the citys laborers dropped by her hovel.
Theyd do a shot of cheap spirits, and after having a good wild time, theyd go off to
sleep.
Izidorius didnt have any small bills on him, so he overpaid for the bottle. Mote
helpfully cut him slices of yellowed bacon.
The world slowly brightened. The situation now didnt seem that terribly hopeless. After a third of the bottle, she even took on the relatively good features of an
adventurous soul.
Men would stop by the dingy room. Next door someone was eternally talking,
laughing, making deals, arguing. Along the ceiling clouds of cheap cigarette smoke
rolled.
Hi, Bronys, Izidorius said, seeing in the doorway the ambulance driver who
lived across the street.
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Hi, he answered automatically.
From his tone, Izidorius understood that his neighbour had greeted him like one
of the regulars who frequented this dirty hovel. But, even so, he didnt want to let go
of that one threat of hope.
So, I hear you bought your wife a washing machine?
How do you know that?
Izidorius was overcome with rage.
I know everything about you, idiot!
With an overzealous attitude, he began to talk about his neighbors wifes radiculitis; about their tense relationship with his hunchback father-in-law; he even mentioned the German shepherd that Bronys had to shoot because it had a wound on its
back that would not heal.
How do you know all that? the driver managed to mutter.
Dont tell me you dont recognize me? Im Izidorius! And then, as though
putting down his last card, he said: The Copper Tycoon.
Well, well, his neighbor muttered, wrinkling his brow.
No, he said after a moment. My memory is like a steel trap.
There was no point in continuing the conversation.
Then an old drinking adage popped into his head: the only way to check what is
for real and what is a hallucination is to drink some more. Usually the hallucinations go away at that point.
Around midnight, Mote began grabbing him by the nape of his neck. He shoved
some bills into the fat ladys cleavage and without saying a word collapsed on the
broken sofa.
6
And that night Izidorius dreamed that in the morning hed left his glass bubble
and that at the bus station hed seen a man with a scythe and the man was planning on trimming the snow, but he didnt, and without even lowering his scythe,
he shuffled off towards the fir forest. He dreamt that he returned to Chestnut
Street without incident, that he unlocked the door to his little house with the
mansard roof, and took a shower, whistling to himself the entire time. He dreamt
that he changed his clothes, went out to walk around the city, decorated for the
holidays, that he called Elena, and that later the two of them ate dinner slowly
by candlelight at the Flaming Giraffe Café, chatting, telling each other how each
of them had spent their time without the other, philosophizing, and then had
returned rather late to that same cozy street. In a word, Izidorius dreamt what had
supposed to happen.
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In his dream hed kissed Elenas hair, her shoulders, stroked her perfumed skin,
and after shed fallen asleep, for a long time hed lain there and had listened to the
noise of the city beyond the window, while his consciousness analyzed the events
of the day, and like a multitude of kaleidoscope pieces, everything fell into place,
turned into an old mirror, gilded with age, and in that mirror Izidorius saw his
shaking face and in that same moment understood that someone was shaking him
by the shoulder
Enough lying around. This isnt a sanatorium.
Mote stood beside him.
His head hurt a little, but his mood was a touch better than yesterday.
Having ended up in the street like this, he decided to act.
His plan was simple. Because hed not known his parents or any of his other
relatives, he decided to check his identity another way. He visited a few official
institutions (the Passport Section of the Police Department, the dorm hed lived in,
the Art School, the Cancer Clinic) but nowhere did he come across his name or his
surname. The answer was always one and the same: doesnt live here, never lived
here, never studied here, never was a patient here.
According to their records, the citizen named Izidorius Ðalva had never existed.
Izidorius had no doubt that since infancy hed breathed the air of these streets,
but the city held no trace of his ever having existed, not one object, not one footstep, not the slightest inkling of confirmation.
All of that felt like a bad dreama dream it was impossible to climb out of. He
remembered an adage hed once heard: pain is the test of reality.
That was a lame thought. Every single cell in Izidorius body had retained the
ability to feel pain; however, that didnt prove a thing. It didnt prove he was dreaming
and it didnt prove he was alive.
Towards evening he gave up. Almost bitterly, he constituted: its not possible to
seriously check whether one is dreaming or not in this existence.
8
He felt betrayed. So painfully, and for the second time in his life.
The first time he was betrayed by his parents, whod left him in the front hallway
of the orphanage not long after hed been born. After hed grown a bit, he still
waited for them, believing, just like every other little one believed, that either this
evening, or the next (the next for sure!) that his real mother and father would walk
through the open bedroom door, take him in their arms, cuddle him against their
chest, and never ever give him away again. But the summers and the autumns
passed, the winters and the springs, and again the summers and again the autumns,
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and his parents never showed up in any doorway. And then somehow, without him
ever consciously noticing it, he began to hate them. His parents became his enemies, the objects of his hatred, people who were off in who-knows-what corner of
the earth living in some barbaric enclave. The strangest thing was that that hatred
grew stronger with time, until eventually it metamorphosed into the sentiment carried by a knight armed for battle.
However, Izidorius parents had written on a scrap of paper torn from a graph
paper notebook three words: Izidorius, forgive us. That is the name he came into
the world with. His surname, however, as the romantically inclined orphanage director liked to repeat, hed brought with him himself. Etymologically, his surname
came from the verb to freeze. On that early April morning when she found Izidorius,
there was frost on the ground. That was how he got his name.
The scrap of paper from the graph paper notebook the director gave to him much
later, after hed been transferred to a dorm. That yellowed sheet of paper, as mentioned earlier, six years ago, when hed received his diagnosis, hed sewn into the
lining of his coat.
Now he felt betrayed a second time.
Only this time the entire world had betrayed him.
9
He went to live in a hotel close to the Old City. On the third floor.
The city alienated him. When hed been a successful businessman, Izidorius
was recognized by everyone, not just the city clerks, but even every street child
knew him. Now, for the second day, he was searching for even one set of eyes that
recognized him; but couldnt find any.
I once reigned in this city, he said to himself in a hoarse voice, standing on the
hotel balcony, looking out at the Old Citys lights. It was a line he remembered
from a poem that had lodged in his head.
Unexpectedly, he noticed a huge car pulling into the hotel yard. At first glance it
looked like a car placed onto the body of a truck with the low beams on.
Izidorius returned to the room and turned off the lights. He observed the strange
automobile from behind the night curtain, pulling it back slightly with his thumb.
Suddenly the cars lights went out, as though the driver were waiting for whoever
was watching him to step out from behind the curtain.
Izidorius was overcome with the agitation a hunted animal might feel. That is
probably how people felt after the war, expecting the KGB to show up at their door
in the dead of night.
He didnt hear a knock, but he grew more and more anxious.
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Thats a lesson, Izidorius muttered through clenched teeth, lying in bed, covering his head with his blanket. Not one maniac against the entire world, but the
entire world against one person.
10
After a few nights he discovered a paradoxical rule: what he saw in his dreams was
a continuation of his earlier life, but when he woke up he ended up in a world
cobbled together by the logic of dream.
His dreams were incredibly realistic. In them Izidorius and Elena walked around
shops, bought themselves knick-knacks, had lunch at the Flaming Giraffe Café,
read the newspaper, watched television, went to galleries, visited friends.
Soon the New Year Carnival had to take place. He and Elena had not yet decided
what clothing theyd wear, what masks theyd cover their faces with. Elena thought
she might dress as a man, and Izidorius was thinking almost as a joke about dressing like a gentleman from the Middle Ages.
In one dream Elena returned late, almost at midnight. He was worried. In the
little house with the mansard roof he sipped whiskey and listened to Tchaikovsky.
The next day Elena gave him a cat as a gift to make up. No, it was a cat with dark
blue fur. When they let it loose in the woods, it began to roll around in the snow.
Miss Smillas feeling for snow, Elena had squealed.
And that is what they named the cat, Miss Smilla.
11
One dream created a new riddle for him. It wasnt even a complete dream, but a
detail from a dream.
Izidorius dreamt that he was watching television. During the news the newscaster announced: Today in the middle of King Mindaugas Prospect, the drunk
driver of an Audi lost control of his car while moving at great speed. The car slid
down the embankment and directly onto the frozen river. The ice broke and the car,
together with its driver, ended up on the bottom of the river.
In the morning he was inspired to search for the footprints of Izidorius Ðalvas
existence. This time in the citys Housing Department. It turned out that, as Izidorius
had expected, hed never owned any real estate in the city, and therefore the aforementioned little house on Chestnut Street had never belonged to him.
He left the depressing little office and walked along the river towards his hotel.
It was getting close to lunch time. Suddenly on King Mindaugas Prospect a red
Audi flew by incredibly fast. It didnt get so far as a hundred metres from him
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when, as though propelled by a set of invisible springs, it jumped into the air,
crashed through the guardrail, and disappeared from view.
Izidorius remembered his dream. Either youll go crazy or youll become Wolf
Mesing.
But he didnt feel any better.
He turned around and walked off in the opposite direction.
12
That had been a distinct sign that his dreams were closely linked to reality. In other
words, this time his dream was changing reality. In his dreams Izidorius could, for
example, hear on the radio news about events that were about to take place on the
day that hadnt yet dawned.
The link between dream and reality grew harder to understand. In the logic of
his dreams he was the Izidorius Ðalva of earlier, but who was he here, in this
reality, existing according to incomprehensible rules and logic?
Besides that, he didnt understand, like most people, one very simple thing
who was he, Izidorius Ðalva, for real?
The phantom dream, traveling through unending hallucinations, labyrinths, or
was it a real thing with muscles, blood and bones, able, like everyone else to fall
asleep and to awaken?
In a way, that state of mind was like death creeping along beside him on soft feet.
He caught himself more and more often remembering Christmas Eve and Maria
Magdalenes warning that had flown past his ears. Maybe for real this unclear
situation, this situation that he could not in his right mind understand, his erasure
from the world, was somehow connected with her mentioned kidnapping.
Or maybe it simply wasnt worth his leaving his glass bubble and returning to the
city.
After the dreamed television newscasters announcement, which had come to
pass not in a dream, but in Izidorius erased world, again the hope was born that
both these spaces would some day fall into place.
13
That day, after the Audi accident, Izidorius walked not towards his hotel, but in the
opposite direction. He came to a red brick church, and, as though pushed, went
inside.
The church was empty. Only not far from the altar, on the right side of the pews,
an old woman prayed in deep concentration.
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Sitting on the opposite side, Izidorius tried to fundamentally understand his situation. However, his eyes were drawn over and over again to the praying womans
hands.
After a few moments, the old woman pulled from her handbag a large raspberry. She ate it secretly. She shoved her hand into her handbag again, but as
she was pulling it out the raspberry fell out and rolled across the church floor.
It lay there sparkling about three steps away from the woman. But she was sitting there so comfortably that she didnt dare even twitch. The womans eyes slid
across the floor. Her left nostril began to twitch and her breathing grew more
rapid.
Such a small berry, it occurred to Izidorius, and the entire house of prayer came
apart.
After some time someones shadow slid into the church. Turning his head, Ðalva
saw the man with the scythe hed seen a few days ago.
Creeping past with a white scarf tied around his neck, he stepped on the raspberry, mashing it into porridge. Only a few red spots were left, leading towards the
altar.
Without even so much as glancing at the Christ on the cross, the man with the
scythe, smacking his lips, climbed up towards the altar, then left the church through
the side doors.
Izidorius stood up from his spot and hastily trailed after him.
14
Having ended up outside, he spotted the silhouettes of four figures walking into the
distance along the river. Theyd already gone a stretch of the road when Izidorius
suddenly recognized them: beside the man with the scythe, gesticulating wildly,
was Elena, Rojus Ruduo, and the Fish!
It was like a minor miracle.
Izidorius stepped up his pace, and trotted towards them, shouting out: Hey,
hey, wait!
But they walked on as though they hadnt heard him. The faster Izidorius ran,
the faster the group moved forwards, away from him.
The cobblestone road ended, and the rubble alongside the river began. Izidorius
could scarcely catch his breath; meanwhile his friends werent slowed by bushes,
by holes, by snowdrifts.
After half an hour of pointless effort it began to grow dark. Then he shouted out
again. He called out their names. In vain. The group, gesticulating animatedly,
deep in conversation, disappeared from his view.
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Izidorius tripped on a root and fell face first into the snow. He cried, he growled,
he laughed, he choked, he coo-cooed
Out of rage he thrashed and rolled about in the mud alongside the river.
15
Maybe all of that is somehow tied to love? Izidorius thought the next morning,
waking up in his hotel room. With true love, the kind that isnt calculated and has
no goals.
Who loved him like that?
His friends? His neighbors? His acquaintances? Hed reached out to them and
they couldnt manage to recognize him; they really didnt love him. Elena? Not
likely. After all, yesterday, alongside the river, sheif that really was her there
didnt even hear his desperate calls.
The Director! Yes, the Director of the orphanage. That soft woman with the shining eyes whom all the orphans called the Director. This word didnt refer to her
responsibilities alone, but to her honor.
A few years back Izidorius had gone to visit her. Shed retired and had gone with
her sister to live in a small town in Dzûkija. At the time she was raising three
piglets and some special species of giant roses.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
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PHOTOGRAPH BY INGA STRAZDIENË
ARNAS ALIÐAUSKAS
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books and authors
Fumigation of the Nidus
of the Disease
BY NIDA GAIDAUSKIENË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
In 1996, Arnas Aliðauskas made his debut with the book of poems Prisukama
karalystë (The Winding Kingdom), which distinguished itself by its uniform poetic
view of the world. The paradoxical language, usually concentrated in texts of strict
Classical versification, opened up Judaic-Christian props, and, at the same time, a
dramatic breaking and staggering. The prevailing metaphysical problems acquired
features of absurd poetry. Implacable death left the hole of the grave covered up, the
darkness of the deadlock was made more intense by the silence from beyond. Dumb
writing in parchments curled up and dried. The ritual of offering, sacrificing an
animal, overshadowed the liturgy of the word. Being closely related to the parallel
of historical cataclysms, it became unsanctioned by God, who reminds us of a mere
inert show, Deus ex machina, mechanically thrusting an uncovered head into the
skies (an allusion to the oriental attributes of the Lithuanian dukes) rather than the
highest institution of justice. The protective Father is replaced by a crippled father
with crutches of the same winding system, or a drunk, staggering father led by a
child at Christmas (the author writes it christmas). The story of the Prodigal Son
becomes entangled: once there is no motherland, physical or metaphysical (everywhere there is a motherland, and everywhere it is not mine), the direction to
return to is not clear. The scenography of a tragedy saturated with the sights of a
damned city, and equal to the space of a Greek amphitheatre in its monumental
nature, is filled with the figurines of a tobacco box of toy sizes, from which the spring
that is being unwound and is getting loose steals the freedom of actions, the variety
of trajectories of movement. The suggestion of mechanical equipment prevents the
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tragedy from ending in an apocalyptic finale. The hands of a constantly overwound
clock erased the figures on its face a long time ago. This is not a linear, or a mythical,
cyclic time. The literary critic Brigita Speièytë likened it to a closed vicious circle.
A world full of surrogates seems to rotate along the edge of a whirlpool, and in no way
can it be drawn inside the funnel. The implied sensation of the vertical is especially
strong in Aliðauskas poetry.
During the 11 years that followed the first book, which, according to the author,
wrote itself, there have not been many publications of Aliðauskas poetry in periodicals; however, the poet has worked hard as a journalist, and prepared publications on the issues of literature and theatre. He has initiated interesting talks about
culture, book reviews, discussions of cultural events and performances. His activity has covered politics (since 1998 he has worked intermittently as a desk officer
at the Presidents Office), theatre (he has created plays based on work by R.
Akutagava and B. Vian, original dramaturgy for the Fundamentum Collegi festival), as well as cinema and the entertainment business (screenplays).
Aliðauskas second book, Rentgeno nuotraukø albumas (An Album of X-Ray
Photographs), published in 2007, differs from the first selection of works in its
formal expression, which is nearer to the tendencies in contemporary poetry. The
poet tends towards a freer stanza, sometimes he does not avoid using a simple
everyday narrative. The sentiments in this book are stifled by the charm of social
themes (figures of émigrés, prisoners, the disabled, patients, a yard-keeper, beggars, the persecuted). Many poems recall cinema, its most important pictures of
personal experience are assembled as if they belonged to someone else. However,
the value-based landmarks of the author remain in essence unchanged. Following
the example of Donaldas Kajokas, Daiva Èepauskaitë and others, biblical stories
are transformed in their own way in the lives of laymen (the poem The YardKeeper Marija by Name). Existential searches are related to Thomas the Doubter
poking fingers in all possible holes, seeking to find the depth of the other wound
under the heart.
According to the author, whose list of creative self-realisations also contained
the photograph on the cover: X-ray is interesting in that it takes pictures of visible
things and shows what is invisible. Man is its target: to be more exact, his architectural carcass, with the most important oxygen supply (respiratory and blood
circulation) system. It is not for aesthetic reasons that the negative of a thorax is
admired. The picture is diagnostic: it shows the nidus of the disease. It is this
nidus that is a metaphor for an apocalyptic fire in man. Apocalypse strikes everyone in his own time. Smouldering life, a heavily breathing spirit, creates a suffocating atmosphere, which is strengthened by the image of shortness of breath and
an irregular heartbeat. An organism working under a heavy load and wearing itself
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out (it is in its finiteness that it differs from a mechanical system) cannot control a
mans whimsical intellectual activity, which is as though independent of the general whole.
It is very difficult to translate Aliðauskas work, not because of its Classical
versification, which is considerably less abundant in this book, but because of the
authors way of thinking, which results from his favourite play of homonyms, which
paradoxically brings different meanings closer. The book is permeated with autumnal omnipotence. An awareness is brought from the first selection (Prisukama
karalystë ends with getting drunk in autumn, and starts with an autumn cardiac
arrhythmia). The wind, which comes in through all unstopped holes, creates a
suggestion of the falling temperature of the body, and at the same time suggestions
of an anaemic, spiritless existence obsessed with disbelief. There is an opposition
between cold-blooded creatures breathing through gills (such as lizards and fish)
and birds, which have lungs, wings and warm blood (the poem Ornitofobija).
The last poem in Rentgeno nuotraukø albumas is not very hopeful. The same situation without an end, without the smallest direction in the dialogue, shows itself
through the historic layers: a human figure moaning in a grey den in the cold ruins
of houses, and the maxim from books on the wall God Exists. The impression of
a vicious circle is well known from Prisukama karalystë. A reliance on the reality
of the word is a choice that has almost no alternatives, because nothing more real
can be found in this illusion of reality, where everyone is ill with mortality.
Not all the poems in Rentgeno nuotraukø albumas are strong. It has some literariness. Perhaps the book has been put together too hastily (according to the author, two thirds of the works in the book were written during the last six months).
However, Aliðauskas best poems are worth the attention of an international audience. The authors value-based guidelines will also be evaluated by the reader who
yearns for allusions to looking for deity in poetry.
Arnas Aliðauskas
Rentgeno nuotraukø albumas
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An Album of X-Ray
Photographs
BY ARNAS ALIÐAUSKAS
MY D
O M I N I
2005
you dont even recall being asked?
its banal and it never happens otherwise
one speaks about love of god and brotherly love
of the slight differences between religions
imperatives
another one says: Im in pain
and that moment as if on purpose the raft cuts loose
yellowness of lamps shadows in the light of operating rooms
along the street along the whole street
where once in your hand
do you still remember?
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I still remember
the candy wrapper broke and bonbons rolled down
along the floor out the door along the pavement
and still keep rolling today
nobody makes them like they used to
they fall into wells
into the trash rusting keys sleepy leaves
how we lived then
it was me who lived
on the hill
as if a photo I remember it so clearly:
the lights are on they roll it hurts
I say
you remember
how it hurts
I know you know also it never happens otherwise:
one loves another one allows oneself to be loved
which one? which one more? which one even more? less, lower?
both of us feel pain we both descend:
the palms of a man descend
slide down along the loins of the cello of the she-wolf
feeding her young
the drop of slaver descends falls down
from the muzzle and the drop of milk from the nipple
that one the one with some blood
descending plunging
we descended we went down
we climbed the walls today we go down silently
encrusted with coronets of mould of dampness
down and deeper
towards grass towards water and deeper
but now carefully:
not to stir up sand from the bottom not to muddy the water
not to muddy the drowned and the dreams of drowsing minnows
we descend: two people spiders two hollow female spiders
after a barren night
in what was once the lair of the spider-web eating up each other
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we condescend to be loved
we descend
hands drop rise and
a palm strikes a childs cheek into another into the third eye
two
tears descend:
we
you remember
late spring in the grass eyes closed supine
falling blossoms of milkweed from your shoulders
spiraling corollas of milkweed fluff fall into your mouth descend again
stick and cling you choke and spit
you laugh and choke and spit
until you spit out everyone
it never happens otherwise
and that one which you didnt immediately spit out
it sprouted
down my
cheek sap of the arum lily
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A I N T S
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And then, two thousand years ago,
For the first time I spat out I dont believe.
And then, two thousand years ago,
He sighed, not for the first time
Another one.
Make sure, touch it
And he lifted up the bloodstained shirt.
And it started.
And it doesnt stop.
Till today I poke fingers into all possible holes
Into the wounds of invalids, eye-sockets of rotten skulls,
Caves of pelvic bones,
Shells of snails, molehills,
Little scooped out hollows for garlic, for gladioli,
The gaping holes of cows after birthing,
And likewise the yawning holes of women,
Keyholes, holes in shoes, in socks
Trails of worms in apples,
Clogged toilets, and unclogged,
Holes in my own teeth,
My grandpas lungs eroded by cancer,
And the stomach of another grandpa,
Caves of hermits,
Needles eyes, the eyes of coconuts,
Holes on walls for holy pictures,
Sleeves of a winter coat,
Foaming throats of dogs approaching in my dreams
So many years have passed I believe ages.
So many years have passed, but till today blood flows from every hole.
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G
O D
E
X I S T S

Leaky windows
Like leaky lungs: pores clean through
Forever
It is forever cold, even in summer
Forever poverty and fear,
That should the drunken commander return
To claim the debt
That should the money, noodles and potatoes be completely finished
That should everything be over
When is everything over?
I am afraid, I will not win through,
I am afraid together with that Orthodox monk,
Who waits in the freezing river
For the wolves besieging him to run away
Or for dawn to come
But here it dawns so heavily so eerily
Here is the land of the moon not the sun
I feel it, mostly under the full moon,
Which stabs clean through the frozen window,
Waking me up piercing my eyes
Side by side with the Wermacht soldier wakened by the searchlight
Nearsighted, with broken glasses, freezing,
His harmonica lost,
Wrapping his bare feet in the putrid remains of promises
Picked from the ruins,
Chattering with rotten teeth,
But yielding up with relief
Its over
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Nothing is over
I fall asleep and wake up in the same cold ruins
The piercing full moon glares I feel sick
Chiefly because it screams from the wall in black letters
Why this fashion to write on walls
With stanzas of poems, with maxims, with bookish wisdom
So when all this cold refuses to clear but it seems
Seeps deeper and deeper, already into the bones,
In the cold house with a wailing stick in the gray lair
Somebody is knocking at the door
Hey, anybody here?
Theres
Only a note on the wall
God is
Nothing else
Translated by Eugenijus Aliðanka
and Kerry Shawn Keys
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PHOTOGRAPH BY VLADAS BRAZIÛNAS
DALIA JAZUKEVIÈIÛTË
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books and authors
A Rebel
from Birth
BY GIEDRË KAZLAUSKAITË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Dalia Jazukevièiûtë, who was born in 1952, is a poet and prose writer. She studied
the Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University, worked in an archive
in Drogobich in Ukraine, and later worked for the newspaper Respublika and the
magazines Laiko balsas (The Voice of the Times) and Veidas (Face). She has published the books of poetry Atsisveikinimai (Farewell, 1989), Traukinys Nr. 183
(Train No 183, 1991) and Imperijos moteris (A Woman of the Empire, 2006), and
the novels Anarchistës iðpaþintis (Confessions of a Female Anarchist, 2007) and
Juodas kvadratas (The Black Square, 2007).
Her fiction writing is connected elastically to her essays. In 2003, she was awarded
the Cardinal Audrys Juozas Baèkys Congratulatory Note, and in 2004 she received
the Church Chronicle Fund Award for her articles which helped protect Christian
values and for her longstanding nonconformist journalistic work. She has been a
member of the Lithuanian Writers Union since 1999.
Jazukevièiûtës poetry is dominated by lyrical flight, emotional apprehension,
and explosive and spontaneous images of death, though it lacks well-considered
aesthetic criteria, developed scenes, artistic distance and sparing language. Her
essays examine poignant problems of existence, usually from the position of a
woman as a social role: she proclaims enthusiastically the emancipation of human
dignity, though she sometimes contradicts herself when speaking in controversial
tones.
Jazukevièiûtës essays have helped her gain a certain popularity among both
male and female readers.
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Her two novels, in a sense, led her into the world of prose; they were met with
curiosity by admirers, and received rather solid favourable reviews (although, in
an academic context, Jazukevièiûtë, like Jurga Ivanauskaitë at one time, is not
considered a high-brow writer: her name is associated more with popular literature). In the novels, which were written in a relatively short time, the reader sees
images that are too naked and drastic, journalistic modes, the inability to distinguish between reality and fiction, and a character infused by too much autobiography. However, this is Jazukevièiûtës established position: she believes in
herself, and declares that she is a rebel from birth, and unashamed of telling
the truth.
In one interview, she stated: You see, even now I do not renounce my maximal
adolescent statements. It is not important that they are maximal; instead it is important that they are pure. I can bravely reiterate: I write only for myself and for
God. And God is attentive. I know this without the tiniest doubt: I am severely
punished for simulation, for lying, and for bluffing. There are no excuses, though I
invent hundreds. They are not accepted there, on High. The same is true for poems.
Perhaps it is suitable for others. Perhaps they are allowed to do, to construe, to
fabricate, to figure out the average, the good, and the most intellectual poems. I am
not allowed to. I am required to write with myself. Or not to write anything at all. To
write in blood, as we used to say Though even that sounds naïve in these pragmatic times, but what can you do? I am not allowed to exit the stage, having gracefully acted, and then more gracefully flirted, though I would really like to. When
youve already lived half your life, you know very well what is allowed and what is
not. It isnt true that those bloody writers quickly exhaust themselves and die off
early. They do not die only if they do not go against God, but walk with God. I try to
walk with Him.
Dalia Jazukevièiûtë
Anarchistës iðpaþintis
Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2007, 328 p.
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an extract from the novel
Confessions of
a Female Anarchist
BY DALIA JAZUKEVIÈIÛTË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
One typically long and dreadful morning, while waiting for my beloved, I sighed
into the hallway mirror where I was brushing my hair:
How can I find out how much longer I have to live? Do I still have a lot of time?
Why do you need to know? an unexpected voice seemed to respond from the
shoe rack.
I wasnt bothered in the least. I was glad it answered. In those days everything,
including voices, real or somehow metaphysical, was not worth my attention.
Yet I wanted to be clear:
I dont know why. Maybe its just that I want to sow my wild oats. To write my
Bible. You know what I mean, dear God.
Dont use the name of your God in vain, the voice that was decidedly not Gods
snarled from out of the shoe rack and became silent.
And yet once upon a time I lived like everyone else. At least I believed and
hoped that I lived like everyone else. Pleasantly. As my mother had dreamed that I
would live. Like those who never even worry their heads about whether they are
alive or not. Mortal or immortal. I was like them too. At least almost. A live corpse.
I thought I was alive. Alive enough. After all Earth is not Heaven. And so on. You
know what Im talking about.
Ive done my time conscientiously at the Department of Statistics. From 8 to 5.
From Monday to Friday. I had a sort of boyfriend. A lover, if you will. His office was
on the second floor of the office; mine was on the third. Wed go everywhere together. To the movies, cafes, grocery shopping. On Saturdays wed dine, each time
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at a fashionable new restaurant. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays, hed lay
me down on the couch in my living room. In other words, hed lay me down underneath himself. Id tighten my eyes. Hed collapse on top of me panting into my face,
my mouth and eyes. Then all at once hed shrivel and fall next to me like a leech
glutted with blood. When he did that to me, I always felt like some kind of biological mass. A trough for the swine to fatten themselves on. But even today I console
myself with the thought that this must be borne by all women who dont want to be
alone.
Sometimes it was worse. My companion, or my lay, Im not sure what to call him,
would sometimes decide to experiment with our so-called sex and would force me
into all kinds of contortions on that ill-fated couch. One leg there, this arm over
here Then my poor soul, unable to bear its disgusting bodys acrobatics, would
sneak into the kitchen to have a smoke, and leave my body rolling around on the
couch. My soul would watch through the window at the wonderful snowflakes, or
the leaves circling in the wind, while it waited for that horrific devils ball to finally
end. That devils ball. All those orgasms. I wonder if anyone knows what orgasms
really are. Theyre so overrated, so supposedly important for everyone. No different
from a sneeze. Nothing more.
Sometimes I would actually feel sorry for my poor lover. My intuition would tell
me that sex experimenters would never uncover anything in their experiments.
Because there is nothing there to be found. Because only love leads to grace.
And thats how I lived for about five years. My job at the Department of Statistics
was a terrible bore. Computers, dust, the same gossip every day. And my boyfriend,
you could say, was there to make the everyday less banal. He would buy me some
article of clothing, or perfume. And lots of other completely unnecessary crap. Like
zombies, we still went to the movies, on Saturdays we went out to eat, and twice a
week he would lay me out down on that same sofa of mine. Monika, whose desk was
next to mine, and who was endlessly polishing her nails, always the same shade of
green, whispered to me that my lover was the dreamboat of all the women in the
Department. District manager, with a good salary, and oh, how cute, he takes good
care of himself, hes respectable.
Like your feelings have a future, Monika would say dreamily. With a view of
the sea you know that feelings can either have a future or not. Yours really do
have one.
And she would irritate me as she tried to convince me that all the unmarried
young women, and even the married ones, were jealous of me.
Married? Id say through clenched teeth. Like hell theyre married.
I guess I was the only one in the office who couldnt stand him. Especially on
those unfortunate Saturdays when hed bring wine, and those thick, nauseatingly
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pink candles, over to my house. I already knew what torture lay behind the wine
and those damn candles, celebrated in those unbearably trivial booklets about sex
in all its varieties. Beyond those varieties gaped a horrible existential abyss. Such
hopelessness
And so two years ago, when my respectable gentleman went overseas on business for a whole week, I set off for the movies alone. Free and with a light heart.
When the film ended, the snow was coming down so thick that I thought that it
wouldnt hurt to stop and get a hot drink. I trudged my way to the closest little café,
but it was packed. My eyes found a table for four with only a dark-haired fellow and
his girl. I excused myself, and when they did not object, I sat myself down next to
the fellow. Right next to him. His lady friend seemed to enjoy sitting across from
her conversation companion. Like an interrogator. When I was almost finished
with my coffee, I suddenly noticed the thigh of my partner on the overstuffed couch
pressing against mine. And burning. Burning through my thick jeans and through
all of my not-so-thin winter tights. I was overcome by such a warm and pleasant
wave that I was unable to pull away. Simply put, I had no more strength. Everything
else I remember as if in a dream. I think I saw him escort his lady interrogator
through the café; he opened the doors into the blizzard for her; I saw him return
and bow towards me, telling me something; and I replied. Later, we waded through
the snow together, we plowed through it up to our ears, until we finally stopped a
taxi. I was overwhelmed with some type of lunacy. Everything occurred at lightning
speed and without my assent. Back then I didnt know that the speed of events and
this craziness, this will-less surrender to some incomprehensible and humanly
uncontrollable power, are in fact essentially characteristics of love at first sight.
We hurried up the stairs, holding each others hands. My shaking hands couldnt
get the key into the lock.
Inside he wouldnt let me turn on the lights. He grabbed my arm as it stretched
towards the light switch and held it tightly.
I dreamed about you I want you, he burbled, as he tore off the buttons of my
coat.
I dont know you. I dont understand I murmured, as if we had to protect
ourselves so that nobody would hear us.
Theres nothing to understand.
He undressed me all at once before we left the corridor. Like a marionette, I
lifted my arms, shivering as his cold fingers touched my skin. He discarded his
jacket and sweater, leaving his clean white shirt, to glow in the dark.
He later pushed me quickly into the room, into which spilled the lights of the
city at night. With one arm he pressed me against him; with the other he opened
the balcony door.
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Dont be afraid. Theres nothing to be afraid of, he reassured me as he pushed
me out the door into the wind. I need snow, I need sky, and I want you to be there
And I was. And I suddenly saw myself. Like some sort of picture, which had lain
for hundreds of years in the basement and was suddenly pulled out into the light. I
became seen. Felt and feeling. I awoke in an instant, like a painting awakens and
glows in all its colors and depths in response to the gaze of the one looking at it.
I gave myself up not to his will. I gave myself up to myself. On the balcony
covered with snowdrifts, my bare feet sunk into the snow. I held on to his shirt
against the cold, sowing his buttons to the wind, his shirt as white as the snow,
while he lifted me up, holding me tightly with his warm hands. He grabbed me
around the waist and propped me up against the black concrete wall.
Look at the sky, he ordered. Open your eyes, Katerina.
I had already opened my eyes. I saw the insanely white, stinging and cutting
bees swarming at us, then their strange whirlpools in the air and always those eyes
of his. So close up that I am fated never to forget them.
I dont remember very well that first night of ours. Just separate fragments. He
said that I would never be cold again. That I would be able to tell everything. That
he would be my eyes and ears, and I would be his eyes and ears. Even now I can
still see his face by the light of the dawn, or suddenly darkened by passion. Then
once again so calm, lit up, so that it looks as if the entire room, the ceiling, the not
yet defined contours of the furniture, the spines of my books, are shining white and
gentle. Nothing more beautiful than that dawn have I ever seen. Perhaps it is not
fated to be seen again? Nothing more beautiful than that face, which, inspired,
suddenly turns as if into God And only sometimes, when he would move too far
away from me, I would suddenly come back to my senses and shudder from horror
that he would up and away from me. And he would take off and never return again
But he would return. Again, and again. My own body, which had always been so
exhausting and unnecessary, suddenly became important to me. And beautiful,
and so gentle. It was through him, the magical conductor, that the white light of
love would emanate, the kind of love I had only read about in the Vedas. My hands
became especially sensitive and fragile; I seemed to be examining them, as if from
a great distance, perhaps from another planet. I saw how they, oh so carefully, like
a mysterious painters brush, with the very tips of their fingers, caressed his eyelids and traced the lines of his face again and again.
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Would anybody believe that I had achieved such identity with another person
and with myself for one long month? An endless month of love
I dont know what to call love. Paranoia, illness, dependence? But when he would
leave and close the door behind him, life would be extinguished in me, just as the
lights dim when you turn them off in a room. He would leave and take the light with
him. He was the only one who could unite my soul with my body. To unite them.
The one who did not cut me up into small pieces for his own use. And our lovemaking It was completely incomprehensible. I think that nobody would be able to
comprehend it. Its a mystery. As impossible as death.
I cant stand the word depression and I cant stand the word sex. They both
sound equally pointless and disgusting. Disgusting because of that nauseating pointlessness which leads me into hopelessness. Sexual pleasure adds not a bit of meaning into life, it certainly cannot rescue you from loneliness. Use those words if they
mean something to you. Just dont include me.
Love is not lovemaking. And not anothers consumption. Love is not bondage.
Love is a kind of happy joke when its not clear who is laughing the loudest.
Love is when you suddenly feel next to you another persons breathing pain of
life, which is no less than your own. This is what those acts of love actually are. The
depths of existence. When you yearn to die along with your beloved only so that, as
you die, you could shelter him with your body and your limitless sympathy from the
legions of the damned that attack his poor soul every minute of his life. Those
disgusting legions come ever closer, getting ready to destroy the essence of your
most beloved, your most intimate person, and to shatter him into a million atoms.
Love is the yearning to rescue your beloved from his personal apocalypse. To rescue him from the claws of that monster and to shield his soul with yourself as if you
were a glass globe, that most unique flower in the world, with your own heart, skin,
lips, arms and legs. To sacrifice yourself in his place.
What is left when nothing is left? Maybe someone knows. I dont.
Katerina N. survived. As do other people who did not manage to die from love.
God did not agree to take her, and thats all there is to it. As if his purpose is to
keep the fortunate out of Heaven?
And later Later, of course, I returned to my desk at the Department of Statistics.
As if it were nothing. During two whole years my position did not change. And I did
not change. Superficially, I looked completely normal and alive. Evenings I would
walk home along the river, so that my journey would be longer and farther, so that
I would tire myself out. Along the way I would buy myself a bag of chips, a small
bottle of brandy, and cigarettes. I would climb the stairs, always reading the same
graffiti painted on the dirty walls. At first the gigantic spray-painted letters AMFA,
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then the smaller black The goat lives here. And then the completely faded but
still legible Red Army go home. Sometimes I had to step over a man who sleeps
stretched out on all the stairs with an open bottle in his hand and a little dog,
patiently perched at his feet. That man too had no idea how to die at the right time.
Or perhaps he had decided to die slowly.
Bang. I would slam shut the heavy armored doors and would feel hidden. From
everything. Immediately I would turn on music. In order. Beethoven would wake
me up, then he would put me to sleep, and then later he would try to even things
out, but he would never be successful. After that the same waltz by Shostakovich.
When I listened to Shostakovich I would see a woman in a long black coat running after a train. A blizzard. She runs, out of breath, the train is speeding away,
the woman falls on the tracks and wails with her whole body quaking. I would also
listen to Ravels Bolero while heating up my meal; I would fix my bed and pour a
third of the bottle of brandy into my teacup. I would carry everything to my bed in
a row: ashtray, cigarettes, the remaining brandy, my books and medicine. Every
day Monika would accuse me of no longer being interested in the world as I used
to be. It seems that she missed my unexpected phone calls, when I would call her
after, lets say, some Radio Svoboda news hour, and would scream as if I had
gotten scalded with boiling water, that the Americans, those damn bastards, had
invaded Iraq. She would cackle: Get your crappy things together and run off to
save your Iraqis. She would laugh hysterically. God has sent a friend. Another
would suggest that you check out the bars, but this one is concerned with the
misfortunes of this world. Or she gets drunk without any purpose and cries over
some crazy Che Guevara. Or she digs up some other archeological finds in the
trash heaps of history.
So when I remembered Monika, I would conscientiously do my duty and would
concern myself a bit with the world. That dustheap of history. I would turn on the
television news. I would find out right away how many and which people were
murdered, exploded, or drowned. I could not understand for the life of me if that
was a lot or a few. But I would still cringe in horror nonetheless. Thats why I would
turn everything off and go back to my little bed.
Those evenings I would usually read the Russians, especially Ivan Bunin. He is
the only one who knows how to write purely about desire and eroticism. None of
that empty materialist crassness that our literature is so fond of. None of that existentialist disgust. He did not avoid depicting openly erotic scenes, unlike almost
all of his contemporaries and all my beloved Russian classics, who, it seems, did
not know how to speak about such a mysterious phenomenon, which, barely mentioned, immediately slips away, evaporates, leaving nothing. Just some kind of
quivering flesh But Bunin found that language. Efficient, but capable of disB
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rupting the very core of intimacy. He wrote about the body using the language of
the soul. Attentively and carefully, but miraculously and precisely. He was the
only one who managed to describe the act in which two peoples bodies come
together as both a calming and a painful experience. Not only as bliss, but also as
a terrifying power, which a persons memory is incapable of fixating and keeping.
Those burns of pleasure and pain Because a persons mind and memory are
almost too frail, imperfect, to manage to conceive of that life-giving element, in
which the spark of the barbaric and the divine merge. And more. Bunin knew
perfectly how to write about it so that even a successful act of love with a stranger,
a complete coincidence, a one-night stand, can be transformed into a destructive
force. One that will degrade your brains and heart like rust. The poisonous flame of
sin flashes up painfully. It is dangerous in its especially horrible yearning for the
impossible. It wildly claws up and destroys fragile reality, and for a long time,
sometimes for years, and sometimes for an entire life, doesnt allow itself to be
cleansed, not with water, not with tears, not with alcohol. Not with anything. Because the one who attempts to enter anothers body without having understood
their soul will be severely punished. Here is for another love story the topic that
has been most denigrated by the greatest variety of hack writers. There is not and
never can be any kind of art of love if you do not love.
When I finished my evening portion of brandy, I would drink four colored pills,
antidepressants, tranquilizers, and some other kind of psychical stabilizers. Although each of these had long ago lost its ability to put me to sleep, their interaction
still worked. This combination was considered very thoroughly and adapted by my
especially attentive doctor. Maybe he would prefer me to call him my analyst? But
I find calling him a doctor much more appealing. Doctor of the soul? No. Thats too
grand. And anyway, to tell you the truth, he doesnt heal anything anyway. Can he
or anyone else heal my soul? Only death will satisfy it. My doctor only forces me to
care for my body []
My doctor works with drunks, drug addicts, psychopaths and neurotics like me.
Or, in general, people who sometimes have the desire to poke around their psyches. Not alone, but as a twosome. To poke around your psyche with your doctor
is somewhat safer, and, of course, more enjoyable. The analyst is not your garden
variety listener. He is also your enemy. Thats why you can assault him in all
kinds of ways, as I do in order to justify my faults and furiously defend my wickedness. Sometimes I get so worked up that I am able to conquer my so-called
enemy. Then the doctor closes tightly his narrow intelligent eyes, almost completely shutting them. Then he smiles at me bitterly. He knows that the ability to
justify oneself in ones own eyes is an effective method based on which it becomes
easier to live. Because you cannot go on if you have judged and damned yourself.
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Having vindicated yourself, at the very least you can weep and then have a good
laugh at yourself. In the happy laugh of the vindicated. And from the cell window
of your solitude you can open up your window once again and meekly look around
at your surroundings. You see all your deeds, the ravaged world, wrecked cities,
dried rivers. And you try once again. From the beginning. To build your cities, to
plant flowers and trees in the town squares, to refill your dried rivers, like crystal
water Until the next battle. So that once again you will be sentenced, destroyed,
and again willing yourself for the same type of vindication. After the war more
than just ruins remains. After the battle you remain. If you didnt you wouldnt
even see the ruins. The wounded cant dance around, but they can at least crawl
or slither along. And later, when the wounds heal, you get up and go. And you go
like some sort of Lazarus, whom Christ ordered to Get up and walk.
All my friends are unhappy that I visit an analyst. That doctor of mine. They
think that this is pure sloppiness and a waste of money. After all, I can chat with
them. They dont understand what I do there, or what I am paying for. I pay because
I never learned how to pray adequately. Everything that I confess to my doctor is
my prayer, my tears, and my conflicts. There is no person in the world who would
have enough patience to drink all this up once a week. There isnt. There cant be.
On the other hand, I am not sadistic enough to lay all this out on my poor daughters
head. Or my mothers. Why would I torture them so? I feel sorry for them. And the
doctor? I feel sorry for him too. But less. Because he chose this. This is his service.
So at midnight I would take the colored pill mix, I would fall asleep. And dream
beautiful dreams.
I live well. I know that what should happen to me has already happened. I also
know that all that is temporary, and one mustnt wage war, but wait patiently. I no
longer fear death at all because I know that my soul is immortal and my body has
become somewhat extraneous. But to avoid fighting This I damn well never
learned. And not only that I somehow believe that God loves the fighters most of
all. I believe that He, lets say, still loves Stenka Razin. Because of the power of
his suffering When the czars soldiers finally nabbed Stenka and his brother
Frolka, and, having brought them to Moscow, stuffed them into wooden cages,
Frolka, tied to the torture wheel, allowed himself to fall. He moaned and prayed,
Quiet, dog! How could God not love such a person who remains loyal even while
his arms and legs are being chopped by Christians. The ideals of fighting. They
do not give in. They cannot be diluted. On the torture wheel Stenkas proud soul
rose up as courageously as did Jesus Christs during his torture. His body shook
with beastly agonies, but his soul remained. Undamaged. But people who never
fight, who are accepting of everything, are inside secretly unable to bear that acceptance, without even realizing it themselves, they are unraveling inside bit by
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bit until they turn into living corpses. They walk their whole little lives worried
over God knows what trivialities, their heads hung low, submissive and unhappy
What can be sadder?
And if God did not exist, then perhaps we could in fact all belong to one society,
government, or nature. Only when there is a God is the world not entirely foreign, wrote Nikolai Berdyaev. Only one God can offer freedom to man. Take it and
use it. Only if you arent afraid But people await it from some kind of idiotic,
degenerate government, expect it from their stingy boss, who only dreams of how to
curb and exploit that freedom as imaginatively as possible. And those complete
weaklings believe that they will get that freedom from their husband or wife
Unfortunately, all that one person can offer to another person is slavery
The piece of God within a person is his only measure of his freedom. And value.
Translated by Jûra Aviþienis
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PHOTOGRAPH BY VLADAS BRAZIÛNAS
ROMAS DAUGIRDAS
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books and authors
Restrained Free Fall
BY VAIVA KUODYTË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Laisvas kritimas (Free Fall) is Romas Daugirdas seventh book. I cannot say that
this one is the same as all the others: if until now free-form poetry has dominated
his publications, then the genre of this book is somewhat unclear. The author himself calls the works in Laisvas kritimas poems; though, in truth, they are more like
miniatures, written without punctuation in stream-of-consciousness style, or they
are short philosophical essays. On the whole, Daugirdas collection is a bundle of
contradictions, thanks to which a unique poetic, cultural, philosophical and even
linguistic context is formed.
The title of the book inspires a sense of lightness, floating, freedom and expanse,
though the texts are written in unkempt language, which grates sharply with the
use of many foreign words (instruction, construction, detectors, architecture, deserters, evolution, prosthesis, affiliate, asphalt, transformation, isolation etc). These words get on the nerves, annoy, and provoke a negative
response. On the other hand, perhaps this is the authors intention, to force the
reader to react, to delve, to read below the surface, to look for meanings in foreign
words, as in historical strata.
As I have already mentioned, the style of the text is stream-of-consciousness.
The streams primary components are connected by causal ties and flow out of each
other. This connection is very similar to the hermeneutic circle, when there is no
exit from the layers of meaning, sinking deeper and deeper, never reaching the end,
because each new metaphor inspires a new cause. When reading the first selection,
the circle draws the reader in; however, when the circles principle begins a boring
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repetition, the language goes beyond, and eventually spits the reader out of the
circle without ever working out the metaphors, and without grasping the reality of
the fiction. This expulsion occurs because of the aforementioned sticky, convoluted, and heavy-handed language.
The primary device in the poems is the growth, development and transformation of metaphors. In Laisvas kritimas, a cry rustles the cells white sails, women
who have never given birth adopt an anchor instead of the moon, the lords hammer comes down on the forehead, a talisman chirps under ones neck, a stone
falls like a head on the worn-down horns of the cow, the corners of fate grow
rounded, a friend sleeps with his immortal soul spread out, god leaves the
heart with most difficulty always stumbling over veins and nerves, etc.
Daugirdas original metaphor is a secret, a mystical miracle, which thrives and
develops. For example, in the poem Kelionë (Journey) there is a single step
from madness to euphoria. Ordinary things become extraordinary: a glance at an
empty wall becomes a harbour tamed with crumbs. This is a solitude where one
feels good. And yet, the metaphor is only strong when independent of the
hermeneutic circle, for in the circle it loses its taste and expanse, and gets lost in
the sea of metaphysics and symbolism. Besides, poetry in which everything is conveyed in metaphors assumes an academic style (foreign word combinations), starts
to irritate, throws the reader off balance, and interferes with the catharsis of the
pleasure of reading.
It is obvious that the peddler of the poems is a man (but I wouldnt dare identify him with the author, because I cannot decide how much of what is presented
in the collection is lived reality, and how much fiction infuses the poetic reality).
The poems are masculine, coarse and cutting, from them arise storms of nihilism
and cynicism: the piano, tortured with the fork and laid on to its shoulder-blades
/ the tuxedo of an anthem, effigies of single women are born, the only way to
differ from others is the colour of your coffin, a forgotten biscuit on the table in
the morgue etc.
On one hand, the peddler speaks slowly, is not prone to sudden emotional
outbursts, and is slow to lose his temper. He therefore seems monotonous and sluggish. Because the mood of the poems does not change throughout the entire collection, you can only read a few poems at a time. On the other hand, the style of
writing forces you to listen attentively, to return continually to the beginning, and
to be a conscious consumer of the text.
Laisvas kritimas is contradictory and complex. It requires more than one interpretation, more than one reading, and more than a casual perusal. Why? The author provides several answers in the last philosophical essay, entitled Aklavietës
palaima (The Blessing of an Impasse):
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What should we do with illusions? They pull upwards like didactic teachers. They blind and deafen
by shutting the eyes and ears with romantic ravings. Lets toss them a bone, lets act out on the stage
(in a circle) a godless, eternal world. Lets turn all the apriori truths into empty, cold aesthetic waterfalls, which crash not only on the seashore, but also near the wasteland.
Finally, the truth of the unkempt language becomes clear: a new world is
created by illusions, which, written into delirium, create a new circle of meaning.
There is no possibility to escape, because new strata of meaning are found in each
circle. Precisely this sort of application of the hermeneutic circle to poetry (more
so in characteristic textual analysis) is new and unexpected in contemporary Lithuanian literature.
Romas Daugirdas
Laisvas kritimas
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Free Fall
BY ROMAS DAUGIRDAS
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Inventory
1. a cake unremembered on the table in the morgue
2. an empty flask
3. a patriots angry oh
4. a handbook for the self-taught mandolin player
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
(the reader continues if he wants to and is not lazy)
explanation: hitting the corresponding inventory points head-on
yields these predictable emotions:
1 and 2 a delicate desire to be born anew
3 and 4 lyric exaltation
1 and 4 normative joy
2 and 3 the verge of despair
P.S. after experiencing the inventory you may harbour other emotions
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R
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When we roll like bottles along the bars flat floor careful not to hit
on something that would break us
when the whirling ventilator in the ceiling or in our heads stirs the darkness
from twilight like titles being printed
and whistles one phrase we wont meet again which always hits right
between the eyes and triggers a backward glance
and perhaps mistakenly wakes the mistake pressed against the chest that
dashes like a rabbit as it disappears in the grass
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Perhaps those are clouds jumping through Rubicons rope
perhaps the cover-girls are hung out to dry for their audacity between
a square and a circle
with the winds help, they model innocence using ruins and air and find
the sun like a raw egg in a beer mug and run out of their bodies
with bats
draped in myths and earrings alone
and they leave yellowed skin like light poles bandaged with advertisements
where kleptomaniacs constellated in a race between melancholy
and the mind
collect youth
and tame the suffocating star
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WAY S
T A T I O N
You feel almost eternal because you almost are not
trees wither around you like facts on forms swamps approach
from each direction like the enemys voiceless army and gone is the one who could
outplay a defeat with baroque like dry land on a raft
a year goes by or maybe ten the air is rare and words slowly
fill its place
a spider weaves a web of words and grants freedom to your mind in formless
blood clots
and someone attends to dusting them like a rug with the final for whom and why
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I N D O W
I stand at the open window with the wing of flight at my feet
I dont remember the beginning, but I cant decide whether to give all of myself
away or in parts starting at the legs or from the head and so on in this style
(thoughts elegiacally flow to my navel)
in the loft mice nibble on a forgotten phrase Ill die before
I get old
nobody nobody comes to tousle my hair the apple doesnt fall
in the orchard silence stopped blossoming only the day before yesterday
sad contemplation becomes that which no longer knows where to exit
there behind the window is the tame darkness that the rag wielding girls
dust off they hold their breath shut their eyes and catharsis comes as if slowly
leaning over the bridge and kissing their own invisible shadows
no one bangs the doors because there are none the walls press upward like
a tent gothic-like and thoughts pull upward to the sky and a strange emptiness
encourages me to try it out
(dont stand near an open window)
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AN A
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O F
A
S
C E N E
Autumn. Almost static. In the middle of a field stands (lays, kneels) a pregnant
woman. Its not enough. Next to her so many apple trees.
On them so many apples.
And one prepares to fall to the ground.
And still not enough. Still, there is no harm in understanding
that emotion like
a smuggler crawls the horizon. Between understanding and the woman
a connection appears, which unleashes mysterious strength, and it is used
as fuel for the eternal engine.
Perhaps thats enough. The woman gives birth. The midwife
in the belated
introduction morality is suffocated
Translated by Ada Valaitis
and Kenneth Smallwood
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PHOTOGRAPH BY ELEKTRA CHRISANTU
DALIA STAPONKUTË
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books and authors
To Become a Metaphor
BY GIEDRA RADVILAVIÈIÛTË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Lietumi prieð saulæ (With Rain against the Sun) is the first collection of essays by
Dalia Staponkutë, who has been living in Cyprus for the last 20 years. Lithuanian
readers will recognise her from her work in Ðiaurës Atënai, Bernardinai and other
publications. The author chose this selection from essays written between 2002
and 2006.
Staponkutë was born in 1964 in Ðiauliai. She studied philosophy at Leningrad
(now St Petersburg) University, and then taught at Ðiauliai University. In 1989,
she moved to Cyprus, where she worked as a translator and taught a sociology
course. She currently teaches literary theory at Cyprus University. She also participates in international academic projects. Staponkutë is a translator of Greek, English, Russian and Lithuanian. In the last ten years she has translated into Lithuanian
The Last Temptation, The Ascetic and The Poor of God by Niko Kazantzakis, and
Mauthausen cantanta by Jakovos Kambanelis. She has also edited and translated a
collection of poetry entitled Sala: 10 Kipro poetø (Island: Ten Cypriot Poets). She
has translated a collection of poetry by Sigitas Parulskis into Greek.
According to Parulskis, While living abroad, she has gained very interesting
and unusual experience, in an anthropological, philosophical and metaphysical
sense. This experience sets her work apart. In addition, her essays deal with the
delicate issues of fatherland, home, identity and language She is perhaps the
first to be so actually and philosophically involved in discussing recent Lithuanian
émigrés and the problems they face. I am interested in this voice. I think it is very
important in terms of the Lithuanian self-awareness.
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If Cyprus were not a part of Staponkutës life, then this book would not exist.
The author says: It is not enough simply to live, without thinking about how you
are living in a new situation. The question how, when it arises in a foreign
place, creates a tension and reveals the history of adaptation. It is familiar to anyone who has ever tried, or was forced to try, to make something of themselves out
of nothing.
We will not find ways of life and the body in this book. Cyprus, an island of
knowledge and desire, is separated from unknown and enviable analytic thought. It
is the search in everyday life not for apparent details, which any sensitive person or
even a curious tourist is able to notice, but for the essence.
I will not get into arguments about the kind of prose that this book is. Instead, I
will cite a few of her thoughts about time: I choose a poor way out, the sword above
my head on a quickly delayed time line or On an island, time is slow and painful
like a string piercing live meat.
Kavafy doubts: I will probably remain here (though I dont really know if I will
remain), because I feel as though I am in my homeland. Staponkutës unknowing
is felt tragically throughout the entire book, but for readers, clearly, the final decision is the least important one. The author says: If you want to live forever, become a metaphor. Staponkutë becomes eternal in this book through metaphor.
She speaks about Cyprus being within her, as a fragile and very strong woman who
wakes up in sunny Nicosia, although her dreams are imbued with Lithuanian snow
and rain.
Dalia Staponkutë
Lietumi prieð saulæ
Vilnius: Apostrofa, 2007, 200 p.
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essays
With Rain
against the Sun
BY DALIA STAPONKUTË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
The Silence of the Mothers
Whether I like it or not, in this our present age of intercontinental peregrination, I, a migrant, a multilingual mother, and a person who wanders across cultural spaces, strain my travel-worn noggin as I brood on the issue of uni-lingual
parents and their multi-lingual, mixed offspring. I could even say it is a sort
of drama, one in which my personal experiences have ended up playing a not insignificant role. At the same time, I am taken aback at the mountains of variegated feminist writings in which so much space and mental energy have been
devoted to the topic of women and men; to their never-ending argument; to the
misery of sexual solitude; to sexual discrimination; to peoples sexual anxieties;
to the voice of the feminist ego; meanwhile, there is only an eerie void when it
comes to taking a proper inventory of the dialogue between a mother and her
child, when a serious and analytical one is needed. In the literary-linguistic
plane, there is barely a whiff of such dialogue: it seems that its not a simple
matter, or perhaps it is an unrewarding task to move it from the cozy web of
everyday sensuality and place it under the light of linguistic discourse, thus turning it into a weightless abstraction. Mothers do not elaborate much when it comes
to their children (not even the mothers gifted with voice and imagination), or
else they do so only on the level of the commonplace, not in any fundamental
manner. (And even when they speak about them on that humdrum plane, they
are usually mistaken.) Mothers have children; often, paradoxically, without grasp53
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ing that they have them in totality. At this point, I am itching to insert a mention of Henri Bergsons idea of vital impetus, or élan vital, about life as a coherent system: one cannot conceive of a hand as anything other than a body part,
for example. And, one probably cannot conceive of a child as anything other than
a part of a mothers body. If we pursue this line of logic and take it a bit further: one probably cannot imagine a child without its mothers native language.
This element seems to be so crucial that without it a pall of doubt is cast over
the integrity of the system, its ties, its relatedness, its essence, and, finally, its
traditions and values. Perhaps it might be too crude to touch upon the notion of
death here as if the bond between mother and child were severed altogether
without the native language but in reality many losses are indeed suffered in
such situations.
I encounter precisely this situation on a daily basis, and I see how it affects
the linguistic relationship between mothers and their children. I have in mind
actual instances ones such as my own which have seen Lithuanian women
and men, single and married, migrating perennially or because they are on some
sort of mission, having landed in their chosen, or promised, no-mans-lands,
drawn there by the wiles of sex tourism, or a better class of work, or the lure of
the Cinderella myth, and so forth. For the majority of these people, the sudden
change in their relationship to their mother tongue and their assimilation into a
different linguistic environment seem to proceed quite painlessly, leaving only a
faint trace, like a mild rash that comes from rubbing skin against stubble. In this
process, time and place become not foes but dependable fellow conspirators. But
the new linguistic space and the time lived inside it present a real threat to the
dialogue between mother and child to its mystery, content, and intimacy
along with a challenge that is not easy to face sustainably. The migrant mother
often ends up sacrificing the child to the foreign place, which gradually replaces
the mother and, like an authoritative guardian of language and culture as well
as a strict and systematic teacher, welcomes its new pupil. Which is when it
dawns on you: mother, place, and language are organically intertwined elements,
parts of the chain of life that, once broken, can never be forged anew. A migrant
mothers every step is marked by sacrifice and loss. Moreover, by allowing a
foreign language to exist between her and her child, she is doomed to a stony
silence.
I have never witnessed a gloomier scene: a mother sitting silently amid her
children who are twittering away in a foreign language; or, a mother whose vocabulary in her adopted tongue consists of a sum-total of five words, muttering
something along the lines of: you-me-come-give-hand. Mummy, are you by
any chance a mummy? mocks the snotty child of a Lithuanian mother and a
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Greek father, while she, during a lively Greek conversation, keeps strangely mum.
Who is this mummy? How does she feel? Can she play with words? What can
she a mute offer other than infinite and unyielding boredom? The mother is
passive, alone, and self-contained, but the environment, with its sounds and colours, is a fast-paced, magical, Harry Potter-like kaleidoscope. Children born outside the space of their mothers native language or their mothers homeland
disavow their mothers as soon as they learn to walk. Children, even little pipsqueaks, manage to jump across the chasm separating their mothers from their
locale with such alacrity that the mother from a strange land ends up stranded
on the other side before she can even manage a gasp. If she wants to keep pace
with her offspring in a foreign linguistic environment, she has no choice but to
become a child herself spry, receptive, and tomboyish. Surrounded by the echoes
of Syrtaki rhythms, all hopes of suckling the child on its mother tongue come to
nothing. The Great Mother archetype, that is to say, the mothers thirst to dominate her child linguistically any cost, is common only to romantics and anarchists.
But even such a trait would not be enough to save these mothers from the verdict of silence, because it is the place-cannibal that, in the end, decides the
childs language.
Such mothers these silenced ones are multiplying, and, along with their
ever-spreading silence, we hear more and more aggressive chatter about
globalisation, which brings the world to heel; one might say it is a sort of revenge
on the muted mothers, or perhaps it is the outcome of their silence. It is believed
that globalisation helps mankind in the fostering of humanist feelings and in the
promotion of tolerance of the other: your pain is my pain. Alphonso Lingis, whom
I like to refer to as a philosopher of anthropology, offers enlightening reflections
on the matter. His works, out of patriotic sentiment it would seem, are being translated by Lithuanians, who are genetically close to him; Greek professors, on the
other hand, upon hearing his name, flash a polite smile of ignorance. It would
seem as though even the most intriguing texts dealing with the phenomena wrought
by globalisation are not read globally. They only pique ones curiosity in that space
where one has at least the tiniest reference point. Or, more precisely, only that
which is local is global. Which is why to ignore the phenomenon of the maternal
language would probably mean doing injury to globalisation or, at least, to its bright
side (we know that all global processes have positive and negative outcomes). I
see that the only possible way out of this confusion lies not in a negation of language, but in shuttle translation. Translation is something thats not limited to linguistic technique; it absorbs the entire body, and even more than that it requires
a historical approach to the body. Lingis calls this historiographic thinking: conceiving oneself as a product of history, translating from outside to inside, and from
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inside to outside. If not, then perhaps the rising tide of migration, the exchange
of women as commodities, the epidemic concept of globalisation would not have
any meaning other than the return to a lifestyle that resembles the primordial coexistence of tribes, whereby inert values are overshadowed by natural forces or
capital, and the mothers tongue is cast aside as a trinket, replaced by more practical things, by intimidation, and by mental stagnation. Globalisation, as an inexhaustible stream of both life and hazards, is rather more reminiscent of a force of
nature, which is why simply being born or giving birth within such a force means
almost nothing other than pain. But to be able see oneself as an integral part, let
us say, of a system of symbols, lets call it place, and to create your own space
within it, to infuse it with life and defend it with the zeal of a romantic anarchist,
is perhaps the only way of reducing this pain of motherhood and of avoiding silence, so that one might obtain a voice. Saddest of all is that mothers have no
time for this undertaking, and that the biological clock ticks louder and more annoyingly than any inner callings, since a womans body is cyclical always waxing and waning and therefore easily worn out, and its language is stronger than
language itself.
Continuously plying the same route, Lithuania-Greece-Cyprus, I meet dozens,
no, hundreds of Lithuanian girls who have become the wives of foreign men and
the mothers of their children, and who have never really spoken any other language than their mother tongue. The biological clock hurries them along: sadly,
the time devoted to children and husbands is irretrievable! And how do you talk
to each other? I ask one long-legged beauty queen at the airport. And she, flashing a pearly white smile, answers: Who needs language? I have fingers, sometimes I have to sketch things if theyve gotten convoluted But anyway, listen,
on the home front, you know silence is golden, and in bed, well, we make enough
sounds. Or, one Greek acquaintance related the impressive story of his trip to
the Land of the Penguins (which is how Lithuania seemed to him from the
airplane) to propose to his chosen one, armed with only a single declarative sentence in English: I love you. The woman of his dreams knew no more English
than he did. After experiencing cultural and intestinal shock from Lithuanian hospitality, his feet clad in his southerners shoes frozen, hiccupping from the
robotic I-love-yous proffered in any and all situations, he nonetheless hauled his
woman away with him. His scheme fell into place: the couple married, settled in
the land of the Greeks, had kids, and are still living together in their mystical
linguistic circumstances. Their children dont speak Lithuanian; the mother speaks
no Greek, though shes picked up a smattering of English I know hundreds of
stories like theirs. Yes, feelings can mean more than words, more than the person
herself knows about them, but I am left wondering how one expresses them withB
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out language? Language likes to torment but not suffer, and, over the course of
time, it gets its own back it out-waits and takes its revenge on the Little Mermaid for her beautiful legs, turning her inner world to permafrost. Mothers who
are unable to talk to their children in their native language feel a piercing nostalgia, one for which there is no analgesic, just as there is no possible return of the
good ship Motherlandia.
What is most interesting is that in those mixed couples, language not infrequently ends up receding from erotic play (if it didnt recede, there would be no
such couples, because the partners involved would all die not of pleasure but
of laughter). An intimate word uttered in an unfamiliar language is lifeless, resting on the lovers bed like a fallen petal; the sweetness of familiar words and
meanings does not seep into the bodys erogenous zones, and wordless petting is
transformed into nothing more than a demonic raving of the flesh. At first this
can seem fascinating, because different races of people are attracted to each
other just as strongly as they repulse. Nonetheless, without the plenitude of language, the union soon begins to become deformed; if the couples caresses arent
accompanied by rich erotic phrases, their love becomes as deserted and harsh
as an arid land. And yet, how outdated my musings on this subject seem when
one considers that such couples and such relationships are multiplying. Their
offspring, though born out of a wordless convergence, swim like fish in the waters of multilingualism, choosing their language not according to mother-knowsbest, but according to their being in the here-and-now. And it is precisely in this
manner that the concept of the cosmopolitan reaches its fulfilment an inhabitant of the world for whom the mother tongue is not a prima donna. This also
creates new ramifications for contemporary family bonds: for children, the maternal or paternal feelings found in their immediate environment can and, not infrequently, are of greater importance than the caring feelings of their biological
parents.
As I observe the agonia (the battle to the death) of my native language in my
childrens lips, I behold the image of my own vanishing. And I must have faith in
theories of translation and seek refuge in the contemplation of global realities.
Practice alone does not suffice, because it is depressing. It is not enough to live
without thinking about how to live in the new situation. Thought without practice
is doomed, like unfinished hardwood that ends up serving as mere fuel. Theories,
like religions, like promises of love, deform the image of reality to a certain extent, though they can help both to explain and to get through lifes inevitable, unmerciful, and cruel losses and betrayals. Whats interesting is that even in our
disavowal (of our native language, I mean), we yearn for soothing and familiar
phrases, whispering them in prayer.
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Fresco of bull-leaping from Knossos
The Hearts Dilemma
Inside every heartfelt No! there lies hidden a deep nostalgia for Yes! I
want to reach my hearts opposite shore, but I cant. I long for my heart to be
whole, but I feel I am too insignificant for such perfection. Ive relinquished half
my heart my island to strangers from another land, and to their exotic deities. I had no strength to resist because I didnt know what I was. And I still
dont. When time and history demand that I give in with the wholeness of my
heart in self-sacrifice, in forgiveness, in love and in faith like some dupe in
a fable, I make up pathetic excuses: Humblest apologies but I was born in the
wrong century. Is knowledge of ones weaknesses a form of wisdom? Is knowledge of ones limitations a weakness? Does wisdom, when it cleaves a heart,
demarcate that boundary? Time always works for the benefit of wisdom, quenching the heart. Wisdom nurtured by the heart enriches historical memory, while
memory, not infrequently, feeds vengeance. Freedom is also a form of revenge
against rules: the minoritys revenge on the majority; the peoples on politics; an
individuals on a community
Lithuania and the island-state of Cyprus are Europes eastern coattails. I
should be overjoyed: both my homelands the actual one and the one Ive
adopted distant and unalike, will be able to join in dancing the Syrtaki (which
in Greek means the pulling dance). I wouldnt be overjoyed unless I could see
personal possibilities and benefits arising from this union: the cultural and psychological traumas of mixed couples and their offspring will be tempered; comB
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munication will become easier; and there will be one more reason to go on living. Joy is contagious, but it is also a deeply personal emotion. Ive chosen to
be buoyed up by the feeling of new possibilities on the horizon, ones that arent
necessarily mine. This helps me feel rejuvenated, and it is a sign of vitality. Ive
become convinced that anger, resignation, feelings of stagnation, and oppressive
thoughts about the narrowing of possibilities bear witness, in one way or another,
to a serious crisis of our age to its decline and fall. This, surprisingly, pertains
not only to an individual body, but also to social-political entities of bodies
countries, nations, communities. Socio-political experience is gained and felt
most strongly via the skin, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu remarked
accurately.
Beneath the sunny, somnolent Mediterranean sky, similar ramblings and banalities taxed my brain, as lazy as a Cypriots. The Greek and Turkish Cypriot referendum was approaching it was supposed to unite this island, divided three decades
ago by military force. To unite, or not; to embark on a journey to Europe with the
islands north lagging behind, or not; or, in short, to vote for a change of life, or not.
For this island, whose population is no greater than that of Vilnius and its environs,
for each islander, this political choice has become a dilemma of the heart. Perhaps
there isnt anything impersonal anywhere. Even the personal lack of desire of Citizen X to participate in the islands politics influences that politics. And Ive noticed another consistent pattern: the more wounds are preserved by memory, the
more unpleasant sediment settles in human relationships, the harder the vote for a
change of life becomes. We often speak of our wounds aloud, but we rarely take
responsibility for their consequences. Wounds, like joy, are a type of personal
property, something thats protected by the Law of Self-Esteem and Dignity. In
the frying pan that is Cyprus, Greeks and Turks have more than once painfully
scorched each others bottoms there have been many scars, and collective historical memory is as stubborn as an old goat. The referendums initiated by youthful
Europe are unable to take root in the hard, rocky surfaces of old conflicts, like the
tender imported seedlings the islanders try, in vain, to plant. There are deep and
ancient riverbeds etched onto the body of this island they are dry now, but one
can still clearly see their contours. Incidentally, in the context of the European
Union, Cyprus will have one distinctive feature it will be the EU state with the
most ancient history. Its hard to change the elderly because the only reality that
appeals to them is a magical one.
In one of the quarters of old Lefkosia, near the demarcation line historically
called The Green Line separating the Greek south from the Turkish north, I
came across a few odd characters who seemed to be sketched by Márques pen. I
knew of them only by hearsay. Its somehow impossible to know more about other
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peoples lives at any rate. These odd ducks with their sedentary lifestyles represent the real history of the community, and their unguessable ages are a parody of
time itself. One of these men was the dinnerware merchant Sotiris, who had inherited his trade from his father, and his father from his forebears. We are not speaking here of a dynasty of shopkeepers, nor of the uniformed representatives of firms
that hawk goods on the streets these days. Sotiris job is to knock at your door and
inveigle his way in by making old-fashioned reverences and to offer you cheap
china embellished with floral patterns while describing its miraculous properties.
He wouldnt be able to work in any other occupation, nor would he wish to. When
I open the door Sotiris greets me, and, after a short prelude, with a magicians
aplomb, he lets fly a few china plates, one after another. The plates bounce off the
wall gently, boomeranging, and, like trained doves, landing softly on his hands.
You see they are unbreakable! I laugh and buy them. I always buy them, knowing full well that they will break into smithereens in my hands before I even manage to carry them into the kitchen. It is said that breaking plates brings happiness;
so, according to the number of plates Ive broken during my life, I should be the
happiest woman in the world. I buy the china because Sotiris masterful performance and his fibbing entertain me. I disagree with the notion that theatre is not the
main thing in life; I think there is nothing other than theatre. If people were capable of grasping this, they would play their roles with greater love and conviction,
thus making each other much happier.
I cast my ballot, and, with equal anxiety, await the results from both sides. The
northern part of Cyprus a homeless little Attila in boxer shorts, a distant cousin
of Russias Kaliningrad region, a child cast aside after a messy divorce has no
voice in the world to this very day. The flourishing south of Cyprus, like Germany
in defeat, lost much but didnt surrender. Thats probably how things break down
in life the more one loses, the greater ones lust for life. Of course, I feel sorry
for the Turkish Cypriots, the twin brothers of the islands Greeks, though my pity
in this case does not approach lovingness. It brings to my mind Lithuanians mistrust of Russia, which is as strong as that of Cyprus Greeks for their neighbor
Turkey.
At any rate, this is not a referendum about joining the EU, but about
neighborhood. In the end, a referendum is a peaceful expression of the peoples
will; it is a verbal statement, not a war. Though it does happen that wars begin
with words, not the other way around. A single utterance can, in a mere instant,
change the history of a country, a community, even a couple. And a word is also a
form of action, one which sometimes bears no similarity to physical action. I vote
No under the sway of historical memory; I cast my ballot into the box and I
freeze when I think: I am already a veteran islander. I see the islands Greeks out
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and about. They are unusually sad, even tearful. The necessity of this historic
No does not give rise to outpourings of joy. There is no more piercing warning
sign in politics than the silent collective tears of small communities. I vote in a
mood that is borderline Mayakovskian, along with the vanishing community and
my vanishing self. I smile: after all, the Greek Ne, translated into Lithuanian, means
Yes.
Translated by Darius James Ross
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the view from here
Literary Quality in
Documentary Literature
BY ELENA BALIUTYTË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Documentary writing, such as autobiography, diaries, memoirs, letters and notes,
is usually defined by its opposition to literature that is based on artistic imagining.
Thus, on the basis of this dividing line, autobiographical genres (as all of the above
could be broadly defined) belong to non-fiction. In the Soviet period the division
between fiction and non-fiction also used to imply artistic or non-artistic. At
present, this division is no longer valid. According to Yuri Lotman, any text capable of realising an aesthetic function in a certain cultural environment should be
considered fiction. Therefore, its documentary genre is no longer an obstacle to
recognising the ability of a text to achieve an aesthetic function. Earlier, only exceptional cases of documentary were considered artistic, and the most outstanding
example of such a text is Dievø miðkas (The Forest of the Gods), a memoir about the
Stutthof concentration camp by Balys Sruoga.
Now that documentary is a legitimate part of literature, there remains a key
question: is it capable of achieving an aesthetic function? Since the genre delegates the problem to the text, we should discuss particular works. In this article
we will also consider more general issues of the literary context, the specifics of
documentary genres, strategies of literary criticism, and other issues related to this
new status of documentary genre. That the autobiographical genres that used to be
on the fringes of literature are now moving towards the centre is first of all determined by the new intellectual aesthetic context. Works of autobiography have never
lacked readers attention: both before and now they have probably been read even
more than fiction. Readers are not interested in racking their brains as to whether
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the memoirs or autobiography they are reading are considered genuine literature
by literary scholars. That the genre has become legitimate and fully-fledged was
probably caused by the increased importance of the institution of the reader, which
at the moment is overtaking other participants in the chain of literary communication, that is, the author and the text. The reader is most of all interested in reality
and forms of reality, and contemporary culture is taking advantage of this: it imitates reality in the shape of various reality shows on television, in crime reporting
in the press, and in the autobiographical quality of literature. We could, of course,
claim that all literature is autobiographical in essence, and we would be right, but
in this case we are talking of a very particular phenomenon in contemporary literature, autobiographical writing that is called novels and is written mostly, but not
only, by women. In this case, a problem arises due to the lack of artistry. Recalling,
for instance, the novel Anarchistës iðpaþintis (Confessions of a Female Anarchist)
by Dalia Jazukevièiûtë, and several other works that critics call journalistic novels, we could say that the autobiographical aspect here is linked to the authors
and publishers promotional purposes, and their wish to attract the reader by verisimilitude and sensation. The autobiographical aspect focused on in interviews,
presentations and the blurbs of the books, the emphasised reality of the events
described, all point to this. The interesting thing is that a genuine autobiographical
contract is not struck with the reader: it is indicated as a novel, because this is the
most marketable. Well-meant criticism sometimes tries to justify the low standard
of the work by the inadequacy of the genre: if they were called autobiographical
essays, the demands on their artistry would be lower, and everything would be all
right. This is not true, because artistry is not related to the genre. The text, no
matter what you call it, will remain the same, linear, hysterically rhetorical, with
inserts of the stylistics of cruel romance.
There is a paradox: the more reality recedes, at least in the minds of theoreticians, the more the need for it grows. We aspire towards a brush with reality in
the same way as people of earlier times strived to touch transcendence, the new
historians claim. What before used to remain unnoticed has become interesting
now: details of daily life, tastes and fashions These paraliterary tendencies cannot bypass literature as such: the forms of the literary aspect in it are obviously
changing. Probably the most distinct example is the growing popularity of essayistic
writing and the high ratings of documentary genres. What is interesting is that
poetry, or at least poetry books, is also witnessing an increase in autobiographical signs: photographs, auto-commentaries, communication signs-paratexts, and
diary-like authenticity.
But let us return to genuine autobiography, which literary scholars define as a
genre in which the author, narrator and personage are the same person. Fictional
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literature is possible without the autobiographical aspect (for example, in science
fiction), while autobiographical literature without fiction is not. In addition, researchers observe that the space for fiction in documentary literature has a tendency to grow. And this is related to the authors will. Autobiography, diaries, and
memoirs are independent genres with a long-standing tradition. Documentary literature is influenced by changes in the artistic form of fiction; therefore, speaking
of, let us say, the total authenticity of a diary, or assuming that a genuine diary
is one written for oneself and not for publication, is meaningless. Writing for
oneself is doubled writing, for oneself as for somebody else. In his Dienoraðtis
(Diary), Vytautas Kubilius writes: It looks as if I am not dedicating it to anybody,
and nobody will read it, and still I am eaten by the feeling that here I am dragging
myself as if to an exhibition, and therefore I am embellishing and polishing all the
corners. The accursed instinct of the man of letters: he sells everything, his egoism, his psychology, his love and grief; he gives everything away for that hapless
honour of the writing person, and he has to wring himself to the last drop.
Thus, without the conventions of the genre, there is also a stylistic plane that is
very obvious in autobiography by writers and literary people. The reader who believes in the absolute documentarism of the genre regards the embellished style
with suspicion: it reduces the credibility of the narrative, it is too beautiful to be
true. This position can be aptly illustrated by Eduardas Mieþelaitis Nereikalingas
þmogus. Fragmentai (The Unnecessary Man. Fragments), in which the eye is caught
by an elaborate and ornate, Baroque and poetic style of narration. The authors
intention to impart a generalising nature to his life, to raise it to a general level
through poetic analogies with Classical myths, is understandable. It is a style recognisable from his poetry. But it is interesting that when he starts writing about his
wartime experiences, about the flight from Lithuania, about how he came within a
hairs breadth of being shot by friendly fire on the third day of the war in Minsk,
about the sights in drunken Moscow, about what he went through on the front line,
the style is no longer conspicuous, and the literary quality is replaced by facts and
details. Mieþelaitis diary, extracts of which were published posthumously in the
weekly Ðiaurës Atënai, thus describes some autobiographical highlights: Actually
it is a confession to myself. I am not writing this book for anybody else. I am not even
writing it for the reader whom I cannot see now and whom I cannot imagine in the
future. Several paragraphs further on, he asserts the contrary: These are, of course,
only separate, more distinct, aspects of my life. They could be expanded upon, but
the book would end up too thick. People do not read thick books nowadays.
Jonas Mekas, who is probably the most diary-like Lithuanian author, in one of
his interviews with the weekly Literatûra ir menas, advised that his diaries mogus
be vietos (Person without a Place) should be read as a novel, because forty years
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later it could only be seen as such. They contain lots of fiction and not too much
truth. There are no genuine diaries. All diaries are novels. Witold Gombrowicz
conveyed the conditionality of the diary form in probably the clearest way: I should
treat this diary as a means to take a certain stand in regard to you: to aim for your
understanding of me, in the way that (oh well, Ill use a dangerous word) my talent
provides me with (Dienoraðtis 19531956, I). According to Manfredas Þvirgþdas,
Alfonsas Nyka-Niliûnas, in his Dienoraðèio fragmentai (Extracts from a Diary),
takes a different position in respect to the reader. Here the reader is simply ignored: Throughout the entire diary, like a refrain, there resounds the motif of the
protection of his own territory, of the forbidden room. Do not attempt to understand it, because what you are reading was written only for myself.
Autobiographical genres used to be important for literary scholars for their informative and documentary value, as supplementary material in research into the
genuine part of a writers work, or in recreating the general context of an epoch.
Autobiographical genres have not lost this significant aspect, but the sociological
approach is no longer sufficient. After the publication of the diaries of Alfonsas
Nyka-Niliûnas, Jonas Mekas, Vytautas Kubilius, Sigitas Geda, Marcelijus Martinaitis
and others, after the torrent of books of memoirs, literary scholars (Rimantas Glinskis
in the monograph XX amþiaus lietuviø dienoraðèiai, Gitana Vanagaitë in her publications on the autobiography genre, and the reviewers of autobiographical works)
more and more often speak of the value of such works as such, that is, their aesthetic value; but all this remains on the level of rhetoric.
So how and where should we look for artistry in documentary genres? On the one
hand, it depends on a particular work; on the other, on the method of reading the
work. To phenomenologists, the body of artistry is style: the more original the style,
the more artistic the work. The quality of the style points to the value of the narrative, to the peculiar priority of the narrative before the facts. We could recall
Jurgis Savickis diary Þemë dega (The Earth is Burning), and the already mentioned Dievø miðkas. In autobiographical texts, a phenomenologist will look for
moments of the manifestation of the writer, for moments of experience. Viktorija
Daujotytë says that the quality of Dalia Grinkevièiûtës autobiographical writing
about her exile is most of all related to the intents and states of writing, to the
phenomenally carnal participation of the writing person in the structures of the
narrative. According to this, of the two versions of Grinkevièiûtës memoirs of
exile (the first was written around 1949, the second around 1970), the first is more
artistic and emotionally persuasive, although the second mentions more facts, names
and fates. The documentary quality is not directly related to the quality of the
writing. Literary phenomenology must be an especially handy method for autobiographical genres for which the principle of experience is essential.
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Textual criticism will delve into the manner of narration of autobiographical
works, and record the moments of the here and now, the expression of subjectivity,
and the relations between the author, narrator and personage. At first sight it looks
as if the relation between these three figures is entirely clear. Although the definition of the genre starts from the coincidence of all three, it is yet another simulacrum:
autobiographical writing also lacks an author, there are only narrators of different
levels. This is why the authors contract, the definition of the genre by the author,
is necessary, because the text per se can in no way justify such an assumption. If
the author does not state that his or her text is autobiographical, the reader does not
have the grounds to consider it as such. (As we know, Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas
refused to strike the autobiographical contract regarding his novel Altoriø ðeðëly
[In the Shadow of the Altars], and Marius Katiliðkis also regarding his work Iðëjusiems
negráþti [Those who Leave dont Come back].) On the plane of the text, the authornarrator-personage relationship is basically the same in fiction and non-fiction.
While reading Giedra Radvilavièiûtës essay Nekrologas (Obituary), I initially
wondered who was writing the obituary of whom: the author of the narrator or the
other way round. I recorded changes in the text, comparing them with recurring
paragraphs, until I finally realised that the author is not in the text at all. The
narrator of one degree is writing an obituary of the narrator of another degree, and
this can continue endlessly. According to Gombrowicz, when the author, even in a
diary, opens the door to the reader to the backstage of his personality, he forces
himself to retreat even deeper and further.
A contemporary autobiographical narrative is very like an essay, and sometimes
it is hard to determine whether a work is a diary or an essay. Obvious examples of
this are Sigitas Gedas Þydintys lubinai piliakalniø fone. Septyniø vasarø
dienoraðèiai (19921998) (Blossoming Lupins against the background of the
Mounds. Diaries of Seven Summers), and Adolëlio kalendoriai (dienoraðèiai,
gyvavaizdþiai, uþraðai, tyrinëjimai) (Adolëlis Calendars [Diaries, Images, Notes,
Explorations]). In the preface to the second book, the author writes: Now I can say
that this was only from part of the diaries. The times demanded the genre. I do not
think I could have discovered it. It was simply a search for the genre. At this
particular time, essay writing became the genre of the times, the most subjective
and liberal manner of writing, that did not restrict itself to strict genre obligations.
Essay writing is also the least literary: it is seemingly the closest to reality.
Meanwhile, authentic reality is one of the constant passions in Gedas work. In
these diary-like essays, the author declares his intention to record what he sees,
what he remembers while seeing it, what he remembers while remembering, and so
on. Somebody asked me: what genre is it? No genre! Let genres get lost. Bowels,
the poet would say. While walking past the derelict estate at Buivydiðkës, I saw
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people butchering a slaughtered pig. So much for memories! The yellow leaves of a
maple, also pink and red, and the pig on its back, like in Ðarûnas Saukas paintings. No art, just life. And the beast up there.
These notes are not egocentric: they are unbiased, observant, accidental. In them,
small people and nature rule. Time imparts a rhythm to the authors will, so that it
could save as much of unique reality as possible that only emerges in his conscience. There are moments, but you have to catch them, like a lizard by its tail.
Sometimes the author succeeds, and sometimes he does not. In any case, having
read Lupins and Adolëlis Calendars, and following the sequels of the diaries
in Ðiaurës Atënai, I feel as though I am playing a lottery: the possibility to see the
caught moment or the truth lurking amidst the trivia keeps me as a reader of these
notes.
Here is an impression from reading Kubilius diary: records from 1945 and 1946,
and almost every day, are documented. The contents of the notes, school love and
studies, are problems usual for that age (even at that time). But the language of the
diaries of those times resembles the language of Marius Ivaðkevièius play
Madagaskaras. In that, the style of speech of Lithuania between the two wars is
artificial, while in Kubilius diaries it is authentic. The rigid language of the new
urban lexicon and the etiquette of clumsy syntactical structures looks comic alongside the facts of rural life.
Virginijus Gasiliûnas, a big fan of documentary genres, predicts that only Dienoraðèiai will survive out of Kubilius creative legacy. Other generations will see. The
French literary scholar Philippe Lejeune made a similar prediction when he said of
Sartres work that only his autobiographical Les Mots would survive.
What is the future of autobiographical genres from the point of view of literary
history? In spite of their aesthetic value, which will be of great concern to
phenomenologists and a few aesthetes, autobiography will remain in high demand
in literary, artistic and cultural milieus, it will be handy for psychoanalysis and all
sorts of ideological criticism, post-colonialism, feminism, Marxism, and, of course,
for normal readers. As for fiction, if it is eager to exist, it will probably have to
prove its documentary value. The works of the classics will start from autobiographies, diaries and letters, from Metrikos (Metrics), making use here of the title of
the sonnets by Aidas Marèënas, which could also be called an autobiographical
narrative poem.
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Arûnas Baltënas. The Rasø Cemetery in Vilnius. 1987
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essay
Obituary
BY GIEDRA RADVILAVIÈIÛTË
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Ill begin with some information intended for pretty much everyone. Please turn off
your mobile phones for about twenty minutes. Its a mournful evening in the
Interpolas kebab restaurant in the Old Town. If any foreigners are looking for it,
theyll find it by the smell.
My dear Ladies and Gentlemen on this busy Saturday we could certainly pay
our last respects to the dearly departed in the usual way: with a few well-rehearsed
phrases that do not break the rules of this sad genre or of our tired traditions. We
would face less gossip and insinuation if we simply said: She will always remain
in the hearts of those who knew her. From now on we will be united by the gentle
sadness of remembering. May her journey be an easy one for her Or something
like that. But clichés and cemented truths have always irritated me as well as her.
And the saying It is better to speak well about the deceased than to say nothing at
all we find absolutely infuriating. I feel I have the right to remember my best
friend more or less as she was. Why? Because of all of us present here, and perhaps
in all of Lithuania, I knew her best: all her biographical details, buried in that
small village, all her unfulfilled plans for the future. Although I am painfully shy,
and my friend was a live wire, we had some things in common. And some people
even confused our faces, tastes, and opinions when we would appear in public
together at book signings, book fairs or literary events.
True, she was ageing, getting fat, going grey, and letting herself go, a bit sooner
than I. She once said that it wasnt the years, but her experience and understanding that were making her grow old. I too have noticed that it is always the most
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infantile, temperamental and optimistic people who remain charming and attractive the longest. If my friend ever lost her earrings, she never bothered to replace
them. I, on the other hand, would go out and buy newer and fancier ones the very
next day, usually Swarowski. If she ever found that her lipstick was down to the
end, shed be sad that it was almost all used up. Whenever I see the same end, I
always think it is just the beginning. My friend would contemplate death much
more often than I, and she read the obituaries just as much. Until now I have kept
my girlish figure. She had dentures for her top teeth put in five years ago. I did
only this year. She had her last man very long ago (what I have in mind is a lover).
My friend is here tonight among those gathered to pay their last respects Thank
you, Artûras.
As Ive already said, neither of us ever liked how at final farewells, or in election campaigns, people are suddenly transformed into moral, beautiful (especially
in hurriedly blown-up funeral home photographs), hospitable beings, almost without sin, neither licentious nor alcoholic, but if they did drink irresponsibly, then it
was for a good reason. A year ago in a small town cemetery, as I was standing by
the graveside and listening to the eulogies, I became frightened to think that we
were probably burying a still-breathing eternally young, eighty-four-year-old, energetic and hardworking, forever forging ahead with his creative plans former
elementary school teacher. Perhaps the saying he lives forever in our hearts
means precisely that (especially in this horrifying sense). Perhaps we sugarcoat
the medically unsanctioned act intentionally with this euphemism? I am certain
that, in our damn public hurrying, we do end up burying some without sufficient
examination. Usually, its those taking an afternoon nap, who seem to have intentionally showered and combed their hair, and covered themselves up with a newspaper, as in the old days they did with a prayer book. Do you remember? It was
probably Tsvetaeva who asked them not to rush to bury her, to put a mirror to her
lips and check a few times whether the silver surface wasnt dampened by the fog
of life too subtle to be seen with the naked eye. And Gogol turned in his grave. Or
was it Gogol who was checked and Tsvetaeva who turned? I dont remember now.
Theyre all the same to me.
Our dearly departed, if she really is departed (please allow me as her closest
friend to think of her as missing in action) was neither energetic, nor beautiful,
nor good, nor especially hardworking. Besides that, she drank enthusiastically.
Every day. Worst of all, it was without any justifiable reason. And dont ask why. I
look at you all in the eye now and I see that nonetheless most of you would be happy
to hear the answer to this not-too-difficult question. If she were to appear here in
the flesh, she would respond as any alcoholic would in the sincere voice of Jerzy
Pilch. I drink because I have a weak character. I drink because something in my
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head is turned upside down. I drink because I am too anemic, and I want to be
rejuvenated. I drink because I am nervous and I want to calm my nerves. I drink
because I am sad and I want to clear my soul. I drink because I am happily in love.
I drink because I am hopelessly looking for love. I drink because I am almost too
normal and a little bit of insanity wouldnt hurt.
Its true that during her last few weeks, the departed drank only swimming pool
water and nettle tea. The latter by the liter. Her cousin the cybernetic suggested
she use those harsh but nutritious weeds to clean out her joints. Diuretics Dear
God, for what? Her job was exclusively intellectual. She did not exercise. She
walked like a duck. She rode her bike, like Molloy She went to her mothers
house again and again. Its true that sometimes seated in front of the computer
screen she would stiffen up. Then her daughter would have to loosen her up by
force for about a half an hour, until she was able to stand up. Almost every two
months that same cousin would come to her house dressed in his black mourning
suit to repair her computers interface with her modem. He wore this suit because
he was ready every time to bury the computer. Yet when he arrived he would be
warm and gentle. He had genetically inherited his gentle demeanor from the May
winds. May was the month he was born. Its odd that he is not here with us today.
On his way out, he would leave pasted on the monitor a photograph of a nettle field
along the Vilnele River; in the dearly departeds thoughts, he would leave a longing for healthy consciousness. While having a smoke in the kitchen, he would ask
her to make some nettle tea, and once, having worked seven hours, perhaps a bit
frustrated, he said that my friends relationship with technology is the same as
Goethes wifes relationship with spiritual values: She was respectfully conscious
of the huge importance of art to humankind.
It was probably because of the nettle tea that my friend began having trouble
getting to the bathroom in time. This handicap was another thing that she and I had
in common. Handicaps, not love, are what tie people most intimately. A friend once
told me the story of when she figured out that she really loved her husband. She
had been brought to the third-floor recovery room after a difficult operation, bundled up in a winter coat because they had brought her to the hospital in January but
released her in February, and, confused about time and place, she was being escorted by her neighbor. On the second-floor landing she felt sick. She leaned against
the wall, and instinctively put her lips to her sleeve. That was when she saw that
her husband was holding out under her lips his large construction workers palms,
with white plaster crusted into his wrinkles, in case she had to throw up on the
stairs One time last year when I was crossing Þirmûnai Bridge I too did not
make it to the bathroom in time. You know what I did? I stopped in the café by St
Peter and Pauls Church and splashed my jeans until they were soaked, so that
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they would be dark blue evenly throughout, because I still had to stop by the Ministry of Culture. Fortunately it was raining.
We really were identical, like two halves of a coffee bean. Thats why once, a
long time ago, she entrusted me and no one else to burn the twenty-five letters
that her husband had sent to her, and the seventeen that she had never sent out to
various men. Dust falls to the ground, smoke rises to the heavens. Of course I
never destroyed them, because I thought that it would be worth publishing one or
two of the letters, because the most popular literature these days is the kind that
falls between fact and fiction. The other reason I made this decision was that her
husband, a man who had stood patiently by her for a long time, became famous.
Its telling that unremarkable fates met the other seventeen, to whom the letters
were never mailed. I took some interest in them: most of them were her contemporaries, harmful leaders, midway through their fifties, having achieved their prostatus
quo, who then married women ten or twenty years younger. My friend reacted to
this phenomenon amiablyshe judged any adoption positively. Divorces in her
life were also telling. She got along (yet did not get along) with her childrens
father as a suddenly awakened nervousness and an ever vigilant mind. Like quicksilver and a thermometer. Like vers libre and a quatrain poem. (Like truth and
fiction.)
Although we were born in the same town, we met and became friends only during our first year at university. I compare my student days to an intoxicating journey on a cruise shipfew passengers on that ship are still alive today. During my
first years in Vilnius, usually at night, images and events from my hometown would
enter my consciousness: the cracking wooden banister of my stairway, the overwhelming smell of malt along the riverside, the infestation of green worms. That
disgustingly memorable summer they hung in the stairwells and balconies, crawled
along the sidewalks, benches, and windowsills, and along book spines, creeping
among carpets of Asian dahlias as if in an odalisque by Ingres. I remember a lonely
little goat nibbling grass in the field. From a distance she looked like a rock. Within
five years the field had been developed with identical houses. Each of those houses
became a home to people who dressed the same, ate the same food, and who unlocked their French locks into the same rooms. A scratch on the underside of the
hand from tuberculosis turned into a dangerous mark the color of a sunset, but
their lungs remained healthy. The theater, to which it was impossible to get tickets. My friend liked to repeat the saying of the cruel but beloved director: the
most valuable treasure is the one thats impossible to lose. In my memory would
arise the statues of the bank which was built in the city center. Titans held up the
arches of the counters so that they would not crash onto the rubles being counted
and recounted below; these rubles financed the comets the Russians launched
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into the cosmos. The cosmos was like the dome in the glass ceiling of the bank.
The track of the school playing field. Shiny, as if it were paved not with cement
but with the sweat of teenagers running a hundred meters in nine seconds. A particular event: a silent, barely noticeable woman, who worked in the sugar factory,
gave birth to a child during her lunch break, and shoved it into the toilet. I cant
remember if they put her in jail, or if she committed herself by virtue of insanity.
But for the next few weeks, every time I went to the bathroom, I would examine
carefully the water in the toilet bowl below, imagining that a slippery baby, like a
kulak, could swim anywhere through the labyrinths of plumbing, even up to our
house.
On our block lived a lady who dressed in black. She kept a bowl of milk for the
cats that would come begging to her doorstep; however, the entire neighborhood
knew that every night when she went to bed, she would step onto a rug made of
kitten fur. We would imagine that she had skinned them in the bath, just as most
normal people sort through huge quantities of wild mushrooms in the fall. On dark
evenings, when November turns unnoticeably into December, and leaves turn into
roughly frozen earth, we would take off at full speed with our sleds right past the
black hag, wed shove her shoulder, gasping out of fear: Murderer! Murderer!
and she wouldnt even turn around. Half blind, shed focus her milky eyes on the
emptiness, and wade through the soft snow as if through a short fur. Recounting
this now, I feel guilty. What if that rug at the foot of her bed was nothing but an
unprovable legend? And she herselfwhat if she was an unhappy, lonely woman,
incapable of making friends with her neighbors, whose parents and relatives had
all died, for example, in Siberia? This Veronika (the name is associated with unhappy love stories not only in literature but also in real life) was abandoned by her
lover, and jumped off a three-storey rooftop, breaking her back and legs. Later she
married another man and gave birth to identical twins who resembled her former
lover, although seven years had passed since theyd broken up. Back then I didnt
know that with men, the ones with whom you feel a fated (one should say clinically,
because this is almost a poisoning) attraction to both body and soul, the relationship can develop in one of two ways: either a mind-destroying but short-lived love
with dependence that is almost identical to hatred, or a long running into the distance, sticking to ones thoughts about one another as if in sweet syrup, ultimately
turning into nothing.
The town movie theater. The films Mackennas Gold, Phantom, The Spinster. Those days seem so long ago, like an Annie Girardot heroines shyness on
a rocky shore. In the morning at the beach, the girl would change out of her underwear into a swimsuit under a special long skirt, the gathered waist of which
would pull up to her neck. A reporter once asked the actress how she imagines
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misfortune. Annie answered: As a beautiful, young woman dressed in black, crying on a park bench on a sunny day. I wonder now, how my friend imagined
happiness. We can no longer ask her But she probably would have answered
very simply. Recounting your own life experiences and those of others, Swimming in a lake until it freezes over, Listening to my daughters impressions about
school: Whoever is not participating in physical fitness todaymeditate, lets
stretch out our arms and hold our legs, Watching how the cat sticks out his
backside as he stretches in the morning.
Some people thought her recently acquired affection for that household pet was
funny; there are those who would argue that this behavior testified to a slight expression of dementia. First of all, that cat was not a household, but a greenhouse,
creature. Its gooseberry-green eyes, its tail squeezed between its hind legs, like a
dogs, its fur electrified into sparks during thunderstorms. My friend became quite
offended when one day in a café a woman sitting at another table saw the animal
in her bag and asked: Excuse me, is that a dog or a cat? My friend responded
to the question with a question: Excuse me, are you a man or a woman? Nonetheless, to call that creature an animal is hard for me as well. My friend would
visit her mothers grave together with the cat. (This seemed pointless to methe
cat did not know her mother.) Together theyd go shopping in the second-hand
clothing stores. The cat would grab onto some drapes or warm childrens clothing
with its claws, and these my friend would buy for him immediately. At the outdoor market, he would effortlessly help my friend pick out the best minced meat.
My friend believed that he didnt disappear in order to join the all-too-promiscuous alley cats, but that he walked through the mirror. Like Alice.
My friend had brought the mirror from her hometown, from her deceased mothers recently sold house, and wanted to hang it in the bathroom. That was the only
place in the apartment where you could have seen yourself full height. I saw it
leaning against the kitchen wall; I fit into it with my head chopped off. My friend
said that she could see history in the mirror. In other words, the past (in all its
height). The simple past in that one-dimensional space fitted like a large ship
built of matches by prisoners fits into a narrow-necked bottle, although from a
distance it may appear impossible. During certain hours at dusk, it would decide
to reflect not the hall, with its untidy shoes, sack of potatoes, the half-open bathroom door, and jackets and coats hung on hooks, but rather a piece cut out of
memory: also a hall, but in another city, fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years ago.
In the old apartment, the mirror was hung facing the way in, reflecting a variety
of people entering and exitingnow into my friends kitchen. Usually her mother
would appear. She would step through the door into the mirror, young, disheveled,
improperly licking an ice cream that she had purchased on the street, or dressed
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in a flannel robe, on crutches. It was a month ago that I sensed in that kitchen
the strange aroma of turpentine and eucalyptus. My friend thought that it must
have been the smell of her mothers arthritis ointment. Other relatives were also
reflected in the mirror. Her uncle would place a stool and, taking out a rusty grater,
he would grate farmers soap into a bowl in order to launder his newborn daughters diapers; he would play the saxophone or a game of chess on a special table;
sometimes with tears in his eyes he would call checkmate to himself. Although a
lost game would not mean the end of the uncles life, he would immediately remind us that he wanted to be cremated. Dont pour the ashes into an urn. I cant
stand them. Sprinkle me into a paper bag, blow up the bag, and burst it on Sunday at the outdoor market, as children do. My friends two-year-old daughter
would also appear in the mirror. Smiling at the kitchen furniture, the barefoot girl
would come so close that it looked as if she was about to step into the other side;
but having come close in her imagination, if she wasnt sick she would pick her
nose and wipe the snot on the mirror. Then, swearing, my friend would clean the
mirror from this side with a little rag. Grandmother would rewind two balls of wool
into one, a fatter thread would be made out of two. Shed wind it on paper spools
made of the wrinkled-up letters of her dead grandfather to another woman. The
neighbor, who had once had a large two-acre allotment, would appear. She would
bring us carrots, cabbage, beetroot, and dill. I began to doubt my friends sanity
when she would take those vegetables (from the mirror). On her kitchen floor there
was always parsley, mint, dill, and scraps of thread, but I think that these were
brought home from the Halë marketplace stuck to her shoes. The neighbor whod
brought vegetables had a dog. She would take him to the garden as well. The retriever didnt bite, but he barked at every cyclist passing by, every piece of newspaper floating on the wind, every starling pecking the ripe cherries. Some breeds
of dog are big, but timid and unthreatening. My friends cat attacked the neighbors
dog in the mirror, and chased him away, thus violating the permissible boundary
of healthy fantasy. The mirror broke into five pieces, which slowly, almost as if
they were weightless, dispersed and settled in the kitchens darkness, like metal
garden puddles reflecting the herringbone sky.
My friend said that after this event, suddenly her memory became weak. I noticed that without her saying anything. Before, she could remember perfectly the
Arabic names of those who had earned the title terrorist in their countrys history; these she began to confuse. She said that the Ministry of Education had finally chosen an adviser, who was well acquainted with the literature of the period
between the world wars and the last century, namely Alfonsas Nyka-Niliûnas. Invited to speak about literature at the university, she lamented that the female students, compared to those of our own Mackennas Gold days, are hardened in
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their ways, they detest postmodernism, and are not open to discussion. They were
surprised at my friends attempt to analyze Þemaitës The Daughter-in-Law in a
very contemporary and thorough way, as thoroughly as the length of a seminar
allows. What do you think Katres final words Please forgive me mean? she
asked the class. Without a doubt, they could not identify with the final submissive
gesture of a backwoods character who is oppressed by the patriarchy and unable to
come to terms with this. Probably Old Vingis had got Katre pregnant; but instead of
proudly assuming this good fortune, the source of which should not matter to a
woman, she crumbles, as she crumbles, degraded, to Jonas and Mrs Vingis. During
her last weeks, my friend became entirely disillusioned with literature. She would
hum the song I am so alone, so hellishly alone claiming that the forgotten,
slightly snobbish twentieth-century Russian writer had a perfect sense of language
and solved ingenious linguistic puzzles: Ya nikak ne ponimal, kak sovetski veter
ochiutilsia v veterinare. Shto delayet slovo tomat v avtomate. I kak prevratit zubr v
arbuza. He had intentionally avoided novelistic narrative, playing a sophisticated
game of cat and mouse to taunt readers who understand plot as the suspenseful
sequence of events.
Whenits no longer relevant howmy friends cat disappeared, I worried that
the kids in her yard, deprived of their daily pleasure of patting the head with the
strangely folded ears as it peeked out of her bag, might decide to play some nasty
prank on my friend. They might decide to kick a ball through her only remaining
cracked window. They might cover the window with the newspaper Lietuvos Rytas
from the outside at night. They might fill a sack of cheburekai with shit and leave it
on her doormat. In winter they might race past her on sleds up the hill. Towards the
Gates of Dawn They might grab onto her shoulder shouting Murderer, murderer! and what could she do? To wade through the soft snow as if through shorthaired fur with dry eyes fixed on railroad tracks. Whats most painful about this is
that the disappearance of her pet undoubtedly contributed to the fact that my friend
never finished her second book or one of her essays. True, I cant prove that she
was always pursuing creative plans; every living person leaves something unfinished when they depart. Sometimes those things are great, sometimes banal, and
sometimes even obscene. My mothers coworkers sixty-year-old husband, for example, died with his mistress. To be more precise, he died on her. The frightened
young woman, before dialing emergency, rolled her friend over onto his back, dressed
him in his suit, and, completely illogically, put on his shoes. If that wasnt enough,
she pressed a book into his hands in order to further neutralize the situation. Stories about this nonetheless tragic event would not have spread as quickly as a good
joke if it werent for the books title: it was the then popular novel by Hemingway A
Farewell to Arms.
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And the aforementioned unfinished essay that my friend was writing was supposed to be called The Last Time. You know, my friend used to say to me, there
are volumes and volumes written about the mysteries of the first time. We could
both recite by heart the McCullough that wed read in our childhood: Bowing,
she gently pressed her lips to his wound, her hands slid down his chest towards
his shoulders, slowly, intoxicatingly caressing them. Surprised, frightened, trying with all his strength to free himself, he pushed her head away, but somehow
she ended up in his embrace once againlike a snake that had ensnared his will
and was holding tight. Pain, the church, even God were all forgotten. We must
admit that from a literary angle, the last time has been neglected without justification.
After all, there are thousands of women who have experienced, contemplated
the act evenhandedly, without emotions, from lets say a three-year distance. I
can formulate for you precisely, she said, how the last time differs from the first.
Its unique, because it is unrepeatable, in the literal meaning of this word. The
first, you know, will be repeated, unless of course at the end, as in the famous
case in our town, you die. But the last time can only be repeated in memory, dreams
and essays. In principle, its all one and the sameformulas without structure, as
the contemporary literary critic Juratë Sprindytë-Baranova would say. I know that
when she wrote, my friend would recklessly ground her work in her own (and sometimes my) experience. Her experience of the last time was with a guy named Vitka.
A painter. And not the real estate agent representing her as one text has stated.
She preferred self-conscious, strong, but painfully sensitive, sexual, even bashful,
cement-spattered men who eat canned fish imported from Asia with a spoon and
curse expressively. Vitka was so self-conscious that he scraped and planed the
corridor walls until hed removed half of the wall. Ill finish tomorrow. I give you
my word, he said to my friend, stepping back two meters from the wall, constantly evaluating his work; but he did not finish for another two weeks. They
became intimate in that unheated, thinned out corridor, to the melody of the
long-drawn-out jealous cats meow.
Her second book The Beauty of Death Strikes also remains unfinished. This
was supposed to be a color photograph book of the highest quality, limited text,
white on black background, dedicated to prêt à porter funeral attire. Clothing created for the final journey was supposed to be affordable for any relatives of the
deceased, but the projected coffee table book was not intended for the average
book buyer, because it was to be priced at a hundred and fifty litas, otherwise the
cost of the photographs and the models fees would never have been covered. I saw
some of the completed photographs. The models lay inside coffins, dressed in specially created suits. A businessman who had committed suicide. A motorcyclist
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whod been killed on the road. An abstract statistic of an émigré whod died in
Ireland. A politician. An ordinary guya beekeeper. A beautiful woman. A homeless person. A poet. A florist. A child. Each got a page with a short caption underneath the photograph. Only the New Lithuanians and sexual minorities received
two-page spreads.
Death, my friend claimed, must be public. Like sex, chastity, indigestion,
and shoe inserts that guarantee quality of life. Its no accident that funeral photographs adorn the front pages of all the best newspapers. I saw a shocking television
show about a fire, which had destroyed a home in a village. The cameraman was
filming the burnt corpse of a baby. People long for death and images of burials.
Flipping through such pages, they crave cheese and beer. Children go into a frenzy
and start a shooting rampage. I wouldnt want to fall behind the times with my
naïve work and turn into a pitiful anachronism. Why is it that for birthdays, weddings or divorces, even when we go to the theater, we dress up, never begrudging
the price of stylish accessories; yet we allow ourselves to get buried in galoshes and
dresses that dont even zip at the back; and in a color that we wouldnt be caught
dead in?
I remember a read-for-press photo of a dead prostitute in my friends book. In a
white coffin, littered with pink feathers, the model lay in only a corset and azure
stockings attached with garters. The edges of the coffin were stylishly decorated
with pleats made from the same material as the stockings. The models head rested
on a stuffed poodle. Her perfect legs and breasts were frivolously covered with
several issues of Stilius magazine. In her hand the woman was holding a pink
mobile phone. I expect that the book would have been successful. I also expect that
someone will make good use of this probably barely exploited idea, if not this year
then in a few years. There is no rush once you are buried.
And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, you can turn your mobile phones back on. I am
coming to the end. And during this part of my speech, nobody has the power to stop
me. I am hurrying like everybody else. I see how several women are crossing their
legs, afraid like I am that they will not make it to where they absolutely must go.
Besides, I want to buy some grapefruit and wine today. If anyone were to ask why I
drink, I would answer like Jerzy Pilch: I drink because my character is weak. I
drink because something in my head is turned upside down. I drink because I am
too anemic, and I want to be rejuvenated. I drink because I am nervous and I want
to calm my nerves. I drink because I am sad and I want to clear my soul. To
conclude, if I really consider myself honest, not wanting to make you too sad, I
have to explain who inspired this talk. One of my many close friendsamong
whom I consider all of you, especially those who came here by accidentis always
asking: Why arent you writing anything anymore? I answer very directly: BeE
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cause the narrator in me has died. Or perhaps it would be more convenient to say
that she has gone missing in action.
Although I am extremely shy, and she was a real live wire, we had some things in
common. Some people, usually at public events, at book fairs or book signings,
when we would appear togethermore precisely, we would meld into onewould
confuse our faces, tastes, and opinions. Its true we were born in the same town.
The same day, the same hour, during the same snow storm. However, we became
friends at universitywe met during our first year. Because that was exactly when
I started to write. Until then, if I still remember correctly, I was staring out the
window at a little goat, which from a distance looked like a rock.
In a few years the field at the edge of town was built over with identical houses.
Each one of those houses soon became a home to people who dressed the same,
savored the same food, and who opened their French locks onto the same floor
plans. Nobody would even have suspected that one sunny June morning one of the
identical Verutës (and all love stories about Verutë in literature, as in real life, are
sad) abandoned by her lover, would have the courage to jump from a three-storey
house. She would jump and soar, holding, in my memory, pressed against her armpit, not crutches, but two little boys. Her twin sons, like two drops of water, resembling her past lover even though thirty-five years had passed since their break
up The black woman, whose relatives all died of hunger in Siberia, is buried in
the cemetery past the town. I found the abandoned grave by accident in late fall
when I was attending a different persons funeralthe former elementary school
teacher. November was then turning into December, and the leaves were frozen.
The aster blossoms in the square patch of black soil had turned brown, and the
ordinary stone monument built by the unknown good Samaritan resembled the
stretched back of a cat. In the dishonorable suicide section of the cemetery, the
monument was almost leaning against the cemetery fence, crafted out of field stones
glued together with cement veins A sugar factor worker, she flushed her baby
down the toilet, and spent seven years in jail. She never married. She moved to
Vilnius. I always buy grapefruit, like other fruit, I dont even know why, at her
kiosk, which is called Marlen. Its not even on my way home, but right next to the
former railroad workers hospital. The still easily recognizable woman puts on green
fuzzy fingerless gloves at the beginning of winter, so that her fingers are bare and
able to move unhindered. I watch as, a bit agitated, but always polite, she weighs
my heavy golden-colored fruit; she places the grapefruit into the open plastic bag
carefully, as if afraid of harming the babies heads.
Sometimes I tire of reworking peoples fates. Your relationship with a text is
similar to your relationship with a beloved man, with whom you connect fatefully,
body and soul. (One should sayclinically, because it is almost poisonous.) Think79
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ing about sentences, punctuation, and words, you get in touch with them, as with
a blind, impossible to medicate, yet brief love affair. The dependence is quite
similar to hatred. Later you distance yourself from the text, sinking into it in your
thoughts as if into a sweet syrup, until in the end it turns into nothing. Recently I
have been occupied with something else. Very secret things. Like a particular,
somewhat snobbish, twentieth-century Russian writer, I decipher linguistic puzzles. He would intentionally separate himself from the narrative with sophisticated
games of cat and mouse in order to taunt his more stupid readers, who understood plot as a sequence of events. I imagine him comfortably seated in an
unmatching chair. Wearing a silk robe. A nightcap made of butterfly netting. In
his porcelain teeth, put in during the years that he spent in America, an eversmoldering cigar.
Standing in line at the post office or grocery store, taking the trolleybus, drinking nettle tea diluted with white wine, looking at the dark of the night, and stroking my cat, I think. My head hurts as I try to get my head around it. What does the
Estonian krona have in common with my grandmother Ona who lived under President Smetona? (She would spin yarn from two skeins into one on paper spools
made out of old letters to another woman.) How a false tooth, fastened onto a rotten root barely attached to ones jawbone became a crown? How did ELTA turn
into talent? Why did the Swarowski crystals seem stolen to me? And finally, and
most importantly, whos the ass, and on what grounds did he dare to name his
penis Dick?
Translated by Jûra Aviþienis
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Arûnas Baltënas. The Rasø Cemetery in Vilnius
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new books
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Nostalgia for the Postwar Crows
BY RENATA ÐERELYTË
Henrikas Algis Èigriejus, Varna braukia aðarà
The novellas by Henrikas Èigriejus, which the author himself modestly calls
descriptions, belong to the heritage of traditional Lithuanian prose. In its theme
and style, this collection resembles the writers earlier books of short stories,
Sugráþusi upë (The River that has Come back, 1996) and Vieðkeliukas pro dobilus
(A Road through Clover, 1999). In Èigriejus descriptions we will not find a
convoluted plot, dramatic personages or episodes bursting with suspense: the postwar years in his novellas are strange because they are too calm; it is a postwar
time not of Shakespearean passions but more of the Good Soldier Schweiks stoicism. On the other hand, we have to admit that the writer possesses the ability to
record sensitively past moments and to find them almost in nothing. All of his
descriptions come almost from nothing. You will not find elaborate sentences or
words that could be copied like Chinese wisdom and quoted afterwards; also, his
writing lacks that pseudo-philosophy that is so fashionable in contemporary literature.
Not to speak about action You read the book and are left surprised. Has anything happened here or not? It speaks of reincarnation, but there is not even the
slightest shift towards the reincarnation of souls (Per bulviasodá [During the
Potato-Planting Time]), which cannot be forgiven, because in a modern thriller it
would have happened three times already. Scared of a portentous phrase, an oaf
does not return home (Pagojo Juziukas [Juziukas of Pagojus]). An intellectual
overwhelmed by the nostalgia of times past shakes the dirty hand of a tramp (Tyliai
leidþias [Quietly Sets ]). Has there really existed a life in which everything
happened so peacefully and unpretentiously?
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Èigriejus novellas are like those old photographs that illustrate the book (The
Girls of Pasvalys [about 1928], Saloèiai before the War, etc). They exist in
their formal form, but the people and the things in them are already part of a
forgettable and fading time, and not of the present tense.
The novellas themselves give the impression of fading photographs: you read
them, and they seem to vanish. They disappear, melt. They are destroyed by the
bright daylight, swallowed by the dynamism of the rushing world. You also forget
the unsophisticated plot and the subtle humour that, although belonging to the
field of popular humour, does not look like it at all, and the narrators sagacious
intonation. The narrator in these novellas is in general playing a very important
role; therefore, the descriptions could also be called stories. And, as stories
go, they are intended for having a good time, for having fun, but nothing more. As
creation, these novellas lack a so-called counterpoint, an accent creating an
underwater layer to the writing. The layer that would prevent the writing being
swallowed like a sweet, that would somehow rend the throat, make you nervous, or
even allow you to pull the author apart.
In Èigriejus case, however, it would simply be indecent. He belongs to the caste
of writers who match Frankls description of literature as the field of art that possesses a curative and not a destructive power. Thus, dear reader, the writers crow
is wiping the tear and not aiming to peck your eyes out. It is up to you to choose
what is better.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
The Speaking Fish
BY VALENTINAS SVENTICKAS
Almis Grybauskas, uvys
Almis Grybauskas named the collection of his new poems uvys (Fish), and in
the first, Atsklanda (Headpiece), he speaks about songs of fishes, about the
meanings that have not burst into bloom.
It is not polite, but sometimes it is worth reminding everyone of the differences
between the real world and the world of poetry, between everyday language and
poetic language. Otherwise, we shall overindulge in lyricism, and will not hear
what the poem is saying. Hence, we are going to coldly state here that, on the
whole, fishes are silent.
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I could mention at least five talented Lithuanian poets who have remained silent
for quite a long time. Grybauskas has been silent too. The phenomenon is worth
analysing, but not here, in a brief talk about books.
The poet made his debut in 1976. Soon after that he issued two more collections,
and was evaluated as one of the strongest and most original of young poets. In the
book Keturi portretai (Four Portraits, 1991), the author of this short review attributed Almis Grybauskas to the diversionists of stagnation.
Later, two selections of works by him appeared: Mugë (The Fair, 1988) and
Apþvalgos spiralë (The Survey Spiral, 2006). They also contained texts that had not
been published before. There were not many of them, but nonetheless there were
some. To be frank, the insertion of new works in selections of works means killing
the new works. Only very few specialists notice them.
Thus, the impression has formed that Grybauskas did not write and publish
any new poems for approximately two decades. As a poet, he disappeared. He
translated poetry (from Czech and Polish), tried to publish a magazine, became
famous for his translations of Václav Havel and Czesùaw Miùosz, published some
essays and articles, visited the Czech Republic (at present he is working there),
and found many important things in common with that country and Lithuania. His
poetic stance, which was expressed in the Soviet epoch in terms of striking images and sharp poetic language, in the time of independence materialised itself
in open forms.
And now we have his new poems. They retain the poets immediate response to
lifes phenomena, the tension of the poetic language, and his nervous style. The
poetic language is rough, saturated with a freely changing rhythm, unusual syntax,
neologisms, dialecticisms, the vocabulary of an intellectual, and cultural references (an unusual, mixed bag). The whole of the book, if we try to summarise it,
metaphorises spontaneous forces and cravings for freedom. Reflections on history
strengthen it (the poet is a historian by profession); however, we have to feel them,
to see them in scenes and images, because the poetics of consistent considerations
is absolutely unacceptable to Grybauskas. As a change in his creative work, I can
see him coming closer to certain canonical forms (like the ballad) and another edge
of possibilities, to prose, to the structures of narrative.
Grybauskas speaks, and at the same time he thinks, about the language, he lives
it, the meanings, their glimmer, their banal and changing meanings, the identities
of sounds and their pronouncement, euphonies, antipodes and etymologies. He
believes that readers will become involved in the creative process, and in no way
accommodates himself to those who crave easy reading. Intense speaking calls for
readers concentration. It is radical here. To tell you the truth, it is radical and
categorical in essence.
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The back cover of the book quotes the words of Grybauskas associate, his unquestioned authority, the poet Antanas A. Jonynas. These are flattering words of
rejoicing. In conclusion, I want to cite Jonynas more important insights: He sees
order in chaos. Let it sometimes be a merciless order that he sees, which prevents
one from yielding to scepticism and sarcasm in the light of delicacy and in the
presence of the wretchedness of temporary things. This is a good, strong book of
dignified and stoic poetry.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
The Linkup
BY ROMAS DAUGIRDAS
Bliuzas Rièardui Gaveliui
Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2007, 336 p.
This book (Blues for Rièardas Gavelis) is a posthumous tribute to a well-known
Lithuanian writer. Its compilers, Nijolë Gavelienë, Antanas A. Jonynas and Almantas
Samalavièius, have included in it their reminiscences about him, his unpublished
notes and letters, selected publicistic writings, and an analysis of his creative work.
I would say with confidence that Rièardas Gavelis was perhaps the only prose
writer of the postwar generation who could excite the curiosity (and partly did) of
Western readers. However, in his homeland he was awarded no serious literary
prize. Officials were too irritated and annoyed by the stand that this lonely nonconformist took, and he was too complicated and abrasive a personality for the masses.
However, let us get back to the book. The chapter of reminiscences is a joke. For
example, one writer confesses in the first sentence that she never knew Gavelis,
but she has managed to write seven pages about him. Another author (a well-known
poet) sheds crocodile tears that he once criticised one of the writers opuses. There
are more similar reminiscences in the book. On the other hand, I failed to come
across utterances by Gavelis closest friends, Audronis Raguotis, Saulius Tomas
Kondrotas and myself. It is difficult to believe that all of them had refused to share
their insights about their late friend.
Personally, I find Gavelis unpublished Uþraðai paraðtëse (Notes in the Margins) and Laiðkai (Letters), to his university friend, most interesting. They at
least partly reflect the development of the formation of his complicated attitudes
towards creative work and the environment. More than one myth that surrounded
the writer is dispelled. For example, the myth of rationality. The authors way of
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thinking was inseparable from subjectivity and other components that could not be
fitted into logic. A search for things in common with Western and Oriental culture
came to light, revising and interpreting this heritage. A sober self-assessment, which
permitted the writer, having made use of the jazz method, to mask (or even turn to
his advantage) some stylistic pitfalls. And Gavelis receptivity: having spent the
greater part of his life in an ebony tower, the writer managed to suck out a lot
from both culture and episodic communication. Perhaps this is why Gavelis characters are not schematic.
I would call all the authors essay writing (the book contains some of it) his great
educational mission to Lithuania. Its aim is to help us get out of the mire in which
we have got stuck. I do not think that I have expressed myself here too emotionally,
because Gavelis merciless but understandable criticism, and his analysis of the
situation, really drew up rational and sufficiently transparent guidelines, which
could help. However, unfortunately, they were usually ignored. The writer, who did
his civil duty in sacrificing the only time in his life which he could devote to creative work, cannot be blamed for that.
When analysing Gavelis creative work, critics seem to have followed the old
principle, to speak either good or to say nothing about the deceased. As if they had
been disposed, in advance, to erect a bronze monument. Gavelis also had his weaker
points, for example, a somewhat sterile and colourless sentence, or clumsy constructions of thinking. But he had enough pluses to pass over his minuses in silence.
If we agree that Gavelis own thoughts and the works of those who write about
him are two different instruments playing jazz at the same time, we will recognise
that the second one performs only an affirmative, repetitive function, and does not
develop a theme of its own. Hence, the linkup is not of great value.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Wine of Melancholy
BY ROMAS DAUGIRDAS
Benediktas Januðevièius, Raugintu krauju
Vilnius: Naujoji Romuva, 2007, 63 p.
Benediktas Januðevièius, a young poet who has already received the favourable
attention of critics and experts on literature, has been known so far for his innovative flight. Many controversial evaluations fell on his shoulders when trying to fuse
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visual objects and verbalism (0 + 6. Eilëraðèiai daiktai [0 + 6 = poems-objects]).
For the most part, he managed to do just that, he successfully overcame a swampy
entry marked with the label experiment.
Januðevièius last collection, Raugintu krauju (With Pickled Blood), is like a
step aside from the curve of his creative evolution. This is a book of dedications
(they form half of all the texts) to his friends and memorable men of culture. At
first, the entire collection was titled Dedikacijos (Dedications). However, later,
perhaps for the sake of flirting with the reader, a more memorable, more promotional, title was needed.
When writing poems dedicated to specific personalities, the poet is exposed to
serious dangers. It is not difficult to play too long with the standard signs, which
revolve around that personality and skim across the surface. However, excessive
subjectivity eliminates the main mass of readers: it is only a group of friends
(close ones) that understand the texts. The only way out is to try to squeeze ones
own emotions into a non-hackneyed archetype that is common to all of mankind,
so that a poem will say something to people who know absolutely nothing about
the names mentioned in the dedications. Januðevièius has coped with this task
successfully.
On the whole, this book is somewhat suppressed: the desperate search for innovation is smothered by existential melancholy. Blood fermented by this melancholy does not turn into acid, but rather becomes vintage wine.
The means of expression is minimal: the author does not throw sharp-toothed
words around; he limits himself to the registration of everyday signs, which is often
broken by a hardly noticeable stirring of intonation (which seems to be quite sufficient), rather than by a profound metaphor.
A dotted speaking prevails, omitting implied words, using the abbreviations characteristic of personal notebooks. In this way, the sketchy nature of the texts, their
deliberate incompleteness, is underlined. They are not polished or refined.
The impact of jazz on the work of the poet is undoubted. It presupposes an improvised freedom in the texts. The initial motif (articulation) branches, moves away,
comes closer, crosses, is stopped by counterpoints, and is broken off. The dramaturgy of the poem is unpredictable, but it always exists and helps us to get rid of the
fragmentary nature of the texts, which the author was so fond of earlier. The collage
has evolved into an arrangement linked by the internal motifs, as if by ropes.
In conclusion, I would like to add that this is manly poetry. The author looks at
himself and the environment ironically and mercilessly, soberly accentuating the
ostensibility of the world. It pulsates towards us in a mediatory manner, through a
long artificial chain of signs of a civilisation where it is so easy for a man to get lost,
or not to find himself.
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○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
A Reserved Savagery
BY LORETA JAKONYTË
Birutë Jonuðkaitë, Kregþdëlaiðkis
Vilnius: Versus aureus, 2007, 142 p.
This book is dedicated to women who have not betrayed their savage nature:
thus Birutë Jonuðkaitë presents her new collection of short stories Kregþdëlaiðkis
(A Letter of a Swallow).
Women are not only the main addressees, but also the heroines. Young and old,
giving birth to babies and motherly, or those that chose abortion, loving, longing,
disillusioned and furious. As in the writers earlier prose, experiences and worries
swirl mostly in the orbit of home (the home is usually in a village), and around the
co-existence of women and men, mothers and daughters, the human and the animal
or plant, life and death.
The savagery of Jonuðkaitës women is reserved, pastel-coloured, and seldom
explodes in a sharp form. Its main content in the book is the womans concentration
on her feelings, memory and desires (the first part of the collection is aptly called
Pojûèiø slenksèiai [Thresholds of the Senses]) and the determination to preserve
them. These are self-aware, brave and articulate women. Because they prefer writing, the motif of the letter is frequent in the stories, and it is varied in an original,
savagely irrational manner (the heroine folds the letter into the shape of a swallow, pushes it into a bottle, adds some dead ants, and throws it into the sea, or she
leaves it with a stranger who she met in a hotel). The stories are not short of plots
and events, but states, senses and sensations (fear, anxiety, relief, smells, sounds
and touch) prevail.
The mystery of life, human, animal or plant, is discerned with amazing nuances
(the heroines bend towards flowers, or a pregnant cat), and at the same time death
is thoughtfully reflected upon. Jonuðkaitës woman learns painfully how to know
and recognise the power of death, and instead of fearing and rebelling against it,
she learns to put up with it.
When writing about women, Jonuðkaitë purifies the archetypal denominators:
childbearing, life, love, home. In the stories about men, she looks for exceptional
personalities: an eccentric lifestyle, a passion for the charm of the language or wild
herbs, the stigma of an incurable disease.
The author believes in the persuasiveness of the realistic story. In places, it is
almost documentary, sometimes interrupted by a more temperamental emotion or
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snappy wittiness, enriched by dreams or the reality of daydreaming, and often
depicted in poetic intonation, like a silkworm in a silk cage made of thread with a
silver shine.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Mercifully Damned
BY VLADAS BRAZIÛNAS
Albinas Galinis, Sapnø knyga, arba Pavëluota ironija:
Albijono ðalies sakmë. Vilnius: Vaga, 2007, 88 p.
You can see at once that Albinas Galinis collection of poetry Sapnø knyga, arba
Pavëluota ironija (The Book of Dreams, or Belated Irony) is compiled, and very
likely written, not as a usual collection, but as an integral book, possessing its own
drama and following it. Therefore, in that alone, it is a rare phenomenon under our
skies, especially when we are talking of the authors first poetry book. In this it is
exceptional.
The authors expression cannot be confused with anything else either: it is original, well thought out, suggestive, and based first of all on cultural images and
allusions to Antiquity and the Middle Ages (the author would never write the names
of these epochs without capitals). They express nothing but the twists and turns,
depths and whirls of the soul of a passionate human. The Antiquity and the Middle
Ages of the soul, and we, the author and the reader, are the characters in our drama
about Antiquity and our Middle Ages, on the stage of the bleeding heart, surrounded
by raging demons and dwarf jokers, who ruthlessly tell us the truth about us and
about our poor and great soul that bares our nature: horrible and majestic, damned
and merciful. Hopefully, to be saved.
The designer Asta Puikienë was very likely cooperating with the author when
she wrote the title on the cover in such a way that the eye first of all falls on these
two words: one black, and one white. Thus, there is still a hope that this book of
dreams, and its irony, is not belated and not put forward: the right book at the right
time. The author, a professional historian, might have wanted to publish a book of
poetry that he has been writing for several years for some time. And yet he waited,
and patiently sifted out the words so that only what was necessary and original
remained.
I recall only a few similar instances in our poetry. The most outstanding is probably Romas Daugirdas. Both are similar and different at the same time, having
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turned away from romanticising, and created, right from the start, their hard-todefine poetic subject and its poetic space; which is, of course, uncontrolled by
outside opinion, advice or rollicking.
Therefore, in this case, you cannot say anything that you would like to say about
the first book. For this debutant is not a debutant at all. Curtain: A dream has no
duration only / absinthe from year to year. Cheers!
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
In the Whirl of Time and Space
BY LORETA JAKONYTË
Gintaras Beresnevièius, Nuostabûs Tomo Vagabundo nuotykiai
ir regëjimai. Vilnius: Kitos knygos, 2007, 126 p.
Gintaras Beresnevièius Nuostabûs Tomo Vagabundo nuotykiai ir regëjimai (The
Wonderful Adventures and Visions of Tomas Vagabundas) is a work of infrequent
fate. The authors earliest attempt at a novel, though published posthumously, was
started in the Soviet period (in 1985 and 1986, when he was in the Soviet army in
Azerbaijan) but was never finished. Two parts were published in the magazine
Keturi vëjai in 1991 at the beginning of the reestablished independence, but largely
rewritten 15 years later.
The word visions in the title is appropriate: it is a stream-of-consciousness
work of free visions and fantasies, unstructured by a plot. Different times and spaces
coexist: mythical and historical worlds (the creation of the cosmos, Ancient Greece,
Tsarist Russia, etc), religions (Christianity, Islam, paganism), and nations and countries (Lithuanians, Indians, Persia). There appears a mixture of animals (a crocodile, a racoon, a camel, a cobra), cultural figures (Plato, Hauff, Novalis, Mozart,
Whitman), Soviet nomenclature figures and fantastic creatures emerging from
dreams or hallucinations.
With elemental force, people and situations turn and twist in the imagination of
the hero-narrator. Everything is happening at once and changing in turn. The multidimensional concept of history and time, and fantastic conventions, are characteristic of Beresnevièius earlier books, bringing together abundant historical,
religious, cultural and literary allusions, paraphrases and heretical parodies. In
the new novel, however, it develops into a fatalistic, raw and unchecked rampage
that can only be experienced, and ironically, even sarcastically, reflected upon.
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man history in general. The mockery of intellectual efforts (for instance, counting
the books not yet written, Pythagoreans fall from the sky and climb back through
nine reincarnations) takes us to sensual experiences.
Tomas Vagabundas, the hero of the novel, is equally spontaneous, and of undetermined identity and changing body shapes. He is both alive and dead, on the
Earth and in Hell, and does not know himself whether he was expelled from Heaven
or kicked out. His body wanders in the vortex of past times and worlds, his
thoughts leap to totally unrelated topics, and it is only the feeling of loneliness that
remains permanent throughout.
The book includes an article by the literary critic Regimantas Tamoðaitis, in
which he highlights the main components of the novel and discerns the contours of
meanings in the oozing flow of words. He sees a gnostic spirit, an erudite narrator,
the heros path to meaning through a woman (here, the femme fatale is Lolita),
ecstasy, and death.
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recent events
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Arrivederci, Torino!
BY KORNELIJUS PLATELIS
May 14 was the final day of the 20th International Turin Book Fair, where Lithuania was the guest of honour. Rolando Picchioni, president of the Book, Music and
Culture Foundation that organises the fair, said at the closing press conference that
Lithuania had brought fresh winds to Turin, and praised lavishly the stand dedicated to children. Ernesto Ferrero, the fairs programme director, emphasised that
our perfectly articulated programme reflected appropriately both literature and
book publishing and other fields of cultural and public life. Then he invited Irena
Vaiðvilaitë, an advisor to the president of Lithuania, and Rolandas Kvietkauskas,
the secretary of the Ministry of Culture, on to the stage, and, through them, extended his thanks to the whole Lithuanian delegation. After the conference, Ferrero
and his deputy, Maurizia Rebole, came to the Lithuanian stand to bid us farewell.
Rebole said that over the 11 years of her work at the fair, she had not seen such a
solid presentation.
Over 301,000 people visited the fair. The stand was in a favourable location: you
found yourself in it immediately on entering through the main entrance. Thanks to
this, most of the visitors saw it. The childrens stand was in a different place, in a
space specially intended for children. I can assert daringly that it was the best
stand of this type at the fair. From morning till evening, it was packed with Italian
children. The ingenious team of Sigutë Chlebinskaitë did considerably more than
what had been expected. Both stands, which were designed by Saulius Valius,
functioned flawlessly, which is very important in Italy, a country with rich traditions in design: first of all, they unconsciously assess everything visually.
Our events at the fair and beyond it attracted attention as well. It is understandable that the names of well-known artists, Jonas Mekas and Eimuntas Nekroðius,
drew large audiences. Sigitas Parulskis, who presented the Italian edition of his
novel Trys sekundës dangaus (Three Seconds of Heaven), outdid everybody else in
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the numbers of his admirers, while Vytautas Labutis, Arvydas Joffe and Leonidas
Ðinkarenko simply went wild at the soiree of jazz and poetry. Yet there were enough
curious people at non-literary events: at the discussion by the cardinals of Lithuania and Turin, Audrys Juozas Baèkis and Severino Poletto, on contemporary Catholicism, at Irena Vaiðvilaitës lecture on the eastern borders of Baroque (it attracted
special interest), or the discussion on the death and rebirth of communism, at
which Vytautas Landsbergis, who was unwell at the time, was replaced by Vytautas
Aliðauskas and Kazys Lozoraitis.
The Italians were also interested in our events in Turin. The Giovanni Agneli
Foundation organised a debate with the European commissioner Dalia Grybauskaitë.
Viewings of films by Ðarûnas Bartas and Jonas Mekas took place at the Film Museum, in the central space of which Saulius Valius installation Internal Motivation was displayed in all its beauty. The jazz musicians Petras Vyðniauskas
(saxophone) and Juozas Milaðius (guitar) played five encores at the packed-out
hall of the Academy of Music. Eimuntas Nekroðius production of The Song of
Songs was performed at the Teatro Alfieri, and at one of the museums of modern art
the exhibition Vilnius is Burning, a curatorial project by Raimundas Malaðauskas,
was shown.
As had been expected, the events at the stand for children attracted smaller
audiences. Still, all of them were held just as had been planned.
The interpreters, Pietro U. Dini, Rasa Klioðtoraitytë, Guido Michelini and Birutë
Þindþiûtë-Michelini, deserve a special thanks. They had to both moderate a number
of events and interpret. Leonidas Donskis, Violeta Kelertienë and Kæstutis Nastopka
did an excellent job in conducting discussions, too. Large forces had been mustered for this fair, and they fulfilled the expectations.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
A Workshop for Translators
BY JURGITA MIKUTYTË
From 24 to 28 May, the Lithuanian Association of Literary Translators, the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre and Books from Lithuania organised a workshop for
translators from German into Lithuanian, and Lithuanian into German, in Nida.
Six translators into German, and six translators into Lithuanian took part in the
workshop: Silke Brohm, Klaus Berthel, Cornelius Hell, Markus Roduner, Magda
Wagner and Edita Werner; and Vilija Gerulaitienë, Laurynas Katkus, Kristina
Kviliûnaitë, Austëja Merkevièiûtë, Giedrë Sodeikienë and Asta Ðimkutë-Tirilienë.
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For three days, from morning till evening, translations were analysed in seminars at the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre. The first, on translation into Lithuanian, were moderated by Antanas Gailius; and those on translation into German
by Jurgita Mikutytë and Thomas Brovot, a translator and experienced moderator
of such workshops.
Translators analysed excerpts from works being translated that they had sent in
advance, helped each other in solving translation and interpretation issues, and
discussed specific issues in translation. Translations of the following were analysed: Sruogas Dievø miðkas, Markas Zingeris Kaip buvo dainuojama Laisvës alëjoje,
Rièardas Gavelis Jauno þmogaus memuarai, Aistë Ptakauskaitës Kleptomanas,
Algimantas Mackus poetry, Goethes Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit,
von Hofmannsthals Unterhaltungen über ein neues Buch, Frankls Ärtztliche
Seelsorge. Grundlagen der Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse, Mattenklotts essay
Leidenschaft, and Ohnemus Als die richtige Zeit verschwand.
On the evening of 25 May the translators met participants in the Spring of Poetry
festival, who read their poetry at the museum: Antanas A. Jonynas, Aidas Marèënas,
Vladas Braziûnas, Alvydas Ðlepikas, Liudvikas Jakimavièius, Valdas Daðkevièius,
and others.
On the evening of the second day, participants watched a film on literary translation, Spurwechsel. Ein Film vom Übersetzen, made by German translators in 2003.
In the film, five translators of Russian literature into German and five translators of
German literature into Russian speak of the subtleties of translation: about losses
in translation, but also about the use of the linguistic riches of ones own language,
about cultural changes, about translation of body language, quotations and swearwords, about how a translator should aspire to achieve the effect of the original
work, to try to maintain the authors style, and so on. Since all these problems are
topical for each translator, after watching the film, the participants in the workshop
discussed the ideas expressed in it for a long time.
In the closing discussion, the translators agreed that they derived both benefit
and pleasure from this joint activity. Very often, people working in solitude do not
even know each other, even if they have heard the names of their colleagues many
times. Therefore, the opportunity to make personal contacts, share their doubts
and thoughts, and sometimes have a long talk and find a solution to a particular
problem in a text, is very important to them. The discussions did not stop in the
intervals: everybody willingly helped their colleagues to improve each others translations.
The diversity of the texts, the expertise of the experienced translators, and the
desire to share their experience, extended considerably the field of vision of the
participants, especially of the less experienced translators. The workshop provided
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the less experienced ones with the opportunity to learn, and the experienced ones
with the opportunity to share their experience. It inspired new projects and stimulated the desire to improve. All expressed the wish for a similar workshop next
year.
The event was supported by the Robert Bosch Fund (Germany), the Culture and
Sports Support Fund of the Republic of Lithuania, and the Ministry of Culture of
Lithuania. Thus the participants had excellent working conditions. In short, the
participants were happy with the organisers, and the organisers with the satisfied
and very diligent translators.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Poetry in Spring
BY EUGENIJUS ALIÐANKA
This year, the Spring of Poetry festival laid claims to be included in the Guinness
Book of Records. Having started with an opening ceremony in Vilnius Botanical
Gardens on 13 May, it lasted precisely two weeks. Over 100 literary meetings,
readings and discussions took place during this time.
There is no need to argue that quantity does not always guarantee quality, but it
seems that the organisers efforts to expand were justified; on the other hand, this
festival hardly differed from its predecessors. But then, should we really expect
something new and unseen before from the festival every year? Should the organisers rack their brains in search of originality? As my personal experience of these
festivals shows, some organisers go for external effects and playfulness, while others concentrate on poetry per se.
This Spring of Poetry was held for the 43rd time and was characterised by solidity and good coordination. The festival is not restricted to Vilnius and Kaunas:
literary meetings are held in numerous cities and towns around Lithuania. It cannot be called elitist, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of events for a professional audience, such as the annual poets and critics conference, the foreign poets
soiree, and meetings with poets in embassies and universities. I would not call it
populist, either. Over many years, the festival has succeeded in preserving the
prestige of the poetic word. This is especially important today, when the output of
poetry books is constantly falling.
The festival is international, yet most of the events are intended for Lithuanian
authors and audiences. Foreign poets are invited for several days, during which the
central events and readings take place. The traditional evening for the presentation
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of foreign guests was held in the Europos Parkas sculpture park. The following
poets attended this years festival: Yolanda Castano (Spain), David Harsent (England), Michael Jennings (USA), Nikola Madzhirov (Macedonia), Bernard Noël
(France), Aliuska Molina Placeres (Cuba), Fiona Sampson (Great Britain), and
Ostap Slyvynsky (Ukraine). A comparison of the Spring of Poetry with other European festivals gives the impression that its foreign guests are more like inclusions
than equal partners.
As the tradition goes, on the eve of the festival the Spring of Poetry almanac
appeared, which, along with the works of many Lithuanian poets, included poetry
by the festivals guests. These always seem important to me, for festivals come and
go, while the translations remain, and you can return to them at a later time.
One of the new aspects of this years festival was that it went far beyond the
borders of Lithuania. During the festival, readings of Lithuanian poets were organised in Dublin, Kaliningrad, Sejny and Punsk. Three poets, Rimvydas Stankevièius,
Vytautas Rubavièius and Eugenijus Aliðanka, were nominated for the festivals
prize for the best book of the year. This year it was the poet and cultural scholar
Vytautas Rubavièius who was crowned laureate. The prize for translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages was awarded to the Italian linguist and translator
Pietro U. Dini, and the prize for translations of poetry into Lithuanian went to the
translator Juozas Meèkauskas-Meðkela. There were more prizes that imparted liveliness and significance to the festival, but only the festival organisers could provide
a full list of them.
The Spring of Poetry closed with readings under umbrellas in the Sarbievijus
Courtyard of Vilnius University, and left the impression that there are still people
who need poetry. Maybe it was not an impression, but just an illusion. However, to
poets an illusion is like a sister.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
Magnus Ducatus Poesis
BY BIRUTË JONUÐKAITË
In Lithuanian it means the Grand Duchy of Poetry. It was founded in Minsk,
and Vladas Braziûnas, the inspiration behind the idea, says about its establishment: The idea itself, encoded in the name (it is true, not in the Latin one yet),
hovered in the air. It originated naturally, from an interest in neighbours poetry,
from the live relation with it and its creators, and in translating that poetry into the
Lithuanian language for a long time. And on the evening of 7 February 2006, havR
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ing hardly uttered the name, it caught on and was taken up by everyone as his own.
Yes, it happened at the Lithuanian embassy in Minsk, at an unofficial reception.
We were talking freely, and, word by word the then ambassador, Petras Vaitiekûnas, felt at once that the intentions were serious, and the following day the
Belarusian poet Andrei Chdanovich and I were already sitting at the embassy,
thumbing through the pages of our written visions, translating them into business
language together, forecasting, and calculating. The ambassador proposed that the
first official performance of Magnus Ducatus Poesis should be given in Minsk, on
5 July, when commemorating State Day of Lithuania. The most important thing was
that it was not just some evening held at the embassy to foster cultural relations
between Lithuania and Belarus. Participating in it were poets and musicians from
Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Latvia. It was sought, and this was achieved, to present
Magnus Ducatus Poesis to the public (diplomats of different countries residing in
Minsk and the elite of Belarusian art, science and culture) in a single common
process of poetry and music, in a creative work full of life and improvisation, in
polylogical concord.
On 5 July this year residents of Vilnius and guests had the opportunity to see and
hear a second similar performance of Magnus Ducatus Poesis in Daukantas Square
(on the eve of State Day). Vladas Braziûnas came to the event carrying a thick,
white book, Magnus Ducatus Poesis. Surmounting Boundaries, and a compact audio and video disc.
The almanac, consisting of 288 pages, and, to be more exact, its first issue,
published verse by the participants in the first polylogical process of poetry and
music of Magnus Ducatus Poesis, and translations into other languages, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Polish, Ukrainian and Russian. The video and audio compact
disc, produced together with the almanac, contains the recordings of the first public performance of Magnus Ducatus Poesis, and its author is Vladimir Andropov
(Belarus). Apart from translators, the verse by the poets is also recited by the
musicians Algirdas Klova (Lithuania), Todar Kashkurevich (Belarus), and Rûta
and Valdis Muktupâvel (Latvia). The venue and time of the performance was the
Lithuanian embassy in Minsk on 5 July 2006, when Lithuanian State Day (the
coronation of Mindaugas) was commemorated.
Hence, according to Braziûnas, a single and uniform, rich and harmonious work
of poets and musicians from Lithuania and neighbouring countries was heard in the
square, and those who did not hear it had the opportunity to acquire the book and
the compact disc and listen to it personally. I shall remind you of the authors of this
work of art: Romuald Mieczkowski (Lithuania/Poland), Kornelijus Platelis (Lithuania), Vladzimer Arlou (Belarus), Dmitro Ùazutkin (Ukraine), Vladas Braziûnas
(Lithuania), Barbara Gruszka-Zych (Poland), Georgij Jefremov (Lithuania/Russia),
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Marya Martysevich (Belarus), Antanas A. Jonynas (Lithuania), Oleh Kocarev
(Ukraine), Andrei Chadanovich (Belarus), Yuri Andrukhovich (Ukraine), and Andrii
Bondar (Ukraine).
The musicians began the performance by improvising allusions to music bringing back the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on different instruments of the
nations of the region. Then the poets joined in, one by one, starting to recite their
work individually, loudly, and then all together in a low voice, thus building the
Babel of poetry (expressing differences and unity, overcoming languages and state
borders). The poets recited pieces of their verse in a certain order in all the languages of the participants. In this way, a general poetic-musical humming went on:
a surmounting of boundaries took place.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
The 18th Druskininkai Poetic Fall
BY ANTANAS ÐIMKUS
From 5 to 8 October, the 18th Druskininkai Poetic Fall festival took place in
Druskininkai and Vilnius. This year over 100 poets, literary critics and publishers participated in it. As always, several poets from abroad read their poetry at the
festival: Paul Muldoon (Ireland), Gerard Augustin (France), Paul Henry (Wales),
Jan Wagner (Germany), Edita Petrauskaitë-Page (Canada), Leszek Szaruga (Poland), Andrei Chadanovich (Belarus), Leons Briedis (Latvia), Mihkael Kaevats
(Estonia), Natalka Bilocerkivec, Liudmila Taran (Ukraine), Félix Grande, Abel
Murcia (Spain), José Luis Peixoto (Portugal), Xavier Farré (Catalonia) and Irina
Nechit-Popa (Moldova). The work of many of these poets, along with translations,
was published in the Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2007 almanac that appeared before
the festival.
The event opened on Friday with a traditional hoisting of the flag of the festival,
and with meetings between poets and schoolchildren in the towns schools.
The theme of this years festival was Eldorado Round the Corner: The Close
and the Distant in Literature. Rimantas Kmita, Giedrë Kazlauskaitë, Eugenijus
Aliðanka, Jan Wagner, Paul Muldoon and José Luis Peixoto read papers at a discussion moderated by Laurynas Katkus. The discussion was followed by a reading
of poetry by young authors. After that, it was already time for the traditional poetry
soiree, which was crowned by an unusual and highly successful auction of poets
manuscripts organised by Agnë Þagrakalytë. Friday evening ended in the Ðirdelë
café, with the Night of One Poem. While listening to poetry, people could draw
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their commentaries on the road (the project Light Graffiti by the video-artists
Aistë Valiûtë and Daumantas Plechavièius).
On the Saturday, from morning till noon, the yard of the Dainava centre hosted a
humming Oriental bazaar where literary critics sold conscience to the poets, fortune-tellers predicted fates, and with maple leaves and other currency you could
buy useful items and beautiful souvenirs. In the afternoon, publishers presented
books published over the year. After the presentations, an exhibition of Romualdas
Rakauskas photography opened in the Sofa gallery, while Rièardas Ðileika presided over two chamber poetry readings, the first of which was dedicated to the
memory of Vladas Ðimkus, and the second to poets long unheard.
The laureates of the Jotvingiai Prize and a competition for an anonymous poem
were announced and awarded at the final gala poetry night. The main Jotvingiai
Prize went to Almis Grybauskas, while the Jaunasis Jotvingis (Young Jotvingis)
award went to Benediktas Januðevièius. A concert by Pieno Lazeriai (The Milky
Lasers) and a dance in the Nakviða restaurant concluded the festive Saturday.
On Sunday, the festival moved to Vilnius. A soiree of poetry by the winners of the
Jotvingiai Prize and the festivals foreign guests took place in St Catherines Church.
The last event, poetry readings in the Uþupis Café, was held on the Monday.
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
A Union of the Arts in Lvov
BY ANTANAS ÐIMKUS
The largest annual East European fair, which draws about 60,000 people, took
place from 14 to 16 September in Lvov, Ukraine. This event coincided with the
second international literature festival, united by the motto: Amore librorum nos
uni. Many writers were invited to the festival, from Poland, Germany, Serbia, Croatia,
Belarus and Lithuania.
Some wonderful book illustrations by Algirdas Steponavièius were brought to
Ukraine from Lithuania. Birutë Þilytë, the compiler of the artists album, and the
illustrator Sigutë Chlebinskaitë, helped to put the presentation together.
Several young poets also represented Lithuania: Þilvinas Andriuðis, Agnë Biliûnaitë, Gabrielë Labanauskaitë, Antanas Ðimkus, Julius Þëkas, and the electronic
music creator Vladas Dieninis. Brought together by the fusion of several arts in the
Sintezija project, they showed an hour-and-a-half-long creation of audiovisual
art and poetry in the Lvov idea museum. In order for this to occur, many young
artists, including composers, directors, photographers, musicians, poets, transla101
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tors, film makers and actors, toiled all summer long. Almost 50 people contributed
to Sintezija at the start of the autumn.
This project, which the Writers Union and the Lithuanian Embassy in Ukraine
helped to organise, was not only interesting because it combined various fields of
art, but also because it crossed cultural barriers. Ukrainian art was featured alongside Lithuanian art during Sintezija. Several Ukrainian poets read their poetry,
accompanied by musical improvisations and a few video-poetic works, including
Bohdan Horobchuk, Pavel Korobchuk, Halina Kruk and Olesya Mamchich.
Judging from the well-attended events and the positive response of the audience,
the work was not in vain: friendship between nations and the arts is possible.
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Books from Lithuania
is a non-commercial organisation, established in 1998 in order to promote
Lithuanian literature abroad.
BOOKS FROM LITHUANIA WORKS IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
as a literary information centre, and
as a translation-promoting fund
T R A N S L AT I O N G R A N T S :
Books from Lithuania promotes the dissemination of Lithuanian literature by
subsidising the translation of works of Lithuanian literature. Foreign publishers
are invited to apply for grants which will partly or totally cover translation costs.
T H E A P P L I C AT I O N S H O U L D I N C L U D E :

an application form
a copy of the contract with the rights owner
a copy of the contract with the translator
the translators qualifications (e.g. CV, previous translations)
brief information about the publishing company
a short letter of motivation for the work chosen
For more information and for application forms please contact
BOOKS
FROM
LITHUANIA
J. Basanavièiaus g. 5, LT -01118 Vilnius
tel/fax (+370 5) 2618741, e-mail: [email protected]
www.booksfromlithuania.lt
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The Vilnius Review
is published twice
a year.
An annual subscription
is 15.
The magazine can
be ordered from:
The Vilnius Review
Mësiniø g. 4
LT-01133 Vilnius
Tel: (+370 5) 2613767
[email protected]
Repro and layout by UAB Inter Se
Þygimantø g. 10, LT -01102 Vilnius
www.interse.lt
Printed by Arx Baltica Printing House
Veiveriø g. 142 B , LT -46353 Kaunas
www.arxbaltica.lt
Circulation: 800 copies
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○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
I gave myself up not to his will. I gave myself up to myself. On the balcony covered
with snowdrifts, my bare feet sunk into the snow. I held on to his shirt against the
cold, sowing his buttons to the wind, his shirt as white as the snow, while he lifted
me up, holding me tightly with his warm hands. He grabbed me around the waist
and propped me up against the black concrete wall.
autumn / winter 2007 | no 22
THE
VI LNIUS
REVIEW
○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ ○
NEW WRITING FROM LITHUANIA
Dalia Jazukevièiûtë in Anarchistës iðpaþintis (Confessions of a Female Anarchist)
A friend once told me the story of when she figured out that she really loved her
husband. She had been brought to the third-floor recovery room after a difficult
operation, bundled up in a winter coat because they had brought her to the hospital
in January but released her in February, and, confused about time and place, she
was being escorted by her neighbor. On the second-floor landing she felt sick. She
leaned against the wall, and instinctively put her lips to her sleeve. That was when
she saw that her husband was holding out under her lips his large construction
workers palms, with white plaster crusted into his wrinkles, in case she had to
throw up on the stairs
Giedra Radvilavièiûtë in Nekrologas (Obituary)
ISSN 1648 -7354
Cover illustration
from Romas Daugirdas
Laisvas kritimas
by Romas Orantas
Vilnius_Magasine#10-COVER.p65
1
2007-12-06, 14:38

autumn/ winter 2007 | no 22 the vilnius review autumn winter no

Transcription

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