Interview with Eugenijus Ališanka

31 mei 2010 The theme of this year's festival is 'prose'. Do you feel there are (many) similarities between poetry and prose?

I think they have lots in common. First of all, it is the attention given to each word, phrase, sentence – in other words, to language itself. Poetry and prose came from the same mythological sources, but eventually they created their own rules and became more and more different. But there were always writers who were marching from one territory into the other. In postmodern times the margins between the genres are increasingly blurred. And I think it’s often poetry that gains a bigger profit from this situation – it “borrows” more often from the prose. Of late, poetry has shown an interest in that special prose instrument – the narrative. With the assistance of the narrative, poetry strives to enrich its already solid-enough language arsenal. And I, too, have tried my hand in this “story”.


You said your favourite novel was Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. Can you explain why you chose this novel?

One of the reasons – it’s possibly because it was one of the novels of my youth, a book from the time when impressions etch especially deep into the hard disc of memory. It was one of those rare books that became a so-called bible of our generation. One must keep in mind that in the gloomy years of the Soviet occupation there were only a few books of such quality that managed “to slip” through the iron curtain. I recognized my own life there – to be precise, its various possibilities. Intellectual rebellion and life on the razor’s edge – was there anything better to hope for? The book was also important to me because it was written like a poem, or at least it seemed to me it was, and this sowed new possibilities for reading or writing about life.


Do write fictional prose as well? If so, do you often use the same themes in your prose and your poetry?

Unfortunately, I don’t write prose because apparently I am too lazy for this. Even in school I hated long-distance races. For me, it’s important to talk about things that are most vital in short flashes, because I myself live in such a way, catching flashes, as the semiotician Algirdas Julius Greim would say. I explore life as estéhsis, as the interface of love and death, as the fusion of the object and the subject. That’s why when writing an essay I sometimes use similar themes; they aren’t “perfectly written”, or completed, and so they are open to various interpretations. If I were to write a novel, I would want to write something similar to Hopscotch, such an estéhsis of the literary game.


Who are your favorite poets?

Poets are like ordinary human beings, with some the friendship lasts a long time, with others much shorter. The Gods of my youth were Rilke, Trakl, Celan. Maybe also because there weren’t so many translations then. But it’s these authors, I can even say now, that helped me mature as a poet. Later T.S. Eliot exercised a huge influence on me. Ten years ago I discovered Zbigniew Herbert whom I see as especially close to my poetic vision. I was particularly attracted by his poetry in prose, and I also translated some of his work. Of course, among my favorite poets there are Lithuanian authors – Marcelijus Martinaitis, Tomas Venclova, Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas, Vytautas P. Bložė – from whom I have also learned a lot. I have also my favorite younger writers whom I see as my companions. I will mention just a few – Jacek Podsiadlo, Marcin Świetlicki, Gintaras Grajauskas, Sigitas Parulskis, Donatas Petrošius.


Do you remember how the poem Essay on Lithuanian Literature came about?

This poem really has an interesting prehistory. Several years ago I was invited to a literary discussion in Moscow, and I was asked to write an essay about Lithuanian literature. But the organizers added – not too long, no more than fifteen lines . . .

There was nothing else to do, but to write such an essay, exactly fifteen lines.