Author: Lauri Otonkoski
A sensitive pessimist
30 December 2000 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Irmeli Jung
When we arrive in Oaxaca, we find a Sapotek culture pulsing with quiet wisdom, a people who, even in their appalling poverty, have preserved their joy in life, mezcal bars which threaten to overturn our blameless work schedules, and the house rented by the Finnish Writers’ Union, where the rooms we are shown to as are empty and unfurnished as the solitary confinement cells in the central jail.
But Pentti Saaritsa has the language skill and, more essentially, the art of relating to people as though he has been lifelong friends with the whole of humanity. During the first week, we explore the squares, markets and furniture stores of Oaxaca. Ritsa haggles with astonishing perseverance, with the result that, in the second week, we are the proud owners of two genuine Mexican desks, stools and standard lamps. But the typewriter takes up an entire chapter in Pentti Saaritsa’s autobiography. Untiringly, he finally reaches the price he wants. And so we settle in a town turned upside down by the Zapatista movement: ‘The Mexican typewriter has / its own handwriting: with letters that bounce / off the lines it continues / the story of my life….’ More…
No one can tell
31 March 1999 | Fiction, poetry
Poems from Ahava (WSOY, 1998)
And life went on, went on as a kind of weird fugue,
a forked path that drops across your eyes,
rejecting simple questions.
Which summer was that,
I ask in December,
in a high room, with a tiled stove, a bricked up
nostalgic sentence about the warmth of other times,
a crossing where all the world's words
discover the the comparative degree of silence,
the one with meaning.
Should I peep across a couple of cloudy stanzas to get a better view,
but again my eye conjures up a medieval constricted soul.
All that's left is a thirst of all the senses, a frigid study of sentences,
of bones.
Around zero o’clock
Issue 2/1996 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from the collection Musta oli valkoinen (‘Black was white’, WSOY, 1995). Introduction by Jukka Koskelainen
When?
When I learned to pay attention to unlikely reptiles to surprising glacier waters to nightgowned rejections to wall-mounted assault rifles to traveling angels to lips shaped like promises to mussels swimming in dreams to crashes, rules and funerals to shady, secret sacristies to the indecisiveness of dancing shoes to the immeasurable indifference of looks like bullets to spring, myself and seductions slow as clouds all of these between the words, was that when the difficulties began?
About the third
To stop waiting, the second step.
To be born of woman. The first.
The price of the word and the moon are determined with the same weightless scales.
The third we don’t know about, don’t ask.
On the ear’s walk
The landscape's deepest melody flowed on over the banks of the resounding Middle Ages.
Do you hear, do you hear it
the way a snail hears,
that snail there who teaches
learns from the earth’s replies, learning
the snail hears and gets there,
gets there for sure
even the slow one gets there,
even the slower one will
then get there, it will
surely get there, into the pot.
Herbal wisdom
New churches, old harmonized organs and repetitions like a prayer or a psalm for seven voices. Against scant blue a hundred people believe in pilots and safety belts. The wind just a little too strong.
But my heart it was, that loaded institution through four expectations it came here. Exactly here where you, with both hands, almost inaudibly intended to break the fragrant life of a sprig of thyme.
That soundless break, the speech of dust, said all I understood.
Around zero o’clock
Just be the shape of an angel, be, be be, be a screeching hatful of sleepless night it dresses even the seagulls in diver's suits, be be lazy intellect and come to bed be manager of nightmare and conqueror of desire
to say
Be the disease of saying Be the lifelong remedy which whether you take it or not certainly kills
Be the one who no longer is a dab of the freedom of the void, a flight of three strides out of thought's night be
Because I’m jading
Translated by Anselm Hollo