Birutė Pūkelevičiūtė’s introduction for the second edition of Metūgės is translated below.

(The introduction in the original Lithuanian, the Walt Whitman epigraph, and the poems in a slightly revised layout of the 1952 Toronto edition can be seen on textai.lt, an online repository of contemporary Lithuanian literature, at this link.)  

A Look at Metūgės—44 Years Later

Metūgės was my firstborn book, yet she had to endure a stepdaughter’s lot: For many years, she (like Cinderella) shelled peas by the hearth. And even now—though a second edition’s carriage has come jingling to her door—it’s doubtful she’ll dance in a shining castle with the princes of Lithuanian poetry. Not the time for dancing. Not the time for glass slippers.

In the diaspora, the climate for the appearance of Metūgės was painfully unfavorable. Today, in retrospect, the scathing criticisms of this book’s morals and eroticism seem worth merely a smile. Perhaps in those days the glaciers of artificial morality had slid in, making human emotions incomprehensible to the prophets. On the other hand, only now reading memoirs have I begun to realize what a closed community the young Lithuanian poets were. They had their own “codes,” and almost all of them wrote in the same spiritual tone, though choosing different forms. So to the meteors streaking in this orbit, I was an utterly alien pebble: fallen from another world. Probably also because I came from the theater, I was not a “woman of letters” among a circle of peers but a “harlequin.”

It’s possible that Metūgės was slightly ahead of its time with its female stance: From afar, the drums and whistles of the approaching feminism were still inaudible. But I, though not a “feminist,” was nonetheless a “femina.”

My photographs were requested for this edition—from those times. While sifting through faces and images of the past, I reflected that the axis of Metūgės revolves around the loneliness of a young woman—in a foreign country, in a foreign city, Montreal—in the aftermath of a terrible war. How dreary Sundays were in the half-dead city, when trams sounded from afar, when I watered sad flower plants grown on the windowsill! Like a huge cloud, sorrow and longing would then sweep in for what was lost—twelve strong brothers who would block the wind with their shoulders. And more: an aching craving to create God in your own image, who would sit with you on the threshold in the evenings.

So is poetry a record of ravings? A proclamation of illusions? After all, in reality I was never a she-wolf, nor a lynx, nor the green snake. Far from it: I was a very ordinary girl. Perhaps poetry’s unreality lies in the human soul—it’s an unease about its small truths and a lethargic state of rebellion. It’s a caressing of dreams; it’s a yearning for what is not. Or, according to ancient wisdom, poetry is what could be. Magic.

I have always valued the image more than the concept. In Metūgės, I sought the economical word and especially the concise sentence. For example, I was very happy to comment on death briefly and simply: “My death is beautiful.” I had inscribed a motto for the book, but it crumbled away by mistake at the printer’s. It was Walt Whitman’s sentence: “[And] If the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” That is how I thought then (I think similarly now) about the unity of body and soul.

I should add that the extremely harsh reception of Metūgės prompted me to change genres quickly and make friends with prose. My second book was [the novel] Aštuoni lapai [eight leaves]. To mark its publication, Metūgės artist Juozas Akstinas created an oil rendition of his illustration for the “Coming of Spring” section (a girl’s head) and presented the painting to me. That was a touching memento of my debut book.

But she herself, the small green Metūgės book (as I mentioned)—remained by the hearth to shell peas.

Birutė Pūkelevičiūtė
1996 07 12