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Tomas Venclova 1937 country: Netherlands Engels |
Since 1980, the Lithuanian-Polish poet Tomas Venclova has been a lecturer in Slavonic Language and Literature at Yale University (US). Long before that, he was already a poet, translator, literary critic and essayist. Poems by Venclova, born in the West Lithuanian port of Klaipéda, were already published while he was still a teenager. His life and work are just as characteristic of the Eastern Europe of his time as his poetry is coloured by his recollections of it. The position of Venclova’s father, the poet and literary big shot Antanas Venclova, who as president of the Lithuanian Writers’ Association belonged to the nomenclature, was something that was a heavy burden for Tomas Venclova. Many of his Lithuanian school-fellows only saw Tomas as the son of a someone in league with the communist oppressors. Tomas began his study of history as the youngest student at the University of Vilnius in 1954. Because of his protests against the Hungarian revolution in 1956 he was dismissed from the university. He was, however, able to complete his language studies in 1960 at the same university. In the years 1966-71 Venclova continued his studies – Semiotics and Russian Literature – at the University of Tartu. Because of his membership of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which criticised the abuses of human rights in Lithuania, Venclova was regularly threatened with sanctions. All the plotting and scheming against him increasingly turned him into a nomadic poet and freelance translator. In quest of his great ideal writers Achmatova, Pasternak and Mandelstam, Venclova travelled all over the Soviet Union. In Moscow and Leningrad he came into contact with others in opposition to the regime, such as Brodsky and Ginsberg. Although Venclova managed to get his first collections of poetry – Signs of Language – published in Lithuania in 1972, he subsequently fell into permanent disgrace on account of his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1977, he acquired an exit visa and left for the US. In 1980, Poetry International dedicated a translation project to his work. This led to his work being translated into various languages by participants at the festival. The work that he had read at the festival was translated into English by the Lithuanian poet/publicist Isaak Kaplanas, from which Bob den Uyl then made translations into Dutch. Jan Sleumer Not al of the information about this poet has been digitalised. For more information contact info@poetry.nl |