Tomas Venclova © photo private

Tomas Venclova [Lithuania]

Tomas Venclova was born in the Lithuanian harbour city of Klaipėda (formerly Memel) in 1937. He studied Lithuanian Language and Literature in Vilnius. During longer periods of abode in Moscow (1961–1965) and Leningrad (1969–1972), he met other writers and dissidents and became an activist in the civil rights movement. He became friends with the poet Anna Akhmatova and with Alexander Ginzburg, Joseph Brodsky, and other authors. Between 1966 and 1971, he studied Semiotics and Russian Literature at the Estonian University of Tartu. He then returned to Vilnius and became a lecturer in the History of Literature and Semiotics at Vilnius University. 

In 1976 he was a co-founder of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group, which campaigned for the protection of human rights. In the following year, he managed to emigrate to the USA with the help of Brodsky and thanks to the mediation of Czesław Miłosz. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a consequence of his human rights work lost his Soviet citizenship. The USA granted him political asylum. He taught Slavonic Literature at Yale from 1980 until 2012, where he also obtained his doctorate in 1985 and became a professor in 1993.

Since his poems and essays were censored in his home country, he produced most of his works in exile. Venclova translated Akhmatova, Brodsky, Miłosz, and Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Baudelaire, Michaux, Pound, and Eliot into Lithuanian. One of his first poems, Hidalgo, was published as samizdat, also as a protest against the quelling of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.

Venclova is doubtlessly one of the most important Eastern European poets. In his very formal poetry, Venclova focuses on rhythm and sound and the particular qualities of the Lithuanian language. His themes are contemporary history, the loss of one’s home, and, of course, linguistic expression. Thanks to translations by Durs Grünbein and others, a part of Venclova’s oeuvre is available in German, including the three anthologies Vor der Tür das Ende der Welt (2002; tr: Before the Door the End of the World), Variation über das Thema Erwachen (2022; tr: Variation on the Theme of Awakening), and Gespräche im Winter (2007; Eng: Winter Dialogue), and his city portrait Vilnius – Eine Stadt in Europa (2006; Eng: Vilnius: A Personal History ).

In 2023, he received the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. He is also a recipient of numerous other international and national awards.