(born 1919)
A L'OMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEUR
Cold sprays of lilac melted,
and in the frail drugged evening
vaguely somehow disquieted of what?
we trembled, as the doors would quarrel in fifths
and octaves and then suddenly
we heard their voices pulpable as flame:
And they call us! And as if we had penetrated
sign and enigma of their bodies' contour,
each night, fell into nightlong dreams
of archipelagoes and their strange islands,
joyous processions, bent, narrow streets.
And with hands unawakened,
played with the pure sand of the amphitheatre
of their configured waists and haunches.
Our reveries adorned them
with fair hair, russet lashes,
profiles of cameos, lethal gowns
and hands that shone like soundless crystal.
Now we feared only their strange fragrance,
motion and form, like those of vessels.
In the orchard, gathered under trees,
we would play, as we listened
to plashing water that unclothed us,
timid, always regretful, why they didn't
leave us and run away.
Then by pure chance our glances come together
eye to eye. We would run, startled,
and not know why. And afterward
for a long time, avoided home. Or there,
wandered from room to room, loitered at doors
and paused at mirrors we who had learned all
the hermetic curves and labyrinthine bodies.
Our dread, the smile of walls and windows
and of the mother. Strange, her gentle rustling!
...Unable now to silence in ourselves
the sure voice of the tree of knowledge.
Translated by Clark Mills
INFERNO
Leave all despair, who enter here.
(Comte de Lautreamont)
To. J.G.
Through dark streams of the cerebral complex I penetrate a season
that was not in the world,
gray-horizoned, with ardent trees
(like ours, their roots more powerful than their trunks),
where my friend Hermes, the Aurora Gate in his eyes, sins the
sheen of your hair,
and sun the scarlet domino of the carnival of our time
fixed in green polar ice, listens to him.
The bells of the Virgin's month that toll (under the earth);
the Mystical Rose, my Mystical Rose, Queen of Immaculate Time
(under the earth), meet us.
Wild birds that would each autumn wrench us from dark-haired
shadowy places;
fatherly errant parabolas of the familiar shadows of the rooms
of youth
and of the closing wooden doors,
parabolas that filled the evenings of the departed, meet us
(under the earth).
Thus my arrival at a melancholy town.
A saint, his hand somewhat corroded, stops me, cries: "You know
here's Inferno!"
Yes! This journey's not my first. And in my mind's eye rises
The First Circle: Shannon, the waiter from Perpignan, and the
doomed, with ciphers on their faces.
But I go forward. I do not turn back.
A street of dust under my feet,
I see this woman, joyous it may be, my mother.
At the rotten parapet of the bridge I find again, as in the mirror
in my native home, Yvonne de Galais who waits, her hair
mournfully fair;
she tells me that The Memory of Mortefontaine, in velvet
darkness, sleeps like a pearl that glimmers
the full red moon drowned in the veins of a tree.
Wrapped close about the house, but dry already lies the river.
Only the lake has grown still more, both from sorrow and rain.
With keener glance, one glimpses in the water the outline of
a church, like a drowned man, snail- and weed-bedecked.
I put my ear to the earth. I listen.
Clad in their small white shirts, the choir of moles continue with
their singing:
In your world only the ironic forms of recollections live
Eumenides, the world has died, your God exists no more.
Beside the yellow churchyard gate, in a Soutine-red jacket, stands
a young drummer.
Girls, their breasts quite hidden,
their bodies formless, and as if they had been mothers long before,
lead forth a faceless bride, in whose still childlike flesh wee see
a numerous family and a wooden table.
This is the Last Supper. The last bread and water.
A dry Garden of Gethsemane rustles beyond the pane.
In small white shirts, alas, the moles' choir sings the hitherto
joyless Epithalamium.
Faces. Bells. Faces. Bells.
And a beggar bird, his cap on his knees.
He would stand up as we approach, but leaves, wind-driven, close
our eyes, and he vanishes without a word.
In her body we find the silhouette of a ruined house.
Diligent as a little shepherd, a gray worm, that has constructed
something with great care in the antechamber, starts.
He opens the door and, his face covered with tears, leads me into
the room. There in the middle of the floor lies in pieces in
a broken mirror my face.
Behind the table sit the brothers. But they no longer know me.
Across the floor scurries the mouse from Gorki's book,
the one that we would once have raised into a horse
to ride into more light. That, God did not allow.
Thus we remained, our hope of liberation smothered
in wretchedness to us senseless, to others, sanctified.
Mother sits by the wall and thinks, perhaps, how every spring my
father dreamed of sailing-ships and winds.
Then suddenly she lifts her eyes, and says,
"You didn't bring us God?"
No. I could not find Him anywhere.
Still, my wish is to console them (you will rise again);
but the worm outside the door resumes the song,
and I, who understand that the joy of oblivion has been, for them,
still greater than their hope for eternal being,
I burn for a long time with a bizarre illusion,
that, dead, I shall call up my sleeping angels from the sand, and
in time's distant reaches overtake the angel of Bellini
who bears on his enormous wings their bodies up to God,
and thus after a hard struggle, bring lost paradise to them
heavens that open simply to the key of iron, and the footprint's
echo upon the earth.
Translated by Clark Mills
THE SYMPHONY OF DISPOSSESSION
The dimmed, dismal fields of fall, brimming with the strange dark
light
That cramps the heart, again sink into the croaking of the crows.
Turned into elements of the season, plovers thrash in the fields
And the heavy drops of autumn knock against me like stones.
There, at the very edge of the fields, on the ground of my blood,
stands a large family of birches,
The only one close to me left in the world,
On the hill, like a crowd of clerics in yellow cloaks hooded against
the sun and rain.
A frozen bird hears that the fields are a shoreless scream
Which, after a number of years, I felt today again.
Oh, it was such a dark and windy night. Yellow trees coldly spread
their branches above my head.
Or a deep midday. Fire. And I, drenched with rain, stand dirty
beside the earth-stained rocks ...
But the earth then with its passion didn't let me feel the sadness
And I remember one coldly clear fall day, like a goblet filled
With fields, houses, heaven and the orchard's yellow leaves.
I slept there once, in the empty field, wedded to the wind, alone
In the abysses of the skies; the earth whispered in my dreams: "No
one will take you from me!"
But when I came home the walls began to cry out
And the doors to lead me from home into the night,
There, where in darkness stared hungry faces of light and eyes sunk
in metaphysical despair,
Across the fields a depleted band of children, holding books like
lanterns, ran to defeat the night.
But they, fighting on their journey like heroes, went blind
And, after a long search, were led home by poverty, the loyal brother.
But I left those distant fields, running away
With November and the failing flame beneath his feet.
Today I toss about like a plover who has lost the autumn fields,
Because I did not escape myself and the melancholy that came
with birth.
Again I hear the incomprehensible whispers of the path
That led me and others from my village across the echoing fields,
Where I was led by Father, Mother, and Melancholy that followed
like a dog through the fields,
Who brought to me the words of courage and of hope.
On the blind horizon a wooden town lies fallen in the dirt, faded as
Mother's hair, familiar.
Melancholy, hidden in every house, watched my first proud steps.
And I was Columbus. I was the king of Sparta.
And the emperor in the chariot of victory.
Now a stranger's autumn meets me by the stone house gate,
And giant maples which rustled once above the light head of the
runner.
Today, wrathfully wrathfully roaring, again they scold,
Seeing the one who returns after losing this life's last battle.
By the town's belfry stand seven old lindens with heads bowed,
A rotting bridge and brambles with loose hair wading in the water,
A blind well hiding beneath the trees,
And alders with torn leaves standing alone by the river.
With wrinkled foreheads cemeteries lie prone on the ground hiding
their faces,
Watching and waiting for something, they steal glances at the distant
fields,
And with a strange joy believe that leaves, my son, will fall soon also
on your breast,
And an old oak will rustle in the night.
Chestnuts bent with age huddle around the churchyard
And with malice and reproach fling leaves beneath my feet ...
And saddened, angry, as if in one symphony by Schumann,
Biting back their tears, wail: "Only now do you return ..."
Houses, sandy streets, steps washed with rain and sun ...
Only Marc Chagall's violinist no longer plays today with tragic eyes,
But his terrible eyes still burn in my soul,
And the leaf that fell in childhood still weighs heavy on my heart.
In the evening I watched how the city lights glowed beneath the
black veil
As if I had had an amazed clear vision of Eldorado.
It was then that a tired old Jew dragged himself home along the roads
With bread, melancholy and contempt on his bent shoulders.
Who will tell me, who will explain, why I carried melancholy with
my books from home,
And painful joy to knock through autumn into the light?
Now I only feel that other hopeless, absurd twitching of the body
That wanders through feelings empty as autumn's fields.
Someone calls out to me today: "The Sun sings! Don't believe it!
It's an illusion!"
If I am a powerful beacon I know why I today still fall into
eternal darkness.
The sun sings. Yes! That's her song not yours!
And my body is filled with her powerful rays!
Who will dim my thirst for life and joy
That I felt once awakening and hearing autumn in the house of my
birth
That held and carried me in its arms while I prayed
With the heard melody of existence, as quiet as the orchard's rustling.
Today I would like to return from the hours of emptiness,
Though I know that on your knees remain the warm dreams I brought.
The fire will have returned, the dirt floor. Unfriendly and foreign.
Pale as a dead mother.
And in the light of lost days, powerful despair will rustle like the oak.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE FOURTH ELEGY
The winter light would ramble in and call out
As if to say goodbye before it drifted into distances.
I nuzzled more deeply into the shabby clothes
And could not understand why my delicate soul
Hurt so much with longing and the cold;
I opened the secret drawer in the faded table
Searching for something to help me with the pain
And felt that life had also injured me.
And in the room sat mother, tortured by the mad light;
Stooped Time wrote secret signs on the walls and on things,
And they watched quiet, dreadfully sad,
Fixing their blind faces on mine.
But I couldn't see. I plunged and roamed within myself
Until I woke, flooded by heavy unease.
Raising my head I saw how Time drank in the wells of my mother's eyes
And, frightened, I wailed in woe.
Afterwards I long looked into her blue eyes, still afraid,
Sitting on her knees
And saw hidden there the blue heavens of her dreams,
The half-naked wind running down the endless meadow roads,
The birth-house, now no longer hers,
In the bleak landscape, on spring's soft hill,
And a small girl with eyes the color of running water,
Violets clenched in her small hands, walking home.
And only then I understood how terribly and hopelessly
Nature neglects the man born on the dusty dirt floor.
Over February's ice-choked bloody river
Stood a silver bridge with large curved arches.
The polar sunset held a black coffin in its arms heaven;
Trees ran to the house from the fields like a pack of barefoot martyrs,
And in the room mother sat gloomy by the window,
And the trembling winter light called out to me and stared.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
MIDDAY
Hands wait forever.
On the table remain
Blue hyacinths, in the eyes
Stains of dusty lips,
And the equations
Of your joy, written
With the cold chalk of memory,
On the blackboard of being.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
CHILDHOOD
As I was sleeping alone someone cried out: Get up!
And I found spring walking through the house with the wind.
Today I am even more hungry;
The fields already smell of spring,
But you do not get up ... And I begin to sing.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
MENTOR
The night they, on returning from the festival,
Still singing and dancing
By torches and flutes, the wine of drunken
Bacchantes bloodying their lips,
Would not stop for a drink
At my well, I knew then
Our time was over,
I had ceased to be their longing and their nourishment,
They had found
Their own longing and pain;
Now they would be able to live
On their own and be themselves, I left the village
Before dawn to prowl elsewhere,
Stalking new quarry I would be giving up.
Translated by Vyt Bakaitis
SYMPTOMS OF SPRING
Fields suddenly no longer fit
The window, or within the orbit
Of a playing child's palm.
Your fingers
Begin to resemble a willow's,
And Hesiod's snail
Shows up in your path
With a house on its back.
Having lost their purpose,
Theories of size and speed
Die out.
Translated by Vyt Bakaitis
PARTY
Wer spricht von Siegen? Ueberstehn ist alles.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The dancer's impact on the drunk
is vague, ambiguous:
the totem of her body floats in air,
almost abstract, and changes
their shapes and distances destroys
their selfishness to be apart,
to be somewhere,
to be a world.
An arm about the shoulders of a smile
enfolds the distant spaces
that fill the fall of dusk. A voice in snatches:
"Why did you come? Don't touch my hands!
Could I have said all that? Forget it!"
And then a cry, prolonged and hopeless.
The body of the dancer floats
abstract in air.
Translated by Clark Mills
WINTER ELEGY
Winter Your final letter. Sorrowful and no longer possible
to answer. Dated by footsteps on the road,
frozen, illegible
between the flesh and the eternal.
And the locale, the dead expanse in the avenue
of the central nerve
witnesses of fulfillment and the terminal joy.
And night approaches.
Branches of trees, branches of night
like the huge body's fibers, crouched
over the cup You had to empty,
vessel of Charon's boat forsaken, sickle crowned
with ears of grain and a night wane of russet; cup
we never dared to drink. Down that street
a bird walks, ears and feet wrapped up
against the cold. Its eyes
reddened with sunset, gnawed by tears.
Why does it move? Why does it not change to a stone?
And You reply: Et in Arcadia ego.
Snow falls into the black
arable mound. It is Your words: "Beloved son!"
They ring, gray as an evening, landscape under the snow
with orphanage, the naked trees of the allee.
Remote, the drowned configurations of a village
and on the mountain, in the violet sun,
an ash, trembling.
And then Penelope, who sweeps the paths:
"Never do you return
home, and your face remains
hidden by distances larger than eternity,
heavier than my cry.
I waited, but you did not wait for me.
Transformed, you change into a bitter word of absence,
giving no reason as you veiled your eyes.
Today the path to the eternal leads, as ever,
past the splotched graveyard of a wooden town,
and as before, still wider than the graveyard.
As you go, close your ears: they bury there
Your first word and your final word. Jackdaws
weep under a torn umbrella. (You know them.)
Returning, never call me: It might be
I would betray my dream of the eternal.
Do not melt back in memories! Tears already
have changed to ice and stone. Night that in those days ended
with my steps risen on the cold antechamber floor
was and remains the resurrection."
The sleigh flies on the high road in the dusk.
Rising and falling in the mist, its grace
embodies forth your contour and ideas.
(The horse's hooves cut letters that write joy.
The highway on a winter night
is a frail miracle of song.)
A childhood intermezzo: Night moves close.
I walk over a frozen stream. The willows howl.
Alders enfolded in their cloaks of black lace
follow my steps. Then Your voice sounds.
Your voice, voice of the landscape,
voice of the tree, of faith and resurrection.
Bread covered with hoarfrost on the table,
still on the wall - the shadow of your hands
held out for water, is your word: "Farewell,
my son," which rings
from all the landscape, with its meaning
that I have never learned.
Translated by Algirdas Landsbergis
INSOMNIA
In the muffled flow of arteries
And veins I hear how fish
Talk at night in the lake,
That the old redthroat has died,
That the snow has already finished covering
The path to our door and that in
Your wrinkled hand burns
The red fuschia antinomy
Of time and space to decorate
The day coming to an end on the cold horizon
And the gravestone prepared for us.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
ISEUT LA BLONDE
You were as gray as the last
Wednesday in March, with a checkered
Apron that smelled of whey, with hands
So chapped they bled and a young
Sparrowhawk's eyes in the kitchen with a shabby
Table and earthenware pots on the shelves.
But yet I forgive me, if you still can
Not wanting to accept you for what you were,
Called you Iseut la Blonde and wanted
To transfer you to my cold world
Of books, because I was then
Only a meaningless word in search of myself,
Not yet the wound I have now become.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
RESIGNATION
Why are you still fighting with me?
Forget it and don't listen. I long ago became
Like that bird in the impoverished landscape
Who, his mate dead, does not search for
Another and sings alone until death
To the valley's alder trees and willows.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
YOUR THIGHS WERE
Your thighs were
Like two rivers
Flowing into one another
O mystical Rose!
And injured
It was not your body that fell
But the word, and it was not your eyes
That wept but time,
Which you had not yet lived.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
MEETINGS AND SEPARATIONS
Meetings and separations
The rhythm of life and death.
The train in the Utena Station and
The Via Dolorosa on the mystical Kaunas street
Where having stopped by a well Jesus drinks
Blood from a rusted cup.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
EASTERN SHORE
I searched for a long time for a name
For these flatlands,
For this day
O eternal repetition!
In my own language,
And today it was revealed to me
By two mute hawks
Perched on the chapel's roof
(Mourning someone)
As they looked at one another.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
ORION NIGHT
That night
I was awakened by the sudden
Barking of Orion's dogs.
Right here.
But I was afraid
To go out and disturb
The boundary of the forbidden wheel:
To be born once more.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE FISHERMAN'S BALLAD
The Highlands.
Near the lake echoes
A sad song:
A fisherman caught
A wondrous fish
With hair of hemp
And ruby eyelashes
In his birth lake
And buried it
On a high hill of pines.
At night on the high hill
Echoes the fisherman's song.
The fisherman has finished fishing.
His song goes on forever.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE DEAD
They play with our existence
And, in collusion
With cynical gods,
Govern us,
Secure in their nonexistence,
Inability to return and single purpose,
Smiling that for us
Today and tomorrow
Are not the same
That's why we must mourn
The living not the dead.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
DAY
Granite is closer
To summer and time
Than your body burned by sun.
In Silurian existence
I waited patiently
For the world flood
Teeming with water
Creatures,
Until hard day
Came again with the eyes
Of dead fish.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
MORNING MOMENTS
The road to the forest. A fox
Runs out and, head turned toward us,
Returns to the shadowed thicket.
Rye on both sides of the path, heavy
As a wall of lead, the cold sperm
Of morning spurts.
Barefoot daybreak comes in
Quietly and on the blanket draws
Your cubistic breast.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1986
I was born and grew up in a
Country created in my parents' imaginings.
I had my own
Home and my own name.
Now I live
In my own suitcase, having laid out
The things most necessary for every day
Miniature furniture and book
Shelves with my own
Discours de la methode,
With my own Sein und Zeit, with my own
Nearly worn out
Masks and without cessation
I cart myself on airplanes
And trains
(Occasionally send myself through the mail),
Trying to find a place
In being and time. Now
I call myself Killalusimeno.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
ALL SOULS DAY
A cold fall rain into the heavy
Granite of the heart. On the edge of blindness
The letters of your name in the yellow
Flicker of a candle. Faces
Threadbare as the weeping old woman's
Umbrella. And black melancholy.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
A THOUSAND YEARS
Time is born and dies
Between who I am and where I am,
Is reborn in death and lives again
In death, in the equations of equality
Of an instant and of pain.
That is why I have decided
To search for my purpose
And role in existence
Relying on the dialectical
Rhythm of meetings and
Separations, which is
A never-ending dialogue
In an unheard tongue.
I will wait a thousand years
For your next and final
Word.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
DUST
When I found you
Friendly familiar motes of dust
Were hanging on your red eyelashes.
Beyond the table with the cool pitchers of night
Daybreak burned and a black summer butterfly was sleeping
On your right breast.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
AUTUMN THOUGHTS
Blue thrushes
Sing a yellow day.
With golden nails
The hops cling to the blue sky.
Our sleepy hands smell
Of roads and potato plants. The air
Will soon turn to wine.
And I say to you:
Our life is a dream,
A dream in which you dream
That I am alive.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
ONE SPRING DAY ONCE
Your hair, moaning, melted away
In the lantern's mystical light and the pastorale
Of the gray water's murmuring, in the house
Where I, looking at the sun, grew up,
Where one night a magical bird descended.
But you did not see it. How could I have
Shown it to you? How? In the pen
The bored horses snorted. My father
Climbed heavily up the hill. On other side
Of the river a voice called out: "Did you find it?"
And another from farther off, like an echo: "No!"
That was the end of your long, hard and dull day,
For which I search now without stopping, even though a voice
On the other side of the river calls out: "No!"
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
A GIRL'S WORLD
When she walks
Bridges become more graceful. The riverbanks
And streets begin to play in the midday sun.
Towers decorate themselves
In their holiday best.
Things suddenly have no weight.
Sociology, politics, and economics
Die, and everything becomes
Erotica and theology.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
LEAVING THE CITY
I am not at all sad
To leave this city, where
Though I lived, during my stay
I brought no light and did not fight
For truth and freedom, did not love
My neighbor, only conscientiously
Paid my bills,
Complained about poor service
Without contributing to it in any way,
Demanded that criminals
Be punished ruthlessly,
Lived only for myself
Proclaiming my own truths. That's why
There is nothing here
That is mine. Nothing
To pity. But leaving
I would still like
To touch with my foreign hand
The head of the chickweed
That grows through the stones of the road.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
A GHOST ENCOUNTERS SOMEONE RETURNING FROM EXILE
After long wandering (the gates are already right here)
My hands began to be insensitive to the feel of things,
And I lay like a dried up tree
Near a foreign river, beneath unfamiliar stars.
Unfamiliar rain
Pitilessly lashed my skin;
The sun barely out,
I ran, afraid of its vengeance; at night
I dreamed about the clanging of weapons, bloody flags and marches,
I marched in columns with those condemned to die,
Knowing that their reality was only my dream;
But they left me, like an actor to applause,
And died alone and for themselves,
Afraid that I would betray them on the other side.
And I awoke like that, unseen by even the guard.
Unable to endure the emptiness
Most empty of the empty
Most naked of the naked
Back covered with the remnants of the argonaut's tunic,
I returned home. Near the gate an unfamiliar ghost said:
"You knew what crime is;
You knew the price of freedom, blood and slavery,
But did not know what you left behind: take it, all is yours.
Nothing has changed here.
Your weathervane is crucified. Your tree remained
And died without completing its last testament to you.
What a clear night! What rustling of water!
Your mother was buried in the vault of heaven
Because the earth was saturated with her sons' and your brothers'
Cain's and Abel's blood. Your sister Moonlight
Became a foreign soldier's concubine, and her children
Patrol the farthest borders of the Scythian's lands.
Your wife is still faithful and is waiting for you
Seven sons would not dry her tears,
Seven rivers would not wash away her shame
And the shirt she has woven to greet you she washes
In the blood of the Centaur Nessus.
What a night! What rustling of water!"
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE LAST DROP OF TIME
The last drop of time
Still undrunk fell heavily
Into the water of pain, and we had to
Separate
Without having begun
To live and die in one another's
Life and death, the way
Heraclitus taught, not yet having proved
The theorem of rain and lips
On the blackboard of the open body.
And only now have I learned
What exile is: gravestones
Silent in a foreign language,
And I will now have to write
Forever ex Ponto, knowing
That only the Silurian stone
Falling into the well
Speaks the way we do.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
VILNIUS 1943
On the sidewalk of pain the echo
Of metal footsteps. O bloody windows
And doors! The rusted martial music
Murdered the snow-covered
Words of this midday in March.
Bloody doorposts. Bloody
Middays and dawns; moonlight,
Windows and books;
The girl's fingers and piano keys,
Jardins sous la pluie,
Silence.
Mother undefiled! Rusted martial
Music tears our veins. A cautious
Gaon Street rat
(The contrabass joins in)
Having grabbed her disobedient children
Runs screaming: Thalassa!
Sea of blood!
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
SCHEHERAZADE'S GRAVE
The yellowed fingers of the ricket grass
In the April sky
Gently caress
Your grave
Deep as thirteen years.
I still lament
The treasure left in the mirror:
The windows absorbed your hair,
Lips and eyes,
Doors and walls,
Kindertotenlieder
And table
With the still-unopened
Moon's letter.
O joy of nonbeing!
Again I go down
The sidewalk of the madwoman's eyes
To the market square
Where prophetic eyes and
Hesperidian apples burn.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
RECOVERED TIME
Blind facades, deaf doors,
Disappointed hands and betrayed breasts.
Windows glazed with lamentations.
In the ecstasy of dawn and despair
Chestnuts not able to control their blossoms
Waited for me near the wall of pain
Like cicadas for the dead
The days are filled with birds,
Gregorian chorales
And the boys' choir of the cathedral of morning.
Do you remember? I lived in a cat's world
There, listening to the dialogue of window flies,
Trying to understand
The optimism of the carefree sparrow
And the sorrow of the aged horse. There
I became acquainted with a dog's existence: his worries, his works;
I knew his routine where he goes
What he searches for, why he's uneasy.
He was my Kant, my Lao-Tse,
My confidant and my friend:
I confessed to him
Fermina Marquez's love.
Now once again I walk
Along with the healed wounds of Kaunas streets,
Bogging down in the black mud
Of innocence. Lilacs covered the bloody balcony
Of the sky. The martyr's hand
Counts out the time in the tower clock.
The boys' (birds') choir of the cathedral of morning.
Adam ubehema toshia Adonai
The grass of hatred rustles.
Adonai! Adonai! He was born
And will never rise.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
LINDAU
On the map of sleeplessness I find
The place of our lodging Lindau
And the old hotel
With vases of geraniums
Beneath the windows and through heavy
Curtains once again I enter
The girl's sonorous dream filled
With erotic fragrances, obscenely nervous
Lines and gestures into the room
Where you lay then
Rings pulled off your fingers,
Naked before the wounded eye of Providence,
Not hiding and answering
No one, already having become
The dichotomy of space and time
Knowing that for us neither body
Nor time will become word.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE MIRACLE OF WINE
Water knew everything but was silent;
It was hard for it to keep
The secret of mindless joy,
Not allow itself
To open, but to be itself: fidelity to nature
And dusk, and silence,
And the house filled with the light of fulfillment.
In the patriarchal darkness, on the overturned amphora
A candle flickered, shielded by benumbed hands
And a smile, wanting to hide
The emerald burning on the hand
That had forgotten breasts, and lips
That no longer remembered lips:
And it knew everything but was silent,
Only the dancers waiting for the wedding procession and the sign,
Not knowing and not wanting to know, only to live,
The supple body remembered,
The linen warm as the earth and the strange
Song heated by flame.
Suddenly the water ignited to wine,
And twilights, branching into giant trees,
Wound around bodies; in the teeth and palate
The memory of a lost paradise awakened; hands
Remembered the breasts' resilience; lips
Felt the grapes, and like a withered blossom
Longing for eternity fell into the dust.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
MARCH
I still searched for your
Neglected silhouette in the dead window.
Your lips in the rain and your voice
In the loneliness of childhood's well; your steps'
Dark track in the sand,
Where the valley's blind echo laments
At the top of the black alder, near the path,
For the moon, robed for death by the wind.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
LIED
In the month of April, at night,
Despite the screeching of the sun,
We left for the north.
The strange talisman
On the girl's glittering arm
Grimly testified that longing
Would be hard for both of us.
Colors dissolved,
The numbers of birds increased,
And the sky more often
Reminded us of the blue of the dress
That danced around her knees,
Her unsmiling words,
Her pain in the gray beating
Of the seagulls' wings, and we
Understood then that she was dead.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
BEFORE DAWN
A narrow sickle of moon.
A smell of sweet-flag and duckweed
In the reed kingdom.
Darkness changed to whitish silence.
Night ladled up a silver treasure.
The Milky Way
Descended to earth:
On it, returning from town,
Trying to sing something,
Walks my father,
A belfry under his arm.
The contours of stands emerge
On the stage of day. Soon will be heard
The first strains of the sun's overture.
Dreamed cities
Fade slowly in the windows
And in the well's cool waters gleam
The shepherd boy's sleep-filled eyes.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE THEOLOGY OF RAIN
A girl's footsteps
In the silence of the old face
The inconsolable landscape
Where eyes
Paint the greenness black,
The erosion of being,
Unknown and never dried
Tears and the theologian
Rain's treatise to the roof
Panta rhei.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
UNFORGOTTEN PAIN
Hands wait forever.
On the table remain
Blue hyacinths, in the eyes
Stains of dusty lips,
And the equations
Of your joy, written
With the cold chalk of memory,
On the blackboard of being.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
PICASSO:
A GIRL WITH A FLUTTERING DOVE AND A BLIND MINOTAUR
It was night. Tall fishermen
Stood on the eyelashes of silence. The river
Sounded the power and longing
Of the season of flood.
The girl a large dove
With fluttering hair
Radiant and being
Wind and night and tree
Led the blind Minotaur by the hand
Through the landscape's naves
As if she were carrying a broken branch.
And we remained with the fishermen on shore,
Wept for her a long time
And wrung our hands:
Because who is the Girl leading
The blind Minotaur into the night? What is
The dove, fluttering in her hand?
And the line of the Minotaur's nostrils,
Equal expression of ambiguous pain?
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
MADONNA WITH FISH
My skin sings and my fingers recite
My mucilaginous memories. A body can never
Forget a body. Your voice that time spouted
Perfect and meaningless as morning in a vase, as a tree
With chiffre d'amour, which our lips and
Hands left behind in the rain. And your garment was white
As the underbelly feathers of a bird.
I lived like a god in the legends of morning's first light
And the green joy of treetop cathedrals
Of the blossoming maiden's Parthenon, where hornbeams grew
Only for me and the warm fragrance of berry stalks
Was the essence of being. I needed only myself
For protection against destiny. In the valley of your body
Burned a bush-bird and a bell sounded.
The pond roiled with a procession of fish with flags
And golden keys. (Having caught one I gave it to you,
Eternal beneath the bridge, o Madonna with fish!)
A boys' choir with red cassocks
Marched across the churchyard of your shoulders and neck. On the road,
Near my daughter's suicidal maple ignited by morning,
With living lamprey grubs in her hair and teeth,
Covering her naked breasts with a bouquet of
Marigolds, shouting something, danced
My incomparable riverside madonna Gemma.
The summer wind was Watteau; the cool room Vermeer.
Rivers fell into the eyes; bloodwort and sow-thistle. A millenium
Of flowers and the still-life of an open bureau
Sleeping on the porch, and the just-returned day
Was the enormous nimbus of your body,
Madonna with fish! Then for the first time
With a hand smelling of the slime of bleakfish,
I touched your still-unsure breasts and the
Cries of your undiscovered lips.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
THE LEGEND OF THE MIRROR
In childhood I lived
Surrounded by gods
Who were interested in the offspring of the one
Driven from paradise and, protected by no one,
I feared them.
Things curious and angry demigods tried
To live in my being, but I always waited
For your body to blossom beneath the window.
And that's how I, eternally struggling against them,
Fell in love with the mirror, which had entered
On tiptoe into my room to show me
The lines of pain,
Invisible to gods, on my face.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
I WOULD LIKE FOR US TO LIVE IN THE NORTH
I would like for us to live in the north.
Angry and damp
Winds would sit in the doorway beneath the elms
Singing and whistling
A song of summer we had not heard before.
A dream, a poisonous dream about summer,
Still in your eyes when you awaken,
Would flow into a river whose name we did not know.
For us, during the year, would be two months March and October;
Our months March and October.
We would go out with the March winds, naked as blood,
And when we return my gift to you would be
The clear drops from the spindle-tree's bark.
We would be alone, but our eyes would never be alone:
They would forever remain pure
(Eyes that grow up in the north are purer).
The spring rain with its grassy lips
Would touch your osier-encrusted hair,
And the spindle-tree's coarse blossoms would fall
(Blossoms grown from the cold black earth
Are always much purer). And you would keep watch,
Looking at the naked water of March,
Eyes filled with birds,
Listening to the unburied grass' bitter rustling
And would once again hear the dead link to the ground
(But be careful that your feet do not turn into roots,
So I do not leave you there like a tree
To solitude and earth, in which
Our mothers reawaken with the young lithe bodies of girls
On the Lethe's crystalline shores
Beneath a flow of rain that smells of snow).
A child blows a horn on a high precipice
And birch trees waken, not falling into my eye.
A body not having managed to hurry off
To eternity lies near the threshold.
Arriving we would look at the line of his lips
And our joy would blossom without end.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
FESTIVAL ELEGY
Burn! In my eye's membrane not even a reflection
Of that which was the festival remains. Burn!
Medea, Andromache and Jocasta
Were my sisters. Velvet twilights
And the baroque of dark green branches accompanied the joy of our escape:
Burn! Like flames on a green stage! Time
Feared your breasts; stopping near the water we saw
How ecstatic bodies sink within arches of triumph
In the fantastic nimbuses of bitter ruin. Burn!
They were your bodies: desiccated lips and poisonously radiant eyes
Did not want to be extinguished: Burn! Destiny,
Medea, Andromache and Jocasta, is our festival's completion.
Incest, mourning and transgression are equal,
Like words which are not touched by resonance.
Burn! In the empty landscapes of consciousness our bodies lay,
Heavy as stones. The blossoming girl's tree
Has dried out and casts no shadow. I wanted
To hide you from destiny, our festival, ringing bitterly.
Incest, mourning and transgression are the end of our festival;
Medea, Andromache and Jocasta,
My sisters.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
APRIL VIGIL
I had not yet been born in April
And my mother lay wounded on the blades of screaming,
Neglected, in meaningless solitude: everything was a wall.
The screaming became too sharp and she rose to leave.
And I listened how beneath my feet the blue-eyed worm
And its family ate the pure earth;
In black hood and philosopher's smile, the nihilist insect
Slowly chopped the awakening roots;
The unbaptised ancient stream
Prayed to the expelled gods of the house,
Recalling the familiar and eternal motion's meaning.
Drifting along the bank
(The unrepeatable and eternal motion),
The damp April wind
With a brilliant virtuoso's fingers touched
Her skin, returning
The form of a body as yet opened to none.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
A TREE FROM GREEN POINT
In the hour of limitation and dispossession
God's awakened hands will touch you again
And you will once more be the redheaded tree from Green Point,
Planted in the black earth of the depths of night.
My stones, as formless as children,
My hands' marks on the alder's bark,
My eyes, which clouded over suddenly before night,
My lips, left on the skin of a body that did not come,
My footprints, which did not heal in my native land,
Will come to touch your body
And you will blossom.
I will be a river
Blind and thick with silt,
Routing around your roots,
Clear and transparent as a shadow,
Singing quiet songs to solitude.
I will be the first rain underneath the sunflowers
Unfulfillment, having turned into rain;
Rain thick, sticky and filled with snails;
Flowing down your body,
Washing away the dust of unfamiliar hands;
In your hair and the shells of your ears,
Washing away the passion of unfamiliar lips;
On your northern breasts and the lines of your belly,
Washing away uninterrable joy
Which I feared so deeply and so long.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
VIGILIA NONA
The gentle song of spring rain
That arrived suddenly with the March winds,
And the moon-colored murmur of water
Constricted my blood with mucilaginous fingers
And we could not breathe,
And we could not dream:
Our bodies transformed into damp boles,
Hungry for sun, wind and fire,
Hungry to cast off the old bark,
Hungry to fly and dream,
Hungry to spread wide and wither.
While in the evenings, the rains passed,
We would sit along the platinum river
Watching how the moon climbed
Up the slippery trunk of the silhouette
Of a willow reflected in the water.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
ONEIRIC MELODY
For a thousand and one nights we
Dreamed together in Harlequin's black kingdom,
In the disobedient doll's house, until they tied
Her hair up on top of her head,
Covered her breasts with silk and, sitting her down
Before the mirror in a hall of heavy candelabras,
Dressed her for a distant journey, having left me
In the angry disobedient doll's house,
In the angry disobedient doll's house,
In masked Harlequin's oneiric kingdom
Beyond the nine rivers, beyond the forests
With porcelain nymphs and fauns
To protect her secret, which
I cannot reveal even to this day.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
BERLIN IMPROVISATION
The winter light would ramble in and call out
As if to say goodbye before it drifted into distances.
I nuzzled more deeply into the shabby clothes
And could not understand why my delicate soul
Hurt so much with longing and the cold;
I opened the secret drawer in the faded table
Searching for something to help me with the pain
And felt that life had also injured me.
And in the room sat mother, tortured by the mad light;
Stooped Time wrote secret signs on the walls and on things,
And they watched quiet, dreadfully sad,
Fixing their blind faces on mine.
But I couldn't see. I plunged and roamed within myself
Until I woke, flooded by heavy unease.
Raising my head I saw how Time drank in the wells of my mother's eyes
And, frightened, I wailed in woe.
Afterwards I long looked into her blue eyes, still afraid
Sitting on her knees
And saw hidden there the blue heavens of her dreams,
The half-naked wind running down the endless meadow roads,
The birth-house, now no longer hers,
In the bleak landscape, on spring's soft hill,
And a small girl with eyes the color of running water,
Violets clenched in her small hands, walking home.
And only then I understood how terribly and hopelessly
Nature neglects the man born on the dusty dirt floor.
Over February's ice-choked bloody river
Stood a silver bridge with large curved arches.
The polar sunset held a black coffin in its arms heaven;
Trees ran to the house from the fields like a pack of barefoot martyrs,
And in the room mother sat gloomy by the window
And in the trembling winter light called out to me.
Translated by Jonas Zdanys
EMPTY EXISTENCE
Empty as yesterday's
newspaper, Lord,
in your world.
But we read it and dress
our old wounds, stage lost fights
with the enemy
who will never be coming to wash
outworn vanity,
attempting to renew the shame
and pain in our brothers body.
Lord, we shall not last long!
The monuments crumble! Lord, we shall not have enough
pain and anger
to renew the dominion of death
since we fight with ourselves.
Translated by Lionginas Pažūsis
THE BLIND MAN TALKS ABOUT HIS HOME
You asked, what did I find when I came home
(Even though you wouldn't lead me)
The wind led me home by the hand
And the ancient bird told me not to fret
I found there my mother's Sunday prayers and your
Lonely footsteps in the empty rooms.
Mid-day I listened to the octaves of approaching rain
Under the lindens with a blind bird.
After that I lay down on the porch steps; they pounded
And beat like a live heart in the chest.
It is an amazing language because you can hear it,
Though deaf and blind, with your own blood and veins.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
HOME
The cat rubs against my dusty outstretched legs.
On the table lie my miraculous books,
Still being read. I lean my elbows against light and solitude.
Mother sleeps beyond the wall (the wind no longer wakes her);
I live for the swelling of deep night in my house.
Beyond the window is the evening with its rustling shadows.
Someone comes, sits, listens for the hymn of rustlings in the dead of night.
Twilight comes home (it is never late)
And hides everything within the center of the deep and wide.
The clock still talks in the corner and the lamp decorated with paper
Shines in my eyes with the light that hides poverty.
It is dreary and empty like before a holiday...
But you do not want to live with me in a house
That was the only truth we had in this world.
The doors fly open like a childhood storybook.
Father and Sister walk in he with winter in his hair, she with spring in her face.
The light shines on them. The hungry night watches through the window,
And I, remembering something, shake with trepidation.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
THE CITY
Ce qui dit à l'un: "Sépulture!"
Dit à l autre: "Vie et Splendeur!"
Charles Baudelaire
Life is clever. It knows how to take away
Your country, your mother, and your home, hidden deep inside you
And in the twilight there is no room left for the place of your childhood
And you cannot cry it out, shattered, amidst the whirr of your orchard.
And they say, there is no point to living ... So be it!
Having lost everything stories, faraway bruises,
Like Don Quixote, having lost the battle with the windmills,
Humiliated, disarmed, wounded, I go
Into the street, the step-mother of the homeless who will never go home,
With a smile In the whole wide world only you alone are left!
And it is all the same to me and in my heart placards hang,
And my mother's lullaby searches for me.
So why shouldn't I sing (I have nothing left on this earth),
While the sun my mother, my native home shines!
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
THE TRIP TO UNKNOWN LANDS
I pack her summer's light and joy,
Faces melted in the dark;
Next to her I lie desperate shouting,
The ringing of an unfulfilled echo.
I put in the sun too, and a poor view of the town,
And the raindrops I collected from the windowsill as a child,
And a princess's hand similar to a smile,
And bags of stories brought by elves.
And I give her up to the homeless wind
To carry alone to unknown lands
And after that no one knew where they had gone,
Only the heart remained behind hungry.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
A QUIET DAY
There is nothing left in the quiet. Only your voice
Rings lonely in the grass and your footsteps
Quietly move along the shoreline
While the sun burns the earth.
There is nothing left in the quiet. A golden morning.
I search for you around the house. The wild sun
Strokes the familiar day.
I long for your hair.
There is nothing left in the quiet. Your not being here
Growls terribly in the grass, and your hands,
The gentle tones of your face,
Fade together with me.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
MELANCHOLY
The sharp cries of birds still call me
To return to your song. The cattails swing
The murdered lake's pain;
The haddock expires on the shore.
The moon calls you, having wandered over though the forests;
The chickweed wails in the yard (only no one hears it);
The guilty mirror.
Your golden forehead.
Moss grows in the scent of the rotting trees.
At night an austere gnome runs over screeching:
Alone on the pole in the valley
The fish died under the willow.
The sharp cries of birds still call me
To return to your dawn. The rain forgot
Time's walls and windows,
The hands forgot the door.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
WHEN WE SAID GOOD-BYE THAT TIME
When we said good-bye that time because you
Wanted to defend yourself and not to love
Do you remember, on the top of the sickly
Chestnut tree the black thrush shrieked;
Inside the rooms I could hear the speechless rusting
Of clothing could be heard, and I did not know
If one day I would be afraid to meet you
Eye to eye because right now I'm afraid
Not only of you, but of myself, and everything
That was ours: Our past.
I live here alone and busy myself
With household work done alone and with my own
Life and death. I measure the oil
In time not cramped by the clock and the calendar.
Sometimes I go out to the town,
Where no one ever looks you in the eye
And no one ever answers. They are only open
In the cemetery where indiscreet
Crosses and sedge born of the dryness
Give away their names, but already too late.
That's why I decided to stay here,
Where everything is like huge
Frozen eyes that stare at me day and night.
But being forced to be quiet is much easier
Than the freedom to pray to foreign gods
(There are no other kind). I sometimes cry: not over you
But over me: that I never even knew anything
About you except for your name,
And that until now you have left me only your voice
From across the river, which I can't lean on
In my loneliness.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
RESIGNATION
Why do you persist in fighting with me?
Forget about it and don't ask. For a long time now
I have been like that bird in the barren landscape
Who, when his mate dies, no longer looks for
Another, and lonely unto his death sings
To the valley's alders and willows.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
EN ROUTE TO DAMASCUS
If you are from my land,
Why do you talk so much? You know, our blood
Talks in silence.
But, be patient, because if not you,
Then your descendants,
Will speak up. Because right now we are all still
Only en route to Damascus.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
THE LOST DAY
For many years now I fight,
Wanting to save that hard
Overcast April day;
But there are so few words.
It was mid-day (it could have been Easter);
A cold wind was blowing,
Cutting through my veins.
The water had already returned
To its bed, and the fields were brimming with puddles,
Stinking of consumption and hopelessness;
On the surface
Clouds flew past on swift steeds.
And the dizzy rows of geese
Returned to the north.
Then I ran along the cold river path,
Alone and neglected, calling:
Lord, how do I get out,
How do I get out of nature's prison?
How do I defend myself
From your persecuting voice,
Calling from death's hollow.
Translated by Laima Sruoginis
SONG OF THE JOURNEY
When leaves fall, I take off again.
Just a few days more of abstracted sitting.
I'll press close to every tree along the way
And bid each bird goodbye.
I'll have given everything that's mine to the winds.
Wind and rain will scour the house wall. All night long,
Silver moonlight will squat alone under my sill,
While a full, frost-struck moon shudders in the mirror.
Translated by Vyt Bakaitis
A CHEERFUL FUNERAL (TITIAN)
Shadows bore her body long ago
Along green byways.
A breeze that loved her followed,
Bent under a burden of blossoms.
Young men with piercing smiles
Came playing through the fields,
Then one Venetian by himself,
His hair pale as full moonlight.
And a faun whistled, softly;
Young, drunk, and with horns.
The flute woke to his fingers,
As did gazelles etched on the urn.
So they buried her under a tree
At the foot of sacred Venus.
The faun came back from Cythera,
Soaked through with fallen stars.
Translated by Vyt Bakaitis
POLITICS
We should be learning politics
From the elephant who runs
In fear of a mouse, or from the child
Who, while the tide comes in,
Builds his house in the sand.
We should be learning politics
From the equally indifferent way a clock
Measures all gain and loss, or how
The moon across millions of years
Gives off a foreign light.
But we do not need to learn politics
From either the fox or the wolf,
Especially not from the living heroes
Who teach us
How easy it is to die for a country,
For the politics is
Not in the dying, but in living and staying alive.
Translated by Vyt Bakaitis
|
Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas was born in Utena, in the highland region of eastern Lithuania, where he uninterruptedly spent his childhood. Nyka-Niliūnas draws his poetic strength draws from the landscape and natural phenomena of his native home, and closely allies himself with other Lithuanian poets from the same region (Baranauskas, Miškinis). A member of Bradūnas' "Earth" literary movement, Nyka-Niliūnas began studying romance languages and philosophy at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, later transferring to Vilnius University. In 1944, as the Soviet front encroached upon Lithuania, Nyka-Niliūnas escaped to Germany, where he lived in Displaced Persons camps until 1949, furthering his studies at Tubingen and Freiburg universities. In the 1950's Nyka-Niliūnas emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a manual laborer for a number of years, and continued writing and publishing collections of poetry, and writing for the ιmigrι press. During his writing career Nyka-Niliūnas has published five collections of poetry in the Diaspora, and has translated Shakespeare (Hamlet), T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land), Perse, Dante and Virgil into Lithuanian. |
