The Daily Campus

Issue date: 9/26/08 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Carolyn Wilke Jonas Zdanys, bilingual poet and translator, reads his poetry at the UConn Co-op Thursday evening.

The UConn Co-op was filled with poetry lovers, students and professors alike, waiting for Jonas Zdanys to begin reading his works.

"It is a confession I am making here," read Zdanys, from his poem "Bones," "I am asleep with no sense of time, and dream that the moment of waking is at hand."

Zdanys, a bilingual poet and translator, read several of his poems, including poems he has translated from Lithuanian into English. His choices of subject ranged from the personal to the political, and audience responses varied from laughter to quiet contemplation.

It was truly a rare treat to hear Zdanys recite poems in Lithuanian. Zdanys grew up speaking Lithuanian at home, not learning English until he started school. His bilingual talent has allowed him to become a successful poet in both languages, publishing 37 books, 34 of which are entirely his own works.

His success has motivated him to translate many Lithuanian poems into English for the English-speaking world's enjoyment. As Penelope Pelizzon, director of UConn's creative writing program, said in her introduction to Zdanys, the poems "read like they had a heart in English."

Immersion in "two worlds" naturally led Zdanys to become a translator, he said.He began a translation workshop at Yale, where he taught for 18 years.

When asked how he goes about translating Lithuanian poems to English, he responded with an unexpected answer.

Since poems cannot be translated literally and still retain their beauty, Zdanys said that he rewrites the poems, concentrating on translating meaning rather than creating a mirror image of the original poem. Because of this, he is often forced to use words with different meanings than the Lithuanian originals.

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