Iron and Silver

“I always thought I didn’t like poetry, that I didn’t understand it,” says actor Rolandas Kazlas. “I preferred prose, philosophers and playwrights, and looked at poets and their verses with suspicion. But in truth, I was waiting for and seeking poetry close to me. Perhaps one must seek it as one seeks Love, as one seeks a beloved, and seek the poet as a soul brother. Someone the same as oneself and yet different: more sensitive, more open, more subtle, loving and strangely radiant. When I discovered Vladas Šimkus’s poetry, I found what I had been waiting for and secretly longing for.”

Born in Kelmė District, and having spent most of his life in Vilnius since studying at Vilnius University, poet, translator and editor Vladas Šimkus remains one of the most enigmatic figures in Lithuanian literature. He began publishing his work while still at school. At 24, he brought out his first book of poetry, *The Most Beautiful Second*, followed a few years later by the collection *Contours of the Shore* (1963). His 1968 poetry collection *Iron and Silver* was a landmark not only in the poet’s life but in Lithuanian poetry as a whole. So, too, was his fourth collection, *Runaway Bees* (1973), which surprised colleagues and literary critics with its radical turn toward an ironic voice and its painfully clear-eyed dismantling of many entrenched cultural myths. This was Vladas Šimkus’s last original collection; a selected volume, *Come Down, Sky, to Earth*, was published in 1982.

As literary scholar Professor Viktorija Daujotytė, who advised the creators of the production, wrote, after taking up a leading position in Lithuanian poetry of the time with his finest collection, *Iron and Silver* (1968), V. Šimkus “almost incomprehensibly withdrew into subtext, into silence, and stopped writing poems. All that remained was the translator, a top-rank professional, and an equally distinguished editor.” The poet worked on the editorial staffs of *Jaunimo gretos*, *Literatūra ir menas*, *Švyturys*, *Pergalė* and *Metai*. He translated the works of A. Mickiewicz, A. Voznesensky, A. Pushkin, B. Brecht, S. Vereš, A. Čakas, H. Heine, F. García Lorca, F. Schiller, J. W. Goethe and other poets. He also translated plays, musicals, and opera and operetta librettos for Lithuanian theatres, but never wrote original poetry again.

According to V. Daujotytė, Vladas Šimkus received rare attention from fellow poets and critics, who sensed the scale of his talent. Yet when people asked him why he no longer wrote, why he was silent, he would answer simply: “I’m not entirely silent; I do a lot of translating, and that’s creation too. Or: I got tired of writing the way I did, and I no longer know how to write any other way… Sometimes, with painful irony: I realised I had no talent… Talented people write easily, while I struggle so much, even count…”

Still, Vladas Šimkus’s poetry, preserved in four collections, along with its imagery and its portrait of the person who created it—that ephemeral “matter” that draws in, speaks to and, when all goes well, shapes its reader—overcame a gap of several decades and became the impetus and substance of the production to which Rolandas Kazlas invites audiences today. As the author of the production *Iron and Silver* says, it should be “an open conversation”.