Birute Ciplijauskaite

MADISON - Biruté Ciplijauskaité, John Bascom professor emerita of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her academic home since 1960. An internationally known scholar of classical and modern Spanish literature, she died on 19 June 2017 at age 88, at Agrace Hospice Care in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, after a protracted illness. She was the author and editor of some 25 books and 200 articles and lectured widely in American universities and abroad, having held visiting professorships at Harvard University, SUNY Stony Brook, and a variety of universities in Spain, Germany, and Lithuania.
A typical "displaced person," Biruté was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, graduated from high school in Germany, obtained a Master of Arts degree at the University of Montreal, Canada, and a doctoral degree at Bryn Mawr University in Pennsylvania in 1960, and was elected a permanent member of The Institute for Research in the Humanities at Wisconsin from 1974 until her retirement in 1998. In 2003 she was named Commander of the Order of Alfonso X el Sabio by the Spanish government, complete with the elegant accruements of the title.
While specializing in Spanish literature--her edition of Góngora's sonnets, to take but one example, remains unsurpassed--she did not neglect her Lithuanian heritage. She served as Vice-President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, 1982-84, and as Founding Senator of Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas 1989-96. She also published a number of essays on Lithuanian literature, and translated contemporary Lithuanian poets and narrators for Spanish, French, and Italian anthologies.
She was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 11 April 1929. Her father was a prominent medical doctor and hospital administrator in Kaunas. Her privileged life found her studying classical music and learning to play piano between ages of 4 and 5 when she also began her study of German as a second language. When advancing Russian forces entered Lithuania in the early 1940s--her father having died--Birute fled with her mother and sisters to Germany at about age 12, eventually joining an extensive Lithuanian refugee community in Té�bingen and there adding French to her formidable language skills. In addition to Lithuanian, she would in her maturity eventually master some 17 languages, which added to her remarkable scholarly output.
She eventually emigrated with an older sister to Canada, and, after daytime work, attended night classes studying French and Spanish at the University of Montreal. During her studies there, she attended a summer course in Spain on Spanish poetry, which thereafter became her special passion and the subject of her extensive scholarship and writing. Subsequently she earned a fellowship to Bryn Mawr University and completed her doctorate in Spanish literature in 1960. The philosopher Jose Ferrater Mora was her inspiration at Bryn Mawr, and her praise
for him was constant and substantial.
For seventeen years after her retirement, Ciplijauskaité volunteered her services to the Special Collections Department of the Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin where she translated the correspondence and unpublished memoirs of Eva Noack Mosse and Martha Mosse, survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She also left Special Collections some 1,000 letters of Spanish writers and critics, most notably those of the poet Jorge Guillén.
Without a doubt, Biruté Ciplijauskaité was one of the greatest Hispanists of the Twentieth Century, a true humanist who taught and inspired several generations of scholars and educators in Spanish letters. Her substantive presence on the international academic scene will be sorely missed.
At her request, there was and will be no memorial service. Her remains are to be buried next to her mother's in a Lithuanian community cemetery in Putnam, Connecticut.

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