on the water.
… For Milda Katinait
, eslov’s. Do you know who you are to me, like all others I would like to meet again? A nation. With a replacement heart valve or two. A nation whose banks lend money in the middle of the night, and without interest. A nation with treaties to sign. Full of cafés and restaurants. Concerts. (When you bought us tickets to see Joe Cocker, I was surprised that you knew who he was.) And a kitchen in you, somewhere, in which we once ate cabbage pie. Full of urgent crises too, for which, without regret, I will set even the most interesting of books aside, leaving it on a windowsill for a whole weekend. And of course with gold reserves — the locket you gave me, which I’m wearing now, is inscribed with the initials “D.G.”: (not yours, and don’t imagine that they’re the president’s, either). A nation with its own laws, its own justice: “As far as I’m concerned, if he couldn’t help carry the coffin, he shouldn’t get the land — for that reason alone! The coffin was hardly heavy. When he got sick, my uncle turned from an oak to stewed rhubarb.” A nation dotted with emergency telephones in November (for example, on train-station platforms) for the use of those who may be considering suicide. Free seminars on business, sex, and knitting. A military too, destroyers, spreading a cloud of melancholy across the world. Cell-phone towers, so that I can reach you even when I don’t know where you are. And a flag, flying high, made out of graying pubic hair.
“ … I write about them with steadfast love (even now, while I write it down, this too becomes false) but varying ability, and this varying ability does not hit off the real actors loudly and correctly but loses itself dully in this love that will never be satisfied with the ability and therefore thinks it is protecting the actors by preventing this ability from exercising itself.” (I think you can really only translate good prose smoothly when you’re a bit drunk. And during a full moon.)
And among all those whom I’d like to meet again, I’ll also single out the man who translated Salinger into Lithuanian. We’d discuss art a bit, as we did once before. He told me I know nothing about contemporary art. Perhaps because I’d flippantly asked, “Could you explain why salt in a shoe is art, but in a sock is uncleanliness?” He translated Salinger at a farmstead in a small village. When he was working, and decided he’d earned one of his rare breaks, he went out to stand in the yard on the knotweed and eat a sandwich. In the light of the moon, cold stars and warm crumbs of bread would fall. In his head, like a thousand cobwebs tearing at once, he would hear Bach, perhaps the piece used in Solaris. Casting down his eyes, looking at the grass as if it were a battlefield, he would try to rally the army of English words at his command, to force it — all of it — to desert their posts, to join up with his native language, and then, standing to attention, without regret, condemn all their prepositions to death, leading them up to the guillotine, changing them into six inflections and attempting to preserve their rhythm with nothing much more than intuition to guide him … until he would get giddy from the sound of the thundering hooves of the multiplying participles, half-participles, and gerunds, until he would get stuck in the convolvulus of two syntaxes and stand, stunned, in front of the already tangible, seemingly under control, but secretly growing chasm of equivalence as it yawned before him once more. “A great part of the moonlight would fall next to the barn and the barn door. I guarantee that if someone had written the very name of God on that door, it would be impossible to read because of the moonlight poured over it.”
“I don’t know where this sentence came from,” he admitted to me. “Is it mine or not? So long as I don’t know, I have to say, it intimidates me more than a little …”
About the Author and the Translator
GIEDRA RADVILAVICIUTE studied philology and literature at Vilnius University. She has worked as a teacher and as an editor, and her work has been published in numerous journals. She has published two books of her writing in Lithuania.
ELIZABETH NOVICKAS studied rhetoric and fine printing at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Her next project, a translation of Petra Cvirka’s Frank Kruk, has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts.