| Description: |
Before he became a pioneer of the U.S. avant-garde cinema after World War II, Mekas was a person displaced by that war from Lithuania, where he had grown up on a farm. He wandered across war-ravaged Europe, eventually landing in a camp at Kassel, Germany, before emigrating to New York. While in the camp and, later, while adapting to America, he wrote the two sequences of poems presented here on facing pages in the Lithuanian original and Bakaitis' sturdy English version. The Idylls recall Mekas' bucolic boyhood; the Reminiscences, his postwar journey. Both are full of vivid, active imagery, but their incidents are less personal than one expects. Mekas conjures up experiences that either communities or, in the case of wartime displacement, multitudes shared. He writes as a witness to epical happenings-vast changes in ways of living and in entire nations-with a love for what is past that is more powerful than nostalgia, with a passion for living that caresses every present blessing. -Booklist |
