Grove of the Eumenides

Tomas Venclova was born in 1937 in Klaipeda, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius University, he travelled in the Eastern Bloc, where he met and translated Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. Venclova took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements and was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. His activities led to a ban on publishing, exile and the stripping of his Soviet citizenship in 1977. Venclova is Emeritus Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University where he taught from 1985. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes including the Vilenica 1990 International Literary Prize, the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000, the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the New Culture of New Europe Prize, and the 2023 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. His works include volumes of poetry, essays, literary biography, conversations and works on Vilnius. His poetry has been translated into English in Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997), The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and The Grove of the Eumenides (Bloodaxe Books, 2025). Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova by Ellen Hinsey was published by University of Rochester Press and Boydell & Brewer in 2017. After many years in New Haven, Connecticut, and a period spent in Kraków, he returned to Lithuania and now lives in Vilnius.

Venclova is a lyric poet of magisterial allure, committed to philosophical meditations…Part exile, part seer, he is the artist as witness and a living example of a literary elite that evolved in crisis yet remained true to the dictates of art.

• 15 Ellen Hinsey: Tomas Venclova: Poetry of Witness and the Return of History I25 On Both Sides of Alnas Lake27 To Master Radovan29 Dictator31 The Process of Beatification33 Before the Fort34 Azovstal36 Flight 39 The Grove of the Eumenides II43 South of the Prospect45 Chinese Impressions54 Landscape with Polyphemus55 Three Imperfect Sonnets57 ‘The Stream of Smoke Dissolved in Yesterday’s Air’58 Prehistory60 Cavalryman near Seinai61 Beyond St Anne’s and the Bernardines63 Extra Urbem66 Caligula at the Gates III69 August Elegy71 Notes on Xenophon74 Death of the Argonaut76 ‘Tell me, what did you love? One city you left behind’77 Mother of the Living79 ‘It’s not instantly clear why it comes up so rich’81 From the Future82 Kotor Sun83 Eos IV87 Hamden, Connecticut89 Hurricane91 Three O’Clock at Night on the Sea94 Syllabic Stanzas96 The Moss of Ammassalik98 ‘Leaving the subway with a pack on my back’100 The Way to Planty Park, Kraków102 Variation on the Theme of Awakening104 Delft105 To My Daughter106 ‘Let the time you no longer remember’ 109 Notes113 Sources for poems115 Selected bibliography119 Translators