Bo Carpelan. Photo: Irmeli Jung

I write one winter’s day,
write off the day and the night, the planets,
go into my house from a harsh sun
and extend those shadows that are swordlike aimed.
It is a day of drifting snow
and with a voice from that which is I
or was.

(From The Cool Day. English translation by David McDuff, published in Homecoming, Carcanet, 1993)

Bo Carpelan, one of the great names of Finnish literature, died in his home city of Helsinki on 11 February. Carpelan’s first collection of poetry appeared in 1946, his last in 2010.

In his poems and prose he frequently described his childhood in apartment buildings filled with the smell of cooked herring, the noise of quarrels and the sound of the news on the radio. Prosaic life is turned into poetry, images and music, the apartment house is built from the rooms of a dream.

Bo Carpelan loved music. His novel Axel (English translation by David McDuff, 1989), is about his paternal grandfather’s brother, who was a friend of Jean Sibelius and the composer’s first critic. Axel was an unsuccessful musician who chose to live through someone else, and Carpelan relates him to the theme of the dignity of rejected human beings.

Carpelan’s prose crossed the boundaries of art forms. Of Urwind (English translation, 1996) it has been said that there is probably no other novel which is at once theatre, art gallery, concert hall and film. The dizzying bliss of a dream and suffocating fear are what one can experience on the cinema screen or in a concert. Why couldn’t literature provide the reader with those things, Carpelan seems to be asking. Urwind’s central character, an old secondhand book dealer, sits in the concert hall of a dream and suddenly ends up in the place of the conductor, who has been taken ill. He raises his baton: ‘Three blows against the rock, a clear, proud stream of water flows out. Joy! The inexplicable reveals itself, formed to a single body, a hovering building, an innermost room.’

In his poems Carpelan seeks the experience that opens up in a short moment. He first mastered the poetry of landscape in his 1961 collection Den svala dagen (‘The cool day’), where he rejected metaphors and symbols, and approached reality with the techniques of the old Japanese masters. With quiet, concrete clarity he wrote about the core of perception, about people’s relations to their loved ones and to nature. In two collections which contain marginal notes on classical Roman verse he established a link to the oldest strata of poetry.

Although Carpelan wrote in Swedish, his life and writing were marked by a natural bilingualism: the Finnish translations of his verse are a central part of Finnish-language poetry, and Carpelan also translated Finnish poetry into Swedish. His own books have been translated into fifteen languages.

In recent years his novels were published simultaneously in Swedish and in Finnish. He received the Finlandia Prize for Fiction twice – in 1993, for Urwind, and in 2005 for Berg, as well as the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1977 and Le Prix Européen de Littérature Award in 2007. Carpelan was a member of Books from Finland magazine’s editorial board from 1982 to 1986.

The melancholy of Carpelan’s prose works is often juxtaposed with a soaring flight across a landscape which reflects both outer reality and the inner world of the one who experiences it, bringing to mind the paintings of Piranesi, Magritte, or Brueghel. This will to transcend reality produces passages in Carpelan’s works that are reminiscent of some of the most startling and enigmatic details in the films of directors like Visconti and Buñuel. The Swedish Academy’s Horace Engdahl has called Carpelan ‘an architect of dreams’. The location of his last novels, which are set in a manor house in southern Finland, evokes the surrealism and spooky hallucinations of Ingmar Bergman’s films. There is also an echo of Bergman in Carpelan’s photography-related descriptive techniques which are aimed at capturing movement. In the images of his writing light streams inward, as in the paintings of Vermeer.

Carpelan is a master of imagery. His poetry wakens the memory to new life.

Translated by David McDuff

‘Jansson!’ Hjalmar, the protagonist of Arne Nevanlinna’s second novel, is repeatedly woken by voices barking his surname at him. The people shouting at him are primary school teachers, commanding officers, nurses, psychiatrists and his bosses; these figures collectively serve as a sort of Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ figure, or Hjalmar’s social superego. At the core is penniless bohemian office drone Hjalmar’s relationship to his boss, Börje, who personifies the archetype of the Finnish banker, both idolised and loathed. Hjalmar eventually rises up from his lowly position into the opposition, aided by several picaresque characters and his own ‘pokeresque’ skills as a gambler.  Arne Nevanlinna (born 1925), an architect and essayist, began writing fiction late in his career: his first novel, Marie (2008), was a runaway success. It tells of a lady from the cream of Strasbourg society who had been married off to Finland and lived in isolation to the age of a hundred. Hjalmar does not quite match its predecessor in terms of quality, but the elegance of old patrician clans persists in its enjoyable irony.

A happy day in Joel Lehtonen's life in 1933. Photo: Otava/H. Iffland

The bookseller Aapeli [Abel] Muttinen, a central figure in Joel Lehtonen’s ‘Putkinotko’ books, is one of those fictional characters for whom Finnish readers have cherished a particular affection, not least because of his keen enjoyment of the pleasures they themselves so regularly share when they escape to their lakeside cottages for the summer.

But although Aapeli Muttinen is Finnish through and through, he is not without counterparts in the literature of other nations. One of his close relatives is the laziest man in all literature, Goncharov’s Oblomov; others, perhaps more surprisingly, can be found in the works of Anatole France – booksellers like Blaizot and Paillot, both gentle dilettanti with a streak of individualism and a penchant for good living. Like them, Muttinen is tolerably well-read: at the beginning of the short story  ‘A happy day’ we find him musing about Horace, and at least one of Horace’s odes must have appealed to him strongly: ‘Happiest is he who, like his sires of old, / Tills his own ground, and lives his life in peace, / Far from the tumult of the noisy world.’

Joel Lehtonen (1881–1934) had a stormy and eventful life and travelled in many parts of the world. His most important literary achievement was the series of four books, published between 1917 and 1923, now known collectively as the ‘Putkinotko’ (an onomatopoetic, invented place name, it could be translated as Hogweed Hollow) books: two novels, Putkinotko, Kerran kesällä (‘Once in summer’) and two books of stories, Kuolleet omenapuut (‘The dead apple trees’ from which ‘A happy day’ is taken), and Korpi ja puutarha (‘The wild wood and the garden’).

In these works Muttinen is sometimes the central character, sometimes a figure in the background, revealing, as the books proceed, an intriguingly complex and contradictory personality with elements not only of the comic, as seen in his exaggerated hedonism, but also of the grotesque and even of the tragic.

We meet him first in Kerran kesällä: born in squalid poverty, a man of energy and resource who makes his own way in the world, ending up as a quite prosperous bookseller, a kind of local Maecenas with his own devoted circle of budding poets, some mediocre, some hardly even that.

Muttinen is an elitist: conspicuous on his shelves are the works of Homer, Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire and Aleksis Kivi (Lehtonen’s own favourites). Undoubtedly he has good taste, but this makes it even more difficult for him to swallow the bitter truth that he has achieved his wealth and elegant life-style by the sale of ‘50-penny dreadfuls’ – trashy adventure novels and love stories – to the small-town bourgeoisie.

Another sizeable slice of his profits has come from the sale of religious and devotional works, and this too goes against the grain; Muttinen disapproves of the Church and the clergy and he is an enemy of conventional morality. ‘Why,’ he splutters indignantly, ‘why should the Church bind two people to each other for life? Married people can hardly ever get along together. Why can’t they be free, like the birds and the foxes and the field mice? How beautiful it would be, to go forth and people the earth – so long as they could part when they wanted to!’ This doctrine Muttinen puts into practice by living openly with his mistress Lygia. There has been an earlier marriage, to a certain Fanni, but even before leaving the altar steps he says to her ‘We’ll separate at once if ever you want to go. ‘ The marriage does not last long, thanks partly to Fanni’s habit, when annoyed, of emptying a jug of soured milk over Muttinen’s lecherous head.

Muttinen’s ideals, as far as private life is concerned, are happiness, freedom and security. Politically he is a pinkish Liberal.  Sometimes he quotes barbed epigrams from Bernard Shaw: over his bed hangs a portrait of Tolstoy, from whom he has adopted the maxim that no man must live by the toil of others and no man must practise violence. He is opposed to chauvinism and militarism, and maintains that the barriers between rich and poor must be broken down.

There is a marked contrast between these doctrines of Muttinen’s and his actual way of life. ‘A person needs money in order to bea person,’ he says. He is rich and he owns land, but he does not ‘till his own ground’, as Horace puts it: the work on his summer estate is done by a crofter. Juutas Käkriäinen and his large family live in dire poverty: he pays rent for the privilege of tilling Muttinen’s fields. The novel Putkinotko describes the relations between the educated landowner and his humble tenant. Muttinen plays the enlightened despot, the humanitarian, full of benevolent charity towards these ‘children of nature’.

But his strategy fails, for Käkriäinen rises in revolt. In Kuolleet omenapuut we read how the civil war of 1918 breaks out, partly as a result of just such grievances over the system of land ownership. Aapeli is sent (more than half against his will, for he is a coward as well as a pacifist) to fight in the front line on the side of the Whites. In a fit of rage he shoots a Red prisoner, ‘a brother human being’. Abel has become Cain, the pacifist has become a killer. For him it is total shipwreck.

‘A happy day’ depicts Muttinen’s life at Putkinotko in the days when his green paradise is still inviolate, untrampled by the cruel march of history. There he relaxes in the lap of Nature, free of thoughts and free of memories. However, the contrast between the bookseller’s altruistic principles and his natural egotism shows itself yet again, this time in the context of an intimate relationship.

For one entire day the landscape ‘loses its true dimensions’ under ‘the boundless blue of the kindly sky’. But there are also intimations of a darker side to the picture: the churchyard, the eerie sadness of the cowbells, the blackness of the water beneath the lovers’ boot.

Translated by David Barrett (1914–1998). This article and the translation of the short story ’A happy day’ were first published in Books from Finland 4/1981

Veikko Huovinen (1927–2009). - Photo: Irmeli Jung /WSOY

Author Veikko Huovinen died on 4 October at his home in Sotkamo, in northern Finland, at the age of 82.

Huovinen was a graduate of the forest research programme at Helsinki University and worked for a period as a forest ranger. In the 1950s he began working as a full-time writer after his first novel, Havukka-ahon ajattelija (‘The thinker of Havukka-aho’, 1952), achieved great success.

Havukka-ahon ajattelija is the story of a stubbornly ruminative backwoods philosopher who ponders natural phenomena and the great political turning points that he hears about on the radio. The novel has been translated into six languages.

The soil that Huovinen’s works spring from is his northern community surrounded by deep forest, and his characters are modelled on its inhabitants: a self-sufficient business owner, a vagrant rascal, an ill-tempered hermit. They withdraw into the shelter of their homes, where the arctic winds and the evil of the world can’t reach them. Such humoresques might bring to mind Mark Twain or the early works of Nikolai Gogol.

Huovinen wanted to broaden his field of interest and brought his playful critical eye to bear on some of the cruellest dictators from world history: Hitler, Stalin, Peter the Great. These works are parodies of biographical research, but making dictators into droll figures, something in the manner of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, was an insufficient foundation for his critique. His Stalin parody was read in the former Eastern block countries, it’s true, but did not achieve a wider audience.

It was perhaps the uniqueness of his novel Puukansan tarina (1984) that ensured its translation into German and English (as Tale of the Forest Folk, 1994); humans do not have a large role in the book. It is an homage to the wisdom of the forest, the story of a community of trees that grows to their full perfection, the main protagonist a wise elder pine more than 400 years old.

Huovinen’s most jubilant writings are his ‘short specials’, brief parodic pieces that poke ironic fun at the bureaucratic welfare state, political correctness, and absurdities of consumer society such as the invasion of the north by mass tourism.

The burlesque merriment of the style and language in these pieces is difficult to capture in a translation, but one example of a hilarious success is David Barrett’s ‘A spot of transmigration’ (Books from Finland 3/1987), which tells the tale of a dead northern traveler’s soul that migrates into the body of a crow, a freshwater cod-fish, a stray dog, a liquor store proprietor, and finally into a crane on its travels into the wilds of Lapland.

[This story, digitised, will appear on our site hopefully next year. The Editors.
For Huovinen's translations, see the database.]

Paavo Haavikko. Photo: Kai Widell.

The poet, writer, playwright and publisher Paavo Haavikko died in Helsinki in October, at the age of 77.

Haavikko was one of Finland’s most internationally recognised writers, and his success was helped by many prominent poets’ interest in his lyric poetry. His work was translated by Anselm Hollo and Herbert Lomas (English), Manfred Peter Hein (German), Bo Carpelan (Swedish), and Gabriel Rebourcet (French), among others.

Haavikko debuted in 1951 as a lyric modernist who broke through all of modernism’s barriers. He was a master of intoxicating lyricism, and an intellectually discerning storyteller of general truths in his narrative poems. His collections Talvipalatsi (‘Winter palace’, 1959) and Puut, kaikki heidän vihreytensä (‘The trees, all their green’, 1966), in particular, have achieved the status of classics.

Haavikko was the middle-class heir to a trading house in a working-class area of Helsinki. He was well acquainted with houses, land, and stocks, and received his business training in the field of real estate. In 1967, he became the literary director of the Otava publishing house, and from 1983 he ran his own publishing company.

In 1984 Haavikko was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy no longer gives Nobel Prizes to writers from the neighbouring Nordic countries, but, as if to make up for this, Haavikko received the Academy’s prestigious Nordic prize. Upon awarding it, the Swedish Academy’s representative called Haavikko ‘the gold standard of Finnish modernism.’ That characterisation spoke of Haavikko’s lifelong interest in money and fortunes and managerial matters, which could also be seen in his poetry as well as in his aphorisms, related to economic life.

A tireless critic of political power, Haavikko wrote on behalf of small nations against the superpowers. Power fascinated him, but he also cursed it. The political interpretations in his poems have a furious irony. In interpreting the past, he often took short cuts toward his conclusions, relying on instinct, amd bypassing reality.

With his keen interest in history, he was in his element in his dramatic texts, of which there are fifty. The most significant of these are his librettos for Aulis Sallinen’s operas Ratsumies / The Horseman (1974) and Kuningas lähtee Ranskaan / The King Goes Forth to France (1974). His parodic radio plays about the Viking King Harald and his ruling methods were also successful abroad. Haavikko’s works have been translated into 15 languages.

Perhaps the most lasting of Haavikko’s amazingly wide-ranging works is his most intimately personal poetry. He was a rare phenomenon: a prosperous businessman who returned again and again to write about love, metaphysics, and death.

Haavikko gave the main character of his two-volume memoir the name Prospero, after the character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who was an all-powerful ruler of the world, friend to the elements and enchanter of humankind, but who in the end gives up his books and his power. Haavikko has left behind his books and his power now – but that fortune has been transferred to us.

The books stay when I, bird, migrate from the world,
books, cumbersome on migration,
letters without an address, the wind shreds them
and when the book has been read, its leaves are leaves.

(From Lehdet lehtiä [‘Leaves (are) leaves’, 1958], translated by Anselm Hollo, published in Paavo Haavikko. Selected Poems; Carcanet Press, 1991)

(First published in Books from Finland 4/2008.)