Greta Ambrazaitė
- Lithuania -
Greta Ambrazaitė (b. 1993, Vilnius) is a poet, editor and author of three books. She holds an MA in Literary Anthropology and Culture from Vilnius University. Ambrazaitė is a co-founder of the publishing house Baziliskas and a director of the annual international poetry festival Druskininkai Poetic Fall. She works at the Lithuanian Writers’ Union as a head of cultural projects.
Ambrazaitė’s debut poetry collection Fragile Things (Trapūs daiktai, 2018) earned the Young Yotvingian Prize as a best young poet’s book. It It was included into the top five of the Poetry Books of the Year selected by the expert committee, and was announced as the 2018 Poetry Book. She was awarded the Young Artist’s Prize by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture in 2019. Her second poetry book, Adela (2022), was awarded the Jurga Ivanauskaitė Prize and included into several best Lithuanian books’ lists.
Her poems have been translated into more than ten languages. Ambrazaitė has translated poems by poets such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Alejandra Pizarnik etc, and edited the anthology of young Georgian poets Aidintys / ექო (2021). She also enjoys lo-fi electronic music, composing, singing, recording it at home, and sometimes she performes poetry with her music. She expresses herself as a book designer for several past years, winning nominations and mentions in various Lithuanian design awards.
"Whole Generations of Darkness"
by literary critic Dovilė Kuzminskaitė (translated by Markas Aurelijus Piesinas):
Since publishing her first book of poetry, Greta Ambrazaitė has been known for her unique voice and as a representative of the contemporary Lithuanian literature scene. Her poetry is marked by its distinctive aesthetic of darkness and the author’s metaphorically dense language. In her second poetry collection “Adela” (Lithuanian Writers’ Union Publishing House, 2022), Ambrazaitė retains her position of distance, observing the world as if she were looking through cracked glass.
“Adela” is Ambrazaitė’s tribute to her family’s history. Based on the figure of her great-great-grandmother whom the author never met (in Greta’s own words – a phantom roaming the waters of her heart), she reflects on family relationships and observes herself and her environment through true or fictionalized memories. Such an approach is best illustrated by the second poem in the book, titled “How I Gazed at My Grandmother’s Hands”: “Hands are inherited with a plucked lilac branch, with rings / from the nameless finger, with sun-spots / blueberry brooches, / chess pieces, afghans, beetles, herbal soup, a child’s / cosmos that cowers in its cradle, wanting to be rocked again” (p. 15). This and other poems in the book often show the lyrical subject in a state of observation, recognition (or failure thereof), and a search for connections, creating continuity between that which was and that which may be from personal and universal history.
Ambrazaitė experiments with visual poetry and plays with the layout of the text on the book’s pages, thus expanding its poetics beyond the meanings of just the words themselves. Thus, contrary to what may be expected, “Adela” does not offer a straight line of memory and reflection and instead twirls and contorts around form and theme, until, ultimately, the last poem “Sky lamps” returns the reader to the starting point, emphasizing the importance of inquiry and an analytical perspective: “one day if we run out of questions – / stop minding antiques / news and the arts / encyclopedias and insurgencies – / suddenly we’d see / how fleet we’ve become from ditching responsibility” (p. 84).
The sociohistorical and at the same time intimate approach seen in the poems of “Adela” does not push Ambrazaitė from the boundaries of her usual poetic speech. As in her first book of poetry, here, too, the poet writes in images, her words first appearing in visual form in the reader’s imagination, as the layer of meaning remains somewhere beyond the thicket of imagery. In other words, Ambrazaitė gathers the material of reality and instead of directly putting it into her writing, she transfers it to another creative stratum, thus distancing herself from straightforward confession. For example, we might suspect that the poem “Gems” refers to the political events that have taken the world by storm since February (“Each morning in the country where nothing is happening / gems of time fall out the window / […] today in the country where nothing is happening / they’re not shattered by salvos of rockets / not looted in bloodied trailers / not rigged with explosives”, but she touches upon sensitive subjects in a very delicate way. Ambrazaitė does not appropriate, while allusions seemingly to trauma carried on from one generation to the next are also established from a distance: “this spring the gems inlaid under my skin / tingle like never before”.
Reading “Adela” feels like fumbling about a dark room in a stranger’s home: you get a hold of certain contours in the dimness, touching unfamiliar objects, observing your own sensations or emotional reactions, and perhaps only then approaching a hypothesis about the space itself as well as the people who live there. Some of the passages in “Adela” read as if the sentences were artificially constructed, translated from a foreign language and unrefined, aged on purpose. Again, such an aesthetic artificiality is quite well-supported by the book’s religious leitmotifs, which, in my opinion, serve the text more as stylistic artifacts rather than authentic references to the norms and forms of Catholicism.
Ambrazaitė’s “Adela” becomes more than a mere object – the reading of this book is an exercise in memorial archeology and an original performance in poetry.
“A poet of darklight”
by literary scholar and critic Lina Buividavičiūtė (translated by Markas Aurelijus Piesinas):
I first read Greta Ambrazaitė’s poetry even before her debut book, the author was known to be an active participant of readings and poetry festivals, and her poems were published in the cultural press and in almanacs. I remember a peculiar world made from letters and rhythms, one that is seemingly self-sufficient yet overcomes solipsism by addressing the reader, calling them to take a deeper plunge, and which does not “imprison in speeches,” for “how great are the things that bind us, / how petty the things that divide us, / do not imprison me in speeches, / behind them – an iron red of the lips” (kraujo pelytė (“blood mousie”) p. 9). Greta surely does not imprison in speeches – the author writes and performs songs, the lyrics of which are often poems written by the poet herself. Greta has scientific pursuits in addition to creative writing – the author holds a Master’s degree in literaturology from Vilnius University.
Having read and heard so much of her work, some time later I saw Greta herself, reading poetry at an event. She struck me as a profound individual; the depth of her personality, as well as her distinctive secrecy and fatefulness, suited the peculiarities of her poems. I felt her to become one with her works as she read them.
Greta and her works are often characterized using the notions of fatalism and Gothicness – I do not deny the validity of these notions, but, knowing the author to be already tired of these descriptions, I seek other ways to approach her writings.
In Ambrazaitė’s texts, the Human is considered philosophically – “as a thing, the thing of all things” (p. 30). This fragility is both eternal and connoting ephemerality and oblivion, as stated by the subject in the poem apkasai (“trenches”): “around are sticky air and fragile things / that I will soon forget”.
Some of her poetry’s exceptional features are its atmosphere, thick and replete with darkness, and its powerful images and intertexts. Greta’s texts are viscous, commanding, and lush, and invite the reader for a tough, perhaps even dire tête-à-tête. Much of the attention is devoted to marginal states of being, with ending up in “chambers of horror” (the term is mine – L. B.), places of stagnation and ruin. The dualism of Hypnos and Thanatos and the “ruts of pain” are also very important in Greta’s works. As I read Greta’s poems, I usually envision a subject that desperately longs for certainty, clarity, perceptibility, yet they are oftentimes submerged in a dreamlike and deformed version of reality, in a disfunction, disharmony, in the pareidolias actualized by the author – because we are constantly broadcasted by surveillance cameras.
The subject created by the author is a believer in the “religion of ruin” (the term is mine – L. B.) and asserts to have “thought about God not enough” to be able to tear this hazy maya apart. The subject captures not the death of God, but God’s silence as a premise for the founding of the mentioned maya, as “all the speakers in the universe are buzzing in silence.”
To summarize – Greta has a talented way of viewing and reflecting on the world. Her creative work is profound, shocking, and authentic. Ambrazaitė is a poet of darklight.
Poetry
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blood mouse / kraujo pelytė
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entrenchments / apkasai
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return / grįžimas
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22:45 / 22:45
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Sleep / miegas
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Volkswagen Passat / Volkswagen Passat
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landlessly / bežemiškai
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liturgical / liturginis
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Pareidolias / pareidolijos
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openness / atvirumas
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primal force / pirmykštė jėga
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grand piano / fortepijonas
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Misericordia, or Mercy / Mizerikordija, arba gailestingumas
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Ego Rex / Ego Rex
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Intoxication / Intoksikacija
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Four Letters of Sarah / Keturi Saros laiškai
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Faithfulness / Ištikimybė
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Slash / Brūkšnys
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Vivaria / Vivaria
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a 1998 motif with Andersen / 1998-ųjų motyvas su Andersenu
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Untitled / Be pavadinimo
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How I Gazed at My Grandmother’s Hands / Kaip aš stebėjau močiutės rankas
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Adela Różewicz / Adela Różewicz
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Name / Vardas
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You will have to wander more / Dar daug tau teks klajot
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The Angel of Melancholy / Melancholijos angelas
