Carefully, Stanley lifts his legs over the railing. He doesn’t look at the water. “Idz srač,” he says, and falls silently down.
A few minutes to twelve. Garšva sits on the flowered linoleum. In paradise. By the blue hills. Surrounded by blooming flowers and giant butterflies lazily fanning their wings. Garšva feels cool, he feels good. There is a rose in his hand. A dead woman’s face. Its petals as soft as curtains. Garšva holds a sheaf of papers that he is tearing into thin strips. His face is happy. A peaceful idiot’s. He smells the paper. A chinchilla’s face.
The book dust continues to float upward. A sunbeam lights up a bare wall, the reproduction now hangs in shadow. Clear blue. Cosy.
Translator’s Note
Any literary translation can be seen as an inherently impossible exercise, but a text that itself plays with translation and with the émigré’s movement back and forth between languages, and does so in multiple voices, presents particular challenges. Antanas Škėma’s Balta drobulė brilliantly conveys the displaced person’s constant feeling of dislocation and cultural adjustment by mixing fragments of English and other European languages into the speech and thoughts of the main characters. This English version of Škėma’s novel attempts to preserve some of that linguistic richness by leaving several key words, as well as passages of folksong, in Lithuanian within the main body of the text, with translations and explanations provided in footnotes; the decision to leave the phrase “up ir down” as it appeared in the original was made to convey some of the blended flavour of the text, as other instances of émigré language and slang were inevitably lost in translation (e.g., “labsteriai” simply became “lobsters”). It is hoped that the end result is in the spirit of Škėma’s faith in the possibility of a synthesis between Lithuanian and other languages and cultures, and in the possibilities offered by that synthesis. This translation would not have been possible without the participation of leading Škėma scholar Loreta Mačianskaitė who provided unflagging support from the beginning of the project, Baltic Studies scholar Violeta Kelertas who read an early version of the draft, and Jurgis Vaitkūnas without whom the whole up ir down would not have been nearly as meaningful.
A personal recollection from Jonas Mekas, American avant-garde filmmaker of Lithuanian origin
I think it was in 1947, in the Kassel Displaced Persons camp, that myself with a couple of younger, post-Škėma generation writers, we read one of the short stories that had just came out in Škėma’s first collection of prose pieces. We were taken by one of his short stories which ended with a very clinical description of a spittoon by hospital patient’s bed. It was so minimal and so clinical like nothing before in Lithuanian literature. As much as we were critical of the writings of the generation “before us,” we admitted that Antanas Škėma was “OK.”
I have to add, that our small group who considered ourselves a “new” generation of Lithuanian literature, we were only some ten years younger…
Later, some five years later, in Brooklyn, I met Škėma in person. He had just opened a theatre studio. I decided to join it. I have to confess that my joining his studio was not motivated by my wanting to become an actor: I joined it because I was falling in love with a young woman who had joined it… And it was amazing to find out how Škėma was able to take a sentence from a play and analyse it in the same clinical, down to earth way as he did with the spittoon in his short story. Piece by piece he was bringing the sentence alive in front of our eyes, very factually and clinically. Only later I found out that before joining Kaunas and later Vilnius National Lithuanian Theatre, where he worked as an actor and director, he had studied medicine and law. So now he applied it all to his writing. No baloney, as they say. No unnecessary ornamentation. Algimantas Mockus, a poet of “our” (“younger”) generation later described his generation as a “generation without ornamentation.” Škėma, more than any other Lithuanian writer of the immediate post-war period, with BALTA DROBULĖ represents most uniquely that generation, the generation with no ornamentation.
Copyright
First published in 1958 as Balta drobulė © the heirs of Antanas Škėma
Translation copyright © Vagabond Voices 2018
This edition published in March 2018 by Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd., Glasgow, Scotland
ISBN 978-1-908251-84-8
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Cover design by Mark Mechan
Typeset by Park Productions
The publisher acknowledges subsidy towards this publication from Creative Scotland
The publisher acknowledges subsidy towards the translation from the Lithuanian Culture Institute
For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website, www.vagabondvoices.co.uk