Novel
Sakmė apie Juzą
Not translated into English
Juozas Baltušis · 1979
Synopsis
In rural Lithuania, some ten years before the Second World War, Youza, a taciturn young peasant, sees the young woman he loves, Vintsiouné, refuse to marry him and marry another. Heartbroken, he leaves the farm he ran with his brother and sister and settles in the wild marsh of Kaïrabalé, at the edge of a village, to build his own holding there alone. But human passions and the regimes that succeed one another in Vilnius come to find him there.
Context
Published in 1979 and printed in some ninety thousand copies in its first year, the book received the State Prize in 1980; built like a ballad, it sets out to give an image of the Lithuanian peasant and to voice the poetry of work, of nature and of an old ethic. In Lithuania it passed for a secret sign of resistance, even though its author served the regime. Translated from Russian by Denise Yoccoz-Neugnot and checked against the original, La Saga de Youza appeared from Alinéa in 1990; it won the Prix du meilleur livre étranger in France and sold more than a hundred thousand copies in two years.
Who it is for
For a prose ballad about the land, the marsh and solitude, carried by a language rich in country words.
Prizes and reception
The best-known Lithuanian work in France, it is ranked by Lithuanian critics among the summits of their literature, despite the author's discredit.