Under an uproar of lindens, before the stone
embankment, by a fast current like the Tiber,
I am drinking Gilbey’s with two bearded men.
In the twilight—the jingle of glasses, smoke.
But we have never met. I knew their parents.
A generation overtakes another. The tape-recorder
warbles and crackles. My two interlocutors
want to know about questions I once pondered:
whether there is meaning to suffering and mercy—
whether art can survive if it obeys no rules.
I was the same as them, but destiny accorded
me a strange fate: this, of course, is no better
than any other. I know evil never disappears,
but one can at least strive to dispel blindness—
and poetry is more meaningful than dreams.
In summertime, I often wake before dawn,
sensing, without fear, the time is drawing
close when others will inherit the dictionary,
along with clouds, ruins, salt and bread.
And freedom is all that I will be granted.
Tomas Venclova, born in Klaipeda, Lithuania in 1937, 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. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages; his English-language collections to date are Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008). He has received, among many other honors, the Vilenica International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize, and the Prize of Two Nations, which he won jointly with Czeslaw Milosz. Also a translator, essayist, and biographer, Venclova is professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University. (updated 10/2023)
