TOMAS VENCLOVA AND W. S. MERWIN
Robert
Faggen:
This evening we w ill have
W.
S. Merwin
and
Tomas
Venclova
read to us.
Tomas
Venclova :
I write in Lithuanian, which is a beautifi.ll language but
most of the audience is not familiar w ith it. So my former student, friend, and
translator,
Diana Senechal,
wil l read my work in Engli sh. But before each
poem I will make a few comments, because some of them touch on esoteric
topics of Eastern European hi story, and of my own hi story.
r
will start with
a poem by Czeslaw Milosz translated into Lithuanian. Most of you probably
know it: "You Who Wronged." I will read it in Lithuanian. [Reads poem.l
My own next poem, "The Member of the Landing Crew," is one of
the most recently translated by Diana. It is about the Lithuanian emigres
who secretly went to their homeland (annexed by the USSR) during the
late 1940s and early 1950s. They were helped, to a degree, by the British
Intelligence Service. Owing to the efforts of Kim Philby and his coll abo–
rators, they usuall y were met by Soviet units posing as anti-Communi st
guerr illas. Most of them were killed or sent to prison camps, and more
than one was recruited by the KGB. It's a cruel sto ry of the postwar peri–
od. The cuckoo is another thing to be explained. Diana told me that the
on ly place she had heard the cuckoo was in the clock. But in Eastern
Europe cuckoos are qui te common forest birds and Li thuanians, Russians,
and Poles share an old belief: when you hear the cuckoo cry, the number
of cries indicates the number of years that you wi ll go on living.
Diana
Senechal:
"The Member of the Landing Crew."
The hardest thing to do was to hide the boats they had dragged up onto
the sand,
to cut up the tight rubber, shove the scraps under the bushes,
to ignore the prickly rain that cOllles before the dawn,
inundating the spine. The low pines kept silent across the dunes.
When the line moved, he sighed . His esophagus
recalled the memory of yesterday's seasickness,
and his shoulders, the strap of the backpack. Penicillin, binoculars,
ammunition, written off of arlllY storage the year before last,
a letter from an old minister with the words " long li ve unity."
The needle of the compass dallced out the ritual klumpakojis dance.
Eight kilometers down the road, next to the deserted farm,
he'd have to encounter the Uear, the Fern 1310ssom and the Coat-
