Rimas Uzgiris on "Tu felix, Austria" by Tomas Venclova

As part of our November 2011 TWO LINES Online offerings, we present translator Rimas Uzgiris' introduction to "Tu felix, Austria," which he translated for the November edition.

Tomas Venclova was born in Klaipeda, Lithuania, in 1937 and was educated at Vilnius University. He is a scholar, poet, and translator of literature. Because of his outspoken membership in the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which monitored Soviet violations of human rights, Venclova was threatened with a number of sanctions, and was allowed to emigrate in 1977. Since 1980 he has been a member of the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, from which he also received a Ph.D. Collections of his poems have been published in English as Dialogue in Winter (1999), and The Junction: Selected Poems (2009). He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000 and the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz.

The poem, "Tu felix, Austria", exemplifies several themes common to Venclova's oeuvre, especially the frank engagement with death, and with the last century's history of violence and occupation, especially in Eastern Europe. Early in Venclova's career, one can find poems like "Nel Mezzo del Cammin Di Nostra Vita" (dedicated to a fellow human rights activist murdered in mysterious circumstances) in which we find a lyric self trying to survive in a environment sated with death, fear, and a state of disrepair/despair reminiscent of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The poem "In a half-mile, the highways cross, . . .", written around the time of Venclova's flight from the USSR, captures the heavy psychological burden of exile. More recently, in View from the alley (1998), "Commando" considers political violence within the larger context of the natural world. A soldier's unmarked resting site is swallowed up by nature—and by its renewing beauty.

"Tu felix, Austria" also places the individual in a wider context—this time within the recent century of political violence. The title comes from the motto of the Austro-Hungarian empire: Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube! ("Wars may be led by others—you, happy Austria, marry!"). Yet the poem immediately points to how history has undermined this prescription (usually interpreted as a reference to the success of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in using marriage to enhance its power). In the first stanza we are reminded that Austria is the birthplace of psychotherapy (which revealed the war within the family), as well as of Hitler's industrial-scale belligerence and hatred. The figure of Sisyphus, and the shift in location of contemporary violence, reveal that the horrors of the 20th century are not exceptions. Human history is grim, with little to hope for, and the psychological burden of this understanding is exacerbated by the apparent finality of death. Nevertheless, little hope is not the same as none. We may extract some meaning—or moral—from our story before we are done.