Karolis Baublys: “Both of us gave birth to a fictitious person who wrote this book” | Culture

Unfortunately, Neringa no longer received this verdict. I spoke with Karolis Baublius, a poet who completed his doctoral studies in France and lives there, about the long-term communion of souls that changed them both, the social and personal struggle for human rights, Greek mythology, intellectual conversations and the book written together with Neringa.

We could call the authorship of the poetry book “Sirens and Unicorns” hybrid. Not only because the names of the two authors are on the cover, but also because the authors of the book, while creating it, deliberately sought to throw feet.

When translating the pages of the book, it is not clear which texts are written by which author.

I asked Karolis how and why two poets came up with the idea of ​​writing a book together in the current age of self-centeredness. According to him, the essence of the concept of the book is friendship:

“This book was born from our friendship with Neringa. We communicated for a very long time, 18 years. When I entered the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University in 2001, I met Neringa. At that time there was still snow, deep winter. Even then I felt that there was something to talk about with Neringa. In order to feel together, our areas of interest are similar: culture, literature. At first, our friendship was quite fragmented, but the further we went, the more often we met and talked.

We went to drink coffee together, we discussed. And it’s really hard to trace when exactly the idea for this book was born, because it just came out of our conversations. And we talked about a lot of things. About philosophy, because Neringa studied philosophy for a couple of years. About authors, both foreign and Lithuanian. And we both wrote from time to time.

In fact, I developed as a poet quite late. First of all, I expressed myself in the cultural sphere as a literary critic, because I liked to think about the work of other authors. And Nering was attracted by what we could call creative psychology. What motivates a certain writer to write, a certain artist to paint. What is before creation. What factors determine the desire to express oneself through a certain creative sphere. I started writing poems at the same time when I was responsible for literary criticism in “Literature and Art”.

Book cover/The book “Sirens and Unicorns”

The first poems were crooked, sloppy. I remember I gave them to Neringa to read and she said: “Not bad, but I expected better.” Neringa also sometimes wrote one other poem and gave it to me to read. This is how we criticized each other. And that’s how our friendship grew.”

Although when creating “Sirens and Unicorns” Neringa and Karolis deliberately chose to play with the readers’ preconceptions, and it is impossible to distinguish in which text Karolis’s voice is felt more and in which Neringa’s voice is more pronounced, Karolis admits that the authorship of the book’s key poem is still revealed:

“Thinking about where is the initial point for the emergence of the book between the two of us, it could probably be linked to Neringa’s poem “Mito perraschymai Eurydicei”. I mention this poem in the introduction to Sirens and Unicorns – when I read it, I felt as if I had written it myself. This was the first impulse to think that authorship is a very conditional thing. I think you, Aušra, have also experienced this feeling when you read another author’s poem or just a paragraph of a novel and you feel that you could have written that way too, because at a certain angle your experience or inner perception comes into contact with that fragment. I experienced this feeling when I read the aforementioned poem by Neringa.”

According to Karolis, one of the most important topics of the book he and Neringa are dealing with are the myths of Antiquity: “After meeting with Neringa, we began to communicate more and more about the poem “Mito perraschymai Eurydicei”, discussing it and myths of Antiquity in general, because both Neringa and I were both interested in ancient Greece and Roman myths. We didn’t even realize how slowly we both began to write poems on the subject of myths. And in one conversation, we began to consider that a book would come out by combining both of our texts.”

Photo by Ieva Budzeikaitė/Neringa Dangvydė

Karolis points out that the idea of ​​hybrid authorship did not reach him through Lithuanian literature, but rather through film studies: “In Lithuania, hybrid authorship probably seems a strange phenomenon, because in our literature, especially poetry, creators do not want to share authorship. In fact, there was no desire to appropriate any of Neringa’s texts, just as Neringa did not want to appropriate my texts. But I think I was indirectly influenced by the art of cinema. It is very natural to make a film with a creative team. It’s impossible to make a film for one person, unless we’re talking more about experimental genres, and we could probably consider this an exception. Even the same script is often written by three people, and it is common for them to correct or rewrite the text written by each other, to correct according to the comments and wishes of the director or someone else.”

The poet says that the artistic quality of the book is much more important to him than the appropriation of individual works: “I have nothing against this way of creation (when the whole creative team or several people work on one work, author’s post). I think it can help to extract better quality from the text. A text can thus go through several instances, several people, several rewritings. This is how Neringa and I corrected each other’s texts. Since I know who is the author of which text, I can say that most of the texts are written only by my hand or only by Neringa’s hand. Only a small part of them evolved and acquired completely new features with the participation of both of us.

But the bottom line is that over time, because we really talked a lot and talked about Sirens and Unicorns more and more, we kind of became each other. Neringa acquired my features, I acquired her features, and from both of us a kind of fictitious personality of the author was born.”

Karolis and Neringa have a lot in common. Both intellectuals, literary critics, the creative process of both is very different from the image of the romantic poet.

Throughout the book, a lot of attention is paid to Antiquity, many different cultural references, intertextuality, another common line connecting the texts of the book is homoeroticism. As far as I know, Neringa’s image as a fighter for human rights is also closely related to her literary activity. So I ask Karolis what was Neringa’s path that led her to fight for human rights and freedom of speech.

And Karolis once again emphasizes the importance of their friendship: “Neringa and I had a great influence on each other. Our friendship and interaction has affected both of us greatly. It was like I took over part of her identity and she took over part of mine. If someone had told me 20 years ago that I would live in France, I wouldn’t have believed it because I didn’t speak French when I was a teenager and the French culture wasn’t that familiar. And now I think that probably Neringa helped give birth to the impulse that later led to the belief that France is my country. It was Neringa who talked to me a lot about French philosophers and I was very interested in their ideas.

And Neringa’s determination to defend certain homoerotic trends in literature, to advocate for human rights, to defend the love of a woman for a woman, the love of a man for a man was indirectly inspired by certain ideas of mine, because we talked about it a lot and I just felt that Neringa was also sensitive to it, close to it. The further she went, the more she opened up. He spoke about it more and more openly. The scandal that arose when she in 2012 is also memorable. “Literature and Art” published the already canonical text “I’m a lesbian, colleagues, and I’m proud of it.” In fact, she wrote about the theater after turning away from one play. This phrase was primarily associated with artistic creation, but this was her first step towards openness. Later, the idea of ​​fairy tales was born.”

Photo by Monika Požerskytė-Kalvelė/Poet Aušra Kaziliūnaitė

Listen to the entire conversation “From both of us, a fictitious personality was born who wrote this book” on the Lithuanian Writers’ Union webcast “Rašytnamis”. Writer, philosopher, doctor of humanitarian sciences Aušra Kaziliūnaitė talks with the poet Karolis Baublius.

Source: www.rasytojai.lt