"They told me: you speak like a Canadian emigrant." Siarhiej Šupa told about Vilnius in the 90s, comparing Lithuanian and Belarusian literature, and differences between nations

Siarhiej Šupa. Photo from Siarhiej Šupa's Facebook page

— At the end of February - beginning of March, after participating in the International Book Fair in Vilnius, you separately presented the translations of four volumes of the Vilnius saga Silva Rerum - with its author Kristina Sabaliauskaitė. What were your impressions of the presentation?

— Yes, the main mass of readers came to a separate presentation, which took place at the Ivan Luckievič Belarusian Museum in Vilnius. The entire hall was filled: about 60-70 people gathered.

It helped us greatly, actually saved us, that we immediately agreed on a non-standard linguistic format. For the sake of order, I asked if there were people who didn't understand Lithuanian: there were quite a few. Then I asked if there were people who didn't understand Polish (Sabaliauskaitė herself speaks Polish very well): one or two timid hands went up. So we agreed: Kristina would speak Polish, and we would ask questions in Belarusian.

This saved us a lot of time and effort, and didn't break the dynamic of the conversation. Kristina admitted after the presentation that she had practically not encountered the Belarusian language before, but noted that she understood almost everything.

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Siarhiej Šupa and Kristina Sabaliauskaitė at the presentation of the Belarusian translation of Silva Rerum in Vilnius

— How did you come up with the idea to publish Silva Rerum in Belarusian?

— I had been looking at the novel for a long time: the first book came out in 2008. The work is very vivid and takes us back to our common history. Belarusians don't have historical novels about the 18th century, and Sabaliauskaitė took the life of the Polonized gentry and wrote a great novel about it.

As it turned out, Silva Rerum is the most popular book in Lithuania this century. This time at the fair in Vilnius, I asked Kristina about the total circulation of all four volumes in Lithuanian (I must say that I was already translating the first volume from its 22nd edition). She replied that the total circulation of all editions is 300 thousand copies.

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Belarusian edition of Silva Rerum. Photo: "Radio Svaboda"

Let me remind you that less than 3 million people live in Lithuania. It turns out that every second or third family had this book.

The novel is not just popular. As critics note, it is a rare combination of popularity and literary quality. This is by no means a cheap bestseller that will make a strong impression upon release but will be forgotten a month later - there have been quite a few such stories in the world.

So there is nothing surprising in our choice of this book for translation. A little earlier, we at the "Viasna" publishing house launched a Lithuanian collection. In 2018, the newspaper Lietuvos Rytas published a rating of 100 Lithuanian books for the centenary of the restoration of the Lithuanian state. There were two lists: literary critics and readers. In the critics' list, the first place was taken by the emigrant writer Antanas Škėma's book "White Shroud". The second - Ričardas Gavelis's "Vilnius Poker". The third - Jurgis Kunčinas's "Tuulė".

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"Vilnius Poker" was published by "Lohvinau" publishing house back in 2018. And we started our Lithuanian series by publishing books No. 1 and No. 3 ("White Shroud" and "Tuulė"). Therefore, today Belarusian readers have the opportunity to read the three most popular works of Lithuanian literature among critics over the past 100 years. "White Shroud" and "Tuulė", like Silva Rerum, are still available on "Knihauka".

— And why did you decide that Belarusian readers would be interested in novels from Lithuanian literature?

— It would be strange not to have any idea about the books of a country and a people with whom Belarusians are connected by centuries of common history. In fact, until these publications (and about a dozen translations from Lithuanian into Belarusian have already been published - also by "Pfliaumboum" publishing house), Belarusians practically knew nothing about what was happening in Lithuanian literature, which was an absolutely abnormal situation. Therefore, we decided to start correcting it.

— To the translation of Kunčinas's "Tuulė" you added a map with points where the events of the novel take place. Thanks to this map, I discovered completely unknown corners of Vilnius. How did you manage to create this map?

— In the 1990s, we lived in Vilnius at the beginning of Antakalnis near the Church of Saints Peter and Paul - there is a street called Vasaros ("Summer"). If you tell a Lithuanian "I live on Vasaros street", you will see an amusing reaction.

— Because there is a psychiatric hospital there, right?

— Yes. It's the same as saying in Minsk "I live in Navinki"... We lived right behind the fence of the psychiatric hospital. And the protagonist of the novel "Tuulė", in which there are many autobiographical features of Kunčinas (he was an intellectual, Germanist, translator, poet), was actually being treated in the hospital. Next to it was the Rytas grocery store. Alcoholics used to go there to continue drinking in the cafeteria on the second floor. I remember those signs: "Persons in hospital gowns are not served."

This description of my Vilnius deeply impressed me. Not the tourist one, with the Gate of Dawn, Gediminas' Tower, etc., but the one where I live. The book was published in 1993. It tells a poignant and tragic love story of the author for a girl he lost.

The novel is extraordinary and very topographical; it accurately describes the places where something happens to the hero. But there was no map in any Lithuanian edition of "Tuulė" and in no translated edition. So I thought it would be very good to make one so that readers could breathe the air from the novel and try to imagine what that or another place looked like in the late 1980s.

I experienced those places in the early 1990s (Siarhiej Šupa has Lithuanian citizenship - budzma.org), not much had changed there then. But from the mid-1990s, rapid changes began with the investment of a lot of money. And at the time when I moved to Vilnius, Užupis was a neglected corner, where probably nothing had been renovated since the 1950s.

— In "Tuulė" there are mentions of Belarusian places: Minsk, Baranavichy…

— At a certain point, the hero meets a Belarusian poetess through correspondence, with whom he goes on holiday to Crimea. This is how the Belarusian theme arises. Our country also appears in Kunčinas's poetry. Belarus as a country was not distant or alien to him.

— What are the peculiarities of Lithuanian literature, when compared to Belarusian?

— Lithuanian literature is very rich and diverse: it developed continuously from the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries, including during the independence of the interwar Lithuanian Republic. After 1944, the second Soviet occupation, the Union of Writers emigrated almost in full (including Antanas Škėma). Literary processes there continued much more actively than, say, in the Belarusian emigration. It's even hard to say how many novels were written by Belarusian emigrant writers - only a few. In Belarus, that generation of artists was destroyed during the repressions of the 1930s. But in Lithuania, they were able to leave for the West.

By the end of the 1950s, new names began to emerge in the literature of Soviet Lithuania as well. Belarus at this time faced total Russification, so literature was largely detached from real life. They wrote about the village, where the Belarusian language still lived, but when they wrote about the city, where everything was already in Russian, the literature did not look entirely natural.

So Belarusian literature differs primarily in that it was created in conditions of total Russification of its readers. In Lithuania, readers were practically not Russified, so their own language and literature developed - albeit with ideological control.

— Today, many Belarusians in Lithuania are learning the Lithuanian language. How did you learn it?

— I visited Vilnius already in my school years - probably even earlier than visiting Belarusian regional centers (Vilnius, as is known, is closer to Minsk than they are). You arrive - and there are other languages: Lithuanian, and Polish, and local-native Belarusian, and Russian, and I even encountered Yiddish.

And if you go further, to Kaunas, everything is in Lithuanian there. I have been an avid linguist since childhood; somewhere, probably in 7th grade, during a visit to Kaunas, I bought a Lithuanian language textbook and slowly taught myself.

Structurally, the Lithuanian language is not that far from Belarusian and other Slavic languages. It is much closer to us than any of the Western languages. I did not experience great difficulties in learning it. And when I moved to Vilnius to live, I already spoke Lithuanian. True, they told me: you speak like some Canadian emigrant.

— So it's a stereotype when they say that the Lithuanian language is very difficult to learn?

— Try learning Estonian… No, Lithuanian is not difficult.

— In what ways are Belarusians and Lithuanians similar, and in what ways are they different?

— The similarity lies in the past, which left an imprint on national characters.

Belarusians, like Lithuanians, are more individualistic, yet reserved, not emotional - when compared with Ukrainians and Russians. If we take ethnography and folklore, there is no distinct border between Lithuanians and Belarusians - except for the linguistic one. For example, when comparing museums of folk life, it would be very difficult for specialists to draw a line.

In general, from the beginning of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania right up to 1991, there was never a border between Belarusians and Lithuanians. Both we and they fell under various occupations – Russian, Polish, Soviet. But where the linguistic border runs, there was no real border all these times. It only appeared in 1991 and, unfortunately, this wall is getting higher and higher.

It is clear that Russification had a very strong impact on Belarusians. Belarusians are a much more Sovietized people than Lithuanians. I would even argue with nation-building theorists: probably the Belarusian nation has not yet fully formed. Or there are, at least, several competing models of what the Belarusian nation is. There is our national narrative, and there is a narrative, conditionally speaking, of Marzaliuk - pro-Russian Belarusians of anti-European orientation.

And you cannot tell a person who considers himself a Belarusian that he is not Belarusian. The same applies when people in the Vilnius region speak a Belarusian dialect but consider themselves Poles: no one has the right to tell them "you are not Poles at all, you are Belarusians." The choice of national belonging is a matter of self-awareness and a private matter for each person, not some external observer who measures skulls, genetics, or performs blood tests.

As for the difference, it is worth noting that Lithuania is also largely Sovietized - when comparing Lithuanians with Latvians and even more so with Estonians. Relapses sometimes manifest themselves in elections: in the last presidential elections, the pro-Soviet and pro-Russian politician Vaitkus received 7% of the votes - which is quite a lot.

— What is the pleasure of working as a literary translator?

— Firstly, it's pleasant to make foreign literature accessible to Belarusian readers. And it's very interesting to test the Belarusian language: can you, Belarusian language, express the feelings and thoughts of another creator who wrote in another language?

I know that some translate as it comes, and then complicated and difficult self-editing processes begin - the draft is refined. I work differently. I do the same work within one sentence or one paragraph. Until they sound ideal to me, I don't move on. Smooth editing happens when I read the translation aloud to my wife, who is also the director of the publishing house (Vesna Vaško, a native of Croatia - budzma.org): then I hear all the weak spots that need polishing. But there aren't that many such spots.

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Translator and his publisher: Siarhiej Šupa and Vesna Vaško. Photo: "Radio Svaboda"

In my opinion, translated literature is as much a fact of Belarusian literature and culture as original literature. This is relevant for small nations. I remember how impressed I was in an Estonian bookstore that 80% of the products were translations. Both readers and writers are nurtured not only by their original literature but also by translations. And translations ideally have the advantage of being already proven literature.

— What are you working on now, and what book can we expect soon?

— I'm working on several projects in parallel, but I'd like to tell you about another book in the Lithuanian series. This book took first place in the century list in the readers' rating. And I think it is, perhaps, the most significant Lithuanian book on a global scale. Its fate is very tragic, and it did not resonate when it should have, and therefore remained unnoticed in the wider world.

This is the book by the intellectual and playwright of interwar Lithuania, Balys Sruoga, "Forest of the Gods". In 1943, after the defeat at Stalingrad, the Germans began to round up mobilization reserves in the occupied territories and create Waffen SS battalions - in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Belarus. This succeeded everywhere except Lithuania (in Belarus, the 30th SS Grenadier Division was created): there, this action was sabotaged. Not without reason, the Germans accused the faculty of Vilnius University of this. About 40 intellectuals, including Balys Sruoga, were sent to concentration camps. True, they sat there not as prisoners, but rather as hostages - implying, we will recruit people into the SS and then release you. But the Germans never recruited anyone, and the intellectuals sat in concentration camps until the end of the war.

Balys Sruoga - a subtle stylist and excellent writer - wrote a book about his life in the Stutthof camp near Gdańsk. It is very unconventional against the background of other similar memoirs about survival in a concentration camp. The book is written from positions of sarcasm, black humor - that's how Sruoga tried to survive. Reading it, you gasp: how could one write about such a thing like that?

The Soviets liberated and evacuated Sruoga; he was separated from his wife and daughter, who had managed to escape to the West in 1944. Sruoga was brought to Lithuania with great pomp: after almost the entire Union of Writers left, only three and a half literati remained there.

He wrote his book in a couple of months, submitted it to the publishing house, but the party censorship said that it was not acceptable to write like that. Sruoga fought for the manuscript as best he could, but lost the battle - he died in 1947. The book was put in a drawer. During the Thaw, it was published, but in a heavily disfigured, practically non-authorial version. In this form, as a testament to Nazi crimes, the book became known and was included in school curricula.

And so, what is practically the greatest Lithuanian book of the 20th century has not yet been published in its author's version. This year marks 130 years since Balys Sruoga's birth, and this autumn the edition will be published for the first time in Lithuanian in the form in which the author intended it.

And translations have been made from the author's version for several years already (the manuscripts have been preserved). The first to come out was Azerbaijani, now Korean is being released, French and Dutch are being prepared - and the fifth will be the Belarusian translation.

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