Poetry
Vizijos
Not translated into English
Vytautas Mačernis · 1942
Synopsis
Visions: an introduction, seven visions and an epilogue, dated from 1939 to 1942, in which the poet, seized by ecstasies, seeks an answer to the essential questions of life. The old farmstead of Samogitia, the house where he was born and its people, memories of childhood become the starting point of these visions, and the native land appears in them as the first spiritual support of man, one whose value is measured only after leaving it.
Context
The author himself dated the pieces of the Šarnelė, Kaunas and Vilnius cycle between 1939 and 1942, and it is the only one of his works that he considered finished. The book appeared for the first time in Rome in 1947, prepared by Vytautas Saulius, as a posthumous book of poetry. Banned in Soviet Lithuania, his work was published there only from 1970; poets of the exile, Kazys Bradūnas and Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas, had preserved its memory. The poet had then turned to classical forms, with the eighty-one sonnets of the Year.
Who it is for
A sequence to be read in one go, like a meditation; no French or English translation of the cycle has been found.
Prizes and reception
His only completed work, whose influence was felt by other poets from the time it circulated in manuscript.
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The pages consulted to check this page.