STORMS AND LOVE

I don't know which I fell in love with first:
a storm, or you, my love.

But for your sake, o storm!
But for your sake, o love!
I go to live with one wild urge:
extending arms to my beloved,
raising my banners to the storm.

Then let us storm together, storm!
Our road lies straight and broad before us.
Sing, my beloved,
if your lover perish in the storm.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


SONG OF THE CAWING CROW

Mists and lamps over street and lane.
A crow caws up in the inky sky.
Ah, my green-leaved youth, I call you in vain,
You and the storm's sweet roar on high!

Ah, crow, old crow, what calamity
Hanged our cry from the forest free
Up in the sooty sky of the town,
A sky where dawn one can never see!

Only maybe the stinted lights,
The sick, bleached patches of rare, dim beams,
And here am I, lost, a village lad,
And, you black daughter of green woods and streams.

Ah crow, black crow, my sister by blood,
What devil brought you to settle here!
Far away is my father's woodland home,
No rustling, storm-riven woods are there here!

Here it hums, but it isn't the noise of the woods,
But the noise of chimneytops black,
But the rubbing of iron against hard stone,
Thousands of concrete jaws crunch and crack.

Ah crow, old crow, you will never fly
Out of the soot-belching chimney row,
When you've let through yourself all the smoke and grime
You won't even be worth a plain black crow.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


A SAD TALE

No, never will I forget till I die
Two outstretched hands.
The gold light of sunset died in the sky
As she looked throught the jailwindow at its strands.

The window was barred and the prison guard
Guarded her with their guns.
And I remembered a fairy tale
Of a charmed princess I'd been told of once.

I stopped. It was quiet. Only the hand
Of the moon in the prison window shone.
It was Father Moon that had come to see
His dear daughter from days bygone.

And the sister-stars in a circle stood,
Weaving a wreath for the head.
It was my country weeping there
Behind the barred window filled with dread.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


THOUGHTS ABOUT ETERNITY

After an unsuccessful trip to eternity
I returned to old Vilnius, my native city,
and put up in a flat built not long ago,
which looked like a coffin – its ceiling was so low,
while indo the window like ghosts, eyes agog,
crept shadows from the ruins of an old sinagogue.

On that first of a long line of sleepless nights
I fancied – the eeriest of nightmarish sights! –
that the blocks of old houses had come alive
and the ruined old sinagogue rose, revived,
and on its balcony, coloured blue,
rabbi Gaon was sitting anew.

"Rebe Gaon", I addressed the man,
"Accept my apologies if you can
for interrupting your thoughts on eternity,
but I'd very much like, from the standpoint of modernity,
to talk of philosopher Maimonide's ideas
which have long been upsetting my mental peace.

"I first came across them right after the war
when I met with a Jew who was old, tired and sore,
having gone through all deathcamps in Poland and Germany
and not flown as smoke from a crematorium chimney.
Facing a corner, in a cellar he sat,
plaintively chanting a prayer,
for he thought that, by some miracle,
he was the last Jew left anywhere,
and bemoaned the plight of his people.

"Then we started talking
about Maimonide's philosophy
according to which a man suffers
not for any fault of his own
but for all his people
and all its history.
I myself more than once thought the same
But dismissed it as quite impossible.
Be so kind, o rebe Gaon,
– for you are a pillar of wisdom –
tell me, can this really be true?"

Falling into thought, Gaon made no reply,
only, digging into a fat talmud,
sorrowfully waged his head,
returning to his eternity,
while I again found myself sighing and coughing
in a new flat, low-ceilinged like a coffin,
with the unsolved puzzle:
for what do men,
people,
and all mankind
suffer terrible torments
which never cease?

When spring came,
I wanted to talk again
with rabbi Gaon about the same subject,
but there, in the place where the ruins has stood
I saw children at play.
But after all, maybe so it should be,
maybe they are eternity,
and through them, life will come back to the old city?

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


THE BALTIC

One windy night the sun
sank into the Baltic Sea.

Amber fishermen sailed out
on the Baltic to fish for the sun.

The Baltic foamed through night.

In the morning fishermen brought
the sun on an amber barge to shore.

Translated by Jonas Zdanys


WHITE SEAGUL

I'll write your name on the sand,
it will disappear with the first wave.
And I'll say nothing to you,
for perhaps my heart
will screech like a gull on the sea.

Then the seagull will fly over the waves.
Only the ocean will murmur. And an unquiet heart.
And perhaps I'll write
your name on the sand
more than once
and say nothing to you,
for words will disapperar in the ocean's murmur,
and I'll be left only with longing.

Then fly onward, white seagull!

Translated by Jonas Zdanys

Kazys Boruta, poet, novelist, and literary editor, was born into a peasant family in the village of Kulokai near the city of Marijampolė. He studied at a teachers' training school in Marijampolė and from 1926 to 1930 he studied literature at the universities of Kaunas and Vienna, Austria. His verse was first published in 1921 and was notably influenced by German Expressionism and the poetry of Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. In Boruta's poems the lyricism of contrasting moods and a romantic intensity of passion are combined with a roughness of imaginery and dynamic rhythm. He also translated many of the works of Schiller, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Tolstoy into Lithuanian. Boruta was imprisoned several times for his political activities.