Poetry
Užgesę chimeros akys
Not translated into English
Jonas Aistis · 1937
Synopsis
The extinguished eyes of the chimera: short poems, written in part abroad, in Italy and France, whence come unexpected images. The poet seeks in them the moment when a fairy-like enchantment interrupts the course of the days; but the book is steeped in weariness, apathy and the sense of a twilight of the West, and the homeland, seen from afar, awakens in it a first nostalgia. The tone remains elegiac and intimate.
Context
The book appeared in 1937, when the author had been studying in Grenoble since the previous year; the poet, who then published under other forms of his name, did not officially take the name Aistis until 1952. It followed a first collection of 1932 and Imago mortis, of 1934. The images brought back from Italy and France led critics to speak of aestheticism, which the author publicly rejected, and the book received the State Prize for Literature the same year.
Who it is for
Short, elegiac poems; no French or English translation of the collection has been found.
Prizes and reception
Lithuanian State Prize for Literature in 1937, the very year of its publication, during its author's stay in France.
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