Vytautas Street in Druskininkai has been decorated with a work of professional art – VDA sculptor Alfonsas Vaura created a chair in bronze in memory of the translator of Ancient works Antanas Dambraukas, based on an authentic artefact, which you can see in the Druskininkai Resistance and Exile Museum. See this armchair, based on a chair made by the translator Antanas Dambrauskas, on which he sat to translate.

ANTANAS DAMBRAUSKAS (1911 – 1995)

^{© Gintaras Žilys}

Born in Norkūnas, Rokiškis district. He was enrolled in the Kaunas Theological Seminary, but doubting his vocation, he continued his studies at the Faculty of Humanities of Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University (1932-1936), and then later taught in Kaunas (1937-1945). He was one of those “disobedient” teachers who, in 1940-1941, did not succumb to the cheap Soviet propaganda and the “new” requirement of teaching literature. For this he was arrested by the Soviet security in 1945, sentenced and imprisoned for 10 years in Chelyabinsk, Kemerovo and Omsk camps. In 1956 he returned to Lithuania, a year later he settled in Druskininkai. From 1957 to 1976 he worked as a teacher in the children’s sanatorium “Saulutė”, and in his free time he translated. Antanas Dambrauskas described the complex and painful vicissitudes of his life in his autobiographical book “Viskas praeina” (“Everything Passes By”, Vaga, 1991). The memory of the translator is commemorated in the A. Dambrauskas Room in the Druskininkai Exile and Resistance Museum.
Antanas Dambrauskas, one of the most famous Lithuanian translators of classical literature, was characterised by his strong Christian morals, loyalty to his chosen profession, excellent knowledge of classical languages (Latin and Greek), and his meticulous and conscientious work as a translator. He was probably the only professional translator in post-war Lithuania who was dedicated to the translation of Latin and Greek authors. Works translated by Antanas Dambrauskas: Aristophanes’ comedies Frogs (1963, 1989) and Plutus (1965, 1989), Virgil’s Aeneid (1967, 1989), Bucolics and Georgics (1971), Plautus’s comedies Slave Deceiver and Warrior Braggart (1970, 1989), all the surviving tragedies of Sophocles – Oedipus the King, “Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone (1974), Electra, Ajantas, Philoctetes, Trachinetes (1984), Homer’s Odyssey (1979), Iliad (1981), Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1979, 1990), Terence’s Comedy of the Brethren (1981, 1989), and translations of the Holy Scriptures (Old Testament). Antanas Dambrauskas also corrected the works of others in search of more precise, modern forms of expression. This resulted in the revised translation of Homer’s Odyssey (1921, 1964) and Iliad (1930: The translation was completed by Sofija Čiurlionienė-Kymantaitė, Pranciškus Žadeikis, Jurgis Talmantas), and a new version of Sophocles’ Tragedies (1939), translated by Antanas Ruska and Antanas Venclova (1974), Algimantas Skoro’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (typescript VUB RS), replaced by an independent translation by Antanas Dambrauskas, a new edition of Jan Amos Komensky’s “Writings” translated by Benediktas Kazlauskas, Leonas Valkūnas, Jonas Adomaitis (1975). Antanas Dambrauskas has repeatedly stressed that it is not the words that need to be translated, but the idea, the thought and the beauty of the work. Comparing his translations from different years, one can see how intensively he searched for that one true word, phrase, idea. In his translations, he established the Lithuanian model of the stylistics of ancient literature, preserving the rich imagery of the vernacular, the smooth flow of the branching periods, the rhetorical splendour of the compound epithets, the tones of sacred solemnity, and the dynamic nature of the hegzameter, alternating between three- and two-dimensional feet, just as in the Years of K. Donelaitis.
For the promotion of the ancient language, Lithuanian culture and literature, his participation in pedagogical work and his contribution to the cultural life of the Republic of Lithuania and the cultural life of Druskininkai, the Druskininkai Municipal Council, by Decision No 222 of 10 September 1994, conferred on A. Dambrauskas the title of Honorary Citizen of Druskininkai.