The Air We Breathe: Ukraine and Lithuania
Poems by Rimas Uzgiris
HEADNOTE: Ever since the 2014 invasion of Ukraine we’ve been hosting numerous Ukrainian poets at our poetry festivals and other readings. Since the 2022 invasion we’ve been even more committed to bringing their poets here, translating their work, giving them a respite from their war-torn country. As a result, they have become acquaintances and friends, people we know and care about.
Perhaps I should pause for American readers and explain the “we” and the “I” a little more here. I am a poet living in Lithuania, writing in English because I was born, raised and educated in the United States. My parents were born in Lithuania and left with their families as refugees during WWII. I “came back” on a Fulbright Scholarship and an NEA Translation Grant. Vilnius University asked me to keep teaching, poets asked me to keep translating, I met my future wife, became a dual citizen, our children were born… and so ten years have gone by. I used to think of myself as an American poet living in Lithuania. Now, I tend to think of myself as a Lithuanian poet who writes in English.
The war in Ukraine has certainly shaken us up. Based on history—i.e., the Russian and Soviet empires of the past, Georgia and Ukraine of the present—and based on what Russian politicians have publicly declared, we know we are next. The rights of democratic self-determination in Eastern Europe have often been ignored. Moscow simply assumes we “belong” to them—even Joseph Brodsky defended a version of this claim—and Western Europe often acted as if we were just some confusing, backwards mass of “Eastern Europeans.” Ukraine is changing all that. They are fighting for us. So we have been doing what we can to help. Hosting their poets is one small thing among many. It is not just a respite from war for them, but, as they say, a relief from having to explain themselves and their country’s situation to “Westerners.” We need no explanations. And their poetry is as natural to us as the air we breathe.
With no direct experience of the war, I do not dare to write about what Ukrainians can write about for themselves. And they are writing very very well. Lithuanian poets have been translating their latest work almost as soon as it comes out. My poem, “Over and Out,” describes the reading of some of this work on the anniversary of the most recent invasion. It was a powerful and moving event.
My other poems here also reach out to Ukraine and the poets I know there. The one with a long (Socratic) title takes place at a mini-book fair in early December. Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, translated for the first time into Lithuanian, was being launched, and I was asked to discuss it as an “expert.” Miller speaks of the need to stand up to Hitler—there was a lot of appeasement going on at the time—and I couldn’t help seeing parallels to Ukraine. Olena (Herasymyuk), Lyuba (Yakimchuk), and Kateryna (Mikhalitsyna) are all Ukrainian poets I know, and in the first days of the war I was trying to get in touch with Olena to ask if I could publish a radical adaptation/re-write of her long poem “Prison Chant,” which I heard her read impressively at the Druskininkai Poetry Festival. She serves in a medical brigade in Donbas, so it wasn’t easy, but she got the message finally and gave her blessing to my version, published in Rattle’s “Poet’s Respond.” “First Snow” references a play, “Driven Out,” by Marius Ivaškevičius that deals with cultural differences between Eastern and Western Europe from the perspective of Lithuanian emigres in London. I interweave this with reflections on Christianity, empire, and the uniqueness of each individual. These issues again turned my thoughts to Ukraine.
I can’t bring myself to write directly about the experience of Ukrainians, but I find that I can write about my caring for what is happening there, my wondering about them, my feeling that our fates in this part of the world are connected. In fact, I find I need to write about this, though it all comes out differently from my other poems. There is something more fragmented and surreal about this work. I suppose that speaks to my experience of this war that is close by but not (yet) here.
Rimas Uzgiris
Vilnius, Lithuania
Over and Out
February 24, 2023, Vilnius
daddy pick me up after the ukrainian reading in which halyna read whose husband is in a bunker at the front in which kateryna read poems by 20-something anton written from a trench at the front at that moment the room was dense with all the air we breathed an oxygenless vacuum a soundless space one of the translators barely made it through his spacesuit must have been malfunctioning and we had to go outside where the tv tower loomed in a zero kelvin night where 13 souls had been sucked under soviet tanks automatic doors closing behind the lviv women standing there like an envoy of erinyes no just young women standing smoking stunned daddy pick me up my daughter said and i told them how glad i was they were here how pleased we could host them what an example ukrainians set for poetry and courage... oh my spacesuit must have been malfunctioning my daughter looped around my neck my american smile so unlike their own which looked as if they were pressing their lips hard to keep the air inside only to realize there is no spaceship but rockets rockets burning bright in the cities of their night goodbye goodbye said my daughter and i as we opened our parachute and gently drifted home
When you’re supposed to be an expert but you’re not,
and then you realize when it comes to that which matters
no one is
someone puts a microphone on the table. the bees have started to buzz. it’s alarming. there are butterflies fluttering in my belly: maybe they’re looking for the pollen inside, for you see, i’ve been cultivating sunflowers ever since i couldn’t reach olena in donbas. perhaps she was lost among the apricots, or mines. miller’s colossus of maroussi lies on the table. in lithuanian, it stands. it tells us not to be indifferent, though the light outside is thin, like the blood of an anemic, or the coffee kateryna drinks in lviv, or the tea lyuba drinks in kyiv, electricity out. a sleeping whale. my friends lie in its belly. the camera rolls. the flickering faces of candles wait for me to speak. before night falls we will blow each other out. gently. as bullets fly through pliant flesh. then george katsimbalis will rise from this table to walk among the graves, speaking stories of light, affirming that in kyiv, kharkiv, and lviv, the dream of greece still lives.
First Snow
Michelangelo’s Jesus is barrel chested and ripped. He looks like he could rip me in two as he judges the gym rats around him. Da Vinci’s Jesus is effeminate and soft, holding a crystal ball aloft. His mystery is incomprehensible and I shrink from his knowing gaze. Knowledge is power, though tell that to Russia, brutally invading Ukraine. A character in the play I’m translating from Lithuanian thinks we all belong to the East (east of Germany), descended from Genghis Khan. Jesus, he claims, is our opponent, representing the “civilized” West, though I don’t know if it’s M’s or da V’s. Or which Jesus was responsible for “The sun never sets on….” But today we felt the first snow of the season as we walked home from school in the dark. My son asked why the snowflakes glitter with light. Little stars surrounding our lives. Ice crystals, I said. Each new flake makes itself unique. Like you, I could have said. So beautiful, I didn’t say. So beautiful, I should have said. Just look.
Rimas Uzgiris is a Lithuanian poet and translator writing in English. Born and raised in the USA, educated at UCSD, UW-Madison, and Rutgers-Newark, he is the author of the poetry collections North of Paradise and Tarp (poems translated into Lithuanian, shortlisted for best poetry book of the year). He is translator of seven poetry collections from Lithuanian and the Venice Biennale Golden Lion winning opera Sun and Sea. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Hudson Review, The Poetry Review and other journals. Recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Grant and a NEA Translation Fellowship, he teaches at Vilnius University.
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