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
March 18th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
This reminds me of what happens in horror movies to people who have sex. Some primitive part of the human mind wants to believe that every pleasure must be paid for in pain.
March 29th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Calling the vagina „plyšys“ is nothing new. In English slang it has been “her gash” for a long time.