Apie žodžių sandūros tikslumą: Juditos Vaičiūnaitės lyrikos vertimai ir vertinimai

ENJudita Vaičiūnaite is a poetess, without whom any discussion about the development of twentieth-century Lithuanian poetry would be impossible. She made her dashing debut in the years of Khrushchev s thaw, when Lithuanian literature started breaking away from the utilitarian aims imposed on it. Along with Vytautas Bložė, Marcelijus Martinaitis, and Sigitas Geda, she would later be referred to as a modernizer of poetry contributing to the liberalisation and rebirth of literature by numerous literary critics and authors of poetry anthologies intended for foreign readers. [...] The present study focuses on translations of Vaičiūnaitė’s poetry, a field so far not explored by literary critics. The official status of a poet, the place he or she takes in the hierarchy of the literary field of the time, reflected quite reliably by the quantity indicators of the poets inclusion in anthologies (in foreign languages, as well) and translations in general, are related to translation and evaluation of poetry. [...] Included in the most of the anthologies and referred to as one of the most significant figures of the time, Vaičiūnaitės poetry with its intrinsic power of language unfolds as a phenomenon not only of national, but also of profound European culture. [...] Four collections of Vaičiūnaitė s lyrical poetry in Russian, English, and Latvian as well as numerous other collections and anthologies make it possible to observe the path of her becoming a recognized poetess, both very closely (by evaluating the quality of her poetry translations) and from a distance (as a long-time competitive process that resulted in recognition of her poetry as part of the canon of Lithuanian literature). [...].The present study reconstructs a more consistent picture of the inclusion of Vaičiūnaitės poetry in the canon of Soviet Lithuanian literature from rather fragmented data: the correspondence between the heads of the Writers’ Union of the Lithuanian SSR and directors of Soviet publishing houses regarding book proposals, invitations to exclusive events representing Republic’s creative forces and desired deep historical roots, accompanying words for collections published abroad, and letters to translators who supervised translations of Lithuanian literature. The fact that at the time of appearance of the first collection of Vaičiūnaitės poetry translations her works were translated and published in the literary press of the USSR since i960 shows that her debut on the scale of the entire USSR was pre-planned and ideologically favourable to the administrators of cultural policy. [...] Vladimir Sergeyev from the Altai region, who translated most of the poems in Vaičiūnaitė s first collection, knew Lithuanian very poorly and did not bother to grasp the specifics of her poetry. His translations lacked that sensitive subtlety that easily melted in incidental visual allusions, the alliterative framework of the strophe, the innovative syncopated rhythm, or experimental breaking of the lines. [...] Vaičiūnaitės second collection of 155 poems translated into Russian, V mesiats nezabudok (In the Month of Forget-me-nots) was published in 1987, and in all respects had claims to be a serious publication. The translator Larisa Sushkova had no experience in translating Lithuanian poetry. Attempts to find out who initiated the translation of this collection and who selected poems for it were not successful. The second collection had no signs of obvious intervention of censorship. [...] Sushkovas translations were much more professional than those of Sergeyev's [...].Both collections ofVaičiūnaitė’s poetry in Russian were projects of centralized planned publishing industry in compliance with state objectives of the contracting authority. "Fire Put Out by Fire", the bilingual collection ofVaičiūnaitė’s lyrical poetry published in the USA in 1996, was a project that matured in a fundamentally new - academic - environment. Word-by-word translations were made by Professor Viktorija Skrupskelytė [...]. The translators were fascinated by specific metaphors, a dense network of images, the harmony between the mundane experiences and higher moments shining through them, profound poeticism, inner dynamism and links of various cultures in Vaičiūnaitė s poems. [...]. "Zemei pieskaroties" (Touching the Ground), a collection of translations of Vaičiūnaitės poetry into Latvian, was published posthumously in Riga in 2002. It was prepared and translated by Hermanis Margers Majevskis [...]. "Dikt fra Sevnhshetens Drake og andre samlinger" (Poems from ‘The Kite of Insomnia’ and Other Collections), which appeared in Norwegian in 1994. [...] Around 1990, the neighbouring Poland also had intentions to introduce Lithuanian poetry in the form of an anthology, but the plan failed due to the lack of qualified translators. In a few years, the "Pogranicze" publishers in Sejny are likely to produce a bilingual Lithuanian-Polish collection of Vaičiūnaitės poetry compiled and translated by Beata Kalęba [...]. In 2017, a collection of Judita Vaičiūnaitės poetry translated into English by the emigre translator Rimas Užgiris. [...] Interpersonal relations between writers from different republics were also important: exchange oftranslations was a token offriendship, and long-term acquaintances could turn into mediators when searching for a translator or supervising the preparation of books.

• Kalbotyra / Linguistics
• Literatūrologija / Literary Studies