Authors

Into the animal kingdom

Issue 4/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews, Reviews

In her first novel, Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (‘Not before sundown’, Tammi, 2000), Johanna Sinisalo has developed a new science, that of trollology, discovering in the northern forests a new mammal species, the troll. The novel takes its readers into a world beyond taboo. where human beings may fall in love with non-human creatures – and mortal danger may ensue. Introduction and interview by Soila Lehtonen

There are still wild beasts in the forests of northern Europe. It is still not far from the cities to the forest -and the forest is no manicured parkland. where the mark of man is everywhere visible. A berry-picker may encounter a bear, a schoolchild see wolf-tracks in the snow. But the territory of wild creatures in shrinking, and it is becoming more difficult for them to find food; and so they are making inroads into the human landscape. There are a thousand bears in Finland, one for every five thousand people; more than one hundred licences to shoot bear were granted this autumn. More…

Love and war

Issue 4/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Väinö Linna ‘s famous war novel, Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier), was editorially censored, with the author’s agreement, on its first publication in 1954. But, as Pekka Tarkka discovers, the English translation that appeared three years later was outrageously falsified

Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) is a story about Finnish soldiers fighting Soviet forces in Second World War. When it came out in 1954, it immediately gained an almost incredibly important place in the hearts of Finnish readers: it sold 160,000 copies in the first year, it has been made into a movie twice, and over the years, it has been one of the steadiest sellers of Finnish literature, reaching a record figure of more than 600,000 copies. More…

A sensitive pessimist

30 December 2000 | Authors, Reviews

Pentti Saaritsa

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…

Epic labours

Issue 3/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews

Kai Nieminen has translated the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, from its ancient poetic Finnish into modern language. Anselm Hollo has in turn translated an extract of Nieminen’s version into English for Books from Finland; here the two poets and translators discuss the process by e-mail between Pemaja, on the south coast of Finland, and Colorado

Anselm Hollo: Why translate Finnish into Finnish?

Kai Nieminen: It may seem like an odd idea to translate from a language into the very same language, but as you, Anselm, may recall: a few years ago, I taught a workshop at a summer session of the department where you teach, the Writing and Poetics Program of Naropa University in Boulder, with the theme ‘Poetry as Translation of One’s Thoughts’. I started out with the notion that writing poetry – perhaps writing literary works in general really consists of translating personal recognitions into more generally recognizable utterance, recognizable even to oneself. Writing poetry, one translates one’s thoughts for oneself. In that workshop I had the students translate English into English, and they thought it was a good idea, an enlightening exercise, a way to learn to read texts in a new way. As a poet-cum-translator I have probably always done something like this when writing my own poems – and also while reading poems by others. Translation is a two-way process. Secondly: As a translator from Japa­nese, I have grown accustomed to the Japanese practice of equipping modern editions of classical literature with a translation into modern Japanese. The modern version is not meant to replace the original, it is a way of helping the reader to appreciate the original all the more – which is what I, too, aim at doing. More…

Happy elegy

Issue 3/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

‘It hurts me to look / When nothing comes back to me.’ So goes the first poem in Kirsti Simonsuuri’s Rakkaus tuli kun lähdin maan ääriin (‘Love came when I left for the ends of the earth’). The persona asks us to look at a cloud lingering in the blond sky, ‘head wrapped in white’ and fading away. The lines forecast the thematic atmosphere of the whole: a happy elegy on the transitoriness of passing moments, people, places, times and love. In the cosmos of the poems everything flows, and the flow is never the same. But it is just this that creates the durable, the movement of continual metamorphosis. More…

About butterflies

30 September 2000 | Authors, Reviews

Birgitta Boucht

Photo: Charlotta Boucht

To think that it can be so cold in Cairo…

A woman sits there writing, and she feels cold. Her name is merely J; around her lie her mother’s posthumous papers. They look like a kaleidoscope. Beautiful formations succeed one another, but the picture is never fixed or unambiguous. Not until the day J is able to see something more than the enticing pictures in the kaleidoscope is she free. That day she stops feeling cold. That day she leaves Cairo in order to continue loving in Finland. More…

Ecstasy and silence

Issue 2/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Essays, Reviews

Peter Mickwitz surveys new Finnish poetry in Finnish and Swedish

Considering all the talk about poetry’s ‘critical situation’ and its ‘marginal­ization,’ it is surprising to see how much poetry is being published in Finland, both in Finnish and Swedish. No less surprising is the fact that so much of it is excellent. Thus, it is not a difficult but a gratifying task to pick four poetry books published in 1999 for brief comment.

Ralf Andtbacka (born 1963), connois­seur and translator of Anglophone po­etry –  but first and foremost a Finland­-Swedish poet – published his third collection of poems, Cafe Sjöjungfrun (,The Mermaid Cafe’, Söderströms, 1999), which was nominated for the Runeberg Prize in the fall of 1999. The first poem in the book, ‘Cesur’ (‘Caesura’), takes place in ‘the first evening of autumn / even though it is still July’ which reminds this reader, somewhat unexpectedly, of Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem ‘Eufori’ (‘Euphoria’), in which the poet’s alter ego sits in his garden at dusk and feels an intense connection to all there is. Andtbacka’s poem is less intense, more distanced, but the presence of things is as strong as in Ekelöf. While Ekelöf writes ‘as if this were the last evening before a long long journey,’ Andtbacka’s anticipation is of another kind, it describes a poetics: ‘a vacuum that waits to be filled / by something as inescapable / as our quiet conversation, here / and now, small demarcations / and corrections, openings / and dead ends, pauses.’ More…

Compelled to write

30 June 2000 | Authors, Interviews

Kjell Westö

Photo: Marica Rosengård

Kjell Westö (born 1961) is one of a generation of younger, urban Swedish-language writers who are at home in both Swedish and Finnish. An extract from his novel Vådan av att vara Skrake (‘The perils of being Skrake’, Söderströms, 2000), which traces the fortunes of the Helsinki family of Skrake from the 1910s to the present day. Here, Westö is interviewed by his alter ego, the discontented poet Anders Hed, editor of the cultural journal Bokassa (now sadly extinct)

Anders Hed: So, to get us going: do you write any poetry at all nowadays?

Kjell Westö: No. The last poem I wrote comes at the end of the title story in Fallet Bruus (‘The Bruus case’). And that book came out in 1992.

It’s a poem about human face and the search for ‘the Thou’, isn’t it?

Exactly. More…

Making nothing happen

30 June 2000 | Authors, Reviews

Jouko Sirola. Photo Sakari Majantie

Jouko Sirola. Photo Sakari Majantie

For a first book, Sisustus (‘Interior decoration’) is unusually self-willed. It is Jouko Sirola’s first book, although his short stories have been published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Sirola’s kindred spirits are not, after all, to be find in the art of the traditional, realist, Finnish short story; instead, for Sirola (born 1963), the surface of the story is like a calm face.

The most important thing is the story behind the uneventfulness. What is spoken by muteness? And what do we dream at the moment when we meet another person in the street, when we pick our keys up from the floor, when we open our mouths to eat? What do we get when we want to buy back the days of the life we have lived? More…

How many worlds?

31 March 2000 | Authors, Reviews

Veronica Pimenoff

Photo: Jukka Uotila

Veronica Pimenoff’s novel Maa ilman vettä (‘A world without water’) recalls in a startling way the time when the founding father of Nordic literature, Georg Brandes, urged readers to ‘make problems a matter of debate’ and when Henrik Ibsen’s plays The Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House provoked widespread debate about money and property, gender and marriage.

The tradition of problem-centred literature in the Nordic countries from the end of the 19th century onward has hardly been studied, but it could certainly be made visible by tracing a line from Brandes to August Strindberg and thence via the working-class literature of Sweden and Finland to, for example, the feminist fiction of recent decades. More…

Taking a line for a walk

Issue 1/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Paul Klee, who is often cited as a pioneer of abstract art, often gave his works names associated with literature. We do not know whether these names arose before he began work, or only as he looked at the finished painting. Probably both.

Klee was well-versed in literature and also wrote himself. In addition to his essays and diaries, he wrote music and theatre criticism. He was also a professional musician, playing the violin in various ensembles. His literary and musical background is clearly visible in all Klee’s work. It is difficult to consider him a purely abstract painter in the traditional sense of the word. Paradoxically, the pioneer of abstract art defies a strict categorisation as abstract or figurative. Behind almost all his works lies a figurative and literary development. And of course music, its transposition into painting.

Klee was in the habit of writing the name of the work, in his fine handwriting, along the bottom edge of the painting, and underlining it. This suggests that he did not consider the associative power of the name of the work trivial or insignificant. It was not, however, intended to direct the viewer, and often the name functions in counter-point to the content of the image. The viewer is both directed and led astray. He sets out to seek correspondences between image and title but finally uncovers his own imagination.

This is an invitation to play. Not so much with the associations and experiences of the artist, but with those of the viewer. Bo Carpelan has accepted the invitation. It is, to my knowledge, fairly rare for a poet to take as his muse the names of an artist’s works. And apparently without particularly examining the works. The wrapping-paper is recycled. Such recycling creates, in his book Namnet på tavlan Klee målade (‘The name of the picture Klee painted’, 1999), a frankly tropical atmosphere, although some of the names of Klee’ s works are transposed directly into Finland-Swedish surroundings. The tropical gaudiness of the poetic images is born with the help of continual metamorphoses. They recall, unbidden, the masterpieces of African recycling in which the renaissance of some worn-out object is celebrated – for example, an empty sardine tin is miraculously reborn as an oil lamp. More…

Short cuts

Issue 1/2000 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews, Reviews

‘For me, writing is an irrational and intuitive process’, says the young writer Tuuve Aro (born 1973). ‘I do not decide or plan in advance what I want to say; the text carries me onward as I go’.

Tuuve Aro strikes one as cheerful and intelligent, a self-assured and resolute young woman. She relates to her new role as an author just as naturally as she describes the genesis of her short-story collection Harmia lämpöpatterista (‘Trouble from the radiator’, Gummerus, 1999). For Aro, writing has long been a tool to figure herself and the world, but she has never felt the compulsion to gather her writings into a book. But when a certain sort of text had accumulated sufficiently, it was time to send the manuscript to a publisher. More…

Automotive

Issue 4/1999 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Among Finnish writers of the younger generation, Jyrki Kiiskinen (born 1963) has wasted no time becoming a prominent figure, both admired and disparaged. While his entry in the new three-volume literary history of Finland is allotted as much space as one of our classics, it does not grant him the status of an innovator. Reviewing his new book of poems, Kun elän (‘As I live’, 1999), for my newspaper, I proposed that it introduces, for the first time in Finnish poetry, the automobile as a metaphor for our entire motorised life style. The president of the Finnish Writers’ Union, poet Jarkko Laine, responded by presenting a list of all the Cadillacs, Renaults and Volvos that can be glimpsed in the pages of Finnish poetry books. More…

Still lives

Issue 4/1999 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews, Reviews

The composition of Raija Siekkinen’s short stories is almost always the same: a woman, a man, slowly developing understanding or alienation, a resolution. In her new, book-length story, Se tapahtui täällä (‘It happened here’), the motivating events take place before the narrative begins, and the journey is toward emergence from grief.

‘One must listen to one’s own voice, and cultivate it. I am no moralist, except in the relation to myself. The persona and voice of the writer must be on the same lines, otherwise one cannot be honest, and writes only for entertainment. One has to live with what one writes,’ says Raija Siekkinen, rolling a cigarette at home in the small coastal town of Kotka, a 120 kilometres from Helsinki, near the church, in her picturesque wooden house. She says she was sensitive and shy as a child, but somehow realised that she had to defend her own words and manner. ‘And in literature honesty is one of the most essential things.’ More…

Mystery and the imagination

30 December 1999 | Authors, Reviews

Jyrki Vainonen

Photo: Niko Aula

Jyrki Vainonen mixes reality with miracles: in his story ‘The pearl’ the central character is a living model in a department store. Introduction by Pekka Tarkka

The setting of Jyrki Vainonen’s short story ‘Helmi’ (‘The Pearl’) reminds me of the Finnish architect Sigurd Frosterus, who lived at the beginning of the 20th century. He wrote a brilliant essay on the Wertheim department store in Berlin, which he saw as a work of art of the age of capitalism, similar to the baths for Romans or the cathedral for the people of the mediaeval period. He realised his vision by designing a handsome building, the Stockmann department store, which has been a much-loved temple of goods for Helsinki people for 70 years. More…