Juha Hurme. Photo: Stefan Bremer

One day during Advent in Helsinki the narrator in the novel Hullu (‘The lunatic’, Teos, 2012), a middle-aged man, goes mad.

Complete confusion fills his mind. He thinks he must be dead, but nevertheless manages to knock on the door of the mental hospital. To his amazement, he is admitted to the yellow building.

Because the boundaries between reality and self are, for him, completely blurred, he believes that the people in the hospital know absolutely everything about his unsuccessful life, and that he must expect humiliations and punishments. The people in white coats are aliens, or perhaps holograms.

In one of the rooms of the next venue, the white building, he sees his mother as she was 30 years ago. His room-mate is some kind of observer, the toilet door is a gateway to oblivion, the Gateway of Final Departure.

Our man tries to find consolation and sense in reading and in his books. But how a poem by Bertolt Brecht describes, in exact detail, his life-story! The pain of knowing! The paralysis of fear! ‘It was one hundred per cent pure, genuine terror – odourless, colourless and tasteless, free of causes and consequences.’

Time works very strangely, but a slow return to a shared reality begins. A notice board gives details of how life in the third, grey building works. Breakfast: 8.00. Lunch: 11.45. That is understandable, but what does this mean: ‘Clothing care individual’?

Becoming acquainted with other patients gradually brings social turning points. In the mornings, the sounds of the building have a soothing effect: ‘It was new that I began to perceive that there were other people pottering about, with their sorrows, their joys, their loves and their confusions’. ‘… I was once more a part of life, although I had only a very small stake in it. You can feel and communicate by listening, too, even if nothing more were ever to happen.’ Terror subsides.

‘I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,’ said Hamlet: the return of a thespian begins gradually. He recognises the difference between illusion and delusion.

Around New Year the patients act, as a read-through, a play written and directed by the narrator. It tells the story of Josef Julius Wecksell, a Finnish poet who wrote verse and plays in Turku in mid-19th century until he went mad and spent 42 years in the silence of a mental hospital. The play, however, moves freely between the late16th century and the year 2015.

‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’ The entire script of the play is included in the novel: its 65 pages include comments by both the director and the actors as well as events external to the drama. The performance ends with one of the patients playing air guitar. ‘We drank our evening tea. Mikko [a nurse] stayed on to supervise and we other actors swallowed our medicines and passed out into our beds. The rockets exploded and the year changed, I presume, but of that we no longer knew anything.’

‘What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!’ The narrator gradually picks up the pieces, rediscovering his reason, his nearest and dearest and his place in the world.

In this, his third novel, the theatre director and dramatist Juha Hurme (born 1959) describes a psychosis and recovery from it. In his story, he weaves a complete play text together with the stories of his main character and his fellow patients; a vivid imagination may play its part in the descent into madness, but it can also play a strong part in surviving it.

The reader of Hullu empathises with the patients, whom Hurme describes with artless but profound humour and deep sympathy: both human tragedy and comedy live behind the closed doors of the mental hospital.

Hurme’s main character takes up the role of a dramaturge in the closed community, simultaneously rebuilding his own self-understanding. ‘All relations in the world are interactive relations.’

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Tuuve Aro. Photo: Liisa Takala

Interview with Tuuve Aro, author of Himokone (‘Desire machine’): in these short stories she borrows titles and ambiance from the silver screen

A dark theatre, the smell of popcorn, expectation quivering in the air. Since childhood, the author and film critic Tuuve Aro (born 1973) has loved that magic moment when a new, exciting story is about to begin once again on the silver screen.

The stories in her fourth short story collection Himokone (‘Desire machine’, WSOY, 2012) have taken their names from films – Vertigo, Alien, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example. The book’s title comes from a certain Dr Samuel L. Brimstone, member of the ‘Royal Film Academy of Suffolk’: according to him, a film projector is a desire machine: it doesn’t give anything, it only shows, and for that very reason it is hard to resist.

A-L E: What kinds of frames do the films form for your stories?

TA: Mostly suggestive ones. The events in the stories don’t correspond with those in the film, but the atmosphere of the stories comes from the films. I feel that films offer an interesting frame for examining various phenomena. For instance, the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was basically a metaphor for the spread of communism: in my story, however, the human-eating monsters are babies, from the viewpoint of a single, childless woman. Naturally, I don’t have any children…

A-L E: Your filmic stories paint a perceptive portrait of our times. They examine consumer hysteria and the absurdity of working life, and also loneliness. In Fight Club, you write about Karoliina Järvi, a young poet hungry for fame, who creates a literary career through social media long before her first collection is published.

TA: It definitely feels quite absurd that nowadays networking and building a literary career comes first – before publishing anything, you create a product of your self and your life. In this phenomenon-first culture, it’s the person or the trend that’s being sold, not the literary worthiness of a book.  A writer today has to know how to sell herself, like sausage. I don’t want to accept that.

A-L E: What is your relationship as a writer to social media?

TA: In my thirteen years as a writer, I’ve been adept at avoiding the pitfalls of competition and envy. But this has been feeling more and more difficult since I joined Facebook a few years ago. Suddenly careers, successes, prizes and disappointments are all on display, and it’s easy to slip into the habit of comparison. It makes no sense. It just diverts attention from what is essential – the writing. You can see the change of mood in literary circles – a vague uneasiness, public poses, sniping. The storms in the publishing field and the general coarsening of values doesn’t help the situation.

A-L E: In your story Tappajahai (Jaws), a woman thirsty for love accidentally destroys the objects of her affection. The way the story arc takes a sudden, strange turn, the dark comedy, the highly original characters, are these signature features of your work?

TA: I like to tweak reality into new and strange configurations in my books. There’s also typically a visuality to the text. I see the events of my stories as images.

A-L E: You’ve published four collections of short stories, two novels, and one children’s book. Which genre is nearest to you?

TA: Definitely the short story. The encapsulation, building ‘short form suspense’ fascinates me. Stopping at the right time is its own skill.

A-L E: Your first film review was published in 1998, your first book, Harmia lämpöpatterista (‘Trouble with the radiator’) came out in 1999. How do fiction and criticism overlap?

TA: Quite naturally. They’re completely different styles of writing, but they feed each other. Reviewing is a deliberate, analytical act. I progress more instinctively when I’m writing fiction. Excessive deliberation in fiction can easily become dry.

A-L E: At the end of Himokone, Samuel L. Brimstone is quoted again: ‘When all is said and done and we’re pondering what life was all about, we no longer distinguish between what we have seen and what we have experienced.’ Is this also a summation of the life philosophy of a film buff author?

TA: In my own life, fact and fiction, sleeping and waking, film and life are definitely mixing together all the time. We live nowadays amid a flood of entertaining stimuli where it’s hard to distinguish between what’s true and what’s made up… This can be disorienting, even oppressive. On the other hand, without films, without my bizarre dreams, I wouldn’t be me. Movies have made me who I am.

Translated by Lola Rogers

Pirkko Saisio. Photo: Laura Malmivaara

Why does the private become political? Who makes it happen? Why should religious doctrines define private matters such as sexuality? Why should those who wield power in the political system define personal sexuality?

Pirkko Saisio (born 1949), a theatremaker as well as a prolific and versatile author of plays, novels, film and television scripts, has written a play for the Finnish National Theatre entitled HOMO! and subtitled, ‘An anarchist musical farce’.

Answers to the above questions – and they are complicated – are to be found in, for example, historical, psychological and sociological research.

In the last century, Stalin and Hitler condemned gays. Thirty years ago homosexuality was considered an sickness in Finland; forty years ago it was a crime. Today, it is still illegal in more than 75 countries: punishments vary from flogging to life imprisonment or death. In democratic societies, the ‘gay problem’ is a question of human rights, and hence a subject for public debate – for example, in a musical play, for of course the issue also involves that eternally fascinating and entertaining feature of human life, love.

At the Finnish National Theatre HOMO! is a musical, composed by Jussi Tuurna; there’s a live band of four musicians on stage. The dozen-strong cast, including two students from the Finnish Theatre Academy, surprise the audience with their considerable musical talents – the National hasn’t exactly been famed for its musical profile in the past. Since its premiere last September, HOMO! has been playing to full houses.

In the central roles are a middle-aged married couple, Veijo and Hellevi Teräs, their student daughter Rebekka and the family’s au pair, the handsome young Moritz – and Hellevi’s conscience.

Hellevi is a hard-line Christian member of parliament who does not approve of gays. The biddable house-husband Veijo has sought the services of a psychiatrist because he is tormented by dreams about Snow White who looks like Hellevi. Rebekka is infatuated with the handsome Moritz, but he is seeking his sexual identity and falls in love with a Muslim boy. Hellevi’s conscience can no longer tolerate Hellevi’s fundamentalist views, and runs away – to become a Muslim.

From the metatheatrical opening onwards, the story treats its audience to a switchback ride of events and imagination. Unafraid of megalomanic exaggeration, the text wants to say absolutely everything about its subject; the operatic music pumps into it a hugely entertaining musical spirit.

One of the things that makes HOMO! topical in Finland now is the current debate: civil relationships between two people of the same sex are permitted, but there is no law on equal, gender-neutral marriage. Both the Lutheran and the (much smaller) Orthodox churches in Finland are state churches which receive government support, and the majority of Finns are members of one or other of these religious communities. The churches’ doctrines have thus traditionally been influential. Homosexuality is no longer considered socially reprehensible (neither is divorce!), but because some of the leaders of the Christian Democrats – which opposes, for example, the gender-neutral marriage bill – have expressed strongly homophobic views, thousands of tax-paying people have left the Lutheran church. This, of course, is a matter of concern to the church, if not to the party.

Saisio skillfully satirises the arguments of politicians and bishops in the dialogue. She also allows Hellevi a biting intellect as well as a sharp tongue – ideologies and world views are set on collision paths, but her characters and her themes are not trivialised, despite the comic turns and speed of the plot.

Into the visually impressive bubbling witch’s cauldron of the stage Saisio throws, along with Snow White, seven dwarves: they are young ice-hockey players, with comical macho clichés. Moritz desperately tries to be one of them. Other characters include bishops, Stalin (‘Homosexuality is a relic of capitalism!’), Hitler and Goering, Shakespeare and Hans Christian Andersen, Churchill, the apostle Paul and the British mathematician Alan Turing (he was sentenced to treatment with female hormones as punishment for a homosexual crime, and died in 1954, having eaten a poisoned apple).

Jussi Tuurna’s compositions are versatile, vigorously melodic and rhythmically varied (including tango, waltz, bolero, march, rock‘n’roll, a ballad). His music is emotional but not sentimental – not at all unlike Kurt Weill’s dramatic narrative scores for Bertolt Brecht’s plays. It inspires the cast, resulting in enjoyable part-singing and solo performances.

HOMO! brings to mind Tony Kushner’s famous play and television film, Angels in America (1991–1992), ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’. Set in the years of the outburst of AIDS, it embraces a huge scale of issues and themes – religion, history and politics, Jews, Mormons, angels, gays, McCarthyism, marriage, race, illness, friendship, loyalty and betrayal. Its world-wide success results from the fact that its contemporary characters are very sympathetic in their suffering and in their love.

Saisio writes: ‘Gays and lesbians continue to form an important minority, larger than the Finland-Swedish or fundamentalist Christian minorities, which bear full civil responsibilities but which do not enjoy full civil rights.’ In the end, HOMO! claims: politicians must not define people’s identities; gay people should not be subjected to any political or religious ideology.

HOMO! ends with a gentle song sung by the ensemble: ‘… if there were a land / where everyone could / love, love, love / whoever they want… There the twin towers / would still rake the sky, / in Baghdad instead of bombs / we’d hear a new story / about a thousand and one nights / where you can / love, love, love whoever you want!… Could it be here, that land, / where even strangers / are able to be loved?’ The audience and the cast share the last minutes of the play in mutual wishful thinking.

Pirkko Saisio: HOMO! Musiikkinäytelmä (‘HOMO! A musical play’, Helsinki: Lasipalatsi, 2011. ISBN 978-952-480-245-1).
Production: The Finnish National Theatre. Music: Jussi Tuurna. A recording is available on a CD (later in digitised form) from the National Theatre

Harri Nordell. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

The poems of Harri Nordell are a mystery to me. Each time I open one of his books, my reading begins afresh. I have analysed and translated his poems, but the texts have still not become familiar. I have not begun to comprehend them. They always speak to me as if for the first time.

I could not wish for a greater gift from a poem. These poems create a special state of being; I could call it not-knowing or marvelling. I feel I am involved in an unfolding event.

Nordell’s poems open me up, but I am unable to prise them open. I do not want to interpret cryptic expressions, or seek out more explicit meanings for them. I would not wish to write on top of these poems, to mute silence with superfluous words.

The imagery of the poems is diverse: traditional at times, highly radical at others. Despite their use of imagery, the texts resist a metaphorical reading, whereby interpretation uncovers the ‘real’ meaning behind an image. The poems do denote something, but not anything that can be named in simpler terms. There is secrecy in the saying.

Nordell’s poems cut across different times, yet their moment is now. A Nordell poem arrives softly yet forcefully. Mere shreds come to the surface, yet the work brings aeons with it. The poem is placeless, in a vacuum. Yet each poem engages with the world.

The modern poem has often been compared to a sculpture. The comparison emphasises the object-like quality of a poem: density of meaning, inward-directed power, sharply delineated contours. The characterisation befits Nordell in that, when scrutinising a sparse poem from different angles, one keeps discovering new meanings, and the relationships between these meanings create tension. For example, the way Nordell blurs the distinction between parts of speech makes micro-reading so rewarding that the poem’s references to the exterior world may not be the main focus of interpretation.

Even so, I think that the effect of Nordell’s work is based on how it extends beyond itself, into ‘reality’. There is something visionary in this, maybe even dramatic; the emergence of the world appears as a kind of birth in which words play an active role. The words do not merely weave into each other, they evoke the world.

In terms of modernist self-sufficiency, a Nordell poem is not complete. It does not close itself off. In the world of sculpture, the works of Alberto Giacometti, which shimmer endlessly, seeking their own contours, provides a point of comparison. This kind of movement intensifies with the progress of Nordell’s work: the innovative narrativity of Valkoinen kirja (‘The white book’, 2006)) departs even further from rock-like solidity. The weight of the single word reduces, the poem’s edge dissolves. The poem breathes in and out.

The ‘I’ of the poem often says ‘you’. The ‘I’ addresses another person, a beloved, but there are much broader implications to this act. The ‘I’ is a function of the ‘you’, and vice versa; and in that sense always incomplete. One’s fundamental relationship with the world entails addressing ‘you’ and being addressed. Addressing ‘you’ signifies participation in the unfolding and emergence of things here and now; just as light creates the world by making it visible.

There are no finished words. The dialogic ‘I – you’ relationship introduces something tentative or sketchy into the poems. Although the texts have been honed to the point of minimalism, the gesture of crystallisation, of finalisation, is missing. They call out to you.

I once stood in front of a Mark Rothko painting. All of a sudden, the painting became a window. I felt I was looking through it, into another world.

Experiencing Nordell’s poems is similar. The most daring leap they make is to reach the outer limit, the edge of ineffability.

The edge of the sacred, the transcendental? The old labels are not good enough. The language has to be constructed anew. It is constructed here, in the actual event of naming, and not in the familiar, established manner. This despite the fact that the whole train of tradition is trailing behind. (And how lightly it trails!) Nordell’s poems are not riddles I could try to solve. They point at something outside themselves, but at what? If you could say it in other words, there would be no poems. The works make me listen to another way of saying things, one that differs from the one I regard as my language.

The potential ‘obscurity’ of the poems does not constitute glued-on aesthetics, but is an inevitable consequence of what they are striving at. The attempt to say, the tough battle the poems wage over naming, is born from an encounter with something outside the known and familiar.

In this respect, Nordell is a Hermetist, a scion of the mythical Hermes Trimegistos and of Paul Celan. But ‘hermetic’ not in the sense of air-tight or impenetrable. In some incomprehensible manner, the Nordell poem becomes a window; we look through it.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

This is an edited version of Tarja Roinila’s ‘Afterword’ to Harri Nordell’s selected poems, Sanaliekki äänettömyydessä. Valitut runot 1980–2006 (‘A word-flame in silence. Selected poems 1980–2006’, WSOY, 2011). See also Sound and meaning, an essay by Tarja Roinila on translating poetry, including Nordell’s

Henriikka Tavi. Photograph: Heini Lehväslaiho

In recent years volumes of contemporary Finnish poetry have offered readers the chance to enjoy excellent cover artwork. Right down to the typographical layout, the visual aspects of recently published volumes of poetry – by small and large publishers alike – have turned these books into highly refined, almost holistic works of art.

In such a way the poetics of the language and, in particular, the thematic starting point of the poems are lent a platform that both enhances and strengthens them.

Decorated with images of butterflies, the mournful grey jacket sleeve of Toivo (‘Hope’, Teos 2011), the third volume of poetry by Henriikka Tavi (born 1978), conceals the book’s bright yellow covers and an illuminated woodland path winding its way across them.

In this way the troubled central theme of this multi-disciplinary, collage-style work is immediately reflected in Camilla Pentti’s cover design.

Tavi is one of the most significant poets of her generation. Her debut collection Esim. Esa (‘Esa, for ex.’, 2007) represented a fanciful fusion of the Finnish language and the latest ideas in experimental poetry, a veritable tutti frutti. In her second collection Sanakirja ‘(Dictionary’), she explored the expressive possibilities of different languages juxtaposed with one another. This time she continues her exploration of the language of emotion – her mother tongue – and in Toivo she extracts a variety of extremely beautiful, rhythmical and typographical potential from the core of the language itself.

The principle inspiration for Toivo is the Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009), perhaps the most influential experimental poet of her generation. Like Toivo, her collection Sommerfugledalen (‘The butterfly valley’) brings together the dual themes of grief and longing with childhood memories and the poetic landscape of a summer meadow filled with butterflies. Both poets explore the process of metamorphosis through the metaphor of flying insects: the life span of hungry grubs, coffin-like pupae and the stunning beauty of butterflies.

Cover design of Toivo: Camilla Pentti

A variation of sonnet form, Christensen’s collection receives its own homage in Tavi’s work: Toivo begins and ends with a four-strophe, sixteen-line ‘Lullaby’. The words of these lullabies are a rhythmic, resonant list of butterflies and moths. A translation of these lullabies may be out of the question, but it would appear that the most beautiful Finnish compound names for these insects have here been brought together in song.  ‘Sysiyökkönen, synkkänopsa, / kuutäplä, kiertokiitäjä, / kiiltoyökkönen, kirjovaski, / lyijysuomu, kilpiruuni’….

Henriikka Tavi writes about generations – grandparents, parents and children – and the areas of sorrow and hope that exist between them, the grey areas that it usually takes a lifetime to process fully. These winged lullabies sensitively expand the boundaries of interpretation into a series of pupa cradles and metamorphoses.

‘The symmetry of grief’ is one of Christensen’s recurring butterfly metaphors; Tavi translates this as ‘the balance of grief’. This symmetry is represented in the stunning colours of the Mourning Cloak or the Red Admiral: bright colours against a dark, velvet background and vice versa. In these terms, some may think this too aesthetic a starting point for a collection of poetry, but the author of Hope is serious. She turns into verses and strophes two-page stories or death, of people who have departed more or less of their own accord, of the years of their births and deaths. Suicide represents the lack of hope, the abortion of life, the breaking open of the pupa cradle before the metamorphosis is complete.

‘I do not write / to air our family’s business to all and sundry. / Let me / say this as clearly as possible: / You died in vain.’ Here the poet addresses all those who have died ‘in vain’ and one figure in particular, someone whom we might interpret as a father. The poet is also like a young migratory salmon on its way towards the sea, a place where its past and future can become one. She wants to make the lost visible: ‘I’m trying to put a spark in you. / I’m writing so that you’ll come and visit / me. I remember things so little.’

Writing, making pictures, art – all these bring into view things that would otherwise be left unexpressed: ‘Take a photograph of me, one that records my fatigue. As a legacy I’ll leave you a leaking rowing boat, the unfinished renovations and innumerable hours of missed sleep.’ The poet peers towards the closest relationships she remembers as a child, memories that now remain so distant. ‘In the shadow of our own dusk, anything can be shaped once again,’ she says and by the very act of writing enters into a series of metamorphoses spanning from one generation to the next.

Where, therefore, is there room for human hope in poems that so wholly inhabit the valley of sorrow? The collection responds to this question by dropping in the full abundance of the poet’s sense of language. The dark background sucks in the bright stripes in the collage of dialect poems, rhymes, stories in the style of recited folk songs – anything that come close to the reader. Tavi revives the intimacy of speech and locality in poems entitled ‘shavings’, including her grandmother’s memories of childhood written in an endearing, touching vernacular.

The brightness of the thematic figure in the collage that makes up Toivo is open to all; it leaves ample room for interpretation and appeals, shamelessly, to the reader’s emotions.

Translated by David Hackston

Bo Carpelan. Photo: Ulla Montan

The epigraph to Bo Carpelan’s prose work, Blad ur höstens arkiv. Tomas Skarfelts anteckningar (‘Leaves from autumn’s archive. The notes of Tomas Skarfelt’) is a quotation from Goethe: Zum Erstaunen bin ich da (‘To marvel I am here’). The world is a wonder to behold, one’s curiosity ought to be satisfied with less. It could stand as a motto for the whole of Carpelan’s literary work.

That work is now complete. Bo Carpelan died in February this year at the age of 84. He had made his debut in 1946 with the poetry collection Som en dunkel värme (‘Like an obscure warmth’).

In his prose as in his poetry, Carpelan built on a process of heightened and unconditional perception. Where others see only trees or forest, he saw a complex, branching light. His poetic ‘I’ could even watch itself perceiving, as when one autumn evening Tomas Skarfelt writes of a long-eared owl: ‘The yellow eyes looked at me attentively for a moment: a rather large, feather-clad camera.’ Carpelan often complained of having a poor memory, but it was a photographic one.

His first prose work for adults, Rösterna i den sena timmen (‘Voices in the late hour’) appeared in 1971, a quarter of a century after his emergence as a lyricist. And this year a quarter of a century has passed since his prose breakthrough with Axel (a novel depicting the life of a relative of the composer Jean Sibelius, translated into six languages, also in English). Carpelan’s native language was indeed poetry, but he extended that language with prose that bore his own personal stamp, a parlando in which the words are lined with air but honed with precision.

Blad ur höstens arkiv (Schildts, 2011; in Finnish, Lehtiä syksyn arkistosta, Otava) consists of 101 diary entries made by Tomas Skarfelt, a retired statistician who remains at his summer cottage even though summer has now run its course. He reflects in elegiac fashion, immersed in nature, watching his ‘I’, sometimes close to and sometimes at a distance. He is also a grumbler. The reader is probably most content when he appears as a sour old man, for then the author can make play with this. Right to the last, Carpelan was able to spin moods out of nowhere while slipping in bon mots like a cabaret performer.

The cover indicates that this is a novel. Carpelan’s work has highlighted problems of genre before. When (uniquely) he received the Finlandia Prize for the second time with his prose work Berg, the award had been narrowed to a prize for novels only, and the choice sparked a debate: was this really a novel? As a book, Berg was poetic and beautifully written, but it lacked a plot, some critics said. This time the plot consists of an ‘I’ that records its insights into the conditions for peaceful coexistence with the world while it watches the autumn closing in around it. The book is a Song of Songs of the everyday: viewed closely, each day is a miracle – ‘Strange, all beauty.’

The self and the world are not alone with each other. In its two hundred pages, Blad från höstens arkiv contains, I believe, more varied elective affinities than any other work by Carpelan. Joyce, Pavese, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Buber, Hesse, Kafka, and all the others: they are there as conversation partners, exact quotations, or semi-furtive nods of greeting. The most assiduous guest is Odradek, an incomprehensible and indestructible ‘something’ which Carpelan has borrowed from a short story by Kafka and now, with a collegial gesture, makes his own. Odradek becomes the name of Tomas Skarfelt’s unease, which follows him through the autumn.

Cover: Anders Carpelan (graphic designer, Bo Carpelan's son)

Bo Carpelan’s posthumous prose derives its intense vitality from the fact that in it the personal is given a precision that cranks it up into universally recognisable experience. The personal has resonance: Blad från höstens arkiv is an echo chamber, and a library, a collection of books. As such, it is a stylish and stylistically appropriate exit from a life among books, some of the most memorable of which he wrote himself.

Translated by David McDuff

Jouni Tossavainen. Photo: Like

Poet and writer Jouni Tossavainen has directed his verbal curiosity towards blog writing in his eighth prose work, entitled Sivullisia (‘Outsiders’, Like, 2011); it consists of a collection of (fictional) blog posts, which seem to contain plenty of junk as well as treasures.

The book is a dizzying linguistic playground; it includes posts, around a page in length, from 157 ‘outsiders’. Escaping the familiar structures of language usage gives rise to snapshots of estrangement.

The narrator of the book claims to have assembled his material from a collection of blog posts received from the greater Helsinki region. Individual fragments of views and facts are like codes that have lost what they were meant to unlock. Mocking, satirical jibes emerge from the texts, accompanied by a sneaking suspicion of understanding and solace, as there ought to be in a true carnival.

Tossavainen’s humour adds a gentle, perhaps more rural shade to the urban cultural landscape. He writes these experienced and less-experienced contributors with rather capricious voices: the result is a discordant yet collective mixed choir. Sivullisia portrays people in terms of their professions, jobs or free time that get muddled up with work or unemployment. The fragmentary stream of consciousness gallops back and forth in an arena from which the voices of the outsiders are thrown into the chaos of the world, mirroring it.

This collection of flowing, torrenting yet brief texts shows that people can – and do – say anything they want at their computers. Tossavainen (born 1958) provides an acrobatic exemplar of this phenomenon. Each blog post starts with a word or job title that describes its writer’s current occupation, from A to Z. The uncensored nature of the Internet reveals something about what links people’s regular jobs to often pointless actions and activities in order to demonstrate the relationship of alienation and outsiderness to all of life.

The narrative, bordering on the absurd and the surreal, is linked to sharp cultural criticism and contemporary satire between the lines. Convoluted slapstick stories develop into tragicomedy, something more serious and even sentimental. These outsiders give us a unique reading of our blogging era.

Translated by Ruth Urbom

Rosa Liksom. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

A Finnish girl studying archaeology in Moscow finds herself sharing a train compartment with a Russian man on the long journey from Moscow through Siberia to Ulan Bator. The girl travels for weeks to see the region’s ancient rock-paintings; the man’s destination is a big building site. The drama of the enclosed space  is built of two people and two worlds that cannot escape one another.

The story, in Hytti no 6 (‘Compartment number 6’) by Rosa Liksom, develops through small stories and reminiscences as the backgrounds of the girl and the man open up. At the places where the train stops, other people from the steppe and cities of Russia become intertwined with the narrative.

The career of the Lapp writer Rosa Liksom spans more than 25 years and demonstrates a rare ability to master various fields of both writing and the visual arts. In the history of contemporary Finnish prose, her novels and collections of short prose are a fantastic chapter of originally developed Nordic localism and post-modernist world citizenship. Liksom’s first book, short prose, was published in 1985; her work has been translated into 14 languages.

In Hytti no 6 (‘Compartment number 6’, WSOY, 2011), Liksom surprises us once again. The writer pays homage to a tradition reflecting the Russian povest, or long short story. This medium-length prose form became familiar to Finns toward the end of the 19th century, in what was then the Russian-administrated Grand Duchy of Finland, when the Finnish-language newspapers of the period published Russian literature in part-work form. Representatives of this form acquired the name novella only later in the 20th century.

The novel is set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, the period before perestroika. In her works of the 1980s, Go Moskova Go (in English: Go Moscow Go, 1991) and Väliasema Gagarin (‘Space station Gagarin’), Liksom (the pseudonym of Anni Ylävaara, born 1958) writes about the same places and themes, but in a different, post-modern genre. Palpable in the new story both stylistically and through open references is the world-philosophical seriousness of 19th-century Russian literature, a kind of modern melancholy, which Liksom realises magnificently.

The well-muscled man is a ‘Stakhanovite meat-machine and concrete hero’, brutal, hard-talking and fond of his vodka. Equally terrible is his background: he lived on the street from the age of five and since then has found his university of life going from camp to camp. He tells stories about his countless women and the ‘burnt-out cunt’ of his wife, who has gone through fifteen abortions, as if to pass the time, which makes the girl feel sick. This man both abuses and longs for the same woman.

The girl, on the other hand, is too dry and mummy-like for the man’s taste – which does not prevent him from importuning her. His dull gaze and impudence raise echoes from the girl’s past; his drunken ramblings are too familiar. Her own father is the Finnish version of this foul-mouthed monster.

Why do I love this country, the girl wonders, and the reader wonders the same thing. When they finally reach Ulan Bator, the ancient rock-paintings almost go unvisited – but then she receives unexpected help from her travelling companion.

Only someone like her can overtake the violent system discipline that reaches as far as Mongolia, which is possible to break down by a credible appearance and a sufficient amount of roubles. ‘People are capable of anything if they are forced to do it,’ remarks an energetic train hostess in the corridor of the Trans-Siberian express.

Russia and its ‘inexhaustible human riches’, as well as the absurdity of the Soviet system, give soul to Liksom’s sometimes poetic narrative, crafting it into a living creature that, like Russian delicacies, combine the sour, the sweet and the salt.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Gösta Ågren. Photo: Studio Paschinsky

The latest poems by Gösta Ågren, in the collection I det stora hela (‘On the whole’, Söderströms, 2011), are a continuation of the poet’s lifelong striving to unite the realm of private and personal experience with the domain of the shared, the social and the universal.

Ågren, born in 1936 in Ostrobothnia, on the west coast of Finland, has published twenty-eight collections of poetry. I det stora hela is the latest in an apparently inexhaustible series of books that reflect upon life and death, mostly in terse, aphoristic blocks that are hewn out of the poet’s own existence.

In the background of nearly all his poems is an Ostrobothnian childhood which, in its remoteness and solidarity with his close relatives, sets him apart in the same way as the Swedish language in which he writes sets him apart within a Finnish cultural context, though perhaps not in a Finland-Swedish one – for he shares not only its linguistic heritage, but also its traditional concern with the polarity and ultimate reconciliation of the individual and the community.

To achieve the synthesis that is the hallmark of his poetry, Ågren makes reference to the universalising quality of classical Greek drama, and especially to its anonymous chorus – the symbol and realisation of mankind in general. In these concise and often painfully intricate epiphanies we are confronted with an extension of the meaning expressed by the German classic poet Friedrich Hölderlin in his four-line poem Die Linien des Lebens (The lines of life): Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen (‘What here we are, there a God can complete’).

The joys, sorrows, failures and celebrations of individual lives are the token of cosmic events that take place elsewhere, on the other side of the gulf that separates the living from the dead. It is a process that we are sometimes dimly aware of in the processes of nature: in the eyes of a cow that is being approached by two people, the poet sees an affirmation of being that is primordial, and goes beyond the immediately human: She observes them / as she observes everything / that moves in the night’s white / peace, for nothing is quite / guiltless; everything that is, / is ancient, and seeks. (Kons ögon, ‘The cow’s eyes’)

Kristina Carlson. Photo: Tommi Tuomi

Interview with Kristina Carlson, author of William N. Päiväkirja (‘William N. Diary’, Otava, 2011)

‘Monsieur W. Nylander had died alone, his head resting against his desk. We’d known for a long while that your beloved relative was not well, but whenever he was walking along the street and someone enquired as to his health, he always replied that he felt fit and well.’

Finnish-born Monsieur William N. lives in Paris at the end of the 19th century. The grumpy old scientist spends his days studying lichens in his small, dusty apartment and writing bitter comments in his diary about the way of the world, all things meaningless, and the glory and reputation that he never achieved.

William Nylander (born Oulu, 1822 – died Paris, 1899) is a historical figure who truly existed, and the remarks quoted above are taken from a letter sent by William’s housekeeper to his sister Elise in Finland, but other than this William’s diary is entirely the work of Kristina Carlson. The hermetic botanist has now become the protagonist of a novel written in 2011.

SL: Monsieur N. is the central character of your third novel, written in monologue form. What was it you found so fascinating about this grouchy old man that he ended up coming to life as a character in your novel?

KC: I was interested in William’s well-documented obstinacy, because it would seem that then as now both scientific and artistic success have required a certain level of social aptitude. At the very least they required good manners. William’s opinions and pronouncements are mostly my own creations, though it is true that he was very upset that even his status as a professor didn’t provide him with a decent apartment in Helsinki.

In our time, one’s social skills are almost de facto put in the spotlight. I doubt William would have had a single friend on Facebook. I wanted to examine what life must be like for such a recluse – not least because I recognise some of the same traits in myself. As I was writing, I wondered what readers might think of someone as unlikeable as William. I’m rather pleased with him because he’s also aroused a great deal of empathy, pity and even sympathy. That’s the way I reacted to him too. William was and continues to be a respected researcher, but his problematic character traits made his life very lonely.

SL: How did you come across Monsieur N.? By chance?

KC: About ten years ago I read A.G. Morton’s book A History of Botanical Science. The translated edition also contained an appendix written by Finnish researchers in the field. That’s when I first encountered Mr Nylander, a man who interested me far more because of his persona than because of his scientific achievements. So yes, it was by chance.

SL: There are conflicts and dichotomies in every one of us. Monsieur N. is an ascetic scientist with a scornful disdain of imagination, a man who from day to day subsists on milk, bread and soup but who, when given the chance, would happily tuck into a dish of braised hare and knows better than to spit in his Burgundy. He never reads novels or listens to music, but a painting by Georges Seurat makes a great impression on him. According to N., paintings are different from novels or music because ‘you don’t have to imagine them’. N. believes that Seurat’s manner of painting is ‘scientific’ because he doesn’t attempt to copy reality but breaks it up and puts it back together again; under the microscope ‘the eyes fix on the tiniest elements and in our brains we perceive their significance, their being.’ Did you consciously set out to look for William’s inherent contradictions or did his personality take shape spontaneously? How do you write when you’re trying to characterise a fictional person?

KC: Biographical information about Nylander and his life provided some material, but for the most part his character came to life in my head. When you look inside a fictional character, when you really get into their heads, the creative process is quite a spontaneous one. I didn’t need to search for dichotomies or contradictions; they arose out of William’s character all by themselves. A person with no contradictions, a ‘rounded’ character, wouldn’t be the least bit interesting. We all have conflicting impulses pulling and pushing us at the same time. We don’t necessarily notice these traits in ourselves, but in a fictional character they are far easier to pinpoint. William’s interest in good food – whenever someone else is serving it – is a manifestation of the other side of his miserly persona: the gluttonous side. In fact, many phenomena that seem so contradictory are in fact simply the other side of another aspect, and in a way they are logically linked to one another.

SL: The novel highlights the parallel natures of and the differences between art and science. Your previous novel Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’, 2009) examines the right of an individual to be different within a homogenous group, in this case a small village community in Victorian England, and the extent to which this is ultimately possible. This time the setting is the crowded city of Paris, but as with the previous book, it seems that at the heart of this novel too is an examination of the price an individual must pay in order to retain his integrity against the pressures of time and society. In his final diary entry before his death, William N. comments that ‘perhaps my soul is reminiscent of a dried raisin, but I cannot hate myself, for I have no one else.’ This is a person who avoids the pursuit of ‘happiness’, but surely he too has an idea of what it is?

KC: William certainly spends time considering what happiness might be. From his perspective it is a stagnant, airless, stuffy state of being. To a great extent he equates happiness with the bourgeois high-life, something that requires certain elements that might be considered markers of respectability: a family, a house and possessions. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that happiness might be something else, a state or a peace of mind that can exist entirely independently of any external factors. Even the comfort or happiness of religion is something alien to him. William is constantly growling and grumbling. He seems anything but happy – and yet I believe that his high self-respect and the knowledge that he has retained his integrity in difficult circumstances give him a level of satisfaction. Perhaps this too is happiness, albeit of a somewhat sour kind.

Translated by David Hackston

I’ve got a problem, and it’s a problem I share with my agent, my publisher, book retailers and librarians.

Nobody really knows which literary pigeonhole my works belong to. Almost without exception my stories include some element that is mystical, magical or otherwise at odds with our everyday reality, or they might be set in the future.

‘Doesn’t that make it fantasy?’ some might ask. ‘Or science fiction?’

Seasoned readers will of course appreciate that both ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’ are very broad concepts that can encompass a whole variety of different texts. Even so, I still don’t want my works to be bunched into either of these categories. Why not?

For the simple reason that what we might call the ‘wider readership’ doesn’t look upon these categories with a particularly open mind. A significant section of the people who do not read books in these styles have a surprisingly narrow understanding of what these genres entail. For them, the mere mention of the word ‘fantasy’ conjures up visions of a pseudo-Dark Age world inhabited by fairies, spirits, dwarves and dragons and where people used magic swords to fight against the powers of darkness. Meanwhile many people think works of ‘science fiction’ must be set in space or on a far-off planet and feature lots of complicated technology, laser pistols and monsters with green tentacles. And it is because of stereotypical ideas like this that many people are turned off by ‘fantasy’ and ‘science fiction’. And the reason they are so turned off is about as rational as saying, ‘No, I don’t read detective novels, because they’re all full of old English spinsters solving crimes in between their cups of tea.’

If my works are labelled ‘fantasy’ or ‘science fiction’, everybody loses out. Certain readers will avoid them, because they’ll think they’re full of magic cloaks and neutron stars, though they might very much enjoy what I actually write about. On the other hand, if fans of post-Tolkien fantasy or hardcore sci-fi pick up one of my books, they won’t get what they are expecting either.

I write stories, for crying out loud, not certain genres. The genre isn’t the point of writing; it’s merely one of the writer’s many tools.

Like all writers, I use fiction to reflect, analyse and to try and deconstruct certain – often societal – problems and issues. Using non-realistic elements in my stories helps me to create a subtext and a fresh perspective on events. We might compare this to the ways in which we light a given object: if realism is when you light a statue from the front, I would move the light source so that the light hits the statue at a steep, diagonal angle. The object remains the same, but it looks different as new details are lit up while familiar details are hidden in shadow.

Let me give an example. If a writer wishes to examine the problems of otherness, of being an outsider, he might choose to write fiction that is a true depiction of everyday experience. But when that writer is someone illuminating the same story from a diagonal angle, such as Franz Kafka, he writes a story in which a man turns into a giant cockroach. A story of social exclusion, otherness, inadaptability, lack of acceptance and self-esteem suddenly becomes arresting and shocking in a completely different way. The story examines the issue of being judged from a most extreme angle: who could possible love an enormous insect?

It’s hard to squeeze Kafka’s story into any particular genre box: fantasy, surrealism, or simply horror? It doesn’t matter; above all the story is weird.

‘Weird’ is a good term for all ‘diagonal’ genres of this kind, hybrids of these genres, and genres that don’t have any other name.

For some reason the community of weird writers in Finland is thriving and of a very high standard. Courageous writers, each carving out their own path, are producing touching, believable and memorable stories that can’t easily be pigeonholed as belonging to any pre-existing genre. Common features of their work include the blurring of genre boundaries, the bringing together of different genres and the unbridled flight of imagination. In their stories, a man might take up residence in his wife’s thigh, dreams might disappear from Europe altogether, or whales may give birth to shamans. They – or perhaps I should say we – are weird and proud of it. In fact, the trend is so clear that we should give it a name all of its own: suomikumma, ‘Finnish Weird’.

I can’t help wondering quite how literature from a small geographical region can suddenly form a concept all of its own, a feat that Nordic crime fiction has achieved in recent years. It started off with a few star authors (in the case of Finnish Weird, Leena Krohn could be a good example), demonstrated that it is of a high quality, found a market of its own – and all the while a thriving, vibrant subculture has gradually emerged: the success of the pioneers feeds new talents, demands increases supply, and with that the positive cycle is ready.

Finnish Weird could very well become the next Nordic literary phenomenon, concept and cultural export product. I would be more than happy for my works to be categorised as Finnish Weird – the name doesn’t conjure up prejudices or dusty old ideas, but simply promises the reader that when they open the book, anything could happen.

Translated by David Hackston

Johanna Holmström. Photo: Irmeli Jung

‘In my writing I try to give as many angles as possible, and my agenda is to show that there’s not just one truth, that there are always several ways of seeing what one perceives at first sight. So I often have more than one main narrator. I constantly aim to question accepted truths. My stories always begin with indignation about something I feel I must write about. Fiction is a way of distancing oneself. After all, books are literary, invented things. When you work on the subject of a literary text it becomes less personal.’

This is how Johanna Holmström (born 1981) describes her approach to writing. Since her first collection of short stories published in 2003 she has produced a book every two years: three short story collections and one novel. Her books have been variously described as imaginative, committed and uncomfortable. Her short story ‘Stormen’ (‘The storm’) is a precisely observed account of a day when everything changes for its young protagonist.

TS: You’ve written three books of short stories. Did you deliberately choose short fiction as your genre?

JH: I’ve written a novel, too, but even as I was writing it I noticed that I was using the same techniques that I do when I write short fiction, and that didn’t really work. In a short story you can focus on every small detail, whereas in a novel you have to employ a style that’s more sweeping. The short story is stylistically compact, it often describes brief moments and yet it should also say as much as a whole novel. When I’m writing I am very precise, I do a lot of work on the language and spend an endless amount of time polishing details.

TS: What do you think the short story of the future will look like?

JH: The short story is going to increase in popularity. It’s already making progress in Europe – and Africa – for example. There is so much room for the form to develop. Anything can happen with that form, it’s able to use all the components of literature. I’m constantly preoccupied with trying to develop it, to see what can be done with it.

Before I started out as a writer I had read so many bad short story collections. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write short fiction – I wanted to write the kind of thing I had wanted to read myself. And I knew what I was going to write, and how. I think a good short story collection can’t consist of disconnected narratives, it has to hang together in some way. That is what I’ve wanted to work towards, and it’s what I did in Camera Obscura. The publisher asked me if I would write it as a novel, but I wanted the words ‘short stories’ on the book’s cover.

TS: But now you’re working on a novel?

JH: Yes, it wasn’t that I thought I had to write one, but the topic I wanted to write about needed that kind of scope. The novel is about a Finland-Swedish Muslim family. It’s a book about fundamentalism, Islam, culture and the rebellion of children against the ideologies of their parents. I did a lot of background work – I borrowed over 200 books from the library, and I also had to make a break with short story thinking. And I was pleased to notice that I’d been wrong in my own assumptions – how much I had really been influenced by the media and the public debate on the subject the book is about, much more than I’d thought, but I was able to revise that picture. A novel takes more time to mature than short stories do, and this one is no exception. I’ve been thinking about the topic and working on the book for nearly five years.

TS: You’re a trained journalist. Has that affected your writing?

JH: I’ve learnt an enormous amount from my profession: the ability to try to remain objective, to do a lot of research if it’s necessary, to write in a pared-down way when required, the disciplined ability to edit and the interest in finding out about things. I read newspapers a lot and I react to external stimuli that I have to get to grips with and write about. I don’t think I could write a historical novel – I want to write about topical issues.

I write a lot all the time, and I’m disciplined about my writing.  I also welcome comments and feedback from others, because I can’t always know what will work for every reader. If someone points out that something I’ve written just doesn’t work, I take it out.

I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. When I was nineteen I took part in a creative writing course where we visited the author Monika Fagerholm and she gave us a useful tip, though I’m not sure that she knows she did: always stop when you know how to go on. Never write everything out of yourself – and that has worked for me all these years.

TS: I read in an interview that you think you have a moral responsibility as an author, that you can’t just write in an aesthetic, literary way? Some of your stories also have a socio-political agenda.

JH: For me it it’s not clear-cut who is good and who is bad. It’s a person’s actions that decide that. My characters’ actions decide what happens to them. I’ve been criticised for making my characters unsympathetic – but for me the characters are less important than what they do. I don’t feel sympathy for them, and sometimes they have to suffer so that the story can go the way I want it to.

I also think about my responsibility as an author, what it is I’m giving to the world and what is the best way to do it. Maybe not everything is material for literature – sometimes it’s better to write a column, and sometimes it’s better to write a diary.

TS: Where is your literary home? How would you place yourself in Finland-Swedish literature, a minority literature that has rather broad and fuzzy outlines, a tolerant one, perhaps, but still relatively traditional?

JH: I would say that I’m slightly outside ‘typical’ Finland-Swedish literature. I wrote my master’s dissertation on the typical Finland-Swedish novel. Statistically that’s a book about a middle-aged man in a midlife crisis written by a middle-aged man. The action is set in Helsinki. Or it’s about Finland-Swedishness, what it means to be a Swedish-speaking Finn. Now there’s a new generation of young writing women who write about things other than themselves. Perhaps I see myself as a bit of an underdog. Not that I’m outside the literary establishment, but I like to adopt the perspective of those who are weaker.

Translated by David McDuff

Johanna Holmström’s works: Inlåst och andra noveller (‘Locked up and other stories’, Söderströms, 2003), Tvåsamhet (‘Twosomeness’, short stories, 2005), Ut ur din längtan (‘Get out of your longing’, novel, 2007), Camera Obscura (short stories, 2009; it will be published in Finnish by Teos in September)

I was born in 1973. I’ve written six novels, and I’m working on my seventh. I’ve written short stories and essays, and translated. That may sound productive, but it isn’t: I can’t stand to sit in front of the computer for more than a couple of hours a day.

My work is elsewhere – in everyday chores: going to the store, taking out the trash, fixing meals, washing dishes, cleaning, playing with the kids. Normal days are full of work and messing around. And my literary work has to fit in with that. I don’t have it in me to write methodically. I do know how to keep deadlines and meet contracts, but the methodicalness is lacking.

I haven’t had a desk for ages; my computer is always lying somewhere different, and I’m always lying somewhere different. I like to be surrounded by noise, whether it be the kids raising a ruckus or the din of a coffee shop. I also like the peace of night, when everyone else is sleeping, and I feel like in all the world I’m the only one sitting up awake. I often write about insomnia, but in my own life it isn’t really about that – it’s just that I don’t want to sleep.

My novel Vastavuuksia (‘Equivalencies’, 2008) was criticised for how charged with anxiety it was. The characters drifting in the book wallow in their angst, unable to control it. Some thought the author must be suffering from the same feelings: depression, grief, anger, jealousy. I never respond to insinuations like that, because I believe in people’s ability to think. Depression is a poor impetus for writing a depressing novel. Vastaavuuksia is morality play. Few critics or readers realised this. The book doesn’t describe how I live – it describes how I would not like to live and hope no one would live.

I’ve seriously wondered about author Erno Paasilinna’s famous comment. According to him, an author should live a certain kind of life in order to become an author. I don’t think there is a certain kind of life, there’s just life.

Would I write better if I would have experienced gruelling tribulations in my life? Would my sentences be brilliant if I would have been an orphan, my stories believable if I would have seen the horrors of war? I doubt it, because I don’t believe that suffering ennobles anyone. It cripples, depresses, turns bitter and suicidal.

I’m referring here to prose in particular, to where it comes from. Maybe poetry is different – or then again maybe not. In order for me to write, I need stability and balance, which makes it possible to write a novel-length book. It doesn’t work without stability and balance in my everyday life. Life isn’t always as smooth as freshly fallen snow, and it shouldn’t be. Maybe it’s a question of basic safety: when I venture into unknown waters, I want to be safe.

For example, when I was writing my novel Vihan päivä (‘The day of wrath’, 2006). It’s based on real events, on a depressed mother who murders her child and husband because of financial troubles. I would argue that when an author is dealing with a subject like this, he has to be standing on firm psychological ground. And I don’t mean training in that field – I mean the ability to analyse real events and the people immersed in those events, the ability to stay in your own right mind when faced with those real, tragic things and to want to throw yourself into them up to your neck, to see them and understand them. Back when I was thinking about this woman and what she did, I was bothered by the grief porn paraded about by the media regardless of whether they represented the gutter press or the state television newscasts. With hindsight I can say that I couldn’t not write about that topic.

And not writing? There are things I never intend to write about. They are my own business, and don’t belong to anyone else. I’ve also left things unwritten for other reasons, for example because of ethical concerns. Unfortunately I haven’t succeeded very well at that. Perhaps amorality is a natural part of the author’s life.

‘And I have a wide, deep cruel streak,’ Augusten Burroughs writes in his book Magical Thinking (2004). I’ve noticed that same cruelty in myself. It isn’t indifference, just a way of seeing things. Often it is words written on paper to ask myself whether I really view people in such a cruel, merciless way.

These are difficult questions for me. I consider them now and then, and haven’t come to any conclusion. Maybe there isn’t one. And besides, liminality is a part of an author’s work, being in an intermediate space, not belonging to any world, being outside. These are clichés, I know, but clichés come close to truth.

If you like you can easily connect this or that author to conditions such as fear of closeness, sexual dysfunction, obsessive compulsive behaviour, insufferable envy, fear of social situations and mania.

But are those qualities fundamental or interesting in terms of literature itself? They aren’t. Instead, they may help the author contemplate what to write about and what not to write about.

Translated by Owen Witesman

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

When I was a little more than 20, when I thought I had completed the manuscript of my first volume of poems, everything was going to hell.

I wanted life to be political, exotic, inspired, but the Finnish way of life, with its instructions and its home loans crushed people into a stiff and monopositional way of being. One of submission. I protested. We made an underground magazine whose cover showed Nixon peeing on South America. We founded a propaganda theatre which raged against the colonels’ junta in Greece. And there was plenty to vilify about the Finnish bourgeoisie, too. I hated capitalism, TV advertisements and the high prices of bus tickets. And there was no hot water in my rented digs. The main thing was to protest.

I had written hooked on adrenaline, with Mayakovsky as my dealer. Written a bunch of poems in a blind rage, but a brusque rejection from the publisher and the passage of a year were necessary before I understood that I understood just a little about writing, and didn’t yet know anything about myself. Not even that rage was only one possible stimulus to write.

I threw away my first manuscript and began again, listening and progressing cautiously as if on one night’s ice. I wrote poems or, rather, portraits of the children and places of my childhood. When my first collection was published I was 25 and had passed the worst; I no longer wrote literature about literature, but what I knew and felt.

When, now and then, I meet aspiring young writers and tell them about my work, it’s very tempting to give advice. For them this may be dangerous, but for me it’s sometimes useful. For the strict principle that you have just formulated for someone else is the one you take pleasure in breaking as soon as you turn your back on them. I have favourite slogans such as ‘The word wind is no more lyrical than the word windcheater’ or ‘Don’t ever decide what you’re going to write about’. Neither do you need definitions of what poetry is (definition shrinks it immediately and takes charge).

But how to avoid the temptations of knowing it all, and how voluptuous it is, from time to time, to give vent to really juicy definitions: ‘Of course, poetry is a startling composition using the stuff of angels, the salicylic acid of whimsy and awakenings tempered with dreams, and if injustice prevails, poetry socks it in the jaw with its soft fist in order to restore the balance between morning and evening, and if profit poisons water and air, then poetry praises the useless in order that breathing might continue, that the moss might retain its speed and the clouds of calm weather their Rubensesque plumpness, and that we should have an answer when we are asked: What did you come here to say?’

Sadly, my own doctrines and brilliant definitions are of no help at all when writing an sich. Only chance, or a subconscious knocking against my skull, can kick a poem into action. Plenty of beginnings collect on little pieces of paper in the back left pocket of my jeans, but most of them leave along with the washing water. From one of those that survived, I remember ‘You don’t swim in champagne in the Samppalinna swimming pool’. It seemed to fulfil some of the (perhaps Mayakovskian) rules I’d set up for the beginning of a poem: it had a good rhythmic pace [champagne is samppanja in Finnish], the melody was good in relation to the content, there was contrast, and because Samppalinna, in the city of Turku, is a natural swimming pool available to everyone, and not a luxury spa, the basis of the phrase felt socially apt and active. I cherished that first line for a couple of years, and only after dozens of attempts did it develop a continuation.

To a poet, this is as familiar as the telegram sent from Yerevan to Moscow at the time of the Soviet space-dog Laika: ‘Have dog, send the appliances.’

But what to do when you’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer and all that needs to be done has ground to a halt?

Emptying is a good way of ensuring new supplies. On a bright autumn day in a forest full of mushrooms you can walk so far that literary tension loosens into a cep-Zen way of being. In Helsinki you can pedal furiously round the city’s sea-shores on your bicycle until the phrases in your back pockets are nothing but pulp and if you happen to be in Paris, you can stand at the Musee d’Orsay in a queue until you feel a drink is due.

In contravention of my doctrines, I have often decided what to write about. Opposites have power, contrast is a handy method. On Christmas Eve when housewives busy themselves in their well-heated homes until they are blue in the face setting their tables with the best they have to offer, a Helsinki charity organises a Christmas dinner for the homeless in an old exhibition hall. The smells are a little different from those of a bourgeois household, but even the underprivileged get their ham and Christmas pudding once a year. My poem ‘Dirty angel’ is about these Finns.

So maybe an active lack of principle should be the poet’s motive force. I don’t know.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Dirty angel

The angel of night
is loitering on the stair
waiting the rear
and, pack on back, with her dirty nail
      digging in her pretty ear

and she´s come with a consignment
of eternal hot water and beds
supplies of teeth and legs
and strong nerves for nervous people
      who´ve lost their heads

      and this is the way this Christmas Eve
            at eleven fifty-seven –
      dustbin lids go off with loud reports
and a hundred drunks are rising
                    with no passports
                        straight into heaven

Translated by Herbert Lomas (from Hyvät, pahat ja rumat [‘The good, the bad and the evil’, WSOY, 1984]; see Electric Verses)