‘I am grateful to Orwell’: On language, literature, and Lithuania
Authors: Venclova Tomas 
Published: October 2007

In many ways, Tomas Venclova's life mirrors the history of Lithuania during the last half century. Translator, poet and essayist, Venclova was born in 1937 in the Lithuanian seaport of Klaipeda. His father, Antanas Venclova, belonged to the radical Lithuanian literary circle, The Third Front, in the early 1930s. During the first Soviet occupation of the country, from 1940 to 1941, Antanas Venclova was appointed Minister of Education of the new Soviet Lithuanian government. After the war he remained a member of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party, and a writer, says his son, ‘of a strict Soviet persuasion’ who ‘belonged to the Soviet élite’.

Tomas Venclova was also a member of this élite. In the first years after Stalin's death he attended the University of Vilnius, lived in Moscow and Leningrad, and formed much closer ties to Russian culture than most Lithuanians. At the University, he occasionally taught courses on Western literature, published a book on his own poetry, The Sign of Language (1972), two books of essays The Rockets, the Planets, and Us (1962) and Golem, or the Artificial Man (1965), and wrote articles for the literary press.

His chief interest, however, was translation. Fluent in four languages — Lithuanian, Russian, Polish, and English — and with a working knowledge of French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, and Ukrainian, Venclova introduced the Lithuanian reading public to many modern and classic works of world literature. He translated poems by W. H. Auden (In Memory of Yeats and September 1, 1939), T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land), short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, plays by Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, Eugene O'Neill, Garcia Lorca, excerpts from the works of James Joyce, Cavafy, and others. In this he harked back to the tradition of the radical Third Front his father had belonged to during Lithuania's years of independence. This group tried to introduce writers and poets such as Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Alfred Doeblin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky to their fellow-countrymen. The younger Venclova also found something in common with other goals espoused by the Third Front. They wanted, he said, ‘to air out literature, to bring Lithuanian letters out of provincialism, to bring it to maturity and to modernise it…’. Often this was done ‘through humour — frequently angry and strident, but nevertheless humour — which in Lithuania is a rather rare thing; it was always much more fashionable with us to strike a suffering and tragic pose’.

Yet the literary activity that had propelled Antanas Venclova into becoming part of the new Soviet establishment served to alienate Tomas Venclova from it. His own efforts to ‘air out literature’ during the post-war Soviet years led to increasing frustrations and obstacles. He recalls:

‘Once I translated four of Borges’ short stories, and brought them to the editorial offices of a magazine. The first thing the editor asked me was, “Is this Borges an enemy of the Soviet system?” I answered that I didn't think Borges was so much against the Soviet system as he was against the solar system. The editor got a little nervous and said, “I'll check to see if he might be on the blacklist.” I asked him, “Maybe you could show me this blacklist, so that I would know once and for all, who can be translated and who cannot.” The editor replied, “I don't have it, and myself am not quite sure where it is.” And in some vague way he checked to see if Borges was on it. In the end they published two of the four stories.'

Tomas Venclova's increasing confrontation with the censor spelled his eventual expulsion from the élite. He was pushed out of it, he says, ‘in part through my own efforts, in part through the efforts of others. There is great competition to win a spot among the élite and people set up obstacles for one another’. Of the difficulties this caused with his father, Venclova says, ‘We argued with one another, but our relationship stayed intact. It was simply that he belonged to one party and I to another. That often happens and people still find something in common to talk about. We tried to do the same.’

Venclova's future in Lithuanian life did not remain intact. In the early 1970s he applied for membership in the Writers' Union as a translator and his application was turned down. He, it seems, did not meet the criteria of the first paragraph of the Union's by-laws, which stipulate that through his work, a writer must contribute to building Communist society. In addition, Venclova turned more and more to dissident and human rights activities, joining the Lithuanian Helsinki Agreements Monitoring Group in 1976. He began applying for permission to emigrate. Several writers in the West — including Arthur Miller, who wrote a letter on his behalf to the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Lithuanian Communist Party — gave him their support. Eventually, Czeslaw Milosz arranged a special lectureship at the University of Columbia, and Venclova was permitted to take the post in early 1977. Soon after he left the USSR, his citizenship was revoked by a unanimous vote of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

In the West, Venclova has continued to publicise both the restrictions on literary expression and violations of human rights in the Soviet Union. He still writes, he says, mainly for readers in Lithuania. It is the thought that his translations, poems, and essays will reach them that underpins his work. While still in Lithuania, one of his principal aims as a translator was to ‘broaden people's cultural horizons and bring them closer to world culture’. This purpose has not changed. His fourth book to be published in the West — which will appear later in 1984 — Texts on Texts, is an example. It is a collection of essays on literature and literary figures from various cultures, written by Venclova in several languages, which he himself translated into Lithuanian. (Venclova's books, whether published in the USSR or the West, have appeared only in Lithuanian.)

The three other books he has published in the West consist of two collections of poetry — 98 Poems (1977) by himself, and Voices (1979) poems by others that he translated into Lithuanian — and a collection of essays, Lithuania in the World (1981). Covering a broad spectrum of cultural and political topics, this book sold out almost immediately, reflecting the central role Venclova plays in Lithuanian cultural life today. Historian Romas Misiúnas says of Venclova, ‘He is one of a handful of Lithuanians who are discussed as much in Lithuania as in the émigré (post-World War Two) community, and who have left their footprints in both surroundings.’

Venclova has made an impact outside this boundary as well. As Misiúnas writes on Lithuania in the World, ‘ (Venclova) concerns himself first with the common problems of humanity. But his analysis of them is from a Lithuanian and Eastern European intellectual standpoint…' The very broad forum where Venclova's work has appeared reflects this. His poems have been translated into English, Polish, and Russian. His essays have appeared in Polish and Russian literary journals, as well as English-language publications such as Encounter and the New York Review of Books. As a member of PEN Writers in Exile, he has travelled extensively in the past seven years. In all, Venclova has visited over thirty countries. He attributes this to a passion for globetrotting: ‘When the Bolsheviks took history away from us, well, somehow we lived with that. But when they took away geography — that was too much!’

Currently, Tomas Venclova teaches Russian literature at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He has no regrets about having emigrated, but his focus never veers far from Lithuania and the Soviet Union. His experience reflects what many who have emigrated from that part of the world in the past fifteen years have gone through. As he explains:

‘For about three years after I arrived in the West, I occasionally dreamt the following dream. I dreamt that I had returned to Vilnius, and sat together with my friends in the Neringa cafe, drinking coffee and cognac (this, in the Neringa cafe, is unavoidable). I talked to them, just as I talk here. Yet no one arrested me, no one hauled me into the secret police. I walked freely through my beloved city of Vilnius. I saw St Ann's Church, the cathedral, and everything was infinitely pleasant. Suddenly, through my dream, I remembered — my dear God, I don't have my American passport anymore, I can't leave! I bolted screaming from my sleep, turned on the light, and with relief, realised that I was in New Haven… This dream… hounded me a long time… We will all return, but the situation is such that most of us will return only through our works….’