Dominykas Norkūnas
- Lithuania -
Dominykas Norkūnas (b. 1993, Vilnius) is a poet, translator and co-founder of publishing house Baziliskas. He studied German philology in Vilnius University. Norkūnas translates from English, German and Latvian. His poems and translations were published in several cultural magazines, and he participated in various literary festivals and readings. In 2021, Norkūnas published his first poetry book, Tamsa yra aštuonkojis (Darkness Is an Octopus, published by Lithuanian Writers' Union Publishing House). In 2021, the book was awarded as the best poetic debut and Norkūnas’ translation of Jerome Rothenberg’s poetry collection “Khurbn” was awarded by the Lithuanian Association of Literary Translators as the most successful debut in translation. Dominykas Norkūnas also serves the International Programme Coordinator for Druskininkai Poetic Fall festival.
Darkness With a False Bottom
Poet, publisher (one of the founders of the Baziliskas publishing house) and translator Dominykas Norkūnas belongs to the first generation of verse-makers to mature after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990. For that generation, the relationship with the treasure house of world literature and verse, including contemporary poetry written in English, German and other languages, was natural. Indeed, that cohort managed to weave the literary experience of both Western and Eastern Europe, as well as the English-speaking world, into their worldview rather harmoniously.
Dominykas Norkūnas debuted in 2021 with a poetry collection titled Tamsa yra aštuonkojis (Darkness is an Octopus), published by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union Publishing House. The book went on to become the best poetry debut of the year, gaining Norkūnas the Zigmas Gėlė-Gaidamavičius Literary Prize.
Diving into Darkness…, one is immediately overcome with ardour and wonderment, following the verse like a tail and trying to decipher what, and why, Norkūnas has picked from the global cultural treasure house and why and how he utilises it in his work, just as one is delighted to discover that the poet is well aware of how cultural and mythological allusions work in the poetic text. The sacredness of the verse, the word, the utterance, and simultaneously, the poetic self’s ability to reveal both light and darkness and to hold the reins over them is one of the running themes of this collection. Of course, there is always the other side – the inability, as well as the refusal to express oneself: “Words are lame puppies / wandering into a temple / where medieval
monks / drunk and resentful / stone them / to death.”
Norkūnas’s verses are evocatively visual: it seems as if the author leads us through the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Zdzisław Beksiński, as well as those witnessed on medieval engravings, along the paths of ruins of human culture. A rapid montage sequence, expressionistically strung together from rituals, catacombs, and sacrifices, spins in the reader’s mind. “Deserted / ziggurats are beaded in dew / and my singular gaze / splits / into a thousand gazes, shattering / like the shriek of a basilisk / in the echo of an infinity / of mirrors.”
However, a pause brings a realisation that, while reading Norkūnas, one is simultaneously solving the riddles of culture and allusions, wondering why the mosaic of images is composed this way and not another, why, in this landscape of all things vanishing, it is those particular snippets, those fragments, and not others, that have been preserved. The quivering thread of ambiguous images turns a poem into a palimpsest of sorts, while the reader must decipher what was written before, underneath the latest writing, and how that interacts with the vast and vastly invisible experience of humanity, its various archetypes and myths.
Norkūnas is comparable with the poets of his generation in both his aestheticism and his turn to antiquity, Hellenism, and early Christianity (the poets Nerijus Cibulskas, Mantas Balakauskas, and Tomas Petrulis are worth mentioning in this context). It seems that they all find in those eras both an anchor that can still hold the restless, capricious ship of the present world and culture, and a kind of a framework that offers convenient, easily recognisable images that, with their accumulated weight and experience of transformations, help to highlight both the pretentiousness of present existence and the regularly recurring entropy, the cyclical horror of the degradation and passing of cultures and civilisations.
Norkūnas is concerned with the mystical experience of survival, the ecstatic magic of ritual, a ritual that the poet employs in his endeavour to pierce the shell of the inexplicability of the world, to grasp how darkness and light coexist in it. “light is an octopus / pulsating / in your bones // darkness is an octopus / undulating / in your blood.”
In this sense, the poet’s work is close to that of Jerome Rothenberg, which attempts to express the apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust, as well as the hermetic verse of W. S. Merwin, which is concerned with the alienation between man and nature. Norkūnas is well acquainted with both of these poets: his translation of Jerome Rothenberg’s collection has won him the Prize for the Best Translation Debut, awarded by the Lithuanian Association of Literary Translators.
In Norkūnas’s poetry, critics find aesthetics of decadence and hermeticism, as well as the Gothic worldview, comparing his verse to beautifully constructed boxes. Indeed, his work is marked by that alluringly gloomy, black surface gloss that occasionally obscures the depth of the poetic text or even replaces it. However, Norkūnas’s verses are saved from the risk of pomposity and ponderousness of kitschy darkness by their laconic form and expressionist style, alongside poetic passion, which is hidden under a thick layer of cultural references, yet palpable.
Of course, Darkness… is not just a sombre book of poetic magic and spells; there is room in it for childhood memories, an occasional love poem, the history of Vilnius, and its urban landscape, among other elements.
If I had to choose an epigraph that would summarise Norkūnas’s poetry collection, I would single out the following lines: “Each word / has four / nostrils / inhaling a smoke / meant for the gods – / each word is omnipotent / like a blood that becomes / its own vessel.”
Written by Marius Burokas / Translated from Lithuanian by Julija Gulbinovič / Dominykas Norkūnas’s poetry excerpts translated by Malachi Black and Markas Aurelijus Piesinas
Poetry
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On Occasional Chanting / Apie tai, kaip kartais giedama
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On the Insignificance of the Gods / Apie dievų bereikšmiškumą
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Five Mosaics / Penki mozaikos gabaliukai
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Words / Žodžiai
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Drought / Sausra
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Three Octopi / Trys aštuonkojai
