Judita Vaičiūnaitė: An Introduction to Her Work

            In the post-war period, when most poets in Lithuania were writing about politics (whether communist verse, or veiled resistance poetry), or when they were focusing their lyricism on nature, on the pastoral (and all its many significations to a culture still steeped in its pagan past), Judita Vaičiūnaitė, without negating politics or her bonds with nature, wrote about the life that was immediately in front of her. She was a poet of the city. Born and raised in Kaunas, then educated in Vilnius where she remained for the rest of her life, she described its streets, its crumbling facades, its courtyards and dead ends. She wrote of city life: going to butcher shops, frequenting cafes, meeting vagabonds and gypsies, romance in cramped apartments, darkened streets. This thematic concern  with modern city life is reflected in the style of many of her poems—they are loaded with sharp and sudden contrasts and juxtapositions. Tender lyricism is cut with violence and foreboding. The lines often break apart. Parenthesis and elipses appear in unexpected places. It is as if the world presses in around the central focus of her poems in ways she cannot control. Randomness, sudden change, and danger are parts of her city life as much as the beautiful facade, the church bells, the cobbled streets.

Vaičiūnaitė’s poetical perspective stood out at the time for another reason as well. She was a poet of the modern woman: single, educated, working, free… Her poems treat love and courtship from that woman’s perspective, giving us an interior, lyrical experience where the man is the distant and desired other. Besides writing the romantic side of feminism, her poems also express themes like the struggle with restraints of a patriarchal world, and the conflicts between the freedom and power to seek her own career path and the responsibilities of motherhood. "The Red Dress" stands out as an example of the understated, yet powerful way she treats feminine desire, the restraints imposed upon it, and the expectation of the modern woman that she will still be free, despite the challenges. Like in many of her poems, the emotional content is expressed through the symbolic power of a physical object. In this case, a red dress is pinned on a clothesline, buffetted by the wind, “yet still”, she writes, “it will break free”.

Despite her comitment to a modern and cosmopolitan lifestyle Vaičiūnaitė did not  disconnect herself from her country’s past. The pagan connection to nature, so prevalent throughout the history of Lithuanian literature, is in her work as well—but transformed. Instead of paens to forest and farm, we find flowers growing out of cracks on the sidewalks, trees dropping their petals over garbage heaps, and run-down buildings overcome with a rich luxuriance of weeds.

The human history of Lithuania is present in her work as well. Vaičiūnaitė excelled at writing lyrical poems from the perspectives of historical and mythological figures. Only Constantine Cavafy comes to mind as her poetic equal in the ability to bring us inside a historical personae’s mind in a singular, sharply defined, deeply felt lyrical moment. Unlike the case of Cavafy, however, Vaičiūnaitė personages are mostly woman. As such, she uses them to bring to the fore perpectives often left out of history. For instance, how did Catherine feel, as the third wife of king Sigismund Augustus, sister to his first wife, and neglected by a husband still mourning the death of his second wife and greatest love? The cycle “Canon for Barbora Ravilaitė• gives us many of the voices connected to this historical drama in the court of the United Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. We hear from the king’s mother, Bona Sforza, whom many think poisoned the beautiful bride because she was not politically connected enough to be queen,  and we hear the king himself at Barbora’s deathbed, speaking to us an interior monologue, drenched in grief and desperate hope. Finally, at the end, we hear from Barbora herself, travelling in her coffin, hearing the sobs of her husband, the ticking of hoofs, returned again to be buried in her beloved Vilnius… and to live on in its dreams. In many of these historical poems, the fragmentary lines and jagged juxtapositions of the city poet give way to rhyming, metrical lyricism.

The diversity of styles, personaes and themes in the work of Judita Vaičiūnaitė, handled with utmost craft, perception and intelligence, leaves no doubt that we are in the presence of a major twentieth century poet who deserves a wider audience beyond the rather small group of Lithuanian readers who have cherished her for decades.

The Red Dress

Pool Hall

Vagabond Sun

Blossoming Pear

from Canon for Barbora Radvilaitė

from Canon for Barbora Radvilaitė

from Canon for Barbora Radvilaitė