Alternating Masks

This is the comprehensive translation into English of poems by Kornelijus Platelis, the most acclaimed contemporary Lithuanian poet and one of the most accomplished of contemporary European poets. The translations in this collection are by award-winning poet and translator Jonas Zdanys. They are the product of a thirty-five year friendship and literary collaboration that celebrates lyric moments of beauty and transcendence that can shine through two languages. Vivid and original, intense and resonant, these poems affirm for us all the insights that the literary imagination makes possible into human complexity, and they attest to the luminous role of art in shaping and defining the self as it seeks to affirm its place in an inconstant world. This is an important and essential book in world literature.