Tag: classics
The lake
Issue 2/1988 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Järvi (‘The lake’), a short story, 1915. Introductions by Kai Laitinen and Pekka Tarkka
I travel the world, not out of any desire for adventure, but because that is the way things have happened. The best of my wanderings are in obscure, tucked-away regions, where life is humdrum and pitched in a low key. There I have no need to stave off nostalgia for the past by leading a hectic life: my days go by in stolid succession from season to season, I am an ordinary unimportant individual among all the rest. For long stretches of time my life does not strike me as being either dull or bright; I derive a certain satisfaction from its very emptiness. It is as though I were, by degrees and to the best of my ability, paying off a kind of debt. More…
A respectable tragedy
Issue 2/1988 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
An extract from the novel Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable tragedy’, 1941). Introduction by Kaija Valkonen. The central theme of the novel is love: young, old, passionate, innocent, proper, improper. The main characters are a middle-aged couple, the doctor and his wife Elisabet, his sister Naimi and the love of her youth, Artur. Hämäläinen’s fine irony, careful and thoughtful psychology and colourful language have made the novel a bestseller. Naimi, an aesthete and an uncompromising character, has left her husband Artur twenty years ago because of his infidelity. But slowly she begins to forgive: this tragic but compassionately told love story, not without tragicomedy and humour, ends in reconciliation
Embalmed passion
In that new Helsinki of the ‘thirties, which had opened like a garden flower, gaily coloured, sunlit, practical and impractical, in love with every novelty of the moment, which it thought astonishing, lived Naimi Saarinen, back from her exile, where she had been driven by wounded passion twenty years before. More…
In my memory
Issue 4/1987 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems and aphorisms from four collections. Introduction by Erkka Lehtola
Let the healing epidemics out! There must be some.
The many-headed monster, the market ideology, it can simultaneously read, count and even write at least 666 works. And without the sign of the beast no one can buy or sell.
Those who can read know you only realise you’ve forgotten how
when you can do it again.
What a handsome winter we have here! If it weren’t so dark, we’d see it. We could orientate ourselves on the stars with the beam from a pocket torch. Somewhere in mid-sky, I’d say, they come flying along on long lights.
As a child I said I’ll do what I want. Now I want what I do.
Who’s in the middle when the two sides of your face are side by side, as they are, in the mirror.
The trees that hide the sun are bright inside.
A frosty night when you feel the stars on your skin and discuss what you’re wearing.
Somebody’s walking over there, with an umbrella over his head, taking the rain for a walk.
I’m so delighted to find so much that’s useless.
What a relief there’s no longer enough time to get acquainted.
From Tuoreessa muistissa kevät (‘Springtime fresh in the memory’), 1987 More…
A small lie
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Pieni valhe (‘A small lie’). Introduction by Marianne Bargum
The white cat had started to hate her.
Only half a year ago, Marja remembered, it had been playing with the hems of her robe, while she had passed the morning reading and drinking coffee. Right now it was staring relentlessly at her from the bookcase where it was ensconced: out of reach, she thought. Its stare was green and mean. At night it attacked her ankles; it lurked in the crevices of the apartment and when it heard her approaching steps it leapt past her, screaming, and crossed the room to the curtains or the table. The curtains fell, books crashed to the floor, the cat stared with its eyes opened wide, the pupils like narrow slits. She would lock the cat into the other room for the night, hear it mew and feel the door with its paws; she fell asleep only after the cat had calmed down. When she approached it during the day, stroked it and called its name, it looked at her, motionless, as if it had seen and known everything, and then she withdrew her hand, backed off, started behaving as if there wasn’t even a cat in the apartment. More…
Soulscapes
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Raija Siekkinen. Photo: Irmeli Jung
When the first collection of short stories by Raija Siekkinen (born 1953), entitled Talven tulo (‘The coming of winter’, 1978) appeared, the critics were unanimous on one point: here was a mature writer with an original, individual voice. For her second collection, Tuomitut (‘The condemned’, 1982), Raija Siekkinen received the coveted Kalevi Jäntti Prize. Since then she has remained faithful to the short story. And since the publication of her fourth collection, Pieni valhe (‘A small lie’), the reader has been able to trace a development in which she has polished and tightened her narrative and brought to it more and more poetic and symbolic elements.
The main character in Raija Siekkinen’s short stories is generally a woman, not old but not very young either, often alone, sometimes broken by illness. Death is a recurring theme with Siekkinen; illness withers her women, her men die sometimes by their own hand. Siekkinen writes seldom about children; when she does so, it is from a child’s point of view. This perspective results in a critique of the narrow and restricted world view of adults. But always sensitively, never pointing the finger. More…
Poems, poèmes
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Mies joka rakasti vaimoaan liikaa (‘The man who loved his wife too much’, 1979 and Vaikka on kesä (‘Although it’s summer’, 1983). Interview by Markku Huotari
Look at this epitaph with whiskers.
Threw herself so gladly into my troubles, sometimes she seemed to be bearing, properly, my burdens.
A dog called Julia. Combining
July and Yuletide.
Often thought of putting her down, so she wouldn’t need to die.
Smash her skull or break her neck
with my own hands, to stop her mourning her premature death.
Which still seems to be delaying.
She puts her four paws gently down, one at a time. So the Lord won’t hear her still about
and whisk her away.
Two years ago, she steps on some glass, her toe sticks out, a tendon’s cut.
She looks at me. Believe it or not,
I’m grieved by little Julia’s lot: for a second
I think the blood’s dripping from my own heart. More…
A poet of the fresh air
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews
Sirkka Turkka. Photo: Pertti Nisonen
Sirkka Turkka is interviewed by Markku Huotari
Snowflakes are already covering the forest, and an angry wind is blowing off Lake Lohjanjärvi. It is autumn, and in the courtyard, at the roots of a stunted rowan, is a lounge chair, its paint already peeling.
‘I’ve left the chair there because my mother used to sit in it and knit.’
I start at Sirkka Turkka’s comment. In my mind is her last-but-one volume of poetry, Vaikka on kesä (‘Although it’s summer’, 1983); its poems sound a contemporary lament, occasioned by her mother’s death.
‘There’s nothing made-up in my poetry,’ says Sirkka Turkka.
Landscape, nature, the circular path of life – all of these have left their wounds in Sirkka Turkka’s poetry. But as she writes in Tule takaisin, pikku Sheba (‘Come back, little Sheba’, 1986), winner of the Finlandia Prize 1987, ‘from the wounds life grows’. More…
Poems
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Vattenhjulet (‘The water-wheel’, 1986). Introduction by Thomas Warburton
Together with time
One day the door to my room closed
and fate said to me: be still.
It was then that I discovered time.
It had lain hidden beneath a lid
of events and hasty decisions.
It was then that I raised the lid.
So strange! There time lay
completely unused, completely itself
smooth and fresh, as if resting.
I looked at time with reverence.
I saw myself new, I sank into
a miraculous eventlessness
together with time
listened to myself living:
a barely perceptible murmur.
The water-wheel
The old horse plods heavily with blinkered eyes the wheel turns slowly and inexorably creating time, a thing that is not visible that is really nothing with the right to kill.
A sense of order
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Solveig von Schoultz. Photo: Charlotta Boucht
That Solveig von Schoultz occupies the position of ‘grand old lady’ of Finland-Swedish poetry is beyond question; yet it is an epithet that fits her badly. It all too easily suggests the image of a stern and queenly poetess, an Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore or Gabriela Mistral. The poetesses of Scandinavia are, by and large, less solemn – more gentle and down-to-earth, even when they grow older and wiser and ascend some of Parnassus’s more elevated thrones.
Solveig von Schoultz has, of course, had a long journey to the top. She has behind her twelve collections of poetry, at least fifteen volumes of prose, and an even greater number of plays for radio, television and theatre, spanning a good fifty years’ acitivity as a writer.
In this long artistic career there is both continuity and development. It might be said that the continuity is represented by the fact that from the very beginning she has preferred to describe women – their daily lives, their loves, thoughts, impulses, relationships. But since so much in the world of women and in women’s thinking has changed during the decades since her literary debut in the 1930s, both her themes and her outlook have necessarily altered, too. Among other things, she has had many of her early, then only half-developed ideas taken up by a later generation, and has thereby had them given back to her renewed. As a feminist she has always been one of the least militant, and for a short time some of her younger co-sisters were uncertain about the strength of her commitment to the Cause. More…
Poems
Issue 4/1986 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Introduction by Kai Laitinen
Evening Mood
It’s widening:
an evening like a sigh –
languidly spreading across the land.
The tree’s unclothing
its branches of their colours, darkening.
As if something somewhere
were ringing and ringing –
a song straying like an orphan.
The words seem
something I’ve heard:
‘only a shadow –
only a shadow of a dream’
It’s slipping away. It’s dwindling.
Everything – everything – I’ve been given
I’ll give away. More…
A poet’s perspective
Issue 4/1986 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Aila Meriluoto. Photo: Pertti Nisonen
When Aila Meriluoto burst on to the world of Finnish poetry 40 years ago in the autumn of 1946 she was at once hailed as a youthful prodigy. Praised lavishly by the leading critics, the 22-year-old poet’s first collection, Lasimaalaus, sold in phenomenal numbers: in a couple of years it went through eight editions, or 25,000 copies, which in Finland is still a record figure. Today total sales are well over 30,000.
Two poems attracted particular attention. One was Kivinen Jumala (‘God of stone’), a poem of defiance unleashed by the experience of wartime bombing, in which God is portrayed as having changed into a stone statue, and people as having hardened correspondingly. It was the first reaction of the younger generation to the war – abusive, strong and inevitable, the proclamation of the death of the kind, just God.
The other central poem of the collection was Lasimaalaus (‘Stained glass’) from which the collection took its name: a taut post-symbolist vision and a dazzling synthesis of the oneness of the world. Baudelaire, master of correspondances, might well have been satisfied with it. More…