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| Translated by Agnieška Leščinska | |
Erika Drungytė. Bukolikos (Bucolics). Vilnius: Slinktys, 2024, p. 80.
Bukolikos (2024) is the sixth original poetry collection by poet, literary scholar, and translator Erika Drungytė. She made her debut in 1998 with the collection Tiksli žiema (Exact winter), establishing herself as a master of nature and domestic reflection, who’s able to capture moments of everyday life infused with deeper existential insight. Drungytė’s sensitivity to the aesthetics of detail and the meditative atmosphere of her poetry resonate with the works of modernists from the older generation, such as Kornelijus Platelis, Donaldas Kajokas, Nijolė Miliauskaitė, and Danutė Paulauskaitė.
An Orientalist self-awareness also became increasingly prominent in her work. Drungytė seems to continue the tradition of Lithuanian Orientalists’ meditative reflections on the self and the surroundings, yet gradually she infuses this meditation with more elements drawn from her own land, history, and cultural-literary orientation. In her 2015 poetry collection Patria, the Buddhist-inspired idea of meditation transforms into metaphors of Lithuanian nature and cycles of rebirth. These metaphors are linked by imagery from Christian culture. From Patria onward, Drungytė’s poetry resonates increasingly strongly with the European tradition of her homeland’s culture and religions.
Oriental culture is absent from the storyline of Bukolikos, yet its influence remains embedded in its reflections on nature and everyday life. This poetry collection is divided into three sections, and each preserves the key qualities of Drungytė’s poetry: a sensitivity to detail, an aesthetic self-awareness, and an original composition of philosophical ideas. These ideas reflect Drungytė’s rather complex worldview journey.
The concept behind Bukolikos leads us to the heart of classical culture – the tradition of Mediterranean Antiquity and the European Renaissance – and invites us to think about primordial stories: the Golden Age, Eden, Arcadia, and the Gardens of Paradise. These stories of shepherds are steeped in the beauty of nature, which portray the peaceful, human-inhabited world of everyday life. Émigré modernist classic writers like Henrikas Radauskas and Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas had already thought about these aspects over half a century ago. Today, alongside Drungytė, similar narratives are being successfully developed by prominent contemporary poets such as Aidas Marčėnas and Rimvydas Stankevičius.
The first section of the book, “Kaimo dienoraščiai” (Village diaries), opens with a motto from the classic writer of Lithuanian literature, Kristijonas Donelaitis: “Thus the mild air refreshed and caressed the fields,” and sets a challenging rhythm for the entire poem through its masterfully arranged hexameter. We might ask: in today’s world of war and looming apocalypse, why would such an odd literary project be relevant for the modern reader? Is the reader, spoiled by digital media’s visual overload, capable of reading a poem in hexameter? The poem “Κόσμος” (Cosmos) in the first section offers a hint at the answer. It illustrates the promise of eternity through the possibilities of experiencing harmony found here and now, in the natural and human world.
A black-and-white cow lies beneath trees thick with crust of white
Nearby, chickens scratched about / a cat dozed on a sunlit sand island
In a small pond, ducks splashed // And everything was linked by a soft
Yet absolute hum / let out by the bees peeling open petals.
According to this perspective, the modern human no less longs for a sense of harmony than people did in Virgil’s era. The use of hexameter – introduced into Lithuanian poetry by Donelaitis, following the example of his favorite poet, Virgil – reflects that the sense of harmony is neither accidental nor spontaneous in nature. For the ancient Greeks, the cosmos was a model of order, yet order has never been an inherent value; it must be nurtured and maintained.
The hexameter chosen by Drungytė, following Donelaitis, in Bukolikos serves precisely this mission: it carries a message that has been important throughout every stage of human cultural history. It’s that we, the children of the Creator, live in His home, in the garden made for us, and that this garden is a promise of harmony, both past and future. The second section of Bukolikos, “Kregždės kišenėje” (Swallows in the pocket), tells the story of being in the present world of the modern human: like Virgil and Donelaitis, we remember and yearn for eternity. Hexameter becomes a highly unconventional way of tending the garden of language, not spontaneously, but in a constructive way.
The use of hexameter in Bukolikos is striking because its artificial rhythm stands out in contemporary poetry, which tends to favor economy of imagery and language. Drungytė’s hexameter achieves a subtlety of authorship and is aligned with the book’s concept. The simplicity of imagery with the hexameter rhythm creates a high threshold of literary meaning: on one hand, simple visuals, for example, “flexible hazel twigs” or “frost on the grass,” reach the reader’s perception from everyday life. On the other hand, the idyllic scene of a garden along with the simplest images creates a warm and picturesque impression.
Renaissance art is full of idyllic, bucolic scenes: realistic human forms moving to music and dancing, the refreshing breath of the wind in sunlit groves, the sense of intimate human connection without a glimpse of threat. In Drungytė’s book, the garden experience focuses on the possibilities of the present because a garden among city homes may be incomplete, without bumblebees or hummingbirds, surrounded by reeking trash bins. Yet the cosmos created by such a garden is just as significant as that of ancient Virgil or of Donelaitis in the Age of Enlightenment in Lithuania. It is a necessary condition for promising the harmony, for capturing a glimpse of eternity. Sometimes a garden can be as small as a “swallow’s pocket,” and even there, a “proud dill” tells not just any tale, but the stories of eternal gardens.
The central drama in Bukolikos unfolds in the third chapter of the book, “Vandens Ješua, žemės Marija” (Water’s Yeshua, Soil’s Mary,) where the figures of eternity appear: Yeshua, God, Father, Mary, the classical and Baltic goddesses Demeter and Žemyna, a choir of men chanting psalms, Medusa, Gabriel, Magdalene, Persephone. The language, shaped in hexameter, embodies the book’s core intent, which is to create order within the human world, a world that, through human time, can be transformed into divine eternity. In this chapter, Drungytė’s use of hexameter and garden imagery links Virgil and Donelaitis, the Greek and Lithuanian myths of eternity, with the New Testament. Donelaitis’s painted landscape emerges in the present through dialogue scenes reminiscent of Virgil’s Bucolics: everyone speaks with one another, referencing themselves and others, and within monologic dialogues lies the Drungytė’s philosophical worldview.
The most fundamental axis of this philosophical worldview connects all cultural layers of Drungytė’s time and speaks in the voice of her generation – mainly about the perceived reality of the world, the challenges posed by history, the remaining natural resources, inherited elemental forces, the implanted conscience and sense of beauty, and looming cataclysms. We could say that in the chapter “Water’s Yeshua, Soil’s Mary,” the very idea of human life within time is being rethought as well as narratives of death and suffering, love and hope. Yet what I find somewhat lacking in this mystical work is the human subject, one who would not only speak through the author’s voice but also ground this stage of eternal heroes in lived human experience.
And it will be a stream of life, far sweeter than death,
And those who drink it will no longer feel the pain of endless longing.
Yet who can tell how to recognize it, to understand its sign?
But look – on the hill stands a radiant woman,
Her face like that of a young goddess. And all around, the sea,
And light covering everything.
A human subject, or perhaps more clearly, a simple “she,” would help me easily locate a point of reference within this vast spectacle. A “she” or “he,” made of flesh and blood, alive yet mortal, would allow us to feel the drama within the lives of the idyllic garden’s inhabitants: the idyllic gardens are only a temporary refuge, merely a dream held in present time. In this regard, the book is indeed consistent. The source of the natural world is equally part of the spiritual world; we are merely cultivating our inner selves, transforming our elemental impulsiveness into deliberate creation.
Yet as I reflect on the contribution of Drungytė’s generation to the world of Lithuanian poetry, I’d like to note that this is undoubtedly a very ambitious undertaking and a risky one too. The ambition in this book is not rooted in the Drungytė’s personal ego, but rather an ego renunciation, a form of self-effacement. Such self-effacement has been achieved by our greatest artists, and the most beautiful works of meditative lyricism lead us toward profound reflections on existence (especially those mentioned earlier in this review). Still, when faced with the glory of this vision, I, as an ordinary reader, find myself powerless before the vast structure of the cosmos.
I feel more at peace in a cosmos contained within a tiny garden, even if it’s worn out. That’s because in such a space, in this time, I feel I have a body that’s real and alive. Not one defined solely by the suffering of Yeshua and Mary but also tender one. A place I can return to with my hopes and dreams, my fears and sorrows, and experience a fragile, fleeting sense of harmony. Everything else is philosophical theory and promises. The heroes of the Renaissance are full of Eros and the joy of life. That’s why I believe in their bodies, even if those bodies are marked by suffering in the Pietà created in the Renaissance. And after all, doesn’t a title like Bukolikos, with its hexameter, promise me a bodily experience too? Of course, Drungytė isn’t obligated to promise anything personally to anyone. Her vision is grander than that, and I value that vision. This book is a promise of renewed classicism in contemporary Lithuanian literature. I don’t recall seeing such ambition before, and I admire it.
