The Ballads of Kukutis

by Marcelijus Martinaitis, Laima Vince (Translator)

Overview

In creating the character of Kukutis, Marcelijus Martinaitis found a voice which could articulate the anger, frustration and passions of the Lithuanian people, a voice which, contrary to all expectations, managed to escape the Soviet censor's pen and which, a decade after publication of The Ballads of Kukutis, was to become the catalyst for revolution in the Baltics. Indeed, during the mass political rallies of the late 1980s and early '90s, poems from The Ballads were chanted, sung and performed everywhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906570262
Publisher:	Arc Publications
Publication date:	01/01/2011
Series:	ARC Classics
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.37(d)

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

KUKUTIS AS A TRICKSTER CHARACTER

According to the Lithuanian poet Marcelijus Martinaitis, Kukutis was the first Lithuanian to bypass the Soviet border control unnoticed. In the eighties Kukutis made his appearance in Sweden and since then he has travelled the globe, showing up around the world in fourteen separate translations. Luckily, Martinaitis has been able to catch up with Kukutis since Lithuania regained its independence in 1991, and is now himself a free citizen of the world.

Martinaitis's Kukutis character has a wooden leg. The wooden leg is a folkloric symbol of wisdom and also acts as the staff of the messenger. Because Kukutis can pass between worlds, he fulfils the role of messenger. This concept turned out to be prophetic as The Ballads of Kukutis has made its mark in a number of European countries. In fact, The Ballads of Kukutis is the most widely-read work of Lithuanian poetry outside of Lithuania. For Lithuanians Kukutis carried the message of freedom. Outside of Lithuania, Kukutis bore witness to the fragility and the tenacity of an occupied people's will to survive.

Poet, essayist, social activist, educator, Marcelijus Martinaitis was born in the village of Paserbentis in Western Lithuania in 1936. Martinaitis's childhood was marred by the invasions of two armies – the Soviet army occupied Lithuania in 1941 and 1944, and the Nazis occupied Lithuania in 1941. The Second World War did not end in Lithuania in 1944 after VE Day. Partisan warfare raged across the country until 1956 when fifty thousand Lithuanian men and women joined the armed resistance against the Soviet occupying forces during the post-war decades.

The Ballads of Kukutis is set in the Stalin era, during the forced collectivization of farms, when Lithuania's farmers lost their land and their agrarian lifestyles to the process of collectivization in which private farms were confiscated and united as large collectively-run farms. During the Stalin and Khrushchev eras villages were flattened by bulldozers in order to create large expanses of arable land. These forced measures taken against an agrarian people whose entire world-view and religion was linked to the land had a devastating effect.

Martinaitis's hero, Kukutis, the trickster fool, lives through these dark times hardly noticing the processes taking place around him. In fact, his very existence is an affront to the local Soviet government. Not only is he incapable of following the laws and regulations of the new regime, he is utterly unable to understand them.

In an interview with Martinaitis conducted on 11 May 2006, Martinaitis talks about how, when he was growing up in his village in western Lithuania, there was a contingency of people who existed outside the realm of Soviet laws and regulations and beyond the limits of sanity. Through their madness, these people obtained an enviable inner freedom. Stalin's decrees did not touch them: they existed outside the realm of governance. Martinaitis recalls how as a child he'd sit for hours listening to these people tell their stories of the visions they'd had, of their incredible travels, of their meditations and ruminations.

The person of Kukutis is based on these village outsiders who managed to live their lives around the regime. Kukutis goes about his life untouched by the law, and therefore is a great inconvenience to the local Communist government. Not only does Kukutis live and function outside of regulation, he possesses the ability to pass between this life and the beyond: he is both animate and inanimate at the same time. He knows no borders or limits. He is a trickster character in the tradition of the Native American trickster tales.

In western Lithuania where Martinaitis grew up, the word 'Kukutis' was used as a nonsense word. People would jokingly refer to each other as 'Kukutises', especially in clumsy or awkward situations. But 'Kukutis' is also the name of a particular rare bird – a beautiful bird with a red crown – a bird one might glimpse only once in a lifetime. At the same time, the word 'Kukutis' is related to the Lithuanian word 'gegute' – coo-coo bird. Martinaitis claims that the name 'Kukutis' came to him completely unexpectedly and from deep within his unconscious, as did the entire manuscript of poems. He wrote the poems quickly and rather effortlessly, with little revision. Years later he read that in Persian literature the name of the bird that acted as Solomon's messenger was 'Kukuts'.

Amazingly, Kukutis was able to infiltrate and evade censorship when The Ballads of Kukutis first made its appearance in 1977. Under the Soviet system, Lithuanian literature was censored and closely monitored by GLAVLIT, a Communist Party-run office that monitored literature and the activity of Soviet writers. The censorship process worked as follows. The writer presented his or her manuscript to the editor at the government publishing house. The editor would read the manuscript, making sure there were no obvious allusions that would catch the attention of the censors. These would be allusions such as religious references, mention of the partisan warfare of the post-war period, or ideas reminiscent of democracy or human rights. Once the editor was satisfied that the manuscript was acceptable, he passed it on to GLAVLIT and that Communist Party committee read it thoroughly, again searching for any allusions that could be considered anti-Soviet.

Obviously, the writer did not have the right to know who was reading his or her manuscript, not did he or she have access to the committee's comments on the manuscript. If anything suspicious were detected, it was the job of the editor to mediate with the writer and to ask that revisions be made. Once all changes were made, then the manuscripts would officially go before the Soviet Literature Committee who decided whether the manuscript would be published or not and who may or may not request more changes or omissions.

After all final changes were made, the manuscript would go to press. Once the first copy of the book was produced, it would be presented once again to GLAVLIT where it would be checked one last time for anti-Soviet references. This last step was particularly nerve-racking for both the editor and the writer, because if problems were discovered at this stage, all the printed books would need to be destroyed at the expense of the publishing house. Because this would be the worst possible scenario, many editors would end up taking out too much from a manuscript beforehand in fear of the final censorship. Luckily, few Russians in Moscow could read or understand Lithuanian. Double agents within the Communist Party and the publishing houses in Lithuania could slide 'dubious' manuscripts past the censors, thus creating an official local literary culture that was more open and expressive than that of Soviet Russia.

In the case of The Ballads of Kukutis, nothing offensive was found by the censors with the exception of one mention of Stalin, which Martinaitis's editor suggested he remove not only for political reasons, but also because it grounded the magical quality of the poems too firmly in that one particular time period. Otherwise, Kukutis marched right past the censors and became the catalyst for revolution in the Baltics.

During the mass political rallies of the late eighties and early nineties, poems from The Ballads of Kukutis were chanted, sung and performed. People immediately connected with the character of Kukutis and in their minds and hearts felt that they were all Kukutises. Once this process had begun, there was virtually nothing the authorities could do to stop it.

With this English translation, Kukutis continues to travel the world, now taking not just the poet, but me the translator along with him on his adventures. I travelled to Soviet-occupied Lithuania in September 1988 on a Soviet student visa to study Lithuanian Literature and Ethnography at Vilnius University. I was determined to translate The Ballads of Kukutis and other work by Marcelijus Martinaitis into English. Although in retrospect my own brashness surprises me, it did not surprise Martinaitis. Professor of Lithuanian Literature at Vilnius University at the time, Martinaitis agreed to give me permission to translate The Ballads of Kukutis and worked with me in shaping the rhythms of the poems and fully understanding their meaning. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, the ballads were published in a wide range of anthologies and poetry journals, but never as a whole collection. Twenty years later I returned to my original translation, but now with much more experience as a translator. This publication marks the first time all of the ballads are published together in English as a single collection.

Laima Vince

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Ballads of Kukutis"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Marcelijus Martinaitis.
Excerpted by permission of Arc Publications.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Kukutis as a Trickster Character,
Spending the Night at Kukutis's Farm,
The World's Pain in Kukutis's Lost Amputated Leg,
Kukutis's Barren Bread,
Kukutis's Lament Under the Heavens,
And Earth Went Up to Heaven,
Kukutis in Forced Labour,
Kukutis's Words,
Instruction for Kukutis Released from Forced Labour,
How Kukutis Regained His Senses,
The Story I Came Up With to Cheer Up Hanged Kukutis,
The Confusion of Tools, Words, People in the Kukutyne,
Kukutis's Swallow's Hymn,
Kukutis's Application for Temporary Relief Aid,
Kukutis's Sermon to the Pigs,
Kukutis, Where Did You Put Your Kukutis?,
Many Kukutises and One,
Kukutis Wants to See His Homeland,
Kukutis Opens His Eyes,
Kukutis Drives Fast,
How Kukutis Became Estranged from His Consciousness,
Forbid Him!,
Kukutis's Might,
An Experiment,
Morning in Kukutis's Cottage,
Kukutis and the World's Fair,
Kukutis at His Funeral,
Kukutis Tells About His Cottage,
Night at Kukutis's Farmstead,
Kukutis's Last Day,
The Women of Zuveliškes Mourn Kukutis,
How To Bury Kukutis,
Kukutis's Testament,
Kukutis's Sorrows on a Dark and Stormy Night,
Kukutis Addresses His Life,
Kukutis's Sinful Soul,
Kukutis Teaches a Child How to Pet a Moose,
A Pony in Kukutis's Ear,
Kukutis's Old Man with a Tin Awl,
Kukutis's Song,
Unhappy Kukutis in the Potato Patch,
Kukutis Needs a Woman,
Kukutis Mourns the Loss of Threshing Machines,
Kukutis Avoids Responsibility,
Kukutis Gazes at a Stewardess,
Kukutis Tells About His Woman,
Kukutis's Trip on the Samogitian Highway,
Kukutis's Visit to Vilnius,
Kukutis Rides a Full Trolleybus,
Kukutis Dreams Up Zuveliškes Village in the Cathedral Square,
Kukutis's Diagnosis,
Kukutis Beats the Agent's Dog,
Kukutis's Appeal to the Alphabet,
A Last Farewell to Kukutis,
Translator's Notes,
Biographical Notes,