“Contemporary Lithuanian Literature”, Vilnius Review/Revue de Vilnius 2024, 248 p., €20.
At first, the reader of the new issue, in French, of the Vilnius Review you may want to rely on some more or less familiar references. He was able to read, among the Lithuanian authors translated in France, the poetry or novels of Tomas Venclova, Valdas Papievis, Undine Radzeviciute, Alvydas Slepikas. You undoubtedly remember, upon finding them in the summary, saying that strange things happen in the literature of the Baltic country. But that’s all. Then the unknown begins.
That’s when the Vilnius ReviewThrough all the accumulated unpublished material –stories, poems, extracts from novels, interviews, studies, etc.–, it fulfills its double promise. That of making Lithuanian literature known by translating its authors into English, for the European public, its mission since 1994. And the one that it transmits to us: the promise of an indefinite growth of our curiosities embodied by the “cultural seasons in countries “foreigners” programmed. every year in France, of which Lithuania is the guest this autumn.
The principle, summarizes Dainius Gintalas, the editor-in-chief, is that “the French-speaking reader can get the most vivid and profound idea possible of Lithuanian literature” of the “last five years”. This is not an exercise in literary history, not even recent ones. It’s about immediacy, “literary flow” where you can let yourself go, in a profusion of contemporary forms that make reading immediately enjoyable.
At the beginning of a story by Jurga Tumasonyte, a moon appears. “soft, dilated with light” on a dark lake that smells “fresh blood” – a girl swims, as if she were running through a haunted house. In other places, a unicorn, or rather a “Six-foot horn/solemn proof that unicorns exist”although the young poet Ieva Toleikyte smiles: “As a pretentious person of the 21st centurymy century,/ I knew it was a narwhal tusk. »
A feeling of instability
From one page to another, sometimes from a paragraph, from one verse to another, the tones, the images slide, collide. “The wind makes a lottery ticket dance on the cobblestones/The next one will be the winner/A child runs clutching a plastic AK-47/What a beautiful corpse you are lifting.”writes Simonas Bernotas. This sense of instability quickly appears as a common trait among so many authors with otherwise very assertive personalities. This evidence that the world is not solid.
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