Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea. Aila Meriluodon elämästä ja runoudesta

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).

Hannu Väisänen. Photo: Paula Kukkonen

Interview with Hannu Väisänen, author of the novel Kuperat ja koverat (‘Convex and concave’, 2010)

For the painter and writer Hannu Väisänen, colour speaks volumes.

In the novel Toiset kengät (‘The other shoes’, 2007, Otava) awarded the Finlandia Prize for Fiction), teenage wannabe artist Antero manages to escape his grey northern hometown of Oulu; he is heading for the eastern Finnish town of Savonlinna, where he will go to art college. Triumphantly Antero dyes his blond hair black in the bus station toilet.

‘Perhaps it was all a question of the right colours and the right timing of colours,’ Antero thinks. In Kuperat ja koverat (‘Convex and concave’, 2010), he leaves for the capital, determined to get into the academy of art. His hair is still black.

But ‘colours do not really have timing; it was an ironic reference to calculation, a mode of working that I hope I will not be forced to use as an artist’, Hannu Väisänen (born 1951) pointed out when he last spoke to us at Books from Finland (2/2007): ‘The bourgeoisie and manuals of good taste paint interiors in correctly timed colours. But colours must be left their capacity to surprise. A colour must not only be a bringer of pleasure – it must also be allowed to challenge.’

In Kuperat ja koverat Antero learns more about shapes than about colours: in studying the three-dimensional world he has to negotiate shapes and forms, and in his graphics class he returns to the shades of grey. In the woollen duffel coat of someone he falls for he discerns a colour resembling ‘the grey of the robe of Saint Francis of Assisi and the hopeful beige of a newborn camel’.

Antero embarks on his first trip abroad on a scholarship to Budapest. There he falls head over heels in love both with fellow art student Tamás and with a Sienese painting the size of a chocolate box showing Saint Thomas Aquinas at prayer. It has a particular shade of green with which Antero becomes enchanted.

SL: It turns out that, unfortunately, Tamás is not right for Antero. But what about the shade of green?

HV: The green is absolutely right. It’s a chromium oxide green, in a technical sense one of the most durable shades of green. And flexible in the extreme, meaning that you can get almost any tone of green you want form it. In Sassetta’s time, artists didn’t have access to as wide a colour palette as those of today, but that chromium oxide made possible a wide scale of greens. He who has the why also has the how, as the philosopher put it.

Now that I’m in a painting phase again, I’ve dug my colours and brushes out of a two-year sleep, almost the first thing I did was to check that I had some chromium oxide. I did, and I use it. The kitchen table, cupboard and benches that appeared In my first novel, painted ’Sassetta green’, still exist, now in different parts of Finland, in the care of my sister and brothers. In the colour elements of my own home all I have kept is a tray painted by my aunt; it, too, wanders through my trilogy of novels.

’A gentle scale of greys, full of contrasts, Antero, but I should have thought colours might have suited your nature,’ says one of the academy’s teachers at the opening of Antero’s first exhibition: the works are pencil drawings on bone-white paper.

Perhaps the fact that colours matter so much to both Hannu Väisänen and his alter ego Antero is due to his childhood, which was somewhat devoid of strong colours. In the single-parent family of an alcoholically inclined NCO, four boys and a girl, life in the austere, post-war Oulu with its harsh winters was not exactly colourful as regards things material.

And yet the grey of the barracks, army uniforms and blankets is a colour, too, with an immense number of shades.

In Väisänen’s first volume of the fictionally autobiographical – or autobiographically fictional – trilogy, Vanikan palat (‘Pieces of crispbread’, 2004), the school’s spring festival tableau is immersed in perfect blue, and little Antero is overwhelmed by it; he discovers the language of colours in making art.

SL: Your third novel ends with a viewing of space through a telescope, the examination of the convex and concave surface structures of the Moon. So Antero remains in a pretty monochrome world, and your series of novels is at an end. But does Antero, in fact, begin to speak the language of colours?

HV: Certainly. If Antero is anything like me. In my paintings, I’m using more and more unmixed colours – that is, colours straight from the tube. It feels as if, after writing – which I always experience as black-and-white – I need to paint in pure primary colours. What a lot a large yellow surface can say!

A recent experience was to spread pure bright yellow for a week on to a canvas measuring 2 by 3 metres. I don’t believe in colour therapy, or particularly in the metaphysical dimensions of colour, but when there began to be more colour before my eyes than my own physical size, it really felt like bathing or swimming.

The trilogy is finished, but writing continues. I’m working on my next novel, in which Antero doesn’t appear. But colours do. I can’t help it. (Happily!) Even in this first drafting stage, colour makes its presence felt. In addition, it’s very invigorating to use words to describe colours and the way they behave.

The basic difference between writing about colours and painting with them is, I suppose, that in painting a colour refers only to itself, without references. Within sentences, a colour, however accurately it’s described, appears like a symbol, within the framework of the agreements of language.

Poet ahoy: Herbert Lomas in Aldeburgh. Photo: Soila Lehtonen

The prize-winning British poet Herbert Lomas has been translating Finnish poetry – much of it for Books from Finland – for more than thirty years. Soila Lehtonen, our Editor-in-Chief and his long-time collaborator, interviews him on the occasion of the publication of his collected poems, A Casual Knack of Living

The shoreline and the seaside promenade stretch out along the windy East Suffolk coast in Aldeburgh, where Herbert Lomas lives in a pink house called North Gable.

In summer thousands of tourists frequent the picturesque village, particularly during the music festival in June, founded in 1948 by the local composer Benjamin Britten. A poetry festival, too, takes place every autumn, this year for the 21st time.

Herbert – Bertie to those, like us at Books from Finland, who know him well – has just published a handsome tome of poetry, A Casual Knack of Living, containing poems from nine earlier collections plus a selection of previously unpublished poems, entitled Nightlights. The home of his publisher, Arc Publications, is in the village where he was born, 85 years ago, Todmorden in the Pennines.

Night fishing

They sit on the shoreline, under
a green umbrella, wielding quidsworth
of equipment and catching a few whiting.

At the eye clinic, behind me, a lady said,
She’s so much older than him, you know.
She won’t leave him alone. He’s had to

take up night fishing. But no: they munch
a sandwich under the wind, share it
with their dog and stare at the silver

the moon’s unrolling to their feet,
feeling how the world was before it was
so well-organised and understood,

and in the dawn a red ball rises
swiftly out of the sea
and disappears inside a cloud like a god.

From Nightlights (in A Casual Knack of Living)

In the 1940s young Bertie left Yorkshire for India – where he served for two years as a lieutenant in the 6th Battalion of Garhwal Rifles during the war – and, after the war, for Greece, to teach English, and then, to Finland.

HL: I studied English at Liverpool University, but knew I really didn’t want an academic career. Then in 1952 I was offered a scholarship, and out of Holland, Germany and Finland I chose Finland, as I had become very fond of Sibelius’s music. So I taught English at Helsinki University for 13 years. I came back to England in 1965, and while I had been away, it had luckily transformed itself from dreary post-war gloom into the swinging England of the 1960s.

His first collection of poetry, Chimpanzees are Blameless Creatures, appeared in 1969. His Letters in the Dark (1986) was an Observer book of the year, and he has been awarded several literary prizes.

He has also been made Knight First Class, Order of the White Rose of Finland – as, while in Finland, he got seriously involved in translating Finnish literature, poetry in particular. Bertie has turned out hundreds of translations, of which the readers of Books from Finland in particular have been able to enjoy since the 1970s. The anthology Contemporary Finnish Poetry won him the [British] Poetry Society’s 1991 biennial translation award. How did he find learning Finnish?

HL: There were no proper text books or dictionaries those days of course. Kept reading Pooh Builds A House and Alice in Wonderland in Finnish as well as talking with peasants, that’s how I made progress. Professor Michael Branch, who taught Finnish in London, asked me to translate for Books from Finland.

Who are his favourites among the Finnish poets whose work he has translated?

HL: I now think Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952; a selection of new translations were published in Books from Finland 2/2007) and Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995). Manner is a metaphysically inclined, visionary, enigmatic poet, and expressionist and modernist Hellaakoski is a master of rhythm and rhyme.

Bertie Lomas likes to play with rhymes and words, ‘solving’ poems like riddles or sudokus – definitely among his best work are the hilarious and ingenious, limerick-inspired verses for children by Kirsi Kunnas.

The poems in The Vale of Todmorden are memories, fragments and glimpses of a time past. Revisiting that ‘lost history’ has resulted in 80 poems with vivid and detailed observations of people, incidents and places in the 1920s and 1930s. ‘…farmers, millworkers, / dyemasters, soldiers, survivors, sometimes / impregnated by randy gentry, we went / down in the world, and up, and down again, / till there were none of us in the valley, / though the valley was still in us.‘ (‘Pennine way’)

HL: My parents ran a pub called The Black Swan – until they lost everything in the Depression; I was placed with my auntie for a while. I was an only child and spent lots of time outdoors, climbing the rocks and wandering on the hills with my dog. In those days children were allowed so much freedom.

Listening

The wind’s listening, and the rain on Whirlaw,
and the valley’s long shadows in the evening.

A late blackbird breaks in on the quiet
of moss and lichen, and I know I’m here.

The trees know I’m here, and someone else
knows I’m here, listening, as I’m listening.

It seems like myself, only older, stranger,
knowing I’m not really the little boy I am.

Before leaving Aldeburgh for London I take a stroll on the broad, motley, crunchy mattress of pebbles on the shore. Those zillions of brown, grey and white stones, polished by the mighty cold swell of the North Sea, are so beautiful that I just have to steal a dozen to take home, to place on the windowsill in the office of Books from Finland.

And yes; Bertie has agreed to solve a few more riddles in Finnish, a handful of new poems by Ilpo Tiihonen, so watch this space.

Sari Malkamäki. - Photo: Irmeli Jung

Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters in Sari Malkamäki’s new short stories

The relationship between parents and children is the central theme of Sari Malkamäki’s fifteen new short stories. She published her first collection in 1994; in Jälkikasvu (‘Offspring’, Otava, 2009), her tenth book, the few stories in which children don’t appear nevertheless allude to childhood experiences or to a child who sets the narrative in motion.

The point of view may be that of the child or of the parent, the focus of description some moment that forms a turning point in the characters’ circumstances, or even in their lives. Malkamäki’s children are often touchingly resourceful and brave, even when their adults fail them.

Families are a perennial favorite of fiction writers (not rarely to the point of reader fatigue…). Childhood experiences stay with one for life, whether for good or ill. Primary relationships are of course a reliable, inexhaustible source of drama, capable of running the gamut from the sublime to the melodramatic.In Malkamäki’s prose, the pasts that characters or those around them think they know thoroughly are revealed, often half by accident, in a completely new light: a classic short story method perhaps sometimes considered old-fashioned, now that a piece of ‘short prose’ could be practically anything. But when it works, it works.

Julius, in the short story ‘A long dream’, is a middle-aged man whose wife, after a short formal briefing, leaves him. Astonished by this and unable to sleep, he counts the days, hours and minutes. ‘There is nothing to disturb his life now that his wife is gone.’ He finally falls into a deep sleep, returning to a childhood dream of losing his own name, and as he wakes, his wife is back. With a gentle irony, Malkamäki charts Julius’s thoughts about his life, lived and unlived.

‘Offspring’, a long story of 47 pages, portrays a retired woman, Vuokko, whose son barricades himself menacingly in his ex-wife’s house with his little twin girls following their divorce. Vuokko’s assistance is needed in the police response; she is forced to review her own past quickly, assess all the love and lovelessness in her life, while talking her son (successfully) out of the dangerous situation.

Malkamäki favours dramatic turns in her stories that arise from contemporary people’s ordinary lives. The world may be cruel, and human relationships may betray, disappoint and frighten us, but by no means does she point at tragedy only. Nor does she ever verge on the melodramatic.

Kristina Carlson. Photo: Tommi Tuomi

Time: late 1870s. November. Place: the village of Downe, Kent, England. Villagers gather in the church on a rainy Sunday. Thomas Davies stays at home with his two children.

After the death of his wife, Thomas has been unable to get over his grief and anxiety. The villagers don’t approve of Thomas’s way of living – he isn’t sociable, keeps to himself, doesn’t go to church, and reads too many books. His employer is Charles Darwin: a famous – or notorious – man who writes too many books. ‘Mr Darwin lives here, and atheism is a worse threat than in the neighbouring villages,’ says Stuart Wilkes, voicing the views of the villagers.

Thomas is the central character in Kristina Carlson’s new novel, Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’, Otava, 2009). Ten years ago her previous novel, Maan ääreen (‘To the end of the earth’), set in 19th-century Siberia, won the Finlandia Prize for Fiction.

As 2009 is the second centenary of Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species (published in 1859), the first question that comes to mind is whether this is coincidental or not…

KC: Well, I didn’t have the anniversary in mind at all when I started writing the novel at the beginning of the 2000s. Aside from Darwin and the clergyman Innes, all of the characters are fictional. The geography of the village is also largely imagined, although I did visit Downe in the middle of the 2000s – I may have added a few hills where there weren’t any.

The voices of the narrative alternate between the villagers and Thomas himself. Petty-bourgeois virtue and self-satisfaction are amusingly abundant when villagers meet on the street, at the pub, or at the parish reading circle: rumour and scandal get around. The slim volume (176 pages) contains a dozen or more humorous, minimalist portraits, but characters can also be seen sincerely pondering serious questions on religion and the philosophy of life.

Although his presence is felt, Mr Darwin is not among the voices in the book himself. Neither is God – but he visits Thomas one night: ‘I saw God the evening before last – he was short, thickset, swarthy, hirsute, with long hair, I saw him walking past the house with his head bowed, he said something just before he walked to the edge of the forest and vanished from sight….’

In his grief, in ‘anger and disbelief’, Thomas has prayed to the ‘God that doesn’t exist’, ‘against my better judgement, out of necessity’. When God goes away, Thomas begins to recover from his anxieties. With his children, he begins to experiment with the influence of electricity on farming – science, condemned as Godless, infuses him with a belief in life. ‘Mr Darwin is a tree that spreads light, Thomas Davies thinks.’

It seems, then, that there are four main characters in the novel, as it were – Thomas, the multi-voiced flock of villagers, Darwin and God.

KC: God is in the picture, because the church was still a strong influence on social life in the late 19th century, despite the fact that secularism – as well as industrialisation and capitalism – were gaining ground. But I think the essential thing is that people’s loneliness and despair is crying out for a god, and everyone seems to have a god suited to their own needs. Even Thomas, although he doesn’t really believe. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between faith, knowledge, intelligence, and people’s internal needs. In its day, Darwin’s work raised questions that shook the faith of those who believed the Bible. It still does.

But how did you come to find yourself in Kent in the 1870s, in Darwin’s garden?

KC: It was because the first idea that came to mind for the book was the title. I could have dealt with the subject as an allegory, of course, and the story could have been set in any era, but it was easier to go back to when there wasn’t as much commentary, discussion, and other materials as there are now.

A simpler world, where there was still a strong consensus about the feeling of security that faith gives to believers?

KC: Yes.

The village’s rich flora (trees, flowers, crops) and fauna (cats, hares, birds, frogs) also appear in your book. How did you learn about them?

KC: I wrote about plants and animals that I’m familiar with – I’ve seen large European hares in Brandenburg in Germany, the village where I stay in the summer has a colony of jackdaws, and so on – and then I checked to see if the same species exist in Kent. I would have like to have written about the Mourning Cloak, which is an exquisite butterfly, but it doesn’t live in the British Isles. In timing the spring  my friend the translator David McDuff, who lives in Kent, helped me. I read a lot to acquaint myself with the place and time. Judith Flanders’ The Victorian House, for example, was very interesting. But, as often happens, and as it should, only a few crumbs of borrowed facts remain in the novel. What happens in people’s head is the most important thing.

In Finland (too), works of fiction tend to be categorised, put in marketable pigeonholes (thriller, historical novel, light fiction etc.); I suppose one could say that Herra Darwinin puutarha is a postmodern Victorian novel? And my guess is that you don’t like that definition, for ‘postmodernism’ is, after all, such a dubious, worn-out and uncool term?

KC: Yes. And no.

Pelaamisen lumo [The fascination of the game]

Tennis is a curious game, as everyone who plays it knows – and even those who don’t, which is why it is such a popular sport. Although Jarkko Nieminen (born 1981), a professional player since 2000, has not yet won a Grand Slam event for Finland, in 2006 he was ranked no. 13. (Unfortunately, this spring Nieminen injured his wrist and missed the top matches of the season.) In this book (edited and published by his sister Anna-Riikka Carlson, who founded the publishing company Avain in 2003), Nieminen tells the story of his athletic career. ‘In Japan my visa said I was an “entertainer”,’ he recalls as he describes what it’s like to walk out on a court filled with thousands of spectators. Tennis is a gentleman’s game, a polite duel (or double), and Nieminen is certainly a gentleman par excellence. His personal story is designed to be strictly informative, as he chooses to keep his family life private, for example (his wife Anu, née Weckström, a Finnish multiple badminton champion, is referred to once). There is no doubt, though, that the reader will be convinced of Nieminen’s happy choice of an athletic profession.

Löytöretki Helsinkiin. Paikkoja, polkuja, puutarhoja. Exploring Helsinki. Places, paths, gardens. I Helsingfors på upptäcktsfärd. Platser, stigar, trädgårdar

In this book, author Julia Donner and photographer Taneli Eskola make a walking tour of the less familiar byways of their native Helsinki, in the changing seasons between 2007 and 2008. Donner quotes authors and poets while recording some of the city’s history. She takes the reader through places often ignored – small, modest enclosures between buildings that only just qualify for the name of parks, suburban parklands or the rocky spaces that have been left untouched in the heart of the city. Eskola’s photographs record the graphic details of frost and sleet as well as the first tinges of spring green, of flora, rocks, water and sky. Some of the text is printed in both Swedish and English. A map would have been useful to readers who are not familiar with Helsinki; some of the photographs also lack captions. This beautiful book, designed by Timo Numminen, is an original series of views that have not been prettified but are true to the everyday life of the city. And readers who live in Helsinki will be surprised by what they discover.

Dinner in a dash: surprise soup?

The flow of cookbooks into bookshops has recently – and universally – slowed down a little, as the internet provides more and more recipes for those wishing to experiment with cuisine.

A book of a more unusual kind, however, was published recently: Sattumasoppaa. Pulavuosien parhaat palat (‘Surprise soup. Choicest morsels of the slump’, Tammi, 2008) by Hanna Pukkila goes back to the years when coffee, sugar, milk, butter, meat, bread and even grain disappeared or became very scarce in shops and in people’s kitchens due to the long years of war, and after.

In 1939 the Winter War against the Soviet Union broke out, and before hostilities began again in 1941, severe droughts damaged harvests; in addition, after the Winter War, a tenth of Finland’s field area had been yielded to the Soviet Union as reparations.

So people had to invent ersatz grub: butter was mixed with cooked potatoes or carrots, flour was made of leaves (‘almost any that can be found will do’), ‘whipped cream’ was made of flour, water and a spoonful of sugar, ‘coffee’ of chicory or sugarbeet, ‘drinking chocolate’ of ground, roasted acorns.

Nettles, mushrooms and berries were collected assiduously. Swedes, cabbage and turnips became staple foods, and a baked, stuffed pumpkin replaced Christmas ham.

The years of austerity came to an end only in 1954, when Finns finally regained the unlimited use of real coffee.

A dessert recipe from Sattumasoppaa instructs: ‘take a large bowlful of pure driven snow, drip carefully, drop by drop, one to two cups of diluted berry syrup into it and sprinkle a little sugar on top.’

Even during those culinary hard times when not much was really what it was called, this went by the name of ‘Syrup snow, or a frivolous dessert’.

Zzzzzzz! In the grey seal kindergarten babies take a nap after dinner. – Photo: Seppo Keränen

Taskinen, Juha
Paluu Saimaalle
[Return to Lake Saimaa]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2009. 204 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-33745-5
€ 38.90, hardback

Keränen, Seppo & Lappalainen, Markku
Hylkeet [The seals]
Helsinki: Maahenki, 2009. 151 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-56-5266-6
€ 45, hardback
Sälar
Helsingfors: Söderströms, 2009.
151 p., ill.
Swedish translation: Annika Luther
ISBN 978-951-52-2603-7
€ 45, hardback

The private life of the species of seal that lives only in Lake Saimaa has been carefully investigated lately. Almost everything about this highly endangered species has been revealed, thanks to technological devices such as transmitters that can be glued to their backs…

STOP! WARNING:  as I realise that not everybody wants to know what pinnipeds do in their spare time, I suggest you quit reading now, if you aren’t interested in the lives and fates of an obscure group of about 260 mammals that live in a lake in the remote west of Finland.

But they are beguiling creatures. An urbanite bitten by the wildlife bug while holidaying on Lake Saimaa, I first succumbed to the charm of the Saimaa ringed seal (Phoca hispida saimensis), and wrote about it for Books from Finland, in 2005.

The landscape of Lake Saimaa: the endangered ringed seal and the osprey live in these waters and on the almost 14,000 islands of Greater Saimaa. – Photos: Juha Taskinen

This spring there has been heated debate in the Finnish media about whether Finland really wants to commit itself to the protection of the Saimaa ringed seal before it disappears from the waters of the Earth.

The ringed seal was trapped in Lake Saimaa, the fourth largest lake in Europe, near the end of the last ice age, some eight or nine millennia ago, as the land began to rise, cutting the lake off from the sea.

Ever since Finns began to inhabit the shores of the Saimaa after the ice age, they have contributed in many ways to the extermination of the ringed seal (in Finnish, norppa, from the Russian nerpa; see here for a four-minute video clip of norppa in its own environment, with a commentary in Finnish). It was hunted to near extinction until it was finally protected by law in the mid 1950s, after which it suffered heavily from environmental pollution – mercury, DDT and PCBs. Inland waters have become cleaner since the 1980s, so the seal has survived; but now, as global warming affects winter temperatures, its procreation is threatened. The mother seal needs to dig a lair in the snow for her pup during its first few weeks. If the pup is born on the ice, it may not survive. When the weaned pup starts exploring its surroundings in April as the ice melts, it will encounter a new, too often fatal danger under the surface: every spring many young seals – an estimated 30 per cent – drown in fishnets.

Born on ice: this seal pup, named Voitto (Victor), was born in a winter with little snow, so his mother couldn’t dig the lair he needed. - Photo: Juha Taskinen

Wildlife experts have repeatedly stressed the need to abstain from fishing with nets between 15 April and 30 June, and free fish traps have been offered to all local fishermen who give up fishing with nets during this short period. However, some of them refuse, claiming it is their ‘ancient right’ to fish how and when they please. The consumption of fish by the small Saimaa seal population does not threaten any kind of fishing: a seal eats a kilo of small fish per day, mostly perch and roach. Nowadays only about 20 people make a living by fishing on Lake Saimaa.

Another premature death: a young seal drowned in a net. – Photo: Juha Taskinen

The Finnish government has expressed its concern – but a law prohibiting net fishing during those crucial weeks has not been passed, indicating that Finland does not have the political will to offer effective protection to a critically endangered indigenous mammal which is rarer than the giant panda.

Juha Taskinen, a nature photographer and guide, has committed himself to the protection of the ringed seal in his native Savo province. In Paluu Saimaalle, a beautiful and touching book, he presents, in words and photos, portraits of the inhabitants of Saimaa in all seasons, telling stories about fishing by humans and pinnipeds, as well as otters and ospreys.

Sealspotting is not easy for the inexperienced: the shy norppa keeps away from humans, and its ringed fur is an excellent camouflage. Thanks to underwater photography and transmitters, the sublacustrine secrets of the seals have been explored.

I’m hungry! Voitto, whose fur is full of frozen lumps of snow, cries for mummy, who emerges from under the ice to feed her pup regularly. This little seal miraculously survived his critical first weeks, but in early spring he was found drowned in a fishnet. - Photos: Juha Taskinen

Taskinen tells how he once caught a seal with his bare hands. He was expecting to be joined by a colleague immediately and got hold of his slippery research subject in the water, but the seal didn’t like the idea of being hugged by a human and decided to leave. Taskinen managed to grab the seal’s back flippers, but as his numb hands were slipping in the cold water, he took one of the flippers between his teeth, just for a second, to get a better grip with his hands – and then accidentally bit the wriggling beast. As Saimaa seals are gentle predators, this one didn’t even try to bite back. Finally the seal was successfully equipped with a transmitter and a flipper tag and released back into his aquatic kingdom, unharmed, save for a minor bite on a flipper and perhaps a firm resolve to never be hugged again.

Later Taskinen thought he should find out whether the seal might have been injured by his bite, so he called a doctor, who rooted around in his medical reference material for a while, concluding that a seal bite isn’t dangerous. There was a long silence on the phone when Taskinen explained again that his was actually a case of man biting dog.

On guard: male grey seals watch over the females feeding their pups on the ice. – Photo: Seppo Keränen

The ancient cousins of the Saimaa seal, the Baltic ringed seal (Phoca hispida botnica) and the grey seal (Halichoerus grypus), live in the Baltic sea, where they too were trapped around 10,000 years ago. The grey seal gives birth on the ice, not requiring a lair in the snow as the ringed seal does.

Hylkeet, Sälar, written by Markku Lappalainen with photogaphs by Seppo Keränen, charts the marine landscape of the Baltic, its people and animals, often in impressive panorama shots. The stony, barren and shallow shoreline, its birds and animals as well as the traditional lifestyles of the people are portrayed with interesting facts and details in the text and in the photographs taken in all seasons.

Group portrait: grey seals of the Baltic live in flocks and are not as shy as their Lake Saimaa cousins. – Photo: Seppo Keränen

Hunting and, increasingly, marine pollution, have critically reduced the Baltic seal population over the past century. In the mid 1980s the World Wildlife Foundation started a protection campaign, which has been successful. The seals eat mostly Baltic herring, but as they consume the same fish as people do, competition on the sea has grown harsher recently. Large, strong and clever, the seals eat fish out of nets, which, unlike the smaller ringed seal, they also destroy. They also consume more salmon now, as their favourite, cod, has almost disappeared from the Baltic.

Sad catch: Heikki Salokangas’s family has fished for 200 years in the Gulf of Bothnia. The grey seal in the Baltic has learned how to plunder nets.. – Photo: Seppo Keränen

In the past the seals have been valuable prey, providing food, train oil, skin and fur. Hunters have also been paid for killing them, to protect human fishing. Now hunting the grey and the ringed seal is allowed during certain periods, but as seals are not easy to catch, only about half of the quota is used up annually. The market for seal products in the European Union isn’t large either. Some of the professional fishermen believe that their trade will soon become extinct as a result of the fast-growing grey seal population. It is estimated that a tenth of all grey seals of the world now live in the small Baltic Sea, which is devoid of polar bears, their only natural enemy (save man).

Both Paluu Saimaalle and Hylkeet richly chronicle the history of the age-old relationship of two mammals, man and seal, both adapted to living in arctic climates. Both eat fish, but the seal survives on fish alone. Only man has a chance of controlling the environment, and the fate of both seals and fish is in his hands – as is his own.

In other words: LIWRE at Messilä Manor

The Lahti International Writers’ Reunion (LIWRE; www.liwre.fi) will be held this year between 14 and 16 June.

In the politically and culturally active 1960s, marked by the confrontation between East and West, an idea was born to found an international, bi-annual rendezvous where writers from all over the world could freely engage in discussions on various themes.

So, in high summer, in the Mukkula Manor and its park, on the outskirts of the city of Lahti (some 120 kilometres north of Helsinki), hundreds of writers have discussed – most often, it seems – the author’s many roles in the changing world.

Among the participants since 1963 have been, for example, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin, Heinrich Böll, Camilo Jose Céla, J. M. Coetzee, Nawal El Saadawi, Günter Grass, Jaan Kross, Mario Vargas Llosa, Andrei Makïne, Salman Rushdie, Claude Simon, Yuri Trifonov…

The political East-West division, of course, became obsolete in the course of the time, but the discussions never run out of neither themes nor debaters.  The theme of the 24th reunion is ‘In other words’. Writers, the heirs of ancient storytellers, recycle and retell tales and myths at will, rework a novel into a play or an essay into a graphic novel. And what happens when fiction gets translated, i.e. is put into other words?

Chairing the discussions, which are open to the public – now at Messilä Manor, just across the lake from the original venue – will be the writer Virpi Hämeen-Anttila and the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Parnasso, Jarmo Papinniemi (who is also a member of Books from Finland’s editorial board).

An international poetry evening will take place at Wanha Walimo (‘The Old Foundry’) in Lahti, and the traditional midnight football match – Finland versus the Rest of the World – will be played one light-filled night.

According to the organisers, among the estimated thirty visiting writers will be the poets Richard Burns (UK), Kristiina Ehin (Estonia), Sayumi Kamakura (Japan) and George Elliot Clarke (Canada) and the novelists A.S. Byatt (UK), Viktor Yerofeyev (Russia), Philippe Claudel (France), Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) and Jayne Anne Phillips (US).