At the Café Huracán across from Salomeja Neris (“The Traitor”) High School
Pietro’s cigar smoke hardly made a dent in the air.
This is Griselda, he said (I think), leaning back
on the wooden bench, saying – your colleague,
Vilnius University, Lithuanian philology.
But you’re in translation studies, poetry, yes?
Yes, but I don’t think Griselda was impressed,
her hair settled to the tonal range of our clouds,
her body swaddled tight against the sharp
autumn day, her smile making me hunch
like the wind that whipped the roofs of German Street
as she mentioned how happy she was that Latakas won
the Jotvingian Prize this year (he seems post-modernly
atavistic to me, which, I admit, is kind of interesting),
and how she loves Stankevičius no matter what anyone says
(ah, it starts to make sense, I thought: the old lady who loves
the powerfully elevated voice, the one which I once
tried to capture in English, but it fled from me like Keats’ bird),
and she talked of living in this Soviet block-building
(built over the ghetto’s ruins) as a young woman,
of how Širvys came to her apartment to watch soccer
because he never had a TV, how Vačiūnaitė lived
just upstairs, how Marcinkevičius would drop by,
how so-and-so would play chess with her,
and so-and-so brought so many books from the library
(ones that were not so easy to get, I was meant to understand),
and she would read and read, a straight A book nerd
reminiscing about the house with the writers –
because the Soviets liked to keep them
all in one place. Oh the impromptu recitals!
The parties they had! The memory of Vačiūnaitė
giving birth before her very eyes made
those now dimmed salon lights sparkle and flare
like candles before they go out. The memory
of the lesser poet jumping off the balcony
brought the shadow of a broken body
to the mirror of her memory. But it was all
as it had to be, for this is what is expected of poets.
And you couldn’t help but feel that this had been
the best time of her life, even as the translator
from Italy tried to moderate her: “That’s how it looks
to you now.” But I knew that’s how it was for her,
the young woman in love with words
fawning over the inspired native tongues
of a colonized nation (remember how Sartre
told Plečkaitis they should write in Russian),
being accepted even if it meant smuggling
Širvys’s booze into the Vilnius Žalgiris match
because he was too big to be caught with such a thing,
and she, well, she was she and is still so.
I don’t think she ever moved out.
–Rimas Uzgiris
Rimas Uzgiris is a poet and translator, author of North of Paradise (Kelsay Books), Tarp (poems translated into Lithuanian), translator of eight poetry collections from Lithuanian, and the Venice Biennale Golden Lion winning opera Sun and Sea. Uzgiris was born and raised in the USA, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant and NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.