Trys Eilėraščiai

My first published translation was a poem by Tomas Venclova, published in The Massachusetts Review in 2010. As the son of displaced persons fleeing persecution by the Soviet regime in occupied Lithuania, I was deeply moved by his poem and personal history of exile. Since then I have published translations of scores of Lithuanian poets, but I have always been drawn back to his work. It is cosmopolitan, philosophical, modernist, neoclassical, with a wide variety of formal poems interspersed with free verse. He was never much drawn to the dominant trends of Lithuanian romanticism, which has roots of identity in the land; instead, his poems range widely through the world. His poems are dense with place and history and mythology. In the poems published here alone, we move from the city of his birth, Klaipėda, to Rome (ancient and modern), and on to the eastern seaboard of the United States. We encounter Roman history, World War II, precise and specific observations of city and landscapes, the history of technology, the Baltic god of the sea, and more, all of this in tightly rhymed and often metrical lines. There is no padding, no stock phrases, no throwaway lines. In other words, he leaves translators no room to maneuver. Of all the poets whose work I have translated, his is the most difficult. To me there is no question of rewriting the content to fit the form. Formal considerations in contemporary English are generally treated more loosely (see Heaney’s “Glanmore Sonnets” or Walcott’s White Egrets). I find that by occasionally switching the rhyme schemes or availing myself of slant rhymes, I can make the form work so that it is recognizable and has a sense of lyrical song, all the while staying true to Venclova’s dense interplay of images, allusions and meditative thoughts. Even then, multiple rewrites are necessary before it all starts to fit together into the organic whole it is meant to be. Tomas always provides helpful comments and context. With these poems, I have also benefited from the suggestions of Ellen Hinsey, who is putting together a new manuscript of Venclova’s poems in English (these included). I can think of one place here where I am resisting her suggestion: the word “orangeade” in “Prehistory.” She felt it was too anachronistic, too modern for the WWII era of that part of the poem. She had a point, and I changed it. But it bothered me that Tomas uses the word “oranžadas.” Further research showed this to be a transliterated loanword from French which can be found in Proust. So I put the word back. There are many moments like this in his poems, and I must admit I kind of love that about them. True, there is a masochistic side to such work, but when a translation of a Venclova poem starts clicking, there’s really nothing like it.