Austėja Jakas
- Lithuania -
Austėja Jakas (b. 1994, Vilnius) is a poet and artist. She has a degree in graphic design. Her poems and essays were published in several cultural magazines, and she participated in various literary festivals and readings. In the summer of 2024, Jakas published her first poetry book, Mėlynieji malonumai (Blue Pleasures, published by Baziliskas). The book was included in several lists of the best Lithuanian books and was announced as the 2024 Poetry Book of the Year. The author currently lives and works in Austria.
Off-the-Beaten Tales
When talking about books, we often overlook their epigraphs, forgetting that they are usually carefully selected by the author and inserted as a kind of key that helps the reader understand the author’s intention and grasp the main idea or structure of the book. The epigraph in Austėja Jakas’s poetry book is a paragraph from The Hour of the Star by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, the last sentence of which reads: “Her thoughts were gratuitous and unconnected because, however erratic, she possessed vast reserves of inner freedom.”
Indeed, inner freedom is the core theme of the debut poetry collection by the young-generation poet and artist Austėja Jakas, titled Mėlynieji malonumai (Blue Pleasures). Freedom to speak, freedom to perceive, freedom to be yourself. Freedom not to know something, to be unsure. Freedom to play and freedom to mourn. „there will be pain and war and love and loss / my blue steamboat in a puddle / i can’t lift its spirits / i can’t solve its problems or its sadness”.
Critics have pointed out that Jakas’s poetry seems to exist outside the Lithuanian poetry tradition. Looking at it more broadly (and taking into account the poet’s contemporaries, such as Tadas Zaronskis, Dovilė Bagdonaitė, or Patricija Gudeikaitė), Jakas’s poetry expands this tradition, deepens it, and opens it up to new things, things not previously tried in Lithuanian poetry, instead.
One of the main features of Jakas’s poetic work (as well as that of her aforementioned peers) is a precise, deliberately emphasised individuality. It is less concerned with conventional poetic norms and more with finding ways to express and accommodate the diverse, multifaceted experiences, feelings, and views of the individual poetic self. “I get a strange email on Wednesday / it says they know all my passwords / it says if I don’t pay $2,830 / they will send my intimate pictures to eight friends / how nice, I think / people will finally know I have sexual organs / the day will come when you won’t have to hide anything”.
Poetic talent and a sense of moderation allow the poet to talk about rather simple, quotidian things without slipping into boredom, banality, self-pity, or the ostentatious opening of psychological wounds and traumas.
But beware, reader: don’t be fooled into thinking that Jakas’s poetry is autobiographical: here, genders are often flipped, even within the scope of a single poem, and there are inserts of surreal, absurd episodes and mini-stories. Thus, Jakas plays with autobiographicality, mystifying her experience, yet her poetry is surprisingly steady and unbroken, no matter the theme. Art critic and poet Alfonsas Andriuškevičius has accurately pinpointed the core emotion of Jakas’s book: the melancholy of non-resistance. “The world painted by the poet is comparable to a rushing floodwater that carries various – sad, painful, funny, stupid, absurd - experiences, too many to count, while the lifeline in that flood is non-resistance,” he writes.
This non-resistance, acceptance of life as a continuous flow, looking at it somewhat melancholically, with nostalgia, but also with humour and gentle irony, is this book’s greatest value. “I was no longer surprised that people used to walk around in wooden clogs / that people sit in jails with pictures of loved ones on the walls / or that they upload videos to youtube about how they ate two kilos of chilli // I’m still surprised that you can transplant a heart / and that mothers read their children’s diaries at night / still surprised that people are lonely and tired”.
Its value also lies in another, more paradoxical, element: Jakas does not assume either the stance or the supposed mission of a poet (something that many wordsmiths do subconsciously, even those without one). The editor of Blue Pleasures, poet Gintaras Grajauskas, has also found that to be the case: “When one simply sees the whole and truly wants to tell others about it, there is no need to adhere to canons. Then one can “be without literature”, maintain all kinds of distance, which helps to preserve the clarity of an observer’s gaze. Austėja Jakas does have something to say – the question of how to say it becomes irrelevant. Such is the method of an observer of the world.”
All that informs Jakas’s writing style: in her verse, the poet skillfully combines the stream-of-consciousness technique with the vernacular. Her poems are always unexpected and rather paradoxical – they are miniature stories, narratives, and sometimes even modern myths, fables or fairy tales. Jakas tends to “derail” her poem from the train of its poetic sound – by breaking the syntax, deforming phrases, or not finishing the sentence, and thus challenging the reader to constantly balance on her poetic texts as if on a surfboard. “my friend says i sleep like a mummy / one night i was attacked by ghosts in my dream / i woke up hissing and cursing at them / i just turned 29 / i’ve seen many dead colourful birds / that’s how life goes / a fragile and lonely thing”. The beginnings and endings of Jakas’s poems perform the same function – they are neither clear, nor obvious, nor defined: poems begin suddenly, as if by a pressing of a record button, and often end as abruptly.
Austėja Jakas’s poetry is also a kind of (anti)story of coming of age: as one is growing up, the world is becoming increasingly strange and chaotic, while memories turn into a series of macabrely exotic events. Her work manages to capture the general complexity and oddness of existence perfectly: “half of this life is given to sleep / what the other half is for i don’t really know // but neither does / the beetle / or the stone”.
Written by Marius Burokas / Translated from Lithuanian by Julija Gulbinovič / Austėja Jakas’s poetry excerpts translated by Rimas Uzgiris
Poetry
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