{"id":1180,"date":"2011-10-29T11:42:08","date_gmt":"2011-10-29T10:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2016-01-23T19:01:23","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T18:01:23","slug":"marcelijus-martinaitus-the-ballads-of-kukutis-arc-publications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1180","title":{"rendered":"Marcelijus Martinaitus, <em>The Ballads of Kukutis<\/em> (Arc Publications)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\">Sometimes a set of poems seem to emerge with an almost all-consuming inevitability.<span> <\/span>One such was and is <em>Crow. <\/em>Another must have been <em>The Ballads of Kukutis <\/em>on its first appearance in Lituania in 1977;<span> <\/span>or that\u2019s how it might seem seen though Laima Vinc\u00e9\u2019s new translation and published by Arc. <span> <\/span>Both <em>Crow <\/em>and <em>Kukutis<\/em> feature tricksters who play the Holy Fool and, knowingly or otherwise, subvert the moral universe they are born into. <span> <\/span>In the case of <em>Crow<\/em> that subversion is of a Judaeo-Christian mythology;<span> <\/span>in <em>Kukutis<\/em>\u2019 case that subversion is the Stalinist command economy that the poet Martinaitus grew up in.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\">Lithuania<\/span><span lang=\"EN-GB\"> in the Second World War was subject to double invasion from Hitler\u2019s Germany and Stalin\u2019s Soviet Union. <span> <\/span>It\u2019s economy was forced into collectivisation and its culture and language almost drowned. <span> <\/span>In such circumstances, the surreal might seem the sanest way to go:<span> <\/span>\u2018All letters are equal\/starting with \u201cA\u201d!\/ \u201dA\u201d blocks our way!\/ Exile \u201cA\u201d to the end!\/Let \u201cZ\u201d be written the same time\/as all the other letters.\/It is against the law to write \u201cZ\u201d\/ to be written in front of \u201cA\u201d, this from \u2018Kukutis\u2019s Appeal to the Alphabet\u2019. This is Martinaitus\u2019 version of the madness of sloganised bureaucracy satirised in both <em>Catch 22<\/em> and <em>Animal Farm.<\/em> But elsewhere such surrealism veers into existential despair; \u2018I\u2019ll never grow used to not being.\/I\u2019ll run away and show myself to widows.\/I\u2019ll loot at night like a prisoner.\/I\u2019ll hide my ragged self in the rye,\/just so that I may die further away\/from my death\u2019(Kukutis\u2019s Testament). <span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\">And such existential despair does haunt this collection.<span> <\/span>But Martinaitus also hauls such existential concern back into the comic. <span> <\/span>In \u2018Kukutis tells about his Woman\u2019 evokes the conceit that e.e. cummings uses in \u2018She Being Brand\u2019, \u2018How much trouble I would have\/getting her started in the morning,\/turning the fly wheel,\/until she warmed up,\/\u2026\/\/ Then I\u2019d let her go\/and she\u2019d fly through the day\/rumbling,\/strewing flour,\/bird seed,\u2026\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\"> <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span lang=\"EN-GB\">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.<span> <\/span>At her appearance in the Manchester Literature Festival, Martinaitus\u2019 translater Laima Vinc\u00e9, spoke of how Martinaitus himself was always amazed at Kukutis\u2019 passing the censors. <span> <\/span>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\u2019s return to democracy in the early nineties. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s how it might seem seen though Laima Vinc\u00e9\u2019s new translation and published by Arc. Both Crow and Kukutis [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[34,150,173],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Marcelijus Martinaitus, The Ballads of Kukutis (Arc Publications) - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=1180\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Marcelijus Martinaitus, The Ballads of Kukutis (Arc Publications) - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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\u2019s how it might seem seen though Laima Vinc\u00e9\u2019s new translation and published by Arc. 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