Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability. One such was and is Crow. Another must have been The Ballads of Kukutis on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977; or that’s how it might seem seen though Laima Vincé’s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow and Kukutis feature tricksters who play the Holy Fool and, knowingly or otherwise, subvert the moral universe they are born into. In the case of Crow that subversion is of a Judaeo-Christian mythology; in Kukutis’ case that subversion is the Stalinist command economy that the poet Martinaitus grew up in.
Lithuania in the Second World War was subject to double invasion from Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It’s economy was forced into collectivisation and its culture and language almost drowned. In such circumstances, the surreal might seem the sanest way to go: ‘All letters are equal/starting with “A”!/ ”A” blocks our way!/ Exile “A” to the end!/Let “Z” be written the same time/as all the other letters./It is against the law to write “Z”/ to be written in front of “A”, this from ‘Kukutis’s Appeal to the Alphabet’. This is Martinaitus’ version of the madness of sloganised bureaucracy satirised in both Catch 22 and Animal Farm. But elsewhere such surrealism veers into existential despair; ‘I’ll never grow used to not being./I’ll run away and show myself to widows./I’ll loot at night like a prisoner./I’ll hide my ragged self in the rye,/just so that I may die further away/from my death’(Kukutis’s Testament).
And such existential despair does haunt this collection. But Martinaitus also hauls such existential concern back into the comic. In ‘Kukutis tells about his Woman’ evokes the conceit that e.e. cummings uses in ‘She Being Brand’, ‘How much trouble I would have/getting her started in the morning,/turning the fly wheel,/until she warmed up,/…// Then I’d let her go/and she’d fly through the day/rumbling,/strewing flour,/bird seed,…’
In doing all these things at such pace and with such piercing accuracy, Martinaitus creates a national epic which resonates far beyond the unadorned plangency of his style. At her appearance in the Manchester Literature Festival, Martinaitus’ translater Laima Vincé, spoke of how Martinaitus himself was always amazed at Kukutis’ passing the censors. And, yet, the all-too-human Kukutis is the kind of everyman who transcends categories and whose presence was large enough for his poems to have been chanted during rallies that marked Lithuania’s return to democracy in the early nineties.