Then What

by Gintaras Grajauskas, Rimas Uzgiris (Translator)

Overview

With the demise of the Soviet Union, Lithuania jumped from a neo-romantic modernism straight into the postmodern wasteland of unfettered capitalism. Pensions disappeared along with jobs. Everything underwent “reform”. Everything was for sale. Poetry audiences went from stadium size to coffee house size. Giddy joy was followed by disillusion, anxiety, angst. Gintaras Grajauskas’s poetry cannot be understood without this backdrop, for it was here that he cut his poetic teeth and became a major Lithuanian poet. He met the jarring changes around him with a wry smile, black humour, irony – all grounded in respect for the quotidian, the small, the insignificant. Reading his poems, one can laugh and grind one’s teeth at the same time. We can see the influences of Polish poetry in the irony and search for meaning in a new cultural landscape. We can see the rejection of lyrical language for the prosaic, the pithy. Paradoxical, absurd, witty and observant, Grajauskas reflects a society that has seemingly lost interest in speaking for itself, for the whole. The individual is on his/her own. Life is tough, and to be alive today is to drift in uncertainty, but it is a human life that cannot sustain itself on cynicism and irony. We question, we search, and we laugh through the tears, reading his work, knowing ourselves better.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780372068
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	04/26/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	257 KB

About the Author

Gintaras Grajauskas is one of Lithuania’s leading poets, and also a multi-talented playwright, essayist, novelist and editor. Born in 1966, he has lived and worked in Klaipėda since childhood. He graduated from the S. Šimkus High School for music, and later from the Lithuanian National Conservatory’s Klaipėda branch in the jazz department. From 1990-94 he worked in radio and television, and from 1994 was the editor of the Klaipėda literary journal Gintaros Lašai. He has been head of the literature department of the Klaipėda State Drama Theater since 2008. Grajauskas has published seven books of poetry, two essay collections, one novel and one collection of plays. His work has won numerous awards, including the Z. Gėlė Prize for best poetry debut (1994), and the Poetry Spring Mairionis prize for best poetry collection (2000). His poems have been translated into many languages, with collections published in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Iceland and Poland. A selection of his poems appeared in the bilingual anthology Six Lithuanian Poets (Arc Publications, 2008). The first English translation of his poetry, Then What, translated by Rimis Uzgiris, is published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Grajauskas is also a founding member of blues-rock band Kontrabanda and of jazz-rock band Rockfeleriais (on bass guitar and lead vocals).
Rimas Uzgiris is a poet, translator, editor and critic. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, AGNI, Atlanta Review, Iowa Review, Quiddity, Hudson Review, Vilnius Review and other journals. He is translation editor and primary translator of How the Earth Carries Us: New Lithuanian Poets, and translator of Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė, Crystal: Selected Poems by Judita Vaičiūnaitė (forthcoming from Pica Pica Press) and of Then What: Selected Poems by Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University, and teaches translation at Vilnius University. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for his translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages.

Table of Contents

'Because I'm not at all the one you're waiting for…' 9

Illumination 10

Winter, a long-legged dog 11

Grandfather's birthday 12

Meaning 13

St Lucy gets hit on the head 14

'On that day, if you remember…' 15

Ballad 16

The maiden and the unicorn 17

St Lucy's secret letter to the Master of the White Scarf Lodge 18

Soft snow poem 19

St Lucy among the Hyperboreans 20

Heat 21

Pipe organs 22

I don't dance 23

How to defeat a berserker 25

God's frequency is 50 Hz 26

How it all happened 27

In high grass gazing at the sky 28

Battleships 29

'Now, it doesn't matter…' 30

The comic strip 31

'To look for insults…' 32

It's him 33

Painfully funny now 34

The ending which probably doesn't exist 35

'Having bounced around the world…' 36

'It's already getting dark…' 37

Emigrant 38

While eating a hamburger by the snack bar at kilometer 64 of the Klaipeda-Vilnius Highway, I met a learned raven 39

Little Buddha 40

Sincerely 41

Poetry readings 42

Poem about the Lithuanian search for identity 43

'I'm building a barricade…' 45

Some kind of Kafka 47

What you need to know about life 48

The artist's wife 49

Second-hand 50

Screen 52

What there is at the internet's core 53

An exercise for summoning happiness 54

Children's games 55

Not a poem 56

Cinematographic poem 57

Before the crucifixion, they muttered 60

When it rains and rains and rains 61

An immortal 63

Victor 64

Icon painter 65

Radvilišskis blues 66

The decline of the West 67

Berserker II 68

The whole truth about knights 69

I understand her, seriously 70

Initiation 71

'Damn, again with that red mazda…' 72

Spring on Mazvydo Avenue 73

The inside of the coat is the better side 74

'Good day! Nice…' 75

Whatever they say, what matters is how it really is 76

Blind Date 77

Closer, farther 78

Person with half a watermelon 79

'You wrote, of course, a mendacious…' 80

Shaman 81

'Yeah, so you're right - I sang and…' 82

'I was playing tennis…' 84

On steam engines 85

Everything seems fine, but something's not right 86

Maybe something's not right, but everything's fine 87

Some more about Frank 88

Five quick looks 89

Procession, Fog 91

'and so i wrote…' 92

[_ _ _ _ ] 93

After a reading 94

Thaw 95