Ash Maria

on translating Paulius Širvys

Before translating Paulius Širvys, I had made an intentional effort to avoid any attempt at translating Lithuanian poetry. Lithuanian has an incredibly rich catalog of intransitive verbs, alongside highly productive morphology, which leads to countless considerations that the translator must mull over. For the sake of capturing the poem’s rhythm and feeling, nuances must be removed. To illustrate this point, I will explain the layers in the Lithuanian word besitrindamos. The root of the word is -trin- which comes from the verb trinti meaning “to rub.” -si- is the reflexive affix. Be- is a prefix to denote that the action is happening for an indefinite amount of time. -damos is the feminine plural half-participle suffix to denote that the action is taking place in tandem with another. A long-winded, yet still insufficient, translation of besitrindamos might be “while rubbing against one another for some time.”

Luckily, this poem did not include any words that were so complex, though there were still plenty of difficult decisions that I had to make. In the second and fourth lines of the poem, Širvys creates a linguistic harmony through the usage of dainą and dienų, meaning “song” and “day” respectively. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any way to recreate this harmony using the same simple language. This original poem also takes advantage of colloquialisms to reduce Lithuanian’s sesquipedalian morphology. This most often occurs with verb endings. For example, in formal Lithuanian it would be daireisi not daireis in line three, and baltame instead of baltam in line four. Again, I was unable to recreate this effect. In lines five and six, Širvys writes the same word, neatmeni, with the meaning of “you don’t remember.” For the sake of finding an equivalent rhyme in English in line seven, I had to make a slight departure from the original’s consistency.

When sharing my translation with a Lithuanian writer friend, the last line was where they had their only reservation with it. In Lithuanian, the word palik is the imperative form of palikti meaning “to abandon/leave behind or in its current state,” but just writing “leave,” as my friend suggested, felt too ambiguous. Therefore, I had to affix the words “I want you to” in order to make it more clear. My heart also sank when I read this line for the first time, as I came across the word ilgesys, which does not have a direct translation in English. It is similar to the concepts of saudade in Portuguese and toska in Russian, but nonetheless the concept is deeply rooted in Lithuanian culture and history. From conversations with Lithuanian friends, the best way I can describe ilgesys is as the following: “an unsettled, arcane longing for a time, place, or person forever out of reach.” In the contemporary Lithuanian conscious, ilgesys is often understood in reference to the idealized free Lithuania of the interwar years.