Post by moira on Oct 15, 2008 23:43:15 GMT 2
Giedre Kazlauskaite
introduced by J. C. Todd
Giedre Kazlauskaite was born in Vilkaviskis, Lithuania, in 1980. As a youth, she studied art in Vilnius at the M. K. Ciurlionis National School of Art (1991 - 1995) during the early years of Lithuania’s independence from the USSR. She has graduated from Vilnius University where she studied Lithuanian philology. Her honors include the 2000 Poetry Spring prize for the best debut in poetry and publication of her first novel, Farewell, School in 2001.
As part of a comentary on the state of poetry in Lithuanian after independence, Giedre Kazlauskaite wrote:
Lithuanian literature has experienced quite distinct ruin after Independence. The political situation provoked enthusiasm at the beginning, but later the literature was pushed out and other spheres got the larger interest of society. During the Soviet time, poetry was adored and meaningful: people were buying and reading books that were published in enormous printings. Poetry was a way to catch ideas hovering among intellectuals, to feel the thought and reflection of the nation's enlightened persons. Poetry often used the fabulist language of “Aesop,” encoding language to express ideas which were officially forbidden, so it became a bit hermetical and isolated. Poets read all the foreign literature they could get through the Iron Curtain. There was a passion to write because it was necessary. Now, that reason is not so important. I think a post-modern attitude at last has come. Young people are writing, but they don't see any noble mission in it. It gives no pragmatic advantage, no popularity, no honour. (As it did in Soviet times.) To write now is just an instinct. I won't say contemporary foreign literature doesn't have any influence, but not everybody reads it with such passion and interest as before, because everything is easily accessible now.
Poetry is looking for new forms of expression and the opportunity to find its niche in forming the national mentality.
Giedre Kazlauskaite
Translated by J.C. Todd
Antipoet
I don't read anything, I don't write poems
I'm picking up the bodies of starved mice
knotting them together by their tails, twirling them in air
I'm the hardened snob, the face I show, arrogance
I toss into the air the corpse-copter of boy-mice
and am left behind, virgin among flax
so tall, sky is in them
as in a cornfield, I'm lost in the flax
I'l1 die here without a sign that I've lived
that I dangled by their tails my only child
just the rumbling rotor of the dead wreath
the mice flying over the broad fields
Night insect, the one who cannot burn
The Prodigy: “Music for the Jilted Generation. ” At 4 a. m.
Brown guy— he can't read— on the keyboard (oh, if only it were a piano) creeps from the keys' squared mountains toward the programmable chips. (I obey blindly, pushing the keys he has tapped.)
A nation of shepherds has walked out of Egypt. One giant, pursuing, has pricked the sole of his foot on a pyramid's tip. Into the footprint he tramped, the Red Sea drips. To die. But for the insect, there is no hope of death.
When the sheep herders stopped to rest at the end of the dark, a column of fire, colossal, shot up from the night-blackened sand.
The wings of night's insect cannot be singed although he rests, respectful, against the screen, flogging himself and flaming in reading's cool passion.
*
Previously published in The Drunken Boat[/i] 2:iv Ed. Rebecca Seiferle.
www.thedrunkenboat.com/kazlauskaite.html
[/font]