Junction

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, making friends with Natalia Gorbanevskaya and Lyudmila Alexeyeva and other members of the literary and human rights underground. He made his living by translating Baudelaire, Saint-John Perse, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and many others into Lithuanian. Venclova 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 Czesław Miłosz, the 2005 Jotvingiai Prize, and the 2005 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 books including Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997), and two retrospective editions with no overlap between them, The Junction: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) and The Grove of the Eumenides: New & Selected Poems (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.

Every major poet has an idiosyncratic inner landscape against which his voice sounds in his mind… [Venclova’s] landscape is that of the Baltic in winter, a monochromatic setting dominated by damp and cloudy hues – the light of the skies condensed into darkness.

• Tomas Venclova: The Labours of Poetry: Between Classicism and Ruins by Ellen Hinsey 10 THE JUNCTION (2005)New England Harbour 19The Émigré 20A New Postcard from the City of K. 22Dunes at Watermill 25Arrival in Atlantis 29For an Older Poet 30Two Apocrypha 32The Junction 35After the Lecture 37Užupis 41Theseus Leaving Athens 42On a Mountain Ridge Near Jordan 44Discipline and Punish. A Visit to the Detention Centre IZ-45/1 48From Landwehrkanal to Spree 50Ormond Quay 53Song of the Borderland 54Homage to Shqiperia 56Anno Domini 2002 58La Baigneuse 60On the Boulevard by Town Hall 62A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning 63Commentary 62In the Lake Region 66Limbo 67He Who Turned Around at the Border 69Antonio Vivaldi 71Las Meninas 72For R.K. 73Landscape, Summer 2001 74Verses for a Child’s Birth 75Pastoral 77 from WINTER DIALOGUE (1997)A Poem About Memory 81Winter Dialogue 82‘I was welcomed by twilight and cold’ 85To the Memory of a Poet. Variation 88Nel Mezzo Del Cammin Di Nostra Vita 90The Shield of Achilles 81The Eleventh Canto 94‘We’ve been seized by the pull of the universe’ 97‘Glimmer a smile, stand still, then take the path back home’ 98‘All night, sleep was equivalent to time’ 99‘Shoots of grass pierce one’s face and hands’ 100‘To the squares on our walls and floors’ 101‘Desist, desist. The crumbling sentence dies’ 102An Attempt at Describing a Room 103Sestina 104Ode to a City 106Two Poems About Love 109‘Although the well is bottomless and steep’ 111‘In the indigent cities, it’s time to leave friends behind us’ 112Ghetto 113A Poem About Friends 114Thanksgiving Day 117Autumn in Copenhagen 119Sheremetyevo, 1977 123‘Bit by bit, at the edge of the unforeseen land’ 125‘I have learned to see in the dark’ 126A Museum in Hobart 128‘Before the middle of July, Paris’ 131Berlin Subway. Hallesches Tor 133East Rock 134Instruction 136Pestel Street 139In the Fire 142‘An enormous book begins to flap’ 143‘Half a mile away, where the highways cross’ 144Tu, Felix Austria 145‘A projector flickers in the somewhat cramped hall’ 150 ˇHenkus Hapenckus, In Memoriam 151San Michele 153The Member of the Landing Crew 154A View from an Alley 156 Notes 157Bibliography 163The translators 168