Not a Day without Lithuanian

The Nemunas River at Žemosios Panemunė

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.  My son dug a battered wood snow shovel out of the basement that worked much better than the new plastic one in cutting through the packed snow.  As a result we were able to get our respective driveways cleared much more easily.  It's my winter exercise.  I'm not confident enough to run in this weather as the city doesn't do a very good job keeping the streets and sidewalks cleared in the suburbs.  I've had my share of falls over the years and at 61 don't want to bust a hip.  It takes about an hour to clear the long driveway at a relative leisurely pace.   I will wait till Spring to start running again.

I'm hoping I will be more motivated this time around.  COVID really zapped my vitality.  Not the disease, as I didn't get it as far as I know, but the general sense of malaise that comes from working at home.  I started going to the office three times a week this past Spring but didn't feel like running home after work like I had before.  I was hoping to get myself in shape for the city marathon this year but that didn't happen.

COVID affected people differently.  Some persons used the downtime to wrap up old projects, learn new skills, write that book they had long been meaning to write, but I found myself in a kind of limbo like the movie Groundhog Day.  Each day seemed to repeat itself and I had little to show for it in the end, not even an improvement in my language skills, much to my wife's chagrin.

There's a new show on television Gimę ne Lietuvoje, where an Nigerian host, Toye Samson Abiodun, interviews foreigners in Lithuanian.  From his LinkedIn bio, I see he teaches public speaking and African studies at the SMK University of Applied Social Sciences in Klaipėda.  He seems like a very friendly guy although the interviews are rather mundane as the language level is pretty low.

However, it serves as a stark reminder of how poor my Lithuanian is.  It's not that I can't follow along in conversations but I'm very poor at constructing sentences and so I quickly resort to my native English in response.  This upsets Daina to no end, reminding me that I have lived in Lithuania far longer than Samson and he talks just fine.  Each year I make it my New Year's resolution to improve my language skills.  Now that I'm out of my Post-COVID Blues maybe this year will be the one.

We have a couple nice projects lined up for the New Year that will get me going again.  One is the remains of a 17th century estate in Lower Panemunė that once belonged to the Sapiegos family.  It is an old Lithuanian noble family from the time of the Grand Duchy that extended into the joint Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth.  Their estates are scattered throughout the country.  There is a beautiful palace in Vilnius that was recently restored and made into a small business incubator.  

In the 19th century, a Scot named Fergus bought the Sapiegos estate on the Nemunas River and made it into his home.  He was a later generation Scot than the ones who settled in Kėdainai.  It's this connection that attracted us to the project and the clients to us.  The estate had passed through several hands and suffered extensive damage during the Napoleonic wars.  He gave it a whole new appearance.  The current owners don't really want to bring it back to its authentic appearance, as there is no record of what it originally looked like.  They want to keep it in a semi-ruinous state with a modern roof over the top, allowing for a broader interpretation of the site.  This is similar to what Daina and I did at the Paliesiaus estate.  We're not sure how the cultural heritage department will respond to this as they are much more strict these days, but we shall see.

I make up for my lack in language skills by familiarizing myself with Lithuanian history.  These projects serve as great lessons.  There was a time I was reading extensively on the subject.  Fortunately, quite a bit of this history had been translated into English.  One of my favorite books is a short history of the Grand Duchy edited by Grigorijus Potašenko that includes a wonderful essay by Alfredas Bumblauskas.  He saw the Grand Duchy not as an expressly Lithuanian creation but as a collaborative effort between noble families throughout the Ruthenian region.  Edvardas Gudavičius provides a follow-up essay on the Ruthenians.  Slavic history is interwoven with Lithuanian history like the traditional linen patterns you find in the country. 

Still, it doesn't fully make up for the lack of language.  There are just some things that can't be translated between one language and another as we often struggle to do when translating some document for our colleagues.  Daina does the heavy lifting in translating the document word for word into English and then I try to make sense of it grammatically without losing the intended meaning.  This often leads to arguments.  Each time we vow never to do this again but then some unappy colleague comes to us with the translation she got from one of the translation services, which invariably had just typed the document into Google.  I have long said we could have done better charging out our services as translators than as architects but then we probably wouldn't still be together.  Pevear and Volokhonsky we are not.

Nevertheless, I have also said more Lithuanian history and literature needs to be translated into English so that the world finds out more about this country.  There are a couple of excellent books translated into English.  Both labors of love carried out by the children of the authors.  The first is Forest of the Gods by Balys Srouga, a major playwright from the interwar period who found himself confined to a German labor camp during WWII.  The book tells of this experience.  The second is Vilnius Poker by Ričardas Gavelis which offers an acerbic view of Soviet life in Vilnius shortly before second independence in 1990.  Both are written with great irony.  They needed it to get through their experiences.

As Daina reminds me, I'm not getting any younger so it is time to do some of the things I promised to do when I first came to Lithuania in 1997.  I can no longer blame COVID for my lethargy.  Time to get some of my thoughts down in words and dig back through my various primers to get a better handle on the language.  As one of them reads, Nė dienos be Lietuvių kalbos - not a day without the Lithuanian language.  And so it begins.