Refuge Rapsiukas

Inga Sipavičūtė is now working on translating Pabėgėlis Rapsiukas into English. Perhaps it is appropriate to publish the chapters one at a time, in a somewhat rough 1st draft, like a real report?

Refugee Rapsiukas, written by Liudas Dovydenas, was printed just after WWII in 1946, in a refugee camp in Germany run by Americans. It is written in Lithuanian, and now a project begins to produce an English translation. The story features animals as the main characters, who talk to each other, but who otherwise live in the normal human world, now torn apart by a great war. It is written for a teenager, and the vocabulary is a little simpler than in an English translation. Nonetheless, it’s not really simplifying anything about the experience of living through a total war. His previous writings were more conservative, and he wrote children’s books, a bildungsroman and a few other novels, and journalism. But after the war the categories began to mix and overlap, the children’s stories became darker, otherwise he stopped writing fiction and started a series of highly nostalgic memoirs. All of these in Lithuanian.

The book was printed with 10 lithographs by Povilas Osmolskis, which are very nice, and can easily be used again, with some work in Photoshop.