Archive for 1999
One more time
Issue 4/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Kun elän (‘As I live’, Tammi, 1999). Introduction by Pekka Tarkka
XI
Here is a treetop
with three
thousand branches,
three thousand
names, whose
syllables no one
knows, three
thousand minds,
one murmur
traversed by a
breath, a sentence,
I’m afraid to say
anything,
a million leaves
sough, speechless,
a thousand dark
branching roots,
names in the soil,
a million words
in humus heaven
a thousand sprouts
bloom yet are lifeless,
dead heroes,
pointless tales,
three million
wrinkles. faces
obscured
by branches,
in the brain’s roots
a new person’s thought
is born and
hums through branches,
roots,
the smoke disappears
through the branches,
the smoke disappears.
XVIII
He saw faces behind the glass,
heard himself breathe.
With his fingertips, he brushed the glass surface
but it was not the same as skin.
Slowly, he arranged what he saw,
that blurry motion, but it did not work
as an architecture, the kind
a living city is perennially building.
He opened up to a gaze, froze,
lost the game altogether.
Then the scythe disappeared. He opened
a window onto the street, heard
leaves rustle as if waking up
to life, one more time.
Intermission
But I did not sing,
I chased her away,
flushed the toilet, paced
circles in the living room
like a moth that looks for
a place to land
or a solution that does not exist
to a problem that probably
does not exist either,
just a wall full of
leather-backed books
and seats among which
the moth chooses one, a
commodified insomnia
a landscape someone
invented once: palaces,
persons, tensions,
systems and maps
constructed by language insects
on top oft he void,
in the air, an imago mundi
never seen before
never before heard-of
utopias, illnesses
people prefer to endure
rather than
giving up, once they have
forgotten the war’s causes
or the cornerstone of their learning
ground up to gravel
long ago, they still love
the country they have
destroyed, for love
is stronger than
its object, and who
needs it, the group
eats reason and everything learned,
it turns us into beasts,
the congregation executes
its christ, the state
its sages, but the sleepless
animal keeps wrestling
in the mud with its inner
hero, the beast; yearns, spits,
rages and grieves, looks for
reconciliation, tries
to mediate and interpret
between invisible enemies
to whom only sleep and murmur
can lend a shape, until the image
finally shatters
into sentences, steps
into line between covers,
on the shelf: in the closed pages
simmers yet another delirium
no one has ever seen before.
Four o’clock
Don’t know why I burst out laughing
in bed, but someone instantly answered
as if by rote, as if
comprehending eternity,
laughing without malice, life
and soul of the party, cruel
as a certain hero
who was asked to hold up
the roof while they were still making
speeches in the hall, while the fool
scratched his belly, raised his cup
to the host. while a woman
raised her skirt, the whole forest laughed
and every demon claw
inscribed history. from which
the laughter freed him.
All of a sudden the clock struck four,
but I heard only my heartbeat,
the rush of systole and diastole,
tides of a muddy delta,
the sleepless whimper
of birth and death, the streams of cellular fluids,
the pulsing of stars, the animal’s paws
as it padded along the runner,
all in step; not long now until the wolfs hour,
nothing stirred on the plains, I felt
a thundercloud push down on my forehead,
and the wind died, the grass
stopped rustling, sugar coagulated, and then
lightning stopped my heart with one blow,
in one rapid motion my hand
tore off the pillow case, my body
sat up in bed, my mouth shouted,
the primal animal, evolution howled.
Upright. he stood in front of me,
in the rearview mirror the car came closer
struck me again and again from behind
with a huge iron fist, made words burst
from my mouth, the car rose into the air: a plane,
a pegasus galloping straight at the pillar,
now muteness, the windshield
cracked, flew out in one piece
to rest on the hood
in the rearview mirror the car
came closer again, I saw how I flew
into the foliage, in my mind
two separate memories:
thus memory shatters time, and so
one can look at the past as true,
barely, barely endure it: she
bent over me, said something.
At the wake, lips moved. behind
the glass stood a fair boy
whom I knew, even though
he had already grown up to be a man.
Translated by Anselm Hollo
Between two loves
Issue 4/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
From Se tapahtui täällä (’It happened here’, Otava, 1999). Introduction and interview by Nina Paavolainen
She thought of the period between two loves as a spacious room, full of light, outside whose windows the seasons change unhurriedly. On the walls are reflections of the morning light. There is the sound of piano music; and the number of rooms grows. Somewhere, far away, a young girl, dressed in white, is at the piano; the wind fans the curtains. Slow awakening, the soft rocking of time, the sound of bare feet on a wooden floor. In the air there is the scent of flowers, apples, and the gentle morning breeze, and perfume, and the scent of clean, ironed clothes and furniture wax. The afternoon shadows are long and cool; the pages of a book rustle slowly. Now the music pauses.
Mystery and the imagination
30 December 1999 | Authors, Reviews
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…
The pearl
30 December 1999 | Fiction, Prose
A short story from Tutkimusmatkailija ja muita tarinoita (‘The explorer and other stories’, Loki-kirjat, 1999)
My name is Jan Stabulas. I am one of the quietest and inconspicuous workers in our department store, this giant ant-heap swarming with people. No one really pays any attention to me, although I am on show all the time. My job is quite simple: to stand in the menswear department, dressed in fashionable clothes. Now that doesn’t take much, I have heard it said. Well, try it yourself. Try standing for ten hours, without moving, in an awkward, even an unnatural, position, wishing that the air conditioning would work when it was hot, or that it would be switched off when you can feel the draught cutting you to the marrow. Think how the customers stare at you as they pass by, like an object which they cannot buy, and consider your words once more. More…
Delina
Issue 3/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Löytöretkeilijä ja muita eksyneitä (‘The explorer and other lost people’, Tammi, 1999). Introduction by Soila Lehtonen
The stranger met Delina at a development organisation’s work camp, but Delina was not a volunteer. Delina lived in the country permanently.
The stranger did not spend very much time in Delina’s company. His evenings were spent with fellow-volunteers in the village cafe, where Delina’s parents did not allow her to go. During the day, both of them worked in their separate ways: Delina at home and the stranger in the work camp’s fields.
The stranger did, however, get to know the girl well enough to hear that she was in love with a soldier called Zmiri from the nearest garrison. This soldier was arrested once when he and his comrades drunkenly molested volunteers – but Delina knew nothing of the case. More…
You@me
30 September 1999 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Liisa Takala
In Leena Krohn’s novel, Pereat mundus (1998) the central role is played by a number of characters called Håkan. All of them are different, living in different times and different places, but they are still Everymans: you and me. In the following e-mail interview, Maria Säntti asks Krohn about her relationship with language, imagination, the world – and virtual reality
Date: Fri Jul 23 18:04:24 1999 To: Leena Krohn <krohn@kaapeli.fi> From: Maria Santti <maria@kaapeli.fi> Subject: Let the interview begin!
Dear Leena,
I have just read Pereat mundus, which I like very much. I have many questions to ask you about it; I shall try to gather my thoughts, but I think I am troubled by the problem of the first sentence. I am alarmed even to contemplate the maze of questions and answers the first question will lead us to.
Over the past thirty years you have published a couple of dozen collections of poetry, short stories and essays, and, since Tainaron (1985), ‘novels, sort of’. This is how Pereat mundus defines its own genre on its title page. Sometimes your works incline toward novels, as in Umbra, 1990, sometimes toward collections of short stories – Matemaattisia olioita ja jaettuja unia (‘Mathematical creatures and shared dreams’, 1992) and sometimes collections of essays – Rapina ja muita papereita (‘Rustle and other papers’, 1989). How did you find this open ‘epistolary novel’ form for your work? More…
The son of the chimera
30 September 1999 | Fiction, Prose
A short story from Pereat mundus. Romaani, eräänlainen (‘Pereat mundus. A novel, sort of’, WSOY, 1998)
I was born, but not because anyone wanted it to happen. No one even knew it was possible, for my mother was a human being, my father a chimera. He was one of the first multi-species hybrids.
Only one picture of my father survives. It is not a photograph, but a water-colour, painted by my mother. My father is sitting in an armchair, book in hand, one cloven hoof placed delicately on top of the other. According to my mother, he liked to leaf through illustrated books, although he never learned to read. He is wearing an elegant, muted blue suit jacket, but no trousers at all. Thick grey fur covers his strong legs, right down to his hoofs. Small horns curve gracefully over his convex forehead. Striking in his face are his round, yellow eyes, his extraordinarily wide mouth, his tiny chin and his surprisingly large but flat nose. More…
Breathe out, breathe in
Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Nio dagar utan namn (‘Nine days without names’, Söderströms, 1998). Introduction by Bror Rönnholm
Quickly, at a zebra crossing
moments
not of wonder but of something closely related: the tree
upturned by the gale with its roots to the heavens, the lit-up
church spire against the night sky, a few simple gravestones viewed at a
suitable season, a quartet from the Marriage of Figaro or just standing at a roaring
crossing and writing this, invisible to all in exhaust fumes and a faint blue
light from a hidden sun, a few times mistaken for a
loved pupil More...
Cause of death
Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Åtta kroppar (‘Eight bodies’, Söderströms, 1998). Introduction by Ann-Christine Snickars
It was a bailer, a blue one. There they were, he, she, the bailer and a stormtossed net on the stern board of a hired boat. The boat had come with the cottage and the cottage with ‘Autumn archipelago package. Now nature is aglow.’
And it was aglow.
Masses of foliage and apples, damson and shiny russula spread out around them in all their glory. It happened everywhere, that glowing. Wherever one turned one’s gaze there was something ready to be picked or ready to fall, ready in general. Those first days they had, at least to each other, she to him, feigned enthusiasm about all this ripe richness, but that time was over.
Their time of fire and flames was over. More…