Tomas Venclova fled communism in 1977, yet he is not a poet of protest. There's no personal mythology or self-dramatisation, just artistry, writes Eileen Battersby
His is a voice in which three great European cultures meet. The respective riches of Russian, Polish and Lithuanian literature have shaped the responses of Tomas Venclova, a lyric poet of magisterial allure committed to philosophical meditations, filtered through traditional metre and rhyme. He looks to the formality of Yeats and Auden rather than to the more cryptic observations of many of his Eastern European contemporaries. His languages are Lithuanian, Russian and Polish while his literary landscape remains that of the Baltic in winter. "Enter this landscape. Darkness still prevails. / Filled to the brim with voices, though unseen, / The continent takes arms against the seas. / Across the dunes, the empty highway wails." (From Winter Dialogue.)
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. A close friend of Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, Venclova does not claim to be a poet of protest. There is no personal mythology, no self-dramatisation, just belief in poetry: "I couldn't do the work I wanted to do, so I had to do something about it."
He sought permission to leave Lithuania. The authorities, always somewhat bewildered by his free-spirited attitude of busily working rather than angrily seething and plotting, finally wanted him to go. "I left." When Brodsky landed at Munich Airport he described himself as free. For Solzhenitsyn exile became a ballet of isolation enacted behind the high fence of his Vermont retreat. Venclova, a working academic and translator, arrived in the US in 1977 and looked for a teaching job, not a personal crusade.
Slightly stooped, and far shrewder than he first seems, he peers at the world through his glasses (which he takes off to be photographed), looking almost as worried as the great Viennese pianist Alfred Brendel, whom he vaguely resembles. Venclova exudes a polite restlessness; therein lies the key to his vision.
In Kilkenny on the eve of European enlargement Venclova appears only absent-minded. He is quick witted, funny, relentlessly well informed and accustomed to handling an audience, and he has forgotten nothing, except perhaps his hat, and that only momentarily.
Is enlargement a good thing or will it stifle individual cultures? "I fear for the language, the language of Lithuania. I would hate to see it lost," he says, hands aloft in a gesture of hope. This is a poet whose passion for his native language is as practical as it is romantic. At his readings at this year's Cúirt International Festival of Literature, in Galway, and at the Parade Tower in Kilkenny he read in Lithuanian, anxious for his listeners to experience the music of a tonal language that echoes Latin, Sanskrit and classical Greek. "Lithuanian is the first language in Lithuania," he says, pointing out his country's linguistic determination to jettison loanwords from Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and German. He is also quick to contrast its survival as a first language against the sad decline of Irish, "now spoken by so few".
Inevitably now thought of as a tiny Baltic country, Lithuania has undergone many changes. The 14th-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest state in Europe. It was then a pagan territory, stretching from the Baltic to the Crimea. During that late-medieval period Lithuania adopted Catholicism, almost the last European country to embrace Christianity.
Everything changed in the 18th century. Russia annexed the country, making Russian the language of the cultivated classes. "Lithuanian became the language of the peasants, but it didn't die." This brave and musical language also survived German occupation from 1915 to 1918. As that war ended, freedom and independence returned to the country. But war again intervened as the Soviet Union took over in 1940, with a second three-year German occupation beginning in 1941. The Soviets returned. "We declared our independence again in 1990, and this was made final in 1991."
As with so much of the new Europe, little is known of the old: the cultures, the traditions, the essential mysteries. Venclova is well used to explaining his country and his language to outsiders, having himself been an outsider since 1977. "When I left Lithuania in that year I didn't know if I could ever go back. It is a hard thing to leave your country, your old life - and, for me, a child - behind."
He has an obvious sense of worth, yet he wears it modestly, with little theatre, in marked contrast to his late friend Brodsky, of whom he first heard on the day Pasternak died, May 30th 1960.
The dramatic Brodsky (1940-96), his forceful genius assured by the prose collection Less Than One (1986), apparently could inspire lasting devotion in friends, particularly those who were fellow poets, but proved a towering egoist to interview. Venclova smiles; his kindly Mediterranean-style shrug suggests he is not overly surprised by the observation. "Brodsky was not" - pause - "an easy man."
Venclova is an affable man; he is also an intellectual and a scholar. More visionary than zealot, he loves literature. Having taught Russian literature throughout his academic career in the US, he is a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Yale and has also taught at Harvard, Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley. He is a fine essayist; his reviewing is informed and honest, honest enough to chide Solzhenitsyn, whose early work he reveres, for the mistake that is his novel August 1914, "a pitiful failure, artistically and intellectually".
In common with many poets, Venclova knows about the distance created by translation. Unlike most of his peers, however, he is very tolerant of encountering readers who are aware of his reputation and the facts of his biography and who have read his essays and reviews but not his poems.
Most tolerantly of all, Venclova submits to being quizzed about life in an atmosphere of oppression and fear. There is also his experience of knowing writers who have become legends. He met Pasternak near the end of the Russian writer's life. There are also his encounters with the poet Anna Akhmatova, a formidable character who did not dispense praise lightly.
Just as Nadine Gordimer spent years expecting to answer questions about the politics of South Africa, seldom being asked about her fiction, Venclova knows he will be repeatedly questioned about the mythic Russian writers he knew. He enjoys speaking about them and is aware of the historic relevance of such encounters, as well as the importance of having lived through such times.
Venclova was 21 when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1958, largely, it seems, for his novel Dr Zhivago, which was to suffer the travesty of a simplistic cinema treatment. But for Venclova it was Pasternak the poet whom he had read. "I had read the poems, knew them, many off by heart. The novel, at that time, was not available." The poems, in an underground edition, appeared in a notebook that was passed about.
Entrenched in a "long silent duel" with Stalin, Pasternak was reviled by the authorities; winning the Nobel Prize merely heightened the savage campaign of denouncements. Yet he certainly had admirers, and the young Venclova was among them. "We, three of my friends and I, wrote to him." He smiles at the youthful daring of it. Their letter had to be delivered by hand, to avoid the censor. It was answered.
A year later Venclova arrived at Pasternak's dacha. The dapper Russian was prouder of his novel than of his poems, which he dismissed as belles-lettres. Venclova argued that the poems were superior. Although Venclova knew he had lost his debate, he was confident that Pasternak, then 70 but looking 50, would survive for the sake of literature. "I said to the friend who was with me, thank God, he will live for another 20 years. But Pasternak was already dying - he had cancer - and was gone within six months."
Venclova had by then translated several of Pasternak's poems in to Lithuanian. Following the writer's death he published the translations. Lithuania, it seems, was the one part of the Soviet Union open to honouring the dead Pasternak; in 1965 it celebrated the 75th anniversary of his birth.
About that time Venclova decided to publish a collected Akhmatova. By then she was in to her 70s, utterly imperious and curiously protected from official censure, because of the impact that Requiem, her book about the prisons and Stalinist executions of 1937, had had in the US and throughout the West. The authorities dared not interfere with her, and she knew it. Venclova was equally aware that this grande dame of Soviet poetry was weary of approaches from ambitious young poets. "She had her own way of dismissing the pretender," he says. "She would say, 'You have a mastery of poetic image,' or, 'You have a mastery of rhyme.' That would mean your poems weren't much good." It seems there was one elusive element she demanded from a poem: mystery. "If you had that you had something." Venclova pauses, his habitual expression of laconic bemusement settling on his features, then continues, remarking that Akhmatova looked "a bit like Catherine the Great".
Later he mentions his recent visit to the Giant's Causeway. "It was very fine, but" - reverting to disappointed US tourist in despair - "a lot smaller than I expected. I felt, have I travelled this far to discover \? Is this all there is?" He says he shared Thackeray's similar sensation of anticlimax.
But back to Akhmatova, of whom he says: "She was initially very difficult to deal with." She had been non-committal about his translations of her poems but became more enthusiastic when she discovered that he insisted on doing word-for-word versions.
Venclova spoke about her at Cúirt, where he read his work in Lithuanian, in tandem with the US poet Ellen Hinsey, who read his poems in her new English translations. His awareness of literary continuity is exciting: Venclova believes writers are custodians of language and pass it down through the generations.
In an essay, Three Russian Poets (1997), he describes Akhmatova as very witty with a sharp bite. "She had a regal manner and could easily interrupt her interlocutor if she thought he was speaking nonsense; or she could express what she called 'magnificent contempt' for some author who was mentioned in conversation. Only later did I realise how lonely she felt and how desperately she had need of friends." He recalls her astutely remarking: "At a certain age a poet must be very careful. One can't write bad poems, because each poem might turn out to be the last."
Russian poetry of the first half of the 20th century, including voices such as Mandelstam, Bely, Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, was, he says, a phenomenon comparable to the achievement of the 15th-century Florentine artists or the Viennese composers of the 18th century.
Venclova was born in 1937 in to a writer's household. "Klaipeda [on the Baltic Sea\] is my birthplace, but we had been forced to leave when I was two years old, when Hitler arrived. It was only later we came to Vilnius, a city of baroque architecture poised against a medieval background." His father, Antanas Venclova, was People's Poet of Lithuania, a winner of the Stalin Prize, an avowed communist and "a type of minister of culture".
Officially, his father's position had some advantages, but the price was heavy. Some considered Venclova the son of a traitor who had betrayed Lithuania in accepting a position from the Soviets. "I loved my father, but I never agreed with him. I never accepted communism." At 16, having suffered the suspicion of his Jesuit-school classmates for his father's actions, Venclova entered the University of Vilnius to study literature - "what else?"
Three years later, in 1956, he was suspended for a year in the wake of the Hungarian uprising and for his part in a student journal. All the while he continued obsessively "reading, reading, reading". It became his job - reading, producing literary journalism and criticism - while concentrating on the poetry that would become his vocation. It was also his passport to travel throughout the Soviet Union. Somehow he never seemed particularly troublesome. Yet this would change. In 1976 he joined the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, a collection of dissenters who campaigned for human rights. He had now become more than troublesome: he was an enemy.
Eventually, he realised he could not do the work he wanted to do. At no time does he present himself as a persecuted writer. He keeps his ghosts, and any bitterness he may have, under control, but he has known suffering. His mother, a product of a Lithuanian intellectual family, had been held by the Nazis. He has known fear, but he is better acquainted with controlled anger. His mother still lives in Lithuania. "I spent the first few years in America moving from one short job to another. I love Lithuania, I love Poland, the literature. I love Russian literature but not the country. How could I? I can't say I love the US. It is different: it is where I live most of the time, where I work." But not the place of which he dreams? "No, I don't dream about America."
In speaking about his life he presents it as a communal narrative, typical of living in a time of crisis. He knows what it is like to have left a wife and, particularly, a child, his daughter, behind. (He remarried and now has a son as well.)
Venclova has monitored the transformation of Europe from a distance. Describing the way in which Lithuanian freedom came with a jolt, in 1990, and the storming of the national television station by Soviet troops a year later, he compares that day of terror to Derry's Bloody Sunday. Initially, the Russians counterchallenged, but then they backed down as revolution settled in to normality. In a poem he describes the sensation of screening a film of the event for his students. He says he had to write the poem as only three people arrived to see the videoed freedom as it evolved on film. Travel remains a passion for Venclova, who now divides his time between the US, Poland, where he has a house, and Lithuania. "I love to travel, I always have."
His poetry offers an intense meditation, a near philosophical discourse. It is poetry as art. For him poets are the truth-tellers. Venclova seems content but never complacent. "That is my story," he says as he completes the narrative of his several lives. His half-smile implies that we are to make of it what we will.
Forms Of Hope: Essays is published by University Press of New England; Winter Dialogue, a volume of poetry translated by Diana Senechal, is published by Northwestern University Press. Ellen Hinsey's translations will be published next year
