Editorial
Warm greetings to all of you, our critical readers and charitable critics. More than once I’ve been asked (as I’m sure all of you have as well): Where can I read your poetry? Your prose? Who are your most interesting writers? What is Lithuanian literature like? What is most important to the writers in your country?
Tomas Vaiseta
- Details
- Fiction
You see, all the cats (there were seven of them at the time) lived according to a strict, ascetic, individual time table, so strict that one might think that they lived only for the purpose of putting it into effect, that that time table was divine guidance with the cats being the devoted and trustworthy executors of its will. It would not be overstating the case to say that behind them their actions – meaningless at first glance, their everyday languorous movements, their royal-like ways of stretching and snoozing, there lay a noble mission to uphold our world order, which we humans, of course, carelessly, irresponsibly, relentlessly disrupt like foaming waves do endless sand dunes.
Greta Ambrazaitė
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- Poetry
can it be that you’re a miracle (I always hear this word),
not a real one, but as if, as if it were a question of belief
the belief or knowledge that you are an independent
heart’s pulse, viscous dust quickened by lightning
Birutė Grašytė-Black
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- Poetry
For the concrete columns
Holding up this world,
For it all, once upon a time
I paid with lilac leaves.
Nerijus Cibulskas
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- Poetry
we are comets with the tails chopped off
our burning heads crashing
to rest
Greta Ambrazaitė and Dominykas Norkūnas: On Poetry and Poetic Ambassadorship
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- Interviews
As we thought about the name for the association, we knew that we want to connect ourselves to Vilnius. The city has had a lovely legend from the Middle Ages about the basilisk of Vilnius – with time, the basilisk became known as a friend of the city’s residents rather than a dangerous beast, and seeing it was known to be a sign of good fortune. Thus, we interpreted the basilisk in our own way as a patron of literature, writers, and translators, while in our view every poet and translator became the basilisk’s ambassador.
Antanas Šimkus: “Poetry Means Being Myself”
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- Interviews
I think that schools and universities as well as other educational institutions need societies like that – not to cultivate some higher level of artistry but to develop a humanitarian environment – where people learn to discuss, be silent, listen, and talk about important things. In other words, where they can get that sense of community that every lover of literature, or any true individualist, secretly thinks about. We write in solitude, but the sense of being in a safe environment for showing and discussing our work is equally important.
Laima Vince
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- Nonfiction
The Italian sailors would sit out those forty days and pass the time onboard their ship, gazing out at what must have been the tantalizing site of land after so much time at sea. But time moved more slowly in centuries past. In our era of globalization, our sense of time has sped up to a dizzying blur. This enforced quarantine may just slow time for all of us.
I have resolved to write my quarantine diary for forty days. I will be like those sailors of times past. I will allow time to slow down for me and my diary shall be a place to reflect.
