GIEDRÈ KAZLAUSKAITÈ
Giedrė Kazlauskaitė (Kėdainiai, Lituania 1980) es poeta, narradora, ensayísta. Estudió Literatura Lituana en la Universidad de Vilnius. Su primer libro Sudie, mokykla (Adiós, escuela), que consta de dos relatos, se publicó en 2001. El libro Postilės (Postillas) (comentarios de evangelias) vio la luz en 2010 en colaboración con el padre Julius Sasnauskas. Desde el 2011 trabaja en el semanario cultural Šiaurės Atėnai (Atenas del Norte). Hasta el día de hoy ha publicado tres poemarios: Heterų dainos (Canciones de Heteras) en 2008, Meninos (Las Meninas) en 2014 y Singerstraum en 2016. Dichos poemarios obtuvieron varios premios locales, algunos de sus textos se han traducido a idiomas extranjeros.
En el marco del dossier de poesía de Lituania preparado y traducido por Dovile Kuzminskaite, presentamos una muestra de la poesía de Giedrė Kazlauskaitė
http://circulodepoesia.com/2017/03/poesia-lituana-giedre-kazlauskaite/
Aprendiendo a coser
Estas costuras se parecen tanto a la línea del camino,
tenía cuatro años, mi madre me llevaba a la ciudad, en la que, quizás,
tenía la vaga esperanza de encontrarse
con mi padre deambulando por las calles.
A mí, contradictoriamente, frente a esta esperanza me entraban náuseas,
vomité en el autobús.
Las mismas costuras; me sentaron delante para que las mirara,
así cosí largo tiempo con una invisible máquina de coser
la línea del medio de la carretera.
La ropa vieja en el ático;
remozando alguna cosa bastaría
hasta el final de la vida.
Claro, no tiene sentido hacerlo,
a no ser por razones ecológicas.
Las texturas que tocaban nuestros cuerpos,
a veces ya muertos; las líneas de las calles
marcan los zigzags de las partículas de Braun
controladas por una mano inmemorial.
Por eso tengo que aprender a coser una vez más,
para que no me den náuseas, para que me cubra
con viejos harapos cual caballera
con su armadura de historias.
Temblad, molinos de locura,
armada con la lanza de aguja
vengo a caballo sobre las puntadas.
¿creará un negocio? – en la tienda de las máquinas de coser
preguntó el dependiente.
no, me dedicaré a crear
La escalera de la biblioteca
Durante las horas de insomnio
procuraba imaginarme las botellas
que me tocó beber.
Puestas en fila en la habitación no cabían,
así que me iba a dormir al balcón.
Me apresaba un gran temor de muerte,
que vivo tanto
sin resultado alguno, solo desperdicio.
Siempre había querido ser costurera –
un trabajo tan meditabundo, en la mente
puedes ir escribiendo una novela.
Tenía amigas que cosían,
parecían tan originales, pero hoy
ya no querría ser así.
Sin embargo, sigo escuchando el trapalear de la máquina de coser;
gruesos y delicados los tejidos de los sueños siguen deslizándose
por los dedos encallecidos.
Basta, en otros libros – si los hubiera –
nada de madres, nada de psicoterapeutas.
Pero por las mañanas a la biblioteca venían
las doctorandas con los ojos desorbitados,
que habían dejado sus niños llorando en las guarderías.
Subía por la escalera de unos cuatrocientos años
y rezaba; aquí estoy, una eterna doctoranda.
Señor, te agradezco por no ser como esta gente – bella, decente, bondadosa,
Porque gracias a no se sabe quién (¿a ti?) no nací en una familia de bien.
Porque por esta escalera solo suben los eternos,
porque el número de las botellas nadie lo sabe.
porque en el balcón donde duermo
por la noche trapalean las frases de una novela.
Como en la infancia, me columpio en el pedal de madera,
manejando una rueda de metal.
Incluso si nunca llegara a escribirla,
por lo menos una cremallera habré cosido.
Por esta escalera doy vueltas una y otra vez sobre un eje desconocido –
con las costuras que sobrevivirán a las venas.
Singer Serenade
El año pasado en Navidad recibí
Singer Serenade – fanfarroneó
una compositora conocida.
Me puse a imaginar como ella
le escribe una serenata; hace un tiempo, de adolescente,
me explicó en la cantina que todo el tintinear
de las cucharas de aluminio,
los pasos, el traqueteo de los platos,
los fragmentos de las conversaciones y otros sonidos
eran música.
Qué pasa aquí, por qué se ha puesto
tanto de moda este hobby
para calmar los nervios.
En el ático encontré ropa de muñecas,
hecha probablemente con una máquina de coser antigua
a base de los patrones para muñecas.
También hallé dos máquinas de juguete:
mamá tenía una así, roja,
muy pesada, de metal, con esa romántica
rueda para girar,
yo, una de un modelo más nuevo,
con un pedal eléctrico, traída de RDA.
Un juguete caro para escribir serenatas;
me imaginaba cómo por las noches
trapaleaba en el ático la bruja con la máquina de coser antigua,
haciendo bolsas para secuestrar a los niños.
El tren de la plaquita solo marcha,
en lugar de los asalariados psicólogos
invertí en una máquina de coser.
El amor es una manera aséptica
para matar a alguien; las serenatas de las cucharas
tristemente lo confirman cada día.
Giedrė Kazlauskaitė, poetess, literary critic, essayist.
She was born 21 March, 1980 in Kėdainiai.
In 2004 she finished her studies of Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University and in 2007 she got her Master's degree. She worked in a bookstore, and at magazines for youth “Lux”, “Birutė”, also “Bernardinai.lt”, “Verslo žinios”, National Television and Radio (LRT) and “Mažoji studija”. She has published a lot of reviews and essays in cultural press. Her poems were published in various almanacks and collections. She is and editor at editorial office of “Šiaurės Atėnai” since 2010.
A member of Lithuanian Writers' Union since 2011.
B i b l i o g r a p h y :
Sudie, mokykla: two novellas. – Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2001.
Heterų dainos: poems. – Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2008.
Postilės (together with J. Sasnauskas): commentaries of gospels. – Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2009.
Meninos: poems. – Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2014.
P u b l i c a t i o n s i n a l m a n a c k s i n f o r e i g n l a n g u a g e s :
Six young Lithuanian poets / selected and translated by Kerry Shawn Keys. – Vilnius: Vaga, 2002.
Up and coming young Lithuanian writers / selected by Agnė Jurčiukonytė. – Vilnius: Books from Lithuania, 2006.
Under the Nothern Sky 2008: almanac of the European Literary Days in Šiauliai / edited by Marcus Roduner. – Šiauliai: Saulės delta, 2008.
Poetinis Druskininkų ruduo 2011. Druskininkai Poetic Fall 2011 / Selected by Marius Burokas. Translated by Ada Valaitis. – Vilnius: Vaga, 2011.
Coeurs ébouillantés, dix-sept poétes lituaniennes contemoraines. Nuplikytom širdim, septyniolika šiuolaikinių lietuvių poečių / Traductrices: Diana Sakalauskaitė et Nicole Barriére. – Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2012.
How the Earth Carries Us. New Lithuanian Poets / Selected and translated by Rimas Užgiris, Marius Burokas and others. – Vilnius: Lithuanian Culture Institute, 2015.
P u b l i c a t i o n s i n l i t e r a r y p r e s s i n f o r e i g n l a n g u a g e s :
Vilnius: literaturnaja panorama Litvy. – 2009, vesna / leto, Nr. 177 (perevod Georgija Efremova).
Arterie 16: kwartalnik artystyczno-literacki. – 2013, Nr. 2 (przełożyli Vytautas Dekšnys, Roman Honet, Zuzanna Mrozikowa).
Washington Square. – 2014, winter / spring (translated by Ada Valaitis).
A w a r d s :
2009 Young Yotvingian Prize for poetry book “Heterų dainos”.
2014 Poetry book “Meninos” was nominated in the Book of the Year Campaign and included into the list of twelve most creative books of the year.
2015 Jurga Ivanauskaitė literary award for poetry book “Meninos”.
POETRY
by Giedrė Kazlauskaitė
translated by Anna Halberstadt
Meaning of Life
To go somewhere, to see something.
A WOMAN ON THE BUS ON THE PHONE
If he is at least, well-to-do, then automatically–an idiot.
I doubt if he agrees to go with her to a so-so show.
Here I stand, Martin Luther.
Oh she is so classy, that bows
descending in air on vertical viola strings-funicular cables
form her Cartesian coordinate system.
She could be working as a therapist
trying to have young women articulate
their life goals.
If I were born in Ancient Greece
I could be a potter
I'd be interpreting eyes
looking into themselves.
If I were born before the revolution
maybe I'd be a libertine, servicing Napoleon's men
(only war turns these shmucks into men.)
If I were born over a hundred years ago, in a Žemaitė story
I wouldn't have lasted longer than twenty five,
would have died from appendicitis.
What would I want to do this weekend?
Watch some stupid movies on TV,
weep when emotional tensions reach catharsis, knit.
More than tomorrow, I wish I had lived yesterday.
Running in the Park
Snails on the road: some smashed by cars and bicycles.
Still can't run by them indifferently, I tear them off from the asphalt,
push them aside, interfere with their karma. I'm really afraid of them bypassing
me. Mom's silk dress: brown, with polka dots
I used to hold on to it before I was born.
I used to count the dots, but did not finish counting.
Like acacia petals they are in the ground: they.
It seems, I've experienced all kinds of feelings, I no longer desire
people applauding, a locket with a lock of hair, a knight to fall in love with me and a gold
cage for a talking parrot, in which I could sing;
Stroking (including against fur), shoes with Achilles' heels.
Instead of counting polka dots, I am dialing letters slowly
in an old fashioned phone dial, and it helps to annihilate
senselessness.
I no longer desire many things, that I used to long for so much–
I no longer need the sea, foreign countries, a home,
some type of music- I can do without it altogether.
I no longer want to learn languages, to meet
Interesting people, live like a exquisite hetaera or a noble ascetic.
I no longer need children, feel more distant from them and closer
to the useless Internet isolation.
I no longer buy those books , that I was dreaming about; delicacies that I could not afford to buy.
I no longer get nosebleeds from playing the flute.
Great passions are all in the past, nothing grandiose under the sun
will take place: knowing and understanding also seems like breach of privacy.
I no longer desire to love God with an open heart, I don't doubt His existence, I don't
observe his commandments: don't look for new stars on the shoulder-straps of my greatcoat,
don't wait for the boldly arriving spring.
When I jump in the river from the bridge, that I often see in my dreams
looking for my symbolic rebirth, diving back into the amniotic fluid surrounding the embryo, going back into the womb and getting baptized again—
I desire only to feel: I am alive
and water is washing over my soul.
Dresses Waiting for Their Hour
It's so banal to congratulate on birthdays
repeat wishes in the Teletubbies manner
show off by attaching emoticons.
You can't stand stuffed animals, even shiver with disgust
in the shopping center, having to cross
this department of love corpses,
the shelf with childhood caskets.
Dresses from fabrics, that are almost extinct
flower petals and leaves of tobacco, wrinkled
old candy wrappers, found on the road
we used to dress pebbles in them, because dolls were too banal
from velvet, cremplene and silk
from souls of beliefs
Dresses in the closet at the summerhouse.
Dresses that are inherited from one generation by another, as body measurements
they have absorbed the light of years and decades—
plaid, or with flowers or dots.
So beautiful, but the time for them did not come yet.
You are still not ready, still did not change your outlook on life,
you have to somehow represent yourself
not through your clothes, not through your children
or other domestics' beauty and accomplishments.
Even the red corset, with down sown to it, from your adolescence
God knows from where, maybe a thrift shop
is dreaming of the time, when you buy a poodle or another
cute dog to dress up.
O my beloved ones, I need you to be my muses,
but you are missing from my wardrobe.
Translated by J.C. ToddJ.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'11 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.
Translated by Rimas Užgiris
Poems from the book „Singerstraum“
Anna Lee Fisher, the first mother in space –
In flight, I contemplated her photograph, black and white.
Dressed in a spacesuit, an icon: beautiful, famous, a woman.
Maybe, in some sense, I could launch myself as well?
Maybe gravity is not so universal as it seems?
Apparently, one can leave one’s children on earth,
sending oneself out into orbit for some time.
Yet here I was, afraid to fly across the ocean...
(For who will raise my child when the plane goes down?)
In my dream, they were training me to be an astronaut –
I had to slide through the narrow intestines
of water park attractions, to eat live meat
without vomiting – impossible, but I passed the tests.
I was ready for the ether now, or at least for the army.
Awaking, I understood these are powers in which I cannot believe,
but secretly, I felt them: in the thought-written world.
And I knew that world is safe, made ready
for our lives and those of our children.
*
At one time or another, it’s going to happen.
Alcoholics will quit, the economic crisis will end.
The child will speak, and walls will open for me;
I’ll quit watching Lithuanian TV,
and begin to speak in forgotten tongues.
Little by little, I’ll begin to think politically, rejecting
the myth of higher education, growing an urge
to live in Washington, where tulips remind me of gender;
so many women politicians here, and by my house –
sleeping lions (melancholic, cement)
in this Lazarus love garden.
I had lived as if wound hard around a spool,
or as a ball of thread that no one
unsews. The time came, all the same,
when I was caught up in a Jacquard weave.
A Jewish custom, where lamenting women
cut and rip their clothes – in this way
I proclaimed the mourning of my home,
shredding swaddling clothes with a vengeance.
It’s liberating, like removing diapers from a child –
I crawl through my dream naked and without shame.
Old New Vilnia
The social class of snobs
calls it Provence style –
yellowish Stalin-era homes:
peeling, dilapidated.
I saw a silly television show
where they babbled about how
this style can alter not only your interior,
but your relationships as well.
Winter mornings, on the way to kindergarten,
by a building like a locomotive
(a building we wanted once to buy
in order to live next to the trains) –
dawn reddened the sky,
and by the doors of the wooden orthodox church,
trampled by inhabitants of the land of headscarves,
the snow began to shine.
We were separated for the day by river and rail,
and that, for sure, can alter a relationship.
It’s quite pretty here – even when
the river bank lies grey and black
like a monochromatic Cézanne.
On the other side of the Provencal homes,
in the hospital’s park, as evening arrived
we made politically incorrect snowmen
to mimic those watching from windows.
Their brains were being eaten by pills,
but that didn’t stop them from shouting
and making signs – they declared
their permanent addresses
in my poems.
At night, wherever I now happen
to rent another apartment,
I hear the trains from childhood
that sewed themselves into my blood.
Even the smell of oil paint lingers.
After all, Provence is just a province.
Singer Serenade
Last Christmas, I got
a Singer Serenade – bragged
my composer friend.
I began to imagine how
it writes her a serenade – once,
in the high school cafeteria I was told
that all the clinking of aluminum forks,
the footsteps, the clatter of dishware,
the fragments of conversation and other sounds,
are music.
What is going on these days
that this hobby is so trendy
for relieving stress?
In the loft I found doll’s clothing,
sewn with an old-fashioned sewing machine
according to cut-out patterns.
And two toy machines:
mama had the red, heavy metal one
with that romantic hand-turned
wheel, and I had a newer model,
an electric motor, driven
all the way from the GDR.
An expensive toy for writing serenades;
I used to imagine how, at night, a witch
would clatter in the loft on her old-fashioned
sewing maching, stitching bags for kidnapping kids.
This train runs on and on on pedals –
instead of hiring pshychologists,
I invested in a sewing machine.
Love is a sterile way
to kill someone; spoon serenades
prove it every day.
The Monk Tent Fest
This garden – I dreamt
two hundred years ago –
before I had children.
The people are all the same, like me
in youth when I was still a prude –
ugly, untalented, and good.
They’re not so different from
the silly society of glossy magazines:
especially when they speak about meaning.
The one and the other practice
the same techniques for suppressing madness:
eat, pray, love.
#NotInMyName
If I were to listen to them,
my faith would be smaller
than a poppy seed.
Having grow old, I would drop
out of my very own eyes.
And from the loudspeaker,
they might just as well play the voice
of the dictator from Chaplin’s film.
He ought to be saying how the wretched,
bumping each other on the bus each day,
are the real communion.
Or how under apartment blocks, on benches,
the elderly chatting all day – someone
goes by, now someone comes this way,
someone sticks a head out of a window –
how these are the invisible tents, this
the festival of monks without vows.
It’s funny, at the very same time,
in the very same park,
some hopeless newlyweds
hold their photo session.
I couldn’t find anyone to ask
if love endures this posing.
The Pretender Writes Back on the Philology Wall
That fall I read Sappho’s poem instead of my own.
In tune with the words, losing consciousness out of love,
I collapsed on the floor.
That semester, we studied stress patterns in words –
I hated it, skipped it, and always snuck into
lectures at the Art Academy instead,
carrying home my portfolio
of worthless sketches.
Where, I wonder, could those people be
whom I drew with sanguine and charcoal?
Perhaps in the state next door?
I still think about women’s gender
like the stresses on words, and my insides roil.
We four Lithuanian poets, wandering America,
should secretly agree to transfer the philology department
to Trakai Castle so we could have our elective
sailing class like at UW-Madison.
We could found a Sappho sorority, writing
Greek letters over the door.
With the fire of our blood, we’d burn our poems into stone houses,
and we’d forgive ourselves for others’ sins. No one would be depressed –
not like once before, in a grim cafeteria
with matronly meatballs of self-flagellation,
separately and secretly, breaking down words.
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