Ages ago, Deimantė sent me this famous video:
It’s a kind of a sketchy video for a number of reasons (its own existence being kind of the big one), but, no matter what, that woman wants to party. And she’s adamant and repetitive about it. What else is adamant and repetitive? Why, a ringtone!
So I’ve decided that in honor of my impending travel to Lithuania (and in honor of today’s being Joninės), I would celebrate the celebration by turning her broken record antics into a 21-second ringtone, available in .m4r format for iPhones and .mp3 format for other contemporary phones.
As I wrote in a post on a different site when I uploaded some Obama ringtones, to install on the iPhone:
- Download the above .m4r, usually by right-clicking or control-clicking and choosing “Save Link As…” or whatever.
- Open up iTunes and drop the .m4r into the library. It should immediately get copied into the ringtones Library.
- Sync. Party.
For non-iPhones, follow whatever technique you normally use for installing ringtones.
There’s a writeup (by me) of the exciting documentary The Linguists over on Donkey Hottie. The movie closes with a bunch of ostensibly Chulym children illustrating a (Chulym) story for a children’s book to be published in Chulym, a language that, however, the children do not speak.
The linguists celebrate this “reconnection” with one’s “history” via this “community project,” but I’m not so sure. I think the value of language is being overstated. So the Lithchatty question becomes:
If I don’t speak a word of Lithuanian, but illustrate a version of (say) “Eglė žalčių karalienė” told to me in English, am I creating Lithuanian cultural output? Can I be a Lithuanian cultural producer without speaking Lithuanian?
Anyway, The Linguists is available to watch online for the time being on babelgum.com, so hurry to watch it if you can.
No, this isn’t going to become a smut page, at least, I don’t think so. But if I’m to judge by search results bringing people to this site, my snippet of Lithuanian erotica from earlier in the month was kind of a (secret) hit.
So for today, I offer this photo that was making the rounds of twitter. I have no idea about its provenance. All I did to it was enhance the colors so that it popped a bit more (as it were).
As you can see, it’s a wonderful testament (as it were) to the long and hard (as it were) work of growing rye and making bread. It’s an ode to the agrarian culture of Lithuania, as well as their love of buns from the oven (as it were).
Sometimes, even, the grain can be a bit testy (as it were) and complain and threaten to grow no more.
But, really, here, it’s all about the last verse, as should be obvious from the oval (as it were) around it, which I did not add.
I guess I’m setting a precedent for any future seemingly historical and dirty things to come my way (as it were). So be it.
Tags: karolis, music, rankdarbiai, twitter
Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in Chicago
The “Guide to a Passport” series is coming to a close, I hope. Despite still not receiving (though they say they mailed it out three weeks ago) my grandfather’s death certificate from the State of Michigan, the upcoming travel season means I need to submit my imperfect application for citizenship in the Republic of Lithuania as soon as possible. So I did that today.
But first, I filled out the two separate .doc forms (išsaugojimas just to guarantee the right to citizenship and įgyvendimas to actually pursue the citizenship without renouncing US citizenship), translated the various certificates and stuff I acquired (with a touch of help from a friend), and put together a pile of pages. I also included three passport photos, since I figured I’d fill out the passport request form while I was at the consulate.
And today I took the whole morning off work, even though I ended up only spending about a half hour in the office. Everything was way more casual than I expected (I even got a little dressed up!). I expected sitting down with a vice-consul or something and discussing all the forms in some opulent office with Adamkus beaming down on me. Instead, I was in a rather perfunctory room with two glassed-off workers and a bunch of tiny cubicles for filling out forms. Entre nous, the Brazilian consulate’s digs are nicer, but whatever.
The byla.
The worker, who was also the fellow I corresponded with over email a few months ago, repeatedly said how “šaunu” my application was, which I took immense pride in. He also pronounced my name completely correctly, save considering the “c” in my first name to be an affricate consonant, not a fricative. In so doing, of course, he simply followed Lithuanian rules of orthography, which generally do a decent job with my name, which only adds to my confusion over how many Lithuanians I know completely foul the name up.
My mother’s Canadian birth certificate, which I had sent off to Ottawa for legalization, will have to be relegalized by the Lithuanians for $14. It’s good that I did send it out, actually, since the notarized copy I had made would have gotten me nowhere. The fact that all of the birth certificates I provided give maiden names was also intensely useful; I got to avoid having to provide marriage certificates (which I do not have). They kept everything I gave them except for my passport and driver’s license, which they photocopied.
Importantly, the office was wholy uninterested in my proving flight from Lithuania after 1940. They were far more interested in proof that flight had happened before 1990. I hope that my mom’s birth certificate and the copies of files I got from the International Tracing Service will sufficiently demonstrate that. This lack of interest in post-1940 flight is crucially valuable information for people pursuing dual citizenship in the future!
Finally, I was charged $28 for the passport application also. The friendly Third Secretary, Vytautas, then told me the documents would all be shipped to Lithuania on Monday, where the Migracijos departamentas will take up to a year to decide my case. Vytautas suspected that I should know in about six months. Considering I’ll have to apply for a student visa for France in June, I would like to know before even then, but whatever.
As a postscript, I left the field for “tautybė” blank. I asked Vytautas if this would be a problem. Since I was making my petition based on familial descent, not ethnic ties, he explained, it was ok for me to leave it unanswered. I did a little dance and thanked him.
I worry that the request may be denied for insufficient information, but then that’ll give me more to write about. Now to the numbers:
Costs this post:
- $14 (legalization of Canadian birth certificate)
- $28 (passport fee)
- $20 (approximate lost wages in going downtown to consulate)
Cost to-date of dual citizenship:$166.26
Robin Scherbatsky enjoys a Švyturys.
This website, I hope, won’t devolve into a Lithuania-in-the-news spotter, but an amusing little thing happened during last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, called “Murtaugh.”
Ted has come up with a “Murtaugh List” of things he think he is too old (at 30) to do any longer. Barney decides to run through everything on the list in 24 hours. After coming home from a rave with a sore back from sleeping on a futon, he has one thing left on the list, drinking a beer bong. Ted reaches into a cardboard box to pull out three “weird, Russian beers” he found in the basement. Robin says she’ll take a “brewski” and then then giggle at the joke of saying “brewski.” At this moment, the camera zooms in on her, and we see the beer she is holding: a Švyturys Ekstra Draught.
Švyturys, of course, is not Russian, but, rather, Lithuanian.
And, yes, this whole post is just an excuse to talk about Cobie Smulders.
A list of refugees flying to Canada from Bremen in 1948.
Not much has been going on in the “Guide to a Passport” front, as I’m waiting for Michigan to send me a copy of my grandfather’s death certificate. I mentioned in my last post, however, that a professor at my university recommended that I contact the International Tracing Service based in Arolsen, Germany, about documents regarding my grandparents. I wasn’t expecting to hear back from them, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear back before I heard back from Michigan!
Yet I got in the mail four photocopies from Germany. The first page is a letter from the “Director, Interzonal Movements,” describing the contents of the second page, “Nominal Roll/s in respect of the above mentioned move ex Bremen/Grohn today 10th November of 150 Displaced Persons proceeding to England for onward air flight to Canada.” The other two pages are, I imagine, internee rolls from the DP-Camp Greven, which is where, apparently, my grandparents and uncle stayed. These photocopies are not legal documents, but I’ll translate them and incorporate them in my application.
I was not prepared for the affective response I experienced looking over these documents. I now had some kind of independent verification of the family history my mom had told me, and that saddened me. I suppose I had hoped it was a fiction–that my grandparents had to flee their homes, etc. Maybe they actually flew to Canada on unicorns or something for the lulz. After a fashion, of course, they did, considering that my grandparents ended up better off than countless millions of Europeans. So I shouldn’t feel too sorry for them; their healthy arrival in Canada directed the way toward my typing these words.
The very idea of Lithuanian erotica, like Lithuanian profanity, strikes me as such a weird proposition. This is largely because my exposure to the language was mostly through my mom, and profanity and the like is probably not appropriate grounds in talking with mom.
That all said, an author on Café Blogas today unearthed a tome of older Lithuanian erotica. Scanning in the cover was already a treat, but the excerpt provided is simply jaw-droppingly amazing. This is not because it’s steamy or anything like that–it absolutely is not that. But it is the sort of thing that is so twisted in its relationship with sex (and the erotic) that it becomes dizzying to someone like me when wearing my close-reading literary critic’s hat. In fact, the excerpt is so overdetermined, that I’m going to bother with a translation just so people can see the tortuous nature of sexual discourse in (I suppose early 20th-c.) Lithuania:
Adomas ir Jieva rojuje labai gražiai gyveno. Adomas labai mlėjo Jievą. Vieną kartą užėjo labai didelis lietus. Adomas labai gailėdamasis Jievos, kad nesulytų, liepė Jievai gulti ant žemės. O Adomas, kad lietus nesulytų Jievos, atsigulė ant jos. Kadangi šlapias kūnas yra slidus, tai kai Adomas ant Jievos atsigulė, tai pradėjo slidinėtis. Taip beslidinėdamas Adomas ėmė ir instrigo už Jievos plyšio. Dievas, pamatęs kad Adomas ir Jieva nusidėjo, tada ėmė ir išvarė iš Rojaus.
Adam and Eve lived very well in paradise. Adam greatly loved Eve. One time, there was a huge rainstorm. Adam, intensely worried that Eve would get soaked by the rain, asked her to lie on the ground. Adam then lay himself on top of her to protect her from the rain. Because a wet body is a slippery body, when Adam lied down on Eve, he began to slide. And so sliding, Adam got himself caught in Eve’s tear. Having seen that Adam and Eve had sinned, God drove them out of paradise.
The mind reels. Interestingly, the last two sentences made up about 90% of the difficulty of the translation here.
I ask readers to be grateful that I’m somehow finding the energy to avoid turning this into a 1500 word post about this paragraph. But maybe I’ll be encouraged in the comments.
Tags: cafe.blogas.lt, erotica, language
[UPDATE 15 April 2009] Having submitted my application, and having had nearly no attention paid to this part of my application, I wonder if my understanding of the law is overly pedantic. It now seems to me that the most important things to show are that your (grand)parents were citizens before 1940 and that they left Lithuania before 1990.
This installment of the “Guide to a Passport” is, perhaps, the most important, because it’s the installment that describes the step of how one proves that they or their ancestors left Lithuania after 15 June 1940. Without this step, my petition for citizenship in the Republic of Lithuania loses its dual citizenship flavor. Every other step is necessary to get a Lithuanian passport, but this step is the one that, from my understanding, prevents my having to forfeit over my US passport. That said, it’s also, perhaps, the most difficult step to prove, so it relies a bit on luck.
That said, it’s a step of dubious future value, as recent laws presented to the Seimas seem to drop this requirement, as I indicated earlier.
Quick family history, for background: my grandparents were living in and around Alytus during World War II. They got married in Miroslavas, which is about eight miles southwest of Alytus, in 1942. My uncle was born in 1943. The whole family fled Lithuania in 1944 and ended up in Germany. From there, they emigrated to Canada in 1949 before ending up, ten years later, in Chicago.
The only documents I have that prove any of this are my mother’s birth certificate (born in Canada in 1950) and her naturalization certificate, from when she became a US citizen after her arrival in 1959. And since the Lietuvos Archyvas, as described in my previous post, was only told to find evidence of my grandparents’ citizenship pre-1940, they did not also try to find anything from after that date (like my uncle’s birth certificate or my grandparents’ marriage certificate).
It seems there are three avenues of approach here, each with benefits and defects. And it also seems like neither avenue, by itself, would be enough.
1. Get documents proving that my grandparents were not in Lithuania after 1940 and before 1990
State of Michigan Certificate of Death.
This is confusing because of how easy it could be. My grandfather died in Michigan in 1986. Obviously, then, he was outside of Lithuania during the time period in question. The death certificate even includes a place of residence, a social security number, and a field that says he was a citizen of the “U. S. A.” The notarized copy I have would not be good enough for the application, but for $39, I can get a rushed copy authenticated with an apostille by just filling out this form, available from the Michigan government.
Another option is getting a “certified true copy” of my grandparents’ naturalization documents from the State Department. Of course, these documents then need to get apostilles from the Office of Authentications. This involves two mailings and an $8 fee per document. The Dutch Embassy in Washington has a good webpage detailing the process.
Of course, my grandparents’ (and mom’s) naturalization documents will only prove that they came to the US from Canada. Perhaps it would be easier to get the documents indicating my grandparents’ arrival in Canada in 1949.
All of the Canadian immigration documents since 1935 are still under the control of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and earlier documents are part of Library and Archives Canada. However, the Canadian Genealogy Centre tells me that any Canadian Citizen can fill out an Access to Information Request Form and demonstrate that the individual they are asking about has been dead for 20 years (or has given consent). Then, for $5, they get a certified copy of the immigration papers.
This would be great, except that I am not a Canadian Citizen. Consultation with the people at the Canadian archives led me to the consulate in Buffalo. In the end, I just asked a friend in Canada to fill out the request form.
So what have I done? I’ve asked the Michigan government for my grandfather’s death certificate (rushed). When that comes, I’ll have all the pieces in place for my application. I also started fishing expeditions among the Canadian and US immigration offices, but that will be just icing on the cake. The death certificate should be substantial.
2. Get documents proving that my grandparents were still in Lithuania after 1940
Of course, even with the first step taken care of, I still need to prove that my grandparents left after 15 June 1940. Proving that they came to Canada in 1949 helps not at all, since who’s to say they hadn’t been living in Germany since 1936?
For this, I turned to the Lithuanian Archive again. It turns out that in 1942, they had a census of every person living in the country. If my grandparents were still there then, then they should appear on the census, no?
After consultation with the generally very helpful people at the LCVA over email, they recommended that I make a request regarding their living in Lithuania. Paying for it was very tricky, however–there’s no easy way for a foreigner to pay for their services. So I had a friend in Lithuania pay for it with his debit card online (doing a debit transfer), and now I owe him a beer or two. Alternatively, I could have paid in euro, but that would have cost 15Eur. Not worth it, because, the expedited search cost only 20.80Lt.
I made the request, had my friend pay, and got a letter two weeks or so later from the archive, telling me that, yes, they found my grandfather’s name, occupation (”Mayor”), and address in the 1942 writeup.
Though I don’t have documents that prove his residency, this letter from the director should suffice to show he was still in Lithuania after 1940. The death certificate (above) should prove that he left before 1990. Put together, they should cover everything.
3. Try to kill two birds with one stone
This is the holy grail. Here what would be great is some kind of documentation saying that my grandparents left for Germany, were in camps until 1949, and then went to Canada. That would, by itself, prove everything. I asked a faculty member here whom I’ve worked for who specializes in Modern Jewish History about where I could find these kinds of German documents. He suggested the International Tracing Service based in Arolsen, Germany. I made a request, but I have yet to hear back.
Typically, I’ve waited until I’ve gotten information back before posting about the steps I undertook in order to receive the information or documents. However, since I think that, once I get my grandfather’s death certificate, I’ll be ready to go straight to the application process, I’m posting this now. The next step will involve the final step of the roadmap (proving that I am who I say I am) as well as the actual application.
Costs this post:
- $1.30 for envelope and stamp to LT
- $7.60 (20.80Lt) for expedited request from Lithuanian Archives
- $40.86 for $39 money order for expedited death certificate + postage and envelope.
Cost to-date of dual citizenship:$104.26
A non-portable reference library.
The recent article on Nežinau about the new release of the translation software package Tildės biuro 2009 coincides with a recent task I’ve undertaken. Part of applying for Lithuanian citizenship involves translating non-Lithuanian documents into Lithuanian. I could pay someone to do that, of course, but the consul lets people who are comfortable with both languages to provide their own translations. I’m comfortable with Lithuanian, but not used to translating legal documents, so I’ve renewed my search for good resources online.
If anyone has any to add to my list, please make use of the comments field to do so!
1. Lithuanian-Lithuanian Dictionaries
For the past several years, I’ve abused the online version of the Dabartinis lietuvių kalbos žodynas available from Autoinfa. The problem is that the Autoinfa page simply cannot render Lithuanian letters with stress marks correctly (on my Mac), and to get it to work on Windows, you have to run a separate program that installs fonts or something idiotic like that. That kind of stuff is an affront to good-computing practices worldwide in this era of Unicode.
DLKŽ vs. LKŽ. (click to enlarge)
In steps in lkz.lt, which hosts the much larger Lietuvių kalbos žodynas, also edited by Lietuvių kalbos institutas. Simply put, not only is the dictionary larger, but the online implementation is far better, namely in that letters are rendered correctly. But the LKŽ also groups words together by root, so you can see how different prefices change meanings (something that is especially useful for a language like Lithuanian, which is so dependent on prefixed verbs). I’ve cobbled together a comparison of the two different dictionaries here (click on image to enlarge), and it’s obvious which is the pick to click.
If I had to think of English equivalents, I’d say that the DLKŽ is more like going to m-w.com to look up a definition, but going to the LKŽ is more like hitting the OED. Naturally, I hit the OED about 95% of the time, so I know where I’ll be focusing my attention. Luckily, the LKŽ, unlike the OED, is free. I’m not sure the LKŽ goes as historically deep as the OED does. That sort of historical dictionary of Lithuanian has been the pipedream of philologists for over a century now, and no one has tackled the immense job, as far as I know.
Additionally, the LKI features links to several Lithuanian technical lexicons for more specific work.
2. Lithuanian <> English Dictionaries
lietuviu-anglu.com vs. Anglonas. (click to enlarge)
If you don’t feel like dropping 440Lt for Tildės biuro 2009, there’s a few other options.
Sadly, however, it seems that anglu-lietuviu.com and lietuviu-anglu.com are the only online options for two-way translation. I think that the two sites are generally ok, but they’ve let me down when my requests have gotten more esoteric. They also give next to no usage guidelines. That seems to be the alpha and the omega of the matter. Alternatively, if you have a Windows computer (or are running a virtual Windows machine, like me), you can buy the program Anglonas from Fotonija. It has a two-way dictionary of over 110,000 terms on either side.
Anglonas is expensive (100Lt), and I’m not sure how available it is outside of Lithuania, but if you want to see the difference between free (the web) and pay (Anglonas), I’ve put together a little screenshot of both. Fotonija also offers other dictionaries, but they are so expensive that I haven’t been tempted to mess around with them.
Given this dearth of options, I often, honestly, end up using Wikipedia for basic translation of nouns of things I never learned in Lithuanian. I look up something in English, then click on the Lithuanian translation of the page.
Of course, there’s also Google’s translator, but I’ve never used it, and, well, I’m afraid to.
3. Slang dictionaries
As far as I know, the only one of these in Lithuanian is the “Jaunimo kalbos žodynas” at kriu.lt. It’s occasionally useful, often useless, but always amusing. It’s the LT version of urbandictionary.com. To the words here, I add in choice words from the “Русско-английский словарь мата,” which has expanded to far more than just a lexicon of profanity. They recently started even tracking internet slang and have a tool that turns normal Russian into “Olbanian.”
4. Grammar
Ha ha ha ha ha.
As far as I know, no declension / conjugation paradigms are available online. Maybe someday I’ll copy some from a book and throw them online. There are guides regarding when to use which cases, and such, but nothing of a more quick-reference nature.
5. Onomastics
There is a totally unsourced names dictionary, “Vardų reikškmės” over at day.lt, which corresponds rather well with my paper copy of Lietuvių vardų kilmės žodynas.
6. More?
Lithuanian, like Castillian and French, has a national office charged with maintaining linguistic prescription. The Valstybinė lietuvių kalbos komisija even has a webpage dedicated to the most common errors made in Lithuanian, so enjoy.
I’m pretty sad at how short a list this is, so I’m hoping maybe readers will come up with more.
Tags: Castillian, french, grammar, language, lexicon, nežinau.lt, russian, slang, Tildė
My grandfather's high school transcript.
Now that I’ve completed the first step on the Roadmap to Citizenship, proving that I’m my grandparents’ grandson, it’s time to move on to the second step, which is proving that my grandparents were citizens of Lithuania before 15 June 1940, which covers this installment of the “Guide to a Passport” series.
This step I actually completed back in July 2003, but if I was not able to complete step 1, then there would have been no point in completing this step.
Back in 2003, I was in Lithuania, and I knew I would need to prove that my grandparents were citizens before I could get my own citizenship (back then, dual citizenship was available without the “and left Lithuania after 15 June 1940″ caveat). So I took a cab up to the Lietuvos centrinis valstybės archyvas. There I filled out two forms, one for each grandparent, asking for proof of citizenship. The forms, or at least ones like the one I filled out, are available online. I don’t know what I paid, but it was probably less than $30 total. About a month later, I received a letter from Lithuania with two cover letters and photocopies of my grandfather’s high school transcript, his university ID, and a personnel file from the Lithuanian army. They also included my grandmother’s university transcript. The Vice-Consul in Chicago told me that the proof of my grandfather’s serving in the Lithuanian Army is sufficient proof, but I’ll bring in everything.
This stamp proves that my photocopies are real.
The photocopies all include two separately-colored stamps authenticating their validity as photocopies. Unfortunately, these documents are not sufficient to prove that my grandparents left Lithuania after 15 June 1940, even though my grandmother’s degree was granted on 12 June 1940. She told me about this the only (I think) time we talked about her life before North America–the occupation of Lithuania was contemporaneous with her graduating from VDU. As a result, in a grim twist, had the Soviets marched in ten days earlier, step 3 on my Roadmap to Citizenship–proving that my grandparents left Lithuania after the Soviet invasion–might have been unnecessary.
One lingering question is why I don’t use birth certificates to prove citizenship. The answer, while not immediate, is rather obvious: my grandparents were born, as mentioned in the first post of the series, in the Russian Empire. Though their birthplaces ended up in the Lithuanian Republic, and they had residency in Lithuania at the time of the blanket granting of citizenship to residents, the fact that my grandfather (to use the more extreme example) was born in what would become, eight years after his birth, Lithuania, doesn’t mean that he was still living there. He could have moved to Moscow as a baby, after all.
Furthermore, documents relating to vital statistics, like birth, death, and marriage, are not held at the LCVA. Instead, they are at the Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas, which has its own payscale and request forms. The Archyvas clearly states that citizenship queries should be posed to the LCVA, so that’s where I turned in 2003.
Finally, it’s very convenient for me to have been in Vilnius to put in the order for these documents. But what if I had not made that trip? Could I have made my request online? How would that have worked? The answers to those questions, along with the ominous return of the LCVA, will make up the following post.
Cost this post:
- $20.00 (approx. fee for searches and copies for two individuals)
- $10 (approx. cab fee from Senamiestis to LCVA)
Cost to-date of dual citizenship: $54.50
