Kornelijus Platelis

is a poet, essayist, and translator. He is president of the Lithuanian Artists Association, editor-in-chief of cultural weekly Literatura ir menas (Literature and Art), chairman of the board of the international annual literary festival “Druskininkai / Poetic Fall”. He has published numerous collections of poetry and a book of essays, and has translated T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ezra Pound and Czeslaw Milosz into Lithuanian.

Articles

Local histories: From censorship to self-irony

Closing speech at the 22nd European Meeting of Cultural Journals

During communism, metaphoric language was the only way to negotiate censorship, recalls the poet and editor Kornelijus Platelis. Yet this experience left Lithuanians cut off from the common European culture of rationality, tolerance and self-irony. Regaining this “European attitude” is the task of cultural journals today.