A BLUE VIOLET ILLUMINES THE FUTURE

Above the ocean soaring swans arise.
It was no thorny earthly road they took,
And now in stately triangles they fly.
Their wings cut silence open like book.

Mirrored among thin bangles that appear
Upon the wastness of aquamarine,
At times we glimpse them, pallid, in the air
Above the limpid plains with pallid sheen.

It's their long wings that curl around the moon.
They carry early ground-frosts on their feet.
Why is it here, not elsewhere, waters clear
Upon their surface those white images repeat?

The water at the earth's top flashes gold,
And, blue, it sighs, as if to say, alack!
Poor earth! Among the stars the swans' loud call
Wipes from its face a wrinkle, sad and black.

So give the first blue violet to me,
Let it cast light upon our destiny.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


SUNDAY

Green Sunday.
Crimson peonies.

Silence and sunshine. The cottage
Fills with a bumble-bee's drone,
Patchy in hue, like an orphan.
Old, like happiness making you drunk
With an odour of jasmine and wax.

O beautiful languor! Only the shadows are wheeling,
The treetops swaying.

Green Sunday.

The cry of a steamer
Returns as cry.

Crimson peonies.

The horizon touches your heart.
On the banks of dykes
Guileless wild flowers
Are restful. And ah! those rustles,
those rustles of northern grass!

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


NOVEMBER

In mist, against the distance full of it,
All dark and wet with rain, people went by.
November like a black-and-white old movie-film
Flew past across the pupil of one's eye.

The North kept on expanding and expanding.
The ploughlands blackened, having gathered patiently
Furrow to furrow in a gloomy darkness
Like a black sea.

The last tear had been squeezed, it seemed, by winds
From people's eyes. The trees no longer were
Like beads. In this part of the Milky Way,
This coil of its big spiral – in this world.

The Archer – a November constellation –
Pierced with his golden arrows the revived

Hallowe'en ghosts. With the primordial exclamations
Of cranes, the seeds of grass scattered before the wind's wild drive –
The voice of Earth, a motif sad and live
Sung to the reaper at the day's cessation.

O that this red sun with its features bright
Should light the evening's close just one more time;
O that this ruddy sun should set within our sight
To give November a fine ending, like a rhyme!

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


BLACK AND WHITE

Whether I blacken black or whiten
White, or I blend the two together,
It doesn't seem to me much lighter...
Light-minded I! My brain's a feather.

Yet neither black's the same, nor white.
Yes, there are steeds, and there are horses.
And there is one real voice – yours, Life,
Deep in one's throat, and huge its force is.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg


A PSALM TO BREAD

Of bread I sing this song of mine.
Be like the bread the earth yields out of iron-bearing dust!
The titans who piled hill on hill envisaged this in their design:
Whatever cares may worry men, for the hungry bread's a must.

Through centuries they piled hills up. Through centuries they topple,
Through centuries the sun stands like a yellow-hued peony.
Through centuries the sun stands in the sky. And with the single
Old man-and-rye metamorphosis, Mother Earth kept groaning.

And this song, like the smell of snowball-trees,
Arises from the bones of ploughmen.

The fall of hills that we pile up is heard intoning
In the thunderpeals of wars, when Sister's eyes, sad-gleaming,
Dilate over my heart, mortally hurt.

And for my heart
One kind of thunderpeal alone has meaning;
When millstones with calamities start groaning.

Let craters roar on planets as they watch the lump of bread
That men break off on holidays for beggars to be fed.
And when there's nothing left at all with which life may be led,
Then save us, bread!

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg

Born into a peasant family in the village of Kuturiai, in 1958 Jonas Juškaitis graduated from the department of history and philology at Vilnius University. His verse was first published in 1954. In Juškaitis' poetry, an impulsive use of symbols predominates, combining subconscious stirrings with the vague outlines of general conclusions.