This Translation Tuesday, we find Lithuanian master Tomas Venclova sea-watching in a pair of entrancing poems, translated with beauty and guile by Diana Senechal. Lashes of brine, mist and cloud rise up from these chilly autumn seas, as do—so often the case—a soft sadness, and the observer’s most tender preoccupations.
August Elegy
For Z. B.
How are you, how is it to live
in the zone unknown to us still?
Forgetful and wet to the full,
the seasons float over the gulf.
Heat presses the narrow pavement,
the helicopter hones its direction,
takes notice: someone is absent.
This barely was able to happen.
Caught in the battered ships’ crush,
the whirlpools thrash the pavement,
and midyear soon comes to the seventh
year of your growing absence.
From that silent place what will I glean
on the balcony, pouring my wine
without you—who conquered alien
beds and bodies, you, skeptic, twin,
soul-likeness of mine? Almost always
you guessed what I had up my sleeve.
Now nature is all you have left—
the one God in whom you believed,
who always offered a safe
retreat from the State and its madness,
and whom—thrush’s skill, lynx’s craftiness—
you held higher than yourself.
Perhaps you are really in the fog,
in the film of glittering oil,
in scattered letters and logs,
by the promenade, where yachts jostle,
where road-loops are etched on the slope,
where the bell is contained in a breath
(a friend does not stay there long,
while an enemy stays to the death).
Perhaps you are really in the rays
where mollusks polish the deep,
in Vingis’s rusty pines,
and in Kotor’s salt molecules,
over here, where the sea vapor clears,
and in sands a thousand versts away.
“It is good,” you yourself would say,
“that nature gets by without tears.”
Eos
The stiff breaths of October drive the boat forth.
She will soon make her way around the pulsating lighthouse.
The sea opens up to her
From cloudy Istria
To the cliffs of Leucada. A fisherman, exhausted
By the cold, drags the bay’s slippery bounty.
Greek bread and wine
Sleep in his flesh and veins.
So death recedes. Morning approaches with a rooster’s cry
And a swallow takes heed—there, beyond the watershed,
Where Aegeus, misled
By a taut black sail
Drank of the wave. Tonight you are alone.
You rely on the motor, finding in the seaside sand,
Decades later, a trace
You left of yourself.
A bed of heather, a stone instead of a pillow.
A woman’s voice in the yard, dispelling deep sleep.
While you were absent,
Time passed in a different way.
The foam wets the sails and burns the whites of your eyes.
A stubborn ray of sun hits your temple aslant
To freeze into your iris
The geometry of the clouds.
Translated from the Lithuanian by Diana Senechal
Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements and was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Since 1985 Venclova has taught Slavic languages and literature at Yale University. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the New Culture of New Europe Prize, and the 2023 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His works include volumes of poetry, essays, literary biography, conversations and works on Vilnius. His poetry has been translated into English in Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova by Ellen Hinsey was published by University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer in 2017. A selection of his later poems, The Grove of the Eumenides, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2025.
Diana Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the author of two books of nonfiction, as well as numerous poems, stories, essays, and translations. Her earlier translations of Tomas Venclova’s poems are featured in his collections Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction (Bloodaxe Books, 2008); her translation of Gyula Jenei’s 2018 collection Mindig más (Always Different: Poems of Memory) was published in 2022 by Deep Vellum. Since 2017 she has been living and teaching in Szolnok, Hungary.
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