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by Antanas Danielius

Angelas krintantis Palangoje (Angel Falling in Palanga) is the first collection by one of the most famous Lithuanian poets, Sigitas Geda, in Swedish. Here his works of the two latest decades are presented.

Best known in this country as a scholar and critic, Tomas Venclova is a gifted poet whose work has remained largely unknown to an English-speaking audience. This collection of fifty-one poems is as distinctive as it is finely and intelligently crafted. Venclova links intimate experience and historical incident in poems that are intensely contemporary, even as they reach back to the ethnic roots of an entire generation. This volume also features a foreword by Joseph Brodsky and a fascinating exchange between Venclova and Nobel laureate Czesùaw Miùosz about the city of their youths – the Polish Wilno for Miùosz, the Lithuanian Vilnius for Venclova – and its profound influence on their work. This extraordinary volume is as much an artistic triumph as it is an exploration of the very nature of creativity.

"Venclova's song starts at the point where the voice usually breaks, at the end of exhalation, when all inner forces are used up."
From the Foreword by Joseph Brodsky

"Tomas Venclova belongs to a distinguished line of late-20th-century poets, one which includes Czesùaw Miùosz, Joseph Brodsky, and Adam Zagajewski to name but a few. These are – or were, in Brodsky's case – the cosmopolitan exiles, the transplanted spirits whose fate has been to burrow back into the mother tongue to claim the home that history denied them … Winter Dialogue is a single-minded meditation – a Yeatsian conversation between self and soul – on the largest themes. For to answer the question ‘What happened to home?' is – or, better, would be – to answer a great many core existential queries."
Sven Birkerts, Harvard Review

Although the title of this sensitive collection refers to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, City of Ash serves as a universal geography of the contemporary soul in an urban context. Through his poetry, Eugenijus Aliðanka searches for personal and historical meaning within the framework of time, recognising both the demands of the self and the impossibility of avoiding what came before, whether human or cultural.

Lithuanian poetry is known for its melodious rhyme and assonance, but Aliðanka favours a more modern approach. The defiance of traditional capitalisation and punctuation in his free verse may be read as a rebellion – conscious or unconscious – against the regulations imposed by the Language Commission in Lithuania. Aliðanka's poems, employing neither surrealism nor stream of consciousness, are, like cities themselves, concatenations of non sequiturs.

À Votre Santé

to those who under collapsing cultures
learn not to be, between a rock
and a rock, mary and magdalene,
between tao and data,

but all that ends in me,
when the eye shrinks into the virgin lead,
without alloy of time

à votre santé, to vanished continents,
to gratuitous creations
of the imagination in empty halls
during the apotheosis of the feast, during the very

lifting of hearts

Crystallography

I

sight strikes the mote,
language climbs down the cornice,
vowels of fog
and sharp consonants,

clear hours partitioning the night,
everyone – like an ice floe flushed out
by voices, but silver nets
catch them too,

the cloth is quartered
and numb fingers grope
for a loose thread,
farther and farther,

where only destination is left
but not death, where the cloth
of stars is too bright,
for an open wound,

the square piazza taps
out steps all night,
ever clearer the winter,
ever higher the white chiton of noah

II

shadows shattered
into sharp flashes catch in cloth,
only the blade of frost
strips the aura: the target of the sky

the trajectory of language
stretches over the longest nights –
myth
of ourselves falling to earth

III

by lips of frost
I create your image:
in the hollow of vowels
air trembles,

limitless
blue January,
starless moonlight night
but feeling in the light

like burnished copper,
along the outline of the body
the clock's hand
stencils

the monogram of being

Crusade

With a gust of the autumn feast
the moon hangs over empty clearings
white as if washed all november
in gutters of rain
the god of war is pale
lovers point to the one who will sacrifice
their child for the crusade
to the graveyards of palestine
the child still in the womb listening
to the father's radiating despair and whisper:
what white what white
no wind and birds not scattering
over heads reflecting on love
descend slowly into the field of silence
hidden carefully from an alien plow
the ancient capital of the kingdom: what white
but feet tingle on hard-frozen earth
and like a flame stretched between palms
a Saracen soldier leaps in the moonlight

Dialogue in a cellar

the river's mouth swells and floods cellars,
gravel, herbs smelling of iodine –
the bed of the sleeping traveller
wrapped in his sunny dream,

who cares about him, who cares about an amphora
recovered from the holds of a foundered ship
near dardanelles strait,
a closed form in itself, not taking root
in the squares of rooms and the frames
of pictures? there are many aesthetics,
says the professor, and the strangest one
is under care of powers
that abhor us,

I accept your challenge, replies the poet,
I am not handsome, my voice
is monotonous and colourless,
I am no troubadour
with a codpiece, a sword at my side,
but nevertheless I am loved,

other times, the traveller says, taking leave,
we descend deep into underground vaults,
we write on damp walls words
we don't want to see
let's drink again and godspeed

Translated from the Lithuanian by H. L. Hix and Eugenijus Aliðanka

© "Vilnius"
© Logium Visi Numeralis

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