Eugenijus Ališanka (1960) was born into a family of deportees deep in Russia, and did not see Lithuania for the first two years of his life. Whether coincidentally, subconsciously or on purpose, he has kept that way for most of his life. It is probably safe to say that Ališanka is the most widely translated Lithuanian poet: he has had more than ten books published in English, German, Russian, and some rarer languages like Slovenian and Finnish, and almost every one of his collections has been translated into another language. Ališanka travels extensively, often spending time on various writers’ residences abroad, and participating in events and festivals. He is also a prolific translator of poetry from English and Polish, and an ambitious intellectual thinker, although his more philosophical prose is often received rather ambiguously. He has written several collections of essays.

Gatvė tarp dviejų bažnyčių (The Street between Two Churches). Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2012. – 210 pp.

Gatvė tarp dviejų bažnyčių (The Street between Two Churches) is Ališanka’s first collection of essays, where he has collected various topical and circumstantial texts united by an extraordinary sense of poetic time. His texts are often termed intellectual essays, seemingly emphasizing that subjectivity is required in the essay genre. A certain distant interpretation of the author’s life, as if presented through glass, from the other, more impersonal side, that one finds there also reflects a wide range of cultural artefacts. Personal stories and memories are woven into the essays seamlessly, or seemingly haphazardly, as if the wrong colour thread had been picked up. That’s exactly why nostalgia is one of the most important actors in Ališanka’s cast, which was described well by Lithuania’s most famous essayist, Giedra Radvilavičiūtė, who termed it as “unsentimental, a simple stating of facts.” And this, one must admit, is still a rare thing in Lithuanian literature.

Selected translations

Italian: Nel corsivo della notte. Translated by Pietro U. Dini. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2018

English: The Street between Two Churches. Translated by Jūra Avižienis. In: The Vilnius Review, 2012 (31)

From Unwritten Histories. Translated by H. L. Hix. Austin: Host Publications, 2011

City of Ash. Translated by H. L. Hix. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000

German: Risse. Streifzuge und Fluchtpunkte. Translated by Claudia Sinnig. Berlin: KLAK Verlag, 2017

Exemplum. Translated by Claudia Sinnig. Frankfurt: Zuhrkamp, 2011

Die Ruckkehr des Dionysos. Translated by Klaus Bethel. Oberhausen: Athena, 2008

Aus ungeschriebenen Geschichten. Translated by Klaus Bethel. Koln: DuMont, 2005

Slovenian: Iz nenapisanih zgodb. Translated by Bernarda Pavlovec Žumer. Liublijana: Društvo Apokaplipsa, 2008

Swedish: Gudaben. Translated by Anna Harrison, Mikael Nydahl, Carina Nynäs, Liana Ruokytė. Sätaröd: Ariel Skrifter, 2002

Russian: Божья кость / Dievakaulis. Translated by Sergej Zavjalov. Saint Petersburg: Symposium, 2002