The first person who translated the Kalevala into the Lithuanian language was Adolfas Sabaliauskas, who was a poet and a priest. He had close connections to Finland. He learned to know A. R. Niemi, who was a professor of folk poetry at the University of Helsinki, before the wars, and he was in Finland when the first world war made it impossible for him to return to his home country. He lived upstairs in the house of Niemi’s family and while he was a refugee he started to translate the Kalevala into Lithuanian. It was published in Kaunas in 1922.

Justinas Marcinkevicius (1930–2011) did another Lithuanian translation. Marcinkevicius is considered a national poet of Lithuania. The translation came out in 1972.