Tag: literary history
Funny peculiar
9 December 2011 | Articles, Comics, Non-fiction
Samuel, the creation of Tommi Musturi (featured in Books from Finland on 7 May, 2010, entitled ‘Song without words’)
Comics? The Finnish word for them, sarjakuva, means, literally, ‘serial picture’, and lacks any connotation with the ‘comic’. The genre, which now also encompasses works called graphic novels, has been the subject of celebrations this year in Finland, where it has reached its hundredth birthday. Heikki Jokinen takes a look at this modern art form
Comics are an art form that combines image and word and functions according to its own grammatical rules. It has two mother tongues: word and image. Both of them carry the story in their own way. Images and sequences of images have been used since ancient times to tell stories, and stories, for their part, are the common language of humanity. The long dark nights of the stone age were no doubt enlivened by storytellers.
One of the pioneers of comics was the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer. As early as 1837, he explained how his books, combinations of images and words, should be read: ‘This little booklet is complex by nature. It is made up of a series of my own line drawings, each accompanied by a couple of lines of text. Without text, the meaning of the drawings would remain obscure; without drawings, the text would remain without content. The whole gives birth to a sort of novel – but one which is in fact no more reminiscent of a novel than of any other work.’ More…
Martti Anhava: Romua rakkauden valtatiellä. Arto Mellerin elämä [Garbage on the highway of love. The life of Arto Melleri]
10 November 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Romua rakkauden valtatiellä. Arto Mellerin elämä
[Garbage on the highway of love. The life of Arto Melleri]
Helsinki: Otava, 2011. 687 p., ill.
ISBN 976-951-1-23700-6
€ 36, hardback
Arto Melleri (1956–2005) has been called the last Finnish bohemian poet. At the age of 35, he received the Finlandia Prize for a collection of poetry entitled Elävien kirjoissa (‘In the books of the living’) as well as an invitation to the Independence Day celebrations at the Presidential Palace, from which he was thrown out. The literary editor Martti Anhava traces his friend’s life from his schooldays in Ostrobothnia to his turbulent life in Helsinki. There are interviews with family members, friends, writers, musicians, theatre-makers; Melleri wound up studying dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy. The year 1978 saw the presentation of Melleri, Jukka Asikainen and Heikki Vuento’s play Nuorallatanssijan kuolema eli kuinka Pete Q sai siivet (‘The death of a tightrope walker or how Pete Q got wings’). Breaking completely with the mainstream political theatre of the 1970s, it became a cult show. The last volume by this poet of bold, often cruelly romantic visions was Arpinen rakkauden soturi (‘The scarred soldier of love’, 2004).
Translated by Hildi Hawkins
Paris match
30 June 2011 | Articles, Non-fiction
In 1889 the author and journalist Juhani Aho (1861–1921) went to Paris on a Finnish government writing bursary. In the cafés and in his apartment near Montmartre he began a novella, Yksin (‘Alone’), the showpiece for his study year. Jyrki Nummi introduces this classic text and takes a look at the international career of a writer from the far north
Juhani Aho. Photo: SKS/Literary archives
Yksin is the tale of a fashionable, no-longer-young ‘decadent’, alienated from his bourgeois circle, and with his aesthetic stances and social duties in crisis. He flees from his disappointments and heartbreaks to Paris, the foremost metropolis at the end of the 19th century, where solitude could be experienced in the modern manner – among crowds of people. Yksin is the first portrayal of modern city life in the newly emerging Finnish prose, unique in its time.
Aho’s story has parallels in the contemporary European literature: Karl-Joris Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890). More…
Kirjallinen kulttuuri keskiajan Suomessa [Literary culture in medieval Finland]
1 June 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Kirjallinen kulttuuri keskiajan Suomessa
[Literary culture in medieval Finland]
Toim. [Ed. by] Tuomas Heikkilä
Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2010. 480 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-212-223-7
€ 36, hardback
The literary material from Finland’s medieval period is both more extensive and more interesting than previously thought. A team of scholars has gone through almost all of the material that survives, from the eleventh to the sixteenth century: missals, merchants’ correspondence, vernacular writings and state papers. Literary culture arrived in Finland with Christianity. During the Middle Ages the language of theologians and scholars on Finnish territory was Latin, the principal language of trade was Low German, and affairs of state were conducted in Swedish. This book examines how, when and where the texts were written and what their distribution says about Finnish literary tastes of earliest times. The scholars have done detective work, tracing and connecting parchment missals which ended up as the bindings of bailiffs’ ledgers. The book takes as its main source the National Library’s Fragmenta Membranea, one of the world’s largest collections of medieval parchment fragments. It is planned to digitise the collection and make the fragments freely accessible to both scholars and the general public.
Translated by David McDuff
Matti Suurpää: Parnasso 1951–2011 [Parnasso, 1951–2011]
21 April 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Parnasso 1951–2011. Kirjallisuuslehden kuusi vuosikymmentä.
[Parnasso, 1951–2011. Six decades of a literary journal]
Helsinki: Otava, 2011. 559 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-1-23368-8
€ 45.90, hardback
The 60-year history of Parnasso, Finland’s longest-running literary journal, is a chronicle of the assimilation of ‘the modern’ into Finnish literature. Matti Suurpää – a long-time contributor, and former head of the SKS publishing house – singles out the 1958–1965 period under the editorship of Kai Laitinen (professor of literature, Editor-in-Chief of Books from Finland from 1976 to 1990) as the era with the broadest editorial scope. Finnish modernist literature, developed during the 1950s, had by then staked out its territory, and the journal consolidated its power to promote it. Laitinen published an excellent themed issue on Finland-Swedish literature to rehabilitate and reintegrate writing by Swedish-speaking authors into the field of Finnish literature. Subsequent editors considered it important to include translations of foreign literature in Parnasso. As the archives of the journal have been lost, Suurpää carried out a close reading of the annual volumes. The result is an eminently clear and readable work in which a wealth of extracts of writing and discussions illuminate the story of the modernisation of Finnish literature.
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Kai Ekholm & Yrjö Repo: Kirja tienhaarassa vuonna 2020 [The book at the crossroads in 2020]
10 December 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Kirja tienhaarassa vuonna 2020
[The book at the crossroads in 2020]
Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2010. 205 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-495-158-6
€29, paperback
This book looks at Finnish book publishing and its likely rate and direction of change. The future of the Finnish industry looks slightly more favourable than similar international forecasts have made out, although there have been some shake-ups in the Finnish book world too. The authors point out that while the decrease of reading as a leisure pursuit appears to be part of a long-term international trend, many feared for the future of the book in previous centuries as well. Book production and distribution, as well as changes undergone by various genres, are illustrated through a variety of statistics. They also go a long way towards explaining whether the publishing industry’s current difficulties are intrinsic or extrinsic in origin. The authors strive to find new perspectives to get away from a fear of the online world. The renewable publishing and reading culture envisioned by the authors will benefit from the novelty and efficiency of electronic publishing and will reinforce traditional knowledge. Professor Kai Ekholm is the Director of the National Library of Finland; Yrjö Repo is a researcher and statistician.
Georg August Wallin: Skrifter. Band 1 [Writings. Volume 1]
2 December 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Skrifter. Band 1: Studieåren och resan till Alexandria
[Writings. Vol. 1: Studies and the journey to Alexandria]
Utg. [Edited by] av Kaj Öhrnberg & Patricia Berg & Kira Pihlflyckt
Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2010. 455 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-583-189-7
ISBN 978-91-7353-371-3 (Bokförlaget Atlantis, Stockholm, 2010)
€ 43, hardback
This is the first volume of a planned six-volume critical edition of the writings of Finnish Arabic scholar Georg August Wallin (1811–1852). The main material for the first volume consists of full text of Wallin’s travel diaries and letters from the years 1831–1843. The Arabic texts are accompanied by parallel Swedish translations. The preface contains an overview of the phases of Wallin’s life and the schools of Orientalism and Rousseau which influenced his work. Wallin’s seven-year research journey to the Middle East, and particularly his crossing of the northern Arabian peninsula as the first Western researcher to do so, brought Wallin great international acclaim. Wallin was the first researcher to record the poetry and study the dialects of the desert Bedouin. He is particularly well known for his visits to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, forbidden to non-Muslims, and to the women’s quarters in their harems.
Irma-Riitta Järvinen: Kalevala Guide
10 September 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Kalevala Guide
Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2010. 127 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-222-193-3
€ 24.90, paperback
This book is a brief but comprehensive English-language guide to the Finnish national epic, which was based on the archaic oral, sung folk poetry of Karelia, but collected and personally compiled by the scholar and writer Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884). The epic (first edition 1839, complemented in 1849) is set in a mythic past; technically speaking, the metre is an unrhymed, non-strophic trochaic tetrametre, characterised by alliteration. Contents, characters, places and themes are explained in the Guide, which also explores myths of origin and the significance of the epic. On his eleven trips to Archangel and North Karelia, Lönnrot met some 70 singers. The Kalevala, now translated, at least in part, into more than 60 languages, has inspired artists the world over (J.R.R. Tolkien was a fan, while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha imitates the metre and style of the Kalevala). The composer Jean Sibelius and the artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela are perhaps the best known Finnish Kalevala artists. And the inspiration continues: for instance, rock musicians and visual artists make use of Kalevala themes, stories and characters in their work. The book includes a list of relevant websites and a select bibliography.
Panu Rajala: Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea [Glass-clear, daredevil]
20 May 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea. Aila Meriluodon elämästä ja runoudesta
[Glass-clear, daredevil]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2010. 417 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-35488-9
€39, hardback
Aila Meriluoto (born 1924) is a poet, author and translator whose first collection of poems, entitled Lasimaalaus (‘Stained glass’), sold more than 25,000 copies in 1946. She became a celebrity of her time, as her young, fresh voice expressed post-symbolist visions and, after the long, cruel years of the war, spoke defiantly about the death of God. Hailed as a youthful prodigy, she was favoured by the dominant poet and professor of literature, V.A. Koskenniemi. Meriluoto has published ten collections of poems, as well as novels, children’s books, diaries, memoirs, and a book about her first husband, the poet and author Lauri Viita (1916–1965). She has translated works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Harry Martinson and Astrid Lindgren. This biography tends to concentrate on the writer’s personal history rather than on her works. The author and scholar Panu Rajala and Meriluoto became acquainted in the 1970s, and he calls his biography ‘a subjective testimonial’. Rajala has written plays, novels and film scripts as well as biographies, among them one of the classic author Mika Waltari (1908–1979).
Dreaming a dream: the poetry of Helvi Juvonen
17 May 2010 | Authors, Reviews
Helvi Juvonen (1950s). Photo: WSOY
The work of Helvi Juvonen is beguilingly strange; intense, eccentric, askew, it sees the world afresh. It charms by means of fairy-tale motifs and apparent nonsense; but it also offers piercing insights into suffering, loneliness, and alienation.
It combines the haunting, elliptical quality of the verse of Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth-century American poet-recluse, with the sharp, fresh imagery of the Finnish 1950s modernist Eeva-Liisa Manner. Its religiosity is complex and unsettling, its humour sly and bizarre. Hard to categorise, Juvonen is both traditional and modern: a sceptical believer, a quiet transgressor.
Juvonen (1919–1959) was known as ‘Nalle’ (teddy) as a child, and her fondness for and identification with animals emerges often her poems:
The mole sleeps,
spade-paw,
velvet-fur,
dreaming a dream, darkly soft
The poetry is also characterised by a fairy-tale logic and a kind of childlike anarchy; a goblin shares her joy with a bumblebee, a tapir talks to a stone. There is a mischievous, surreal streak in the work. The world is anthropomorphised, as in a fairy tale; the poet addresses a singing kettle.
Juvonen in fact wrote fairy tales, not published in her lifetime, like that of Little Bear dreaming as she hibernates. ‘Bon bons, bon bons,’ she says repeatedly, this stream of sound constituting joyous nonsense, an acknowledgement of the miraculous freshness of the world. More…
Sirpa Kivilaakso: Satukuningatar Anni Swan [Anni Swan, the queen of storytelling]
7 May 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Satukuningatar Anni Swan. Elämä ja teokset
[Anni Swan, the queen of storytelling. Her life and works]
Jyväskylä: Atena, 2009. 275 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-796-561-3
€ 32, hardback
Anni Swan (1875–1958) was a writer, translator and editor of children’s magazines. Her symbolic tales utilise her highly original language of sensory imagery. Swan’s symbolism is rooted in the golden age of Finnish arts at the end of the 19th century. The pre-eminent setting for Swan’s stories is the Finnish forest. Her ‘eco-criticism’ of practices that exploited the natural environment can be seen as radical for her time. Swan is also considered to be the first true writer of books for young people in Finland. Her stories about upper-class characters who overcome obstacles emphasise the class conflicts and other injustices of their day, yet they have remained popular into the 21st century. This book, based on Sirpa Kivilaakso’s doctoral thesis on Swan’s fairy-tale symbolism, presents a biography of the author, with supporting extracts from her books, diary entries and letters.
Women and the city
17 April 2010 | This 'n' that
Jolly good! Young women celebrating the First of May in Helsinki in 1912. Photo: Ivan Timiryasev
How was city life for the single woman a hundred years ago in Helsinki?
She could ride a bike, for example, provided it was equipped with an ‘alarm system’ and the speed was not high. Socially she could have fun as long as she obeyed the rules. No admittance to restaurants without male company, for example.
Some young women in those days had to make a living by teaching or by working in an office – before they got married, of course.
A new exhibition (25 March–29 August) at Helsinki’s Ateneum art museum, entitled Kaupungin naiset (‘Women of the city’), focuses on the cultural life of young women in Helsinki in the 1910s through the eyes of the writer and critic L. Onerva (aka Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882–1972). More…
Vesa Karonen & Panu Rajala: Yrjö Jylhä, talvisodan runoilija [Yrjö Jylhä, poet of the Winter War]
11 December 2009 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Yrjö Jylhä, talvisodan runoilija
[Yrjö Jylhä, poet of the Winter War]
Helsinki: Otava, 2009. 351 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-1-23840-9
€ 35, hardback
Yrjö Jylhä (1903–1957) was a poet and translator whose collection of poems entitled Kiirastuli (‘Purgatory’), published in 1941 after the Winter War, is one of the most popular works of Finnish verse. Jylhä served as commander of a Karelian army company during the Winter War. A certain sternness, melancholy and pessimism about life are considered to be characteristic of Jylhä’s writing. The author of this book, the first biography of Jylhä, had access to new source materials including letters written from the front. The war meant not only great change for Jylhä as a writer, but also a test of his own limits as a leader and a soldier among other men. After the war, Jylhä’s reputation began to wane – partly for political reasons, as people took a more dismissive attitude towards war poetry about the Finnish fatherland. Jylhä suffered from a serious illness and artistic frustration in his middle age, which led him to take his own life.
Esko Rahikainen: Impivaaran kaski [The burnt clearing at Impivaara]
24 September 2009 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Impivaaran kaski. Aleksis Kivi kirjallisuutemme tienraivaajana
The burnt clearing at Impivaara. Aleksis Kivi as trailblazer of Finnish literature.
Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2009. 270 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-222-107-0
€ 29, hardback
This year marks the 175th anniversary of the birth of Finnish national author Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872). His work as a creator and cultivator of the Finnish language and literature was truly pioneering. Impivaaran kaski (the title refers to his major work, the novel Seitsemän veljestä, Seven Brothers, 1870) deals with the social conditions surrounding the creation of his works and examines their critical reception. Divisive literary disputes raged, and it was not until the second decade of the 20th century that Kivi’s status came to be acknowledged more widely. Esko Rahikainen – a librarian at the National Library and the author of several books on the life and works of Kivi – has utilised new sources to investigate the criticism and marketing of Kivi, as well as readers’ experiences and the use of his works in Finnish education.