Archive for September, 2006

Dear God

30 September 2006 | Authors, Reviews

[Maria Antas reports to God on Erik Wahlström's novel:]

Hello God!

I have just read Erik Wahlström’s new book with you as the central character (Gud, ‘God’, Schildts, 2006), and now I think I know you and like you better than I did before. While it is true that during my career as a literary critic I have often come across novels where you appear both as an Old Testament patriarch and as the bleeding fellow human being of the Gospels, it is not until now that I have read a novel that sheds light on your complexity, while at the same time making many demands on me as a person and as a critic. More…

Being God

30 September 2006 | Fiction, Prose

Extracts from the novel Gud (‘God’, Schildts, 2006)

Side by side, wolves and antelopes graze on the juicy grass.

A deer playfully chases a lion through the bushes.

‘Can you do this?’

Adam crosses his arms in front of his chest and folds his hands back to front so that the right hand is on the left and the left hand is on the right. With his hands folded he twists them downwards and holds them out. Now they point to Eve, still folded, and still with the right hand on the left.

Eve tries. She succeeds, and laughs with delight.

A gentle breeze is blowing from the east, just strongly enough for the couple not to be troubled by the heat, but not so they would feel the need for clothes to keep them warm. More…

Contemplating the cosmos

30 September 2006 | Fiction, poetry

Poems from Valkoiseksi maalattu musta laatikko (‘A black box painted white’, WSOY, 2006)

Good morning, murmuring universe,
dim tortuous thingamybob
with your moving and unmoving parts,
which every day need
new instructions for use
even though the previous ones
were not all that clear, because the article itself
is perpetually modifying its rules of behaviour.
There are threats that our details are being checked,
exhortations to be good, to wait,
wait and believe,
to stay outside at night
in abstract space
till the next numerical series. More…

Grasping reality

30 September 2006 | Authors, Reviews

I suppose many readers, like myself, first encountered Pentti Saaritsa (born 1941) as a translator, and only later as a poet. He published a distinguished translation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry in 1964. Since then he has interpreted South American poetry, previously almost totally unknown in Finland but which has become, precisely through Saaritsa’s translations, important for many readers and writers.

In addition to Neruda, he has edited anthologies of Latin American poetry, and among writers he has translated are Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel García Marquéz, Fernando Pessoa, Federico García Lorca, Paulo de Carvalho-Neto and Jorge Luis Borges. More…