Rimantas Kmita is the author of two poetry collections, two works of literary criticism, two plays, and three novels. The plays and novels are all set in the tumultuous years around Lithuania’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1990. The first novel, Pietinia Kronikas (Southside Chronicle) became a best-seller and won multiple awards. (An extract in English translation was published by the Vilnius Review, and another is forthcoming in Lituanus.) That book is a bildungsroman that traces the life of a high school student nearing graduation in the city of Šiauliai, Lithuania, as he tries to find purpose, meaning, and a coherent sense of self in a rapidly changing society.
The Iron Curtain came crashing down. The Soviet economy and social structure fell apart. New products appeared, but many people had lost their jobs, or rather, the jobs simply vanished. People needed money. Outdoor markets, full of knock-offs and hand-me-downs and myriad homemade products, flourished. Criminal activity amidst changing laws and currencies was rife. Šiauliai became a center for smuggled goods and mafia activity. So the novel is not just a coming-of-age story of a young man, but of a young nation also trying to find itself in a radically new world. Stylistically, the novel is distinguished by its use of the local dialect and slang of the times, humor, and innumerable references to the new cultural and pop-cultural landscape of the era. It was made into a feature film with the same title (directed by Ignas Miškinis and translated into English as “The Southern Chronicles”), which also became a national hit with international recognition.
Kmita’s second novel, Remyga, presented a darker view of the Soviet past and the way its traumas continued to haunt people into the ’90s. Also set in Šiauliai, the main character, Remyga, is an Afghan war veteran whose parents were killed under mysterious circumstances. His attempt to discover the truth about the past puts him into conflict with dark forces, and much of the conflict is told in a magical realist style.
The present novel, Editas Kompleksas (The Edita Complex), published in 2025, like its predecessors, is also set in the 1990s rough and tumble Southside neighborhood (or borough) of Šiauliai. The novel’s subtitle, “Normal People Don’t Smile,” gestures with rueful humor towards the grimness of the stagnation era of Brezhnev’s rule as well as to the persistence of Soviet attitudes and behaviors into the independence era. All together, the three novels make up a trilogy of Šiauliai stories that mark this tumultuous and important period in Lithuanian history. They can also be read from a post-colonial perspective, revealing the ways in which the Soviet Empire left material and psychological scars on Lithuanian society, and the ways in which Lithuanians tried to move out of its zone of influence and towards the West.
Like the first novel, The Edita Complex treats these themes with a lighter touch (though the tone, I would say, is somewhere in between the other novels: not as funny as the first, not as grim as the second). The characters are younger than Remyga and less traumatized. They are more able to see their situation, and that of their society, with humor. The Edita Complex involves, in fact, many of the same characters as Southside Chronicle. This time, however, the story is told from a young woman’s perspective. A young man, Rimants, was the narrator in the first novel. Edita was a secondary character there, but here she is the main focus: the story is told through her. Some of the same scenes from the first novel recur, but they take on a very different flavor when seen through Edita’s eyes, the two novels producing an almost Rashomon-like effect. However, this interesting overlap is limited to a few episodes, for the focus is very much on her story and her life. We learn, for instance, that she works in a video rental store – a new phenomenon of the times – and that she has become obsessed with movies. So just as the main character in the first novel, Rimants, turns to literature as a means of grounding and orienting himself in the changing societal landscape of an independent Lithuania, Edita turns to the relatively new phenomenon of Western films to try to comprehend who she is and who she should be. And just as Rimants tried to process his newfound romantic love through literature, Edita uses film to interpret her crush on a handsome classmate. Her way of diving into romantic fantasy by way of popular movies can be seen as a kind of compensation for the struggles and uncertainties of her life. After all, she goes to a vocational-technical school, her parents are struggling financially, her father is now a jobless alcoholic, and she struggles to see what her place will be in society. Movies become her ordering principle, and she sees everything through them. So when her neighbor, a dashing young man, takes off his sweater in the market at the table where she is helping her aunt, Edita is smitten. She sees him as Johnny from Dirty Dancing. She, of course, would then be Johnny’s “Baby” – his love interest. Her developing obsession with him, and its causes rooted in a life denuded of meaning and stability, is the main plot strand. The influence of Hollywood films on Edita’s mindset can be seen as a kind of compensation for the difficulties and uncertainties of her post-Soviet life. Post-colonial theory is relevant here as well. Her parents were essentially colonized by an all-encompassing Soviet culture that excluded all else – they are the “normal” people who don’t smile. Edita, by contrast, is choosing to be colonized by Western popular culture. Her story can be read as an attempt to free herself from both of these systems of thought: Soviet and Hollywood. To become who she needs to be, to fully come of age, means to move past the grim realities left by a failed empire without falling for the illusory promises of the silver screen.
As in the first novel, where we get to know Rimants’ friend Mindas as a counterpoint to the dominant narratorial voice, here too we meet Edita’s friends, and they give us other perspectives on how women faced the radical changes going on around them at the time. Monika is the “good” girl: studious, proper, from a family of doctors (and the love interest of Rimants in Southside Chronicle). Gražkė is Edita’s cousin and works as a model, taking advantage of new opportunities to essentially sell herself (and her stint in the Middle East comes with the implication that there may have been unsavory elements to that employment). Garfield is the tough girl: she takes judo classes, wears a hoodie, and won’t take crap from anyone. Thus, the novel gives us an important perspective on what it was like to be a young woman when society was both crumbling and reconstituting itself at the same time. The struggle to survive was real. Old illusions were replaced by new ones. The future was deeply uncertain, though with plenty of promises (both real and illusory). And yet, and yet, they are young and full of life. There is humor, friendship, and love. There is violence, there are lies, there is wisdom and there is heartbreak. It is a journey that anyone can relate to but that could only take place with this particular palette of sound and color in the 1990s Southside ‘hood of Šiauliai, Lithuania.
And about that sound and color… The translation of dialect and slang involves numerous problems. The Šiauliai dialect and Lithuanian slang of the times provide unquestionable charm, vibrant energy, and cultural realism to the telling of the stories of all three of Kmita’s novels. How can this be conveyed in translation? One possibility lies in translating dialect for dialect. Indeed, Kmita himself has said, in the Author’s Note to his first novel, that this was the origin of his fiction. He translated a novel by Pedro Lenz, written in a Swiss German dialect, into the dialect of Šiauliai. In the process, trying to recover the speech of the times (Kmita has lived in Vilnius for a couple decades now), he found himself reliving the experiences of his youth. So after finishing the translation, he set to work on his first novel. I would argue that Kmita’s experience reveals both a solution to the translation problem of dialect as well as its danger. Dialect is so strongly associated with certain times and places that one cannot hear it without thinking of those times and places. Kmita, in using his dialect for a translation, was transported back to the Šiauliai of his youth. If I, in turn, were to translate his dialect into some equivalent in English, say, Glaswegian, would the reader not have associations relating to Glasgow called to mind? Does not dialect translation involve an unavoidable dislocation in the reader’s mind? Of course, there is also a question of technical difficulty that each translator must face: how well do they actually know regional dialects?
For both of these reasons, I have translated my excerpts of Southside Chronicle and The Edita Complex into standard colloquial English with general American youth slang. The Šiauliai dialect and colloquial English can be said to share the characteristic of shortening words. For instance, the Lithuanian “dabar” becomes “daba,” and “ir” becomes “i.” Similarly, in English speech, young people often cut the “g” in participles and gerunds, so that “walking” becomes “walkin’,” and so on. Thus, by dropping the “g” in some cases, and by using what youth slang I could (and perhaps it helps that I grew up in America in the ’80s and ’90s), I have tried to give a sense of the casual nature of Edita’s speech as well as of its energy and verve. Readers will not get the full sense of Šiauliai this way, but at least they won’t be transported to working class Scotland either. For all that, the story is still the story. The sound and fury of the city are still there, perhaps with a slight American flavor, but translation can never occur without any transposition. And if there were no translation, there would be no way for you to get to know these characters, these times, and this culture. Or rather, the only other option would be to learn Lithuanian well enough to understand the Šiauliai dialect and the Russian-influenced slang of that era. There are courses for that. But it would take some time.
