I discovered this information in the documents about the festival that were sent to me by e-mail. Actually, the three women poets are supposed to read in Vilnius itself, in the cultural center at the American Embassy, and although that will take place before the festival formally starts, I notice on one page of the documents which were sent to me that their reading will signal that the festival has begun.
All this is a reason for even more amazement, when I think about how the international poetry festival in Druskininkai is originally Nordic, certainly not American or Anglo-Saxon.
If I’ve learned anything from my past experiences of poetry festivals of the sort we’re discussing here, then I know that nothing will prevent these three American poets from reading at the opening of the festival. Neither a bomb attack on their embassy in the city, nor unforeseen deaths back home, be that in Wyoming or Nebraska, will prevent them from being at the podium at the designated time.
No doubt it will surprise people that I react to the matter like this, by declaring my opinion that nothing will prevent the American trio from doing what they’re supposed to, yet in reality the plans of the people who devise the program for a festival of this caliber seldom go wrong. I speak from experience in this matter.
For example, I don’t foresee that, instead of these three American women, three male poets from Finland who no-one is expecting to be in Druskininkai in October will suddenly jump up from nowhere. Three very fat and dead drunk Fins with everything showing, in all senses of the phrase.
No. Nuh-uh, as people say out in the country, people who have no idea that a gathering like the Druskininkai gathering exists anywhere in the world, and who wouldn’t give a hoot if they did.
If something unpredictable were to happen at a poetry festival like this, it would be along these lines: a few minutes before a reading, somebody would notice that the texts from one of the foreign participants, which have been translated into Lithuanian like everybody’s else’s poems, are not actually his own poems, but some entirely different pieces which are totally unconnected to poetry.
An obituary about a deceased relative? A letter to a newspaper which the party in question wrote to protest the planned organizational changes to the city center in the town where he lives?
The poet accidentally e-mailed the wrong document overseas, and the translator, who had naturally never read anything by the poet, and so had no sense from reading the article how it ought to sound, hadn’t noticed anything wrong, and so translated the whole caboodle without hesitation, trusting that the continuous and somewhat lumbering text is just one long and rather detailed prose poem.
Lithuanian is a very old language. The oldest in Europe, if Icelandic is not counted. I’ve read works in Lithuanian and heard it spoken on board a ferry to Norway, and I really think it would be exaggerating to describe the language as beautiful in either texture or sound.
I, at least, can’t make it work to lyrical ends. It needs some great changes to become a useful tool in the hands of the poet, at least those poets who have developed any feeling for sound and rhythm.
According to the program of the Druskininkai festival, some domestic poets will be showing off. I can already hear the rattle when all the Antanases and Vytautases begin booming loudly into the microphone in the festival hall.
That will be an unbroken hour of torture and we’ll have to listen to it. And then the reading will continue with the translated poems of the participants, with the proud translators rising up from their chairs and reeling off the obituaries for deceased friends and the newspaper articles about planning matters, and then one will deeply wish, just like the young student Rastignac — when he stood before Monsieur and Madame de Restaud, having dropped old Goriot’s name — that the earth will open up and swallow him.
But let us assume everything goes as it should as far as the translation of the foreigners’ poems is concerned. Let us allow the natives the benefit of doubt in this respect.
There is still, on the other hand, the question of whether one will be able to actually read one’s poetry, even though that is the reason for the trip to Druskininkai.
Three or fours years ago, I was invited to take part in a comparable festival in the city of Liège in Belgium, although that festival was perhaps on a considerably greater scale than the one I will be attending in Lithuania.
Despite the fact that I stayed in Liège for four whole days, and though the organizers were good enough to see to everyone’s needs while we were there, it turned out, when it came down to it, that there wasn’t enough time to read my poems.
In the first place, so many poets had been invited to the festival, from every corner of the world, that there were very few poets left in the countries they had come from; it would have caused serious problems if the invited poets hadn’t returned to their native countries. And secondly, the program in which I was included stretched so far in excess of the time limit that, when it was time for me, the time set aside for the reading had already run out.
The festival organizers announced the immediate departure of the coach that was going to deliver the participants from the reading hall back to the hotel.
At that very moment I was beginning to get dry in the mouth, out of nervousness at having to read in front of such esteemed people from so many countries.
There was no way, apparently, to make the coach wait. The driver needed to get home. And the question I asked one Belgian poet, a young man who I had talked with earlier, during one of the many midday breaks, was this: “To his home where? Is his home so far away that the organizers of the festival need to worry about him getting there in good time? In good time for what?”
For my part, I’d come all the way from Iceland to read poems in Belgium, and because this Belgian driver, who had been hired to drive me and the other poets home to a hotel after the recital, needed to get home right now and go to sleep, there wasn’t time for me, the next-to-last poet in the program.
Nor for the South African poet, who was last in the program.
It seems the poetic democracy they have in Belgium is like the freedom of speech in the Parliament of the Communist party in Moscow: the Chief Secretary and his comrades from the Party’s Executive Branch Committee reported, in a speech lasting many hours, all the magnificent qualities of the red power and the Party’s mercy, but the people’s delegate to Parliament was only given three minutes to make his own recommendations.
The difference, of course, is that the black South African and I didn’t get a single second to showcase our excellent abilities.
We could just as well have stayed home; he in his faraway Johannesburg (if that’s where he lived) and I in Skúlagata, in my cozy little Reykjavík.
And so I’ve still never read my poems in Belgium. Even though I was sent there for four days for precisely that purpose.
The only thing I got for my trouble in making that journey to Liège was a daily meal with the other poets in the assembly hall of the conference center where the festival was being held.
And wine. There was certainly unlimited wine with our food, both during the festival and in the evenings.
The food itself was nothing to complain about, although some poets, at least one from Iraq and another from Cyprus, did have some criticisms, particularly about the relative portions of meat, fish, potatoes, and salads on their plates.
This all begs the question, of course, as to whether something similar, that is, in terms of the amount of time for reading, is in the cards for Lithuania.
“In the cards for Lithuania?” That reminds me of the story of a man whom I met by chance in a restaurant in downtown Reykjavík two or three years ago. He had been invited to Lithuania, but unlike me was he on a business trip (although in a certain sense you could say that my dealings with that country are a little business-like in character).