Reflections on Belonging

What does it feel like to arrive anew in a country one was born into? To try on its seas of water and wheat for size, to trade a conifer forest for towering concrete, the present capital (Vilnius) – for a historic one (Kaunas) and to go back on that deal again? Let me tell […]

We Have Been Waiting for You I grew up with one mother and two grandparents. I grew up with a grandfather who told me the sea was the only border I could trust, who told me the people who stay behind die or hide and about the pyramid dunes he ran across as a child.

          In the spring of 2020, my mother Vida and the other residents of her Toronto nursing home were sitting ducks when the virus arrived. Close living quarters and daily, intimate contact with dozens of caregivers put everyone at risk for contagion. We didn’t understand exactly how the new virus was

It was the midwinter of 1999. School was out, but I wasn’t heading home. Me and my best friend walked to the bus stop and got on trolleybus 19 to take the new route Pašilaičiai–Antakalnis, which had been running for only a few months. We were headed to Žvėrynas, up to this day considered a

On a warm afternoon in late April 2001, I walked down Gedimino, smiling at spring. I was jet-lagged from my first trip to America and still intoxicated by its nature, food, seemingly unrestricted personalities, and cosmopolitan vibe. A trolleybus rolling by slowly like a large yellow chunky caterpillar, its whiskers gripping the wires above, was

Metaphorically Speaking One of my hobbies is physics. I have a special interest in the origin and evolution of our universe, including the period of “inflation” immediately following the Big Bang. For non-science readers, “inflation” refers to a very brief and very rapid expansion of the universe from its very small (nuclear-scale) beginning. When I

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t see translation as a matter of course. Whenever I read something and decisively thought it was good, I just knew it had to be translated. Other people need to read this. An instant response, an urgency to share. There are many reasons for this, I suppose. A reader’s

Lord, if you wish for me to return, make it so that a fish would swim through my meadow, my eye swimming in pursuit until it reaches the fish’s refreshing embrace. G. Grass —  When the war broke out in Ukraine, I visited my grandfather, who is slowly approaching his centennial birthday, hoping that he

When I was asked to write an essay about translation, I knew I wouldn’t be able to elucidate upon the finer points of the craft and make a lofty defense of my profession and what it entails. Why? Because I look at the work of translation as simply work, word after word, sentence after sentence,

There are so few Greeks now in Leningrad. Joseph Brodsky There is probably no translator who has not encountered the dilemma of the untranslatable. I could say that, as a translator myself, such moments bring about existential dread and helplessness. Is the word (or saying, or the emotional or semantic charge) I am stuck on