Böcker av Kornelijus Platelis

This is the comprehensive translation into English of poems by Kornelijus Platelis, the most acclaimed contemporary Lithuanian poet and one of the most accomplished of contemporary European poets. The translations in this collection are by award-winning poet and translator Jonas Zdanys. They are the product of a thirty-five year friendship and literary collaboration that celebrates lyric moments of beauty and transcendence that can shine through two languages. Vivid and original, intense and resonant, these poems affirm for us all the insights that the literary imagination makes possible into human complexity, and they attest to the luminous role of art in shaping and defining the self as it seeks to affirm its place in an inconstant world. This is an important and essential book in world literature.

Two Voices/Du Balsai is a literary celebration of a thirty year friendship between poets and translators Kornelijus Platelis and Jonas Zdanys. Over those years, both have translated each other's poems, sent one another literary questions and explanations, enjoyed the currents of their aesthetic discussions as they moved to poetic consensus, and engaged in interesting and essential conversations about poetry and art. In this bilingual volume, published in English and Lithuanian, Zdanys and Platelis engage with one another as poets and as translators. Each presents himself as well as the other, through original poems and through their respective translations on the facing pages in the other language. The poems include the most recent published texts by each poet as well as some yet unpublished work, and the respective translations are new and made especially for these pages. The work in both languages reveals textures and nuances of a long and productive literary collusion. Above all else, these poems and translations provide an engaging affirmation of the work Platelis and Zdanys have been doing together, work in two voices that bridges the years and crosses an ocean, and thereby affirm how each has contributed to and learned from the work of the other.