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© Hartwig Klappert
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Eugenijus Alisanka
Lithuania
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The Lithuanian poet Eugenijus Ališanka
was born in 1960 in Barnaul, Siberia, the place where his parents had
been exiled. After the family's return to their home country, he grew
up in Vilnius, where he studied Mathematics, and upon completion of his
studies became a member of the academic staff at the Culture and Art
Institute. In 1991 he published the first volume of his almanac
»Miestelėnai« (t: Towndwellers; second and third volume in 1995 and
1999), followed in the same year by his first collection of poems,
»Lygiadienis« (t: Equinox), for which he was awarded the Zigmas Gėlė
Prize for the most promising poetic début of that year. Following his
residency at the Iowa Writers' Workshop his second collection of poems,
»Peleno miestas« (1995; Eng. »City of Ash«, 2000), was translated into
English. Selections of his work – four volumes of poetry and two books
of essays – have also been published in French, German, Swedish,
Polish, Russian and Finnish.
Ališanka worked as director of
foreign programmes for the Lithuanian Writers' Union from 1995 to 2002,
also organising the festival »Poetry Spring«. Since 2003 he has been
editor-in-chief of the »Vilnius Review«, which presents contemporary
Lithuanian literature in English. He has, moreover, become established
as a translator, translating among others Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława
Szymborska from Polish and Aleš Debeljak from Slovenian.
His own
poems demonstrate a great capacity to integrate foreign influences,
traditions, themes and motifs: Ališanka combines these with local
images and autobiographical references, making use of individual modes
of expression with great skill. His work – from its stream of language
written in free verse without punctuation – reveals an openness to
interpretation ranging from the tense to the ironic. Therein he shows
us a new trait in Lithuanian poetry which does not limit itself to an
encoded protest against Soviet heteronomy but rather opens itself to
Europe with a sense of self determination, and newly balances its
cultural autonomy. »The oft-attested postmodern constellation on which
Ališanka meditates in his cultural essays is more than simply an
attitude or short-lived trend. Rather, the essays interweave human
experiences from around the globe... What older people commonly
experience and label as loss and crisis, for many people from around
the world also represents a slice of freedom and the opportunity for
new aesthetic projects.« Thus writes Klaus Berthel on the latest volume
of poems, »iš neparašytų istorijų« (2002; t: from unwritten stories).
The next book to appear in Germany is the collection of essays »Die
Rückkehr des Dionys« (2006; t: The return of Dionysus), Ališanka's
second treatise on the problem of current representation following his
study »Vaizdijantis žmogus: sacrum sklaida kultūroje« (1998; t: The
representative human: The seed of the sacred in culture). The volume
was awarded the Literature Prize by the Ministry of Culture of the
Republic of Lithuania. The author lives in Vilnius and is currently a
guest of the German Academic Exchange Service in Berlin.
© internationales literaturfestival berlin
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Miestelėnai
Taura
Vilnius, 1991
Lygiadienis
Vaga
Vilnius, 1992
Vaizdijantis žmogus: sacrum sklaida kultūroje
Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla
Vilnius, 1998
Dievakaulis
Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla
Vilnius, 1999
City of Ash
[OT: Peleno miestas]
North Western University Press
Evanston, Ill., 2000
[T: Harvey L. Hix]
aus ungeschriebenen geschichten
DuMont
Köln, 2005
[T: Klaus Berthel]
Die Rückkehr des Dionys
ATHENA-Verlag
Oberhausen, 2006
[T: Klaus Berthel] |
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