This is not an easy question to answer, not because of a lack of options, fortunately, but because of all the names I would like to mention!
The first thing that comes to my mind is Sun & Sea, the truly exceptional opera-performance by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, which represented Lithuania at the 58th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation in 2019. Since then, as much as the pandemic has allowed, this powerful opera-performance has traveled the world, inviting viewers to witness the spectacle of inevitable climate change. It was hailed by The New York Times as “one of the greatest achievements in performance of the last 10 years.” The libretto was written by the talented author Vaiva Grainytė and translated from Lithuanian into English by Rimas Uzgiris. Thus, along with world-renowned artists in classical music (like the conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla or the soprano Asmik Grigorian) and theater (like the directors Oskaras Koršunovas and Eimuntas Nekrošius), contemporary Lithuanian artists have also started receiving more international acclaim for their bold and open work, which stretches beyond conventional genres.
The success of their shows and the press coverage and awards that they receive are of course important criteria of significance in this case. As for literature, we also factor in number of translations and print run size. It is great to see Lithuanian authors being translated and appreciated in other countries. It might interest you to know that the most-translated Lithuanian author is in fact a poet—Tomas Venclova, a major literary figure whose works have been published in more than twenty languages. The bestselling Lithuanian author Kristina Sabaliauskaitė has a huge following in Poland and Latvia for her historical novels. Alvydas Šlepikas’s historical novel In the Shadow of Wolves (tr. Romas Kinka; Oneworld, 2019) has also been translated into more than ten languages and was on The Times’ Book of the Year list in 2019—an exceptional achievement for any author or literature. These are a few examples off the top of my head.
In children’s literature, Lithuanian authors and illustrators have been putting Lithuania on the map for decades.
Describe the structure of your organization and its goal(s). How many staff members does it employ and what are their main activities?
Lithuanian Culture Institute (LCI) promotes Lithuanian culture and professional art abroad with the aim of creating sustainable cultural partnerships. LCI was established by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania in 2008. At the moment, we are fourteen women working out of an office located in a beautiful historical building in central Vilnius. On a daily basis, we collaborate with both local and international cultural organizations, artists, and culture professionals, as well as a network of Lithuanian Cultural attachés in foreign countries.
One of our main activities is the promotion of literature. Since 2010, we have run a Translation Grant Programme which advocates for the translation of Lithuanian literature into foreign languages, and to this day we have supported the translation of more than 450 literary works into 38 languages. In addition to translation funding, we also help publishers promote the Lithuanian authors they publish, so we often contribute to author events whether at book fairs, literary festivals, or stand-alone book launches.
We maintain an active presence at international book fairs in London, Bologna, and Leipzig, where we organize a Lithuanian stand, and we also take part in the Frankfurt Book Fair. An important part of our work is meeting and consulting publishers with and looking for new contacts. We find it really important to create opportunities for publishers to learn about our literature and culture without distance. To that end, we organize publishers’ visits every year, often during the international Vilnius Book Fair, a central literary event in the Baltic countries.
We take pride in fostering our community of translators, who are the real ambassadors of Lithuanian literature and culture abroad. Every two years, we organize an international translators’ seminar. This gathering of thirty translators of Lithuanian literature from all over the world is a truly special event that sees many stories shared on each occasion. In addition to this seminar, we partner with various translation workshops and mentorships. We also present Lithuanian authors and their work in our catalogues and other publications, as well as on our website.
How much funding does your organization disburse in a year and where does the funding come from?
Our yearly budget for literature promotion is approx. €300,000, which is given to us by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania. A significant part of it is allocated to the Translation Grant Programme. The rest of the budget goes to participation in international book fairs, publications, translation projects, publishers’ visits, subsidizing travel for our authors, collaboration with international festivals, and various other forms of translation promotion. As one of its organizers, the Lithuanian Culture Institute also funds the cultural program of the international Vilnius Book Fair.
Including the one just announced in October 2021, as many as five Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded to writers working in English in the past decade alone. Translation into English has also been a crucial factor for many of the winners to receive consideration in the first place. In light of this linguistic hegemony, I imagine that there is an increased focus on translation into English, the costs of which can’t be met by market demand alone. Given your own institution’s limited resources, what criteria do you use to choose which authors to fund, and, given the sources of your funding, are there certain considerations factored into your selection?
It’s a two-way street, isn’t it? Authors who are translated into English may then have a wider readership and be more able to attract interest from publishers from other languages. It is common for foreign publishers to be offered a sample—in English translation—of an entire book to familiarize themselves with the author’s work. However, English-language markets are still difficult for us to break into, even with the increasing interest in translated literature in the UK. Our participation in the Baltic Countries Market Focus Programme at the 2018 London Book Fair brought us new connections with publishers in the UK, and we then had more translations into English than in previous years. One of the goals we had while preparing for this London Book Fair was to discover and encourage emerging translators from Lithuanian into English. To that end, we started a new and still ongoing partnership with the National Centre for Writing in Norwich to implement mentorship programs and workshops (together with the British Centre for Literary Translation) as a way of seeding new projects. Currently, we are also in the middle of a publishing and translation project with the Strangers Press that will showcase new writing from Lithuania. We greatly appreciate how these partnerships help pave the way for translators in their professional careers.
Coming back to your question about funding for authors, I’d like to stress that we support translations first, and subsequently the promotion of these translations, which may include author events. Applications to our Translation Grant Programme are considered by an independent committee consisting of five experts; this committee changes every three years. We don’t offer direct grants for authors, as they are funded by another institution—the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
A literary ecosystem not only includes writers and translators, but also editors, reviewers, publishers, literary agents, and booksellers, all of whom play a role in fostering a vibrant literary scene. Bearing this in mind, how would you describe the state of the literary ecosystem in your country (e.g., is it healthy, in your opinion)? Does any part of your funding go toward supporting the wider literary infrastructure (as opposed to just writers and translators)? If there was a local equivalent of a magazine with a global focus like Asymptote, would it receive any ongoing support from your organization, for example?
There are many wonderful professionals who create a healthy literary ecosystem here. On the other hand we do lack literary agents—in fact, there is only one independent agent working in children’s literature. Also, feedback from publishers tells us that there is a growing demand for editors. And, as in many other countries, independent bookshops in Lithuania are going through challenging times.
As one of the organizers of the Vilnius Book Fair, we make sure to involve various local professionals and support them in the Fair’s programming. To create opportunities for networking and professional development, we invite editors, literary critics, and publishers to participate in our foreign publishers’ visits or be featured at the national stands that we organize for the book fairs in Bologna and London. Local literary critics play an important role in the creation of our literature catalogues and other publications.
Recently, we started to cooperate with the organizers of the Children’s Literature Industry Days. In partnership with the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, we will be introducing the Illustrators Survival Corner Program in Vilnius this November. This specially tailored program is dedicated to the illustrators, publishers, (future) agents, and other professionals working in children’s books. This is also one of the ways we’ve dealt with the challenges of recent years when in-person book fairs didn’t take place. When our professionals and artists are not able to go to Bologna, we bring Bologna to them.
As for magazines, I’m happy to say that we have partnered with the literary magazine Vilnius Review, which is targeted at English-speaking audiences, and we have just started another partnership with the new Baltic literary magazine No More Amber, which was launched this summer and aims to present authors from Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.
Funding decisions can sometimes be controversial. Tell us about a funding decision by your institute in the past ten years or so that elicited controversy, describing the fallout and explaining both sides.
It’s no secret that institutions that support translations sometimes fall into a situation when the publisher who received funding doesn’t publish the work in the end. This usually happens due to the financial difficulties that they face, but there have been other reasons. I remember one case where the book was not published because an author and a British publisher fell out because of disagreements at the editing stage, although the book was succesfully published in many other European countries. However, these are difficulties that are hard to avoid over many years of funding translations, and are perhaps not that controversial.
The sitcom Seinfeld was notably a flop in Germany. Similarly, authors who encounter success in one culture sometimes do not receive the same reception in another. What are some surprising crossover successes or failures you have encountered in your tenure with this institution and what do you think might have led to these outcomes?
Two books come to my mind immediately. The first is the graphic novel Siberian Haiku (trans. Jūra Avižienis; SelfMadeHero, 2020), originally published in Lithuanian in 2017, written by Jurga Vilė, based on her family story, and illustated by Lina Itagaki. The second is Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s memoir Shadows on the Tundra (trans. Delija Valiukenas; Peirene Press, 2018), originally published in Lithuanian in 1988.
Though of different genres, both books allude to the complex history of mass deportations from Lithuania to Siberia and Soviet repression. This tragic and difficult period is not widely known in the Western world, so it was quite difficult to predict the reception of these books, but they were among the most-translated Lithuanian works in the last decade. Siberian Haiku, which swept awards in Lithuania and abroad and was published in thirteen languages, has been nominated for this year’s prestigious Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (the winner will be announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair). Grinkevičiūtė’s memoir has been translated into more than ten languages and has become a bestseller in Germany. Both these books are compelling and moving accounts based on real life experience, and this has won them readers, regardless of country or language. It is also true that the people who worked to spread the word about these books and stories behind them had a part in their success.
What are some recent challenges you have faced advocating for your country’s literature and how has your institution adapted to meet these challenges?
Obviously, the time since last year has been tough for everyone. However, I believe that creativity and flexibility are encoded in the DNA of the cultural sector, and so we have found ways to get back on our feet. In particular, we took advantage of digital platforms and events. For example, we organized a special digital Lithuanian literature showcase with Normandie Livre & Lecture, our partners in France, which included an online conference and a series of podcasts in French. We participated in international online networking events and together with our Latvian and Estonian colleagues organized an online presentation of Baltic translation programs for international publishers. Over the year, we have also concentrated on updating our digital literature catalogue on our website.
The most disappointing thing during this time was all the cancellations of author events—no travel was possible this year—but we are happy that they have resumed again this May. It is a huge encouragement for authors to be able to travel and meet readers again. Reaching out to new contacts in recent years also proved challenging, as they usually come through recommendations or in-person meetings at various professional events. It is an unlikely scenario to schedule a Zoom meeting with someone you haven’t met in person or were not introduced to personally beforehand. So, as soon as the conditions allowed, we decided to organize a publishers’ visit, starting from our closest neighbours in the Baltic region. With the kind help of our colleagues from Latvia and Estonia, we conducted a very positive and inspiring visit of publishers from the Baltic countries in this past summer, followed by a visit from their French counterparts in September. All this was a new beginning after a long time marked by distance and computer screens.
Tell us about your proudest accomplishments as an institution in the past ten years. I’d be particularly interested to hear about any campaigns that your institution conceived to advocate for your country’s literature.
Thank you for asking about this! I’m thrilled to tell you about our proudest moments, which happened during Lithuania’s participation as Guest of Honour country at international book fairs. In 2011, we were the centre of attention at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. This exceptional event helped our creators to grow professionally and the fair continues to be a tremendous inspiration and springboard to foreign markets. For me, it was my first major campaign of Lithuanian literature and culture as a culture manager, and since then I’ve grown even more passionate about children’s literature and its promotion. In 2017, Lithuania was the Guest of Honour country at the Leipzig Book Fair, the second largest book fair in Germany. For us, it became a real breakthrough in the German translation market in terms of the number of new translations into German and of the ensuing media coverage. 2018 was a special year for us, too: for the first time Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia participated together as the Baltic countries in a large-scale program in an international book fair and presented the Baltic Countries Market Focus program at the London Book Fair. It was a very interesting experience for us to build a joint Baltic program, and it gave us more opportunities to reach the publishers of the tiny translation market in the UK. I’m convinced that without this program we wouldn’t have achieved growing numbers of translations into English, and, importantly, new partnerships with excellent literary organizations and wonderful people working in translation around the UK.
This special status of guest of honour country was a very important recognition for our small country and small language, as well as a huge opportunity and challenge. No doubt, in addition to great enthusiasm, it requires long and consistent preparation as well as many years of substantial financial support. Having had all these experiences, we continue to take on new challenges and look for new opportunities, which I look forward to sharing with you next time!
In his Nobel Lecture, Kazuo Ishiguro exhorted us to “widen our common literary world to include many more voices from beyond our comfort zones of the elite first-world cultures. We must search more energetically to discover the gems from what remain today unknown literary cultures, whether the writers live in far away countries or within our own communities.” Yet, in one crucial respect, this ideal of inclusive world literature shares the same problem as the climate crisis or even the COVID-19 vaccine crisis: countries that have the means to do something about a global situation often end up looking out for their own interests. How do you think institutional advocates of a country’s literature might be better allies for world literature, if they might even play a role at all?
This is a beautiful and meaningful idea, close to those working in the field of literature and translation promotion. Over the years, we have met many supportive people in major countries, who are passionate about literature in translation. Interest is there and we can encourage it, and in doing so, expand world literature and inspire others along the way.
I remember that when the Brexit referendum happened in 2016, we received many friendly messages from our partners in the UK who wanted to continue our collaborations, and still want that even more than before, although it is becoming less and less easy. I am convinced that the visits we organize for literary professionals are often an eye-opening experience, which change mindsets and foster greater understanding. Just recently, one publisher admitted to me that before she visited Vilnius it was more of a “mythical,” distant place on the map, whilst now it has become much closer in many ways. Most important of all are the translators, who provide the real link between cultures and, as such, are the true co-creators of world literature.
Thank you, Asymptote, for the very important work you do and for your appreciation of different literary cultures!
