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)

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

Leevi Lehto. Photo: Lotta Djupsund/Savukeidas

Founded by poet Leevi Lehto, ntamo is seen by many as the black sheep and enfant terrible of the world of Finnish publishing.

From its inception, ntamo (shortened from the word kustantamo, publishing company) has striven to subvert the familiar conservative models of publishing that audiences are used to.

Ntamo publishes books for small circulation, such as poetry and experimental prose. Its catalogue includes works both by celebrated writers, such as Kari Aronpuro, and by a whole host of authors making their literary debuts.

Lehto’s objective has been to publish as many books as possible, using a system of print on demand, and to have as little to do with the books’ content as possible. What’s more, ntamo’s publications are not marketed at all. Readers can find information on new publications by following the publisher’s blog [in Finnish only]. I met up with Lehto a while ago and we discussed ntamo’s current situation, new trends in the publishing world and the future of books and literature in general.

Teemu Manninen: When ntamo was first founded, I couldn’t help thinking it was some kind of performance or a work of conceptual art. What do you think of ntamo nowadays? How have your decisions not to actively market books and not to edit them worked out as a business strategy?

Leevi Lehto: I’ve been surprised at how effective a marketing strategy of not marketing your books can be. It’s made it possible for us to establish and develop a brand that’s easily recognisable. I’ve received a lot of feedback on my refusal to edit books. At first I just thought that books should be released exactly the way they were written, but before long I came across situations where I ended up having to edit some books in the traditional way. That being said, I still think one of the reasons larger publishing houses seem so stiff is because they won’t budge when it comes to editing new works.

The tradition of editing always comes back to the issue of technology and the fact that, once an edition has come out, you can’t recall it. But with the advent of modern technology, polishing each and every new work for publication seems utterly senseless. At the same time, the internet has removed the distance between producer and consumer: anyone can produce a book and publish it. In order to remain competitive, paper books will have to be able to do the same, which will involve publishers’ thinning out their vast organisations and essentially cutting out marketing altogether, because it will no longer be cost-effective.

TM: We could soon move to e-books. What do you think about that?

LL: Whenever a new technological medium is created, at least at the outset it’s always filled with content from the old media: for instance, in the early days of the wireless, the radio used to broadcast plays, and so on. In the same way, the e-book currently preserves the whole idea of a book, and is actually strengthening it. As long as this is the case, e-books will not challenge the dominance of paper books. From the markets’ point of view – for the time being, at least – e-books and paper books have to be seen as fully interchangeable with one another.

TM: You’ve often said that the era of large publishing houses as gatekeepers and guardians of good taste is over. This prediction seems to be coming true – only recently, Jacques Eijkens, the CEO of the largest publishing house in Finland, WSOY, commented that the financial significance of works of literature was just ‘small potatoes’. At the time, people were shocked at this comment, but I remember thinking that ‘potatoes’ is in fact the future of literature as a whole: there will no longer be such a thing as an international bestseller; instead there could be a vast amount of books with small print runs aimed at smaller audiences. That’s the reason online bookstores like Amazon have been so successful.

LL: Absolutely, and in fact ntamo has already proved that, in this changing environment, publishing poetry can actually make for profitable business. This too is linked to the notion of the larger publishing houses’ role as the guardians of good taste: from the perspective of traditional publishing houses’ marketing strategies, it was important to keep up a fictional assumption of the existence of a ‘refined’ taste and the literature of national significance, and that every now and then we could graciously accept new members into this closed clique. In fact, this is precisely the kind of fiction the traditional houses have succeeded in destroying, because it no longer meets the needs of the current market conditions, as Eijkens’ comments aptly demonstrate. But isn’t it ironic that it is this kind of fiction that has made publishing poetry look like a fruitless endeavour, the idea that selling marginal literature constitutes some kind of aesthetic and financial risk.

In reality, things are now the other way round: literature published in small print runs has to sell lots of different titles in order to be profitable. Of course, it’s taken a certain amount of courage to start a publishing house based on this theory alone. The fact that I dared to do it links back to the idea you mentioned of conceptual art: at first it didn’t matter whether I succeeded or not, the important thing was just to give it a go. That same spirit of adventure is still at the heart of what I do, and it’s for that reason that I should say ntamo will never become a real publishing house. Whenever I manage to make ntamo look more like a real publishing house, it increases the pressure on me to do things differently.

TM: Finally, I’d like to give you a comparison. When people talk about ntamo with a sort of moral superiority, I’ve often heard them say it’s like a light-footed woman, and that getting involved with it would be like entering into a sinful relationship. On the other hand, a large publishing house is like the most desirable bachelor in town, with whom writers strive to enter a loyal marriage. The reality is that this partner too flirts with hundreds of other lovers, and nobody thinks there’s anything indecent about that.

LL: Exactly, because a large publishing company is a male! This is a pretty good metaphor. It’s clear that every book published by ntamo is something of a one-night stand, and I want to make sure it stays that way. And not just to make sure you have the freedom to sleep with other people too, but so that, if you want to, you can also sell the books you have published with ntamo somewhere else. All I ask is that, if you get me pregnant, I get to keep the baby.

TM: So in other words, I could effectively clone our shared child?

LL: Precisely.

Translated by David Hackston

The queen who chose not to rule: Christina of Sweden in the play Queen C (first produced at the Finnish National Theatre in 2003, directed by the author, Laura Ruohonen, with Wanda Dubiel in the role of the Queen). Photo: Leena Klemelä

Extracts from ‘Postscript’, published in Kuningatar K ja muita näytelmiä (‘Queen C and other plays’, Otava, 2004)

It’s hard to read plays. I was bitterly disappointed at the age of eight, when I hid in my grandmother’s attic and opened up Romeo and Juliet, a book that seemed to promise lust and appalling acts. But it wasn’t even a real book; it was just talking from beginning to end! Where was the plot, the action, the much talked-about love story?

It’s also hard to write plays. Novels and works of poetry are closed miniature worlds that invite the reader in. A play always serves two masters. It has to be open and porous to allow the actor and the performance to penetrate into it.

For that reason, it’s more vulnerable, it can be more easily distorted into something unrecognisable than the sturdier forms of literature. If you want it to last, a play has to have a strong skeleton that can always be dressed in new clothes as time goes by to fit the fashion.

But it’s hard not to write plays, too. At its best, drama has a unique capability of transforming word into flesh: to evoke a world with many diverging ideas and opposing impulses expressed in vibrant, densely packed dialogue.

My way of writing a play is like an ancient Finnish bear hunt: you need to approach your prey from several directions at once, surround it circuitously, creep up on it sideways, get close to it without ever aiming directly at it. That’s how you have to approach your subject, prowling around it, approaching at a tangent, until you start to understand what’s in it that interests you and how that could form the basis of the work as you write.
As a child I despised Queen Christina. In the story Tähtien turvatit (‘Protégés of the planets’) by Zachris Topelius [1872], she is portrayed as a spoiled princess who grows up to be a capricious traitor to her country, whose selfishness and vanity leads to the ruin of the nation and the death of great philosopher. When I grew up I started wondering what Christina was striving for when she gave up everything she had been born to: status, religion, gender. What made her abdicate her throne? To my surprise, in the broad field of literature written about Christina, I didn’t find a single satisfying explanation.

From Christina’s own writings a picture started to emerge of an ambitious rebel for whom the mere crown of little Sweden wasn’t enough. She wanted something more magnificent, and she wanted to acquire it by herself. At the beginning of Christina’s era, in the 17th century, an idea was emerging of the modern individual, someone who makes of herself what she wants to be. Centrally connected with this idea was an idealisation of personal freedom and independence. In my play Kuningatar K, Queen C, I wanted to examine a person who’s ultimate goal was freedom from all personal constraints, the most demanding of these being love, a person who was ready to go to any lengths to achieve her freedom.

As early as 1996 I wrote to a friend: ‘I plan to write a queen play. [The history plays by Shakespeare are called ‘king plays’ in Finnish.] The main characters are Queen Christina of Sweden-Finland and the philosopher Descartes, whose concept of love and equality will be one of the central themes of the play. [Descartes was invited to Stockholm in 1649, where he gave the Queen lessons in philosophy. He was said to have suffered from the harsh winter, fell ill, and died in February 1650. According to a new study, though, he may have been poisoned.] My aim will be to combine a poetic and comic-book style, with philosophical and spontaneously invented material, to create a play that will bring history almost too close and alive.’

But it was seven years before I finally got to direct Christina on the stage. Why? The most important reason can be seen in the structure of the text. I didn’t want to force historical themes that interested me into the disguise of drama, but I also didn’t want to give up my main character. Although the text loosely follows the events in the life of the historical Christina, it couldn’t advance by means of turns in the plot but instead by intertwining, multi-layered images and ideas.

The solution swam right to me. A Swedish field guide to fish fell into my hands – with recent research discoveries about the lives of eels. Modern natural science is still delightfully baffled when it comes to eels: the more we learn about them, the more mysterious they become. This primeval, mythical water creature, which is always changing its form and gender, was a door into Christina’s world for me. No matter how long the power of the entire modern scientific apparatus examines it, the riddle of the eel is never-ending. The same is true of Christina: the more I knew about her, the deeper the mystery. (Just a few years ago they dug up her grave for DNA analysis to make sure for the umpteenth time that she was a woman.) Among the aphorisms that the historic Christina wrote this one touched me most: ‘In every person there is a room to which only she has the key.’

Queen C (Wanda Dubiel, The Finnish National Theatre). Photo: Leena Klemelä

Queen C in its present form, having been produced in various languages and as a radio play, is above all about the tensions that are fuelled by the pursuit of freedom, by power and the megalomania at the centre of power. Christina is a modern rebel who rejects the roles of woman, mother, and female ruler that are offered to her, and instead lets nothing get in the way of building a new identity that shatters concepts of gender and the limits of acceptability, regardless of the consequences. What happens to a person who places her own freedom above love, loyalty, and friendship?

Translated by Lola Rogers

Tiina Raevaara. Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

Themes enriched by the natural sciences set in a kind of naturalised literary fantasy make Tiina Raevaara an interesting young prose-writer. She is a doctor of genetics and a science writer whose collection of fourteen short stories, En tunne sinua vierelläni (‘I don’t feel you beside me’, Teos, 2010), is her second literary work.

Fantasy and a sombre dystopia combine in her debut novel, Eräänä päivänä tyhjä taivas (‘One day an empty sky’, 2008), which took its readers to the centre of ecological catastrophes and struggles for power taking the form of family relationships. The novel was seen as a morality tale examining the issue of human responsibility, and Leena Krohn, Johanna Sinisalo, Maarit Verronen and Jyrki Vainonen were identified as its literary godparents.

What unites these Finnish writers working at the borders of fact, fiction and fantasy? They are distinguished from realist prose by the way they pose a certain type of ethical question: the complex relationship between humankind and what is called nature, and the inexplicable fuzzy area between the two, which the hard sciences are unable to grasp. In these writers’ work, fantasy often layers into philosophical allegories which examine the limits of what can be experienced as human.

In her new collection of short stories, Raevaara (born 1979) succeeds in developing the thematic lines described above. This is important, because she always appears to be writing in order to say something serious. Short forms suit her concentrated style and the condensed atmosphere she strives for.

It is no wonder that her short story ‘Sääkset’ (‘Ospreys’) won the prestigious Martti Joenpolvi Prize. Here Raevaara’s strongly nature-centred understanding of life is revealed at its most uncompromising. At the edge of the osprey swamp everything is the same: ‘The bog grows on the surface and dies inside, at the same time, for thousands upon thousands of years.’ Her riddling description of the fate of a walker examining birds and their nesting habits in the motionless landscape of the swamp poses a spectacular challenge to the central role of man assumed by humanism.

The idea of juxtaposing perceptions and judgements of people and animals recurs in many short stories. Raevaara gives a point of view to animals, creatures and things that people fear, admire, consider strange. A certain Mr Gordon feels himself to be a stranger in the birds’ hospital: ‘I’ve never known a bird,’ he finds himself confessing to a black-throated diver. The short story develops into an allegory that personifies the entire bird kingdom; all that remains for man is the role of a disappearing part of nature.

Alongside nature and the animal kingdom, the hidden fears and traumas of the human mind, and the dregs that only come to the surface in dreams, are the area that Raevaara’s short stories examine. ‘Kaivo’ (‘The well’) is a depiction of a nightmarishly strange landscape that is revealed as a living painting. From it grows the force-field of a maternal woman who bears life and children who rise from the well. In the end the painting, which could be interpreted as the nightmare of every mother, fades and releases its grip on the viewer.

The world of the short story ‘Luojani, luomani’ is similarly strongly gendered. Its narrator is an artifical female intelligence, who is always switched off at night, a kind of gynoid whose self resides within a hard case. The man is her creator and her owner, and men rule the technical world which the literate machine dazzles with her achievements. But for the man she is merely a saleable, unfeeling object, devoid of any tangible selfhood.

This story, lent wings by its quotations from Dante’s Divina Commedia, remains intriguingly open at the end, as Raevaara’s short stories generally do. Their atmospheres are a call to empathy, so strongly do they depict the power of the unconscious to give voice to that which has been silenced.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Helvi Juvonen (1950s). Photo: WSOY

The work of Helvi Juvonen is beguilingly strange; intense, eccentric, askew, it sees the world afresh. It charms by means of fairy-tale motifs and apparent nonsense; but it also offers piercing insights into suffering, loneliness, and alienation.

It combines the haunting, elliptical quality of the verse of Emily Dickinson, the nineteenth-century American poet-recluse, with the sharp, fresh imagery of the Finnish 1950s modernist Eeva-Liisa Manner. Its religiosity is complex and unsettling, its humour sly and bizarre. Hard to categorise, Juvonen is both traditional and modern: a sceptical believer, a quiet transgressor.

Juvonen (1919–1959) was known as ‘Nalle’ (teddy) as a child, and her fondness for and identification with animals emerges often her poems:

The mole sleeps,
spade-paw,
velvet-fur,
dreaming a dream, darkly soft

The poetry is also characterised by a fairy-tale logic and a kind of childlike anarchy; a goblin shares her joy with a bumblebee, a tapir talks to a stone. There is a mischievous, surreal streak in the work. The world is anthropomorphised, as in a fairy tale; the poet addresses a singing kettle.

Juvonen in fact wrote fairy tales, not published in her lifetime, like that of Little Bear dreaming as she hibernates. ‘Bon bons, bon bons,’ she says repeatedly, this stream of sound constituting joyous nonsense, an acknowledgement of the miraculous freshness of the world.

And yet, Juvonen’s poetry is sometimes seen in Finland as a poetry of suffering and of intense, even forbidding, religiosity. There is indeed a prayerful longing in much of the work, and the poems feature frequent repetition, which creates a hypnotic, liturgical effect. But God is depicted here as an intimate, to whom the poet makes suggestions:

Then I will say it to Him,
then I will say it:
Let’s play that new game now,
the one in which we are happy
and everywhere.

(‘A new game’, 1952)

God is a potential playmate, with whom one can negotiate – although the playfulness of the poem is mitigated by a wistful, mournful note; it is only in a make-believe world that God and the speaker can be ‘happy / and everywhere’. Juvonen’s unorthodox faith can perhaps best be viewed in pantheistic terms, since it is through nature that God is perceived in the poems; ‘heaven’s weeping’ appears as glints on leaves. Nature is a manifestation of the divine, and a source of wonder: ‘But think that in early April someone will find the first blue anemone of the spring. Is that not wonderful?’ The poet appeals to the here and now; in ‘In this life’ (as opposed to the next), she rejects a far-off hereafter and suggests that paradise could be earthly:

In that land, the land of which I sing,
ravens fly, bringing food.
In that land, the land of which I sing,
there is always a hand for a human hand.

In an article entitled ‘Images of isolation’ by Soila Lehtonen published in Books from Finland 1/1992, Juvonen’s work is likened to that of Emily Dickinson. The comparison is not unfounded, for the poets have in common a controlled yet intense quality, and they combine spiritual concerns with a sharp focus on the natural and the everyday. Juvonen admired Dickinson and translated some of her poems; in an essay of 1958 she termed Dickinson’s poetry tender, humorous, intense, calm, matter-of-fact, and analytical. As in Dickinson’s work, in Juvonen, small details appear magnified and acquire a vast symbolic significance. Juvonen’s most famous poem is a prime example:

The lichen raised its fragile cup,
and rain filled it, and in the drop
the sky glittered, holding back the wind.

The lichen raised its fragile cup:
Now let’s toast the richness of our lives.

(‘Cup lichen’, 1952)

Such stark, marvelling poems were written in the context of a difficult life. According to ‘Images of isolation’, Juvonen lived in ‘the drab surroundings of post-war Helsinki’, where, after studying at Helsinki University, she occupied posts as a bank clerk and a proof reader, before earning her living as a writer and translator. Her life was ‘circumscribed’, ‘often penurious’, and characterised by solitude and suffering; Juvonen underwent mental and physical illness and died at the age of 39.

But the isolation reported here is exaggerated; Juvonen lived with a female companion, Sirkka Meriluoto, for about ten years. This partnership offers interesting points of departure as far as biographical readings of Juvonen’s work are concerned. In an article about Juvonen in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (27 October 2009), the poet Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen detects in Juvonen’s poems signs of hidden homosexual experience. The sense of precariousness and dividedness in Juvonen’s poems is powerful and multivalent, whatever its precise, ‘actual’ cause. The poems present vivid metaphors for unease and instability, as in ‘The tightrope walker’:

Two summits rose up above the dark.
Between them,
taut as a bow’s arc
the walker’s rope is strung.
If you look into the dark, dizziness strikes.
You need to have brains of ice.

I see the summits, both ablaze.
Back and forth, back and forth!

Such evocations of dividedness can be read in numerous ways, as expressions of the modern, alienated, urban individual; of the female writer, that recent invention; of the queer subject, forced into hiding; or the believer whose faith has been challenged. The sense of being in between can also be linked to Juvonen’s place in literary tradition, for she was a poet at the cusp of modernism.

Modernism came to Finnish poetry in the 1940s and 1950s; at this time, formal restraint slowly gave way to freer forms. Juvonen’s poetry combines technical formality with startling imagery and a clear, direct voice. It moves between rhyme and free verse and forms a bridge between ‘tradition’ and modernism.

Helvi Juvonen published five collections of poetry between 1949 and 1955; a sixth was published posthumously in 1959, and in 1974, a collection of prose works, edited by Mirkka Rekola, came out.

Helvi Juvonen (1950s). Photo: WSOY

As 2009 marked a number of anniversaries – 90 years since Juvonen’s birth, 50 years since her death, and 60 years since her debut collection, Kääpiöpuu (‘Dwarf tree’) – her collected poems, Aukea ei koskaan metsään ovi (‘The door to the forest never opens’, WSOY) was also published; the volume includes other writings by the poet as well as critical and biographical material.

The recent anniversaries have meant a timely renewed focus on Juvonen’s work, which asks us to attend to that which is usually hushed up and overlooked; to sharpen our senses; and finally, to ‘toast the richness of our lives’.

Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen. Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

One of the most exciting features of Finnish poetry since 2000 has been the wealth and breadth of poetry by young women. Compared to literature written by women in earlier decades, contemporary poetry appears to have freed itself from one-track feminism and knotted brow earnestness to become a literature with a richer approach to womanhood, its forms and history.

The first collection by Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen (born 1977), Sakset kädessä ei saa juosta (‘You mustn’t run with scissors in your hand’, 2004) was a glimpse into the culturally restricted but nevertheless autonomous world of young girls. Mother’s instructions and Father’s advice will be broken down as one grows up; in spite of the genderised system, it is still possible for a young woman to make her own choices.

In the collection Naisen paikka (‘A woman’s place’, 2007), Huotarinen further extends her look at feminist themes by addressing women’s history. She dedicates the collection to a woman poem singer named Mateli Kuivalatar, a distant relative of hers who in the 1830s sang the best folk poems to Elias Lönnrot (compiler of the national epic Kalevala), who later published them in his Kanteletar collection.

Folkloric features are evident in the collection not only in the themes of joy and sorrow but also in the structure of the poems, with its varied and rhythmic repetition. Huotarinen is not the only contemporary poet who is interested in the oldest Finnish sung poetry. For example, the poems of Johanna Venho (born 1971), planted in women’s everyday life, grow from the same tradition. This is an intriguing feature of Finnish poetry since 2000, which has at the same time been extremely receptive to different linguistic philosophical pulls along with the influence, for instance, of contemporary American poetry.

In her new collection Iloisen lehmän runot (‘The poems of the happy cow’, WSOY, 2009) Huotarinen brings to the centre of her poetic imagery the cow, icon of Finland’s agrarian landscape. Historically speaking, the stories of the woman and the cow are intertwined; milk and dairy farming in Finnish culture have been decidedly the realm of girls and women. But that is just the thematic sounding board for Huotarinen’s poems: she develops the figure of the happy cow into an analogy for women of all ages and times. The reader re-encounters the ‘lean lass’ of the first collection, the speaker of poems, but also mythic Aphrodite and Penelope, along with today’s Wonder Woman. All the cow-women live in a world that forces them to take their place in the barn, to settle in their own pen.

Nonetheless bursts, leaps and joy are possible; the collection notes with irony how the well-behaved, good-natured cow figure and agrarian culture have changed and crumbled as barns grew empty. Yet the call of Queenie – the leader of the herd, the one with the cowbell – remains the eternal maternal cry on behalf of life: the call is followed, even when it means butting through a wall.

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

‘The answer grows like the spring light. / In my desk drawer there’s something, important. / I slowly remember it.’ I wrote these words in my first published work, my collection of poetry Hämärän valo (‘Light of dusk’) from 1986. I was born in 1949, so I was something of a late bloomer.

Still I had been writing ever since I was a child. After a ten-year break, I published my first children’s book under a pseudonym. In the space of three years after that, a total of twelve books appeared in the Anni series. In 1999 I published my first novel, Maan ääreen (‘To the end of the earth’). Another ten years passed; my second novel, Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’), was published last autumn.

I’ve often been asked – more often than I have asked myself – why I publish so rarely. I don’t find writing difficult, but it is difficult to write well. For me, writing well involves clarity, precision, brightness, finding just the right mood and rhythm. If it were simply a case of the classic ‘murder your darlings’ problem, it could easily be resolved through a process of sufficiently pruning the text, but such pruning would leave us with nothing but a bare tree.

Writing is such a synthetic process that it is hard to describe, as it is inherently bound up with one’s own language and mind.

Nowadays authors like to make a point of their own professionalism. Some start work at nine o’clock in the morning and continue until three in the afternoon. At the risk of mystifying and romanticising an author’s work, I admit that I am incapable of such self-discipline. I write when my soul tells me to write.

The material for my second novel built up slowly over a number of years. I would write in the evenings, at night, as once my funding had run out I had to support myself writing book reviews and columns and doing other literature-related odd-jobs. That being said, such external reasons are still almost nothing but excuses. This too may sound overly romanticised, but a novel will take as much time as it requires.

First of all, I needed a title. ‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’ is a title that just seemed to pop into my head. At the time I was living temporarily in a small village in the countryside; I used to look out of my window at the river bathing in the glow of the setting sun, behind a row of slender, bare tree trunks. And the name appeared. I had to write the book in that name, and after only a few seconds I knew that the title was not allegorical, but that the novel would tell the story of a real gardener working in Charles Darwin’s garden in the village of Downe in Kent.

Like a magnet, the title began to attract people and events, but all this happened slowly, little by little. I became frustrated that these imaginary villagers wouldn’t leave me in peace – and they wouldn’t give in to me either. At times I wondered whether I should shelve the project altogether.

Some time later I was in Berlin and went for a walk in the botanical gardens in Dahlem. All of a sudden I realised that there were tears in my eyes; I missed Lennart, the protagonist from my first novel, who eventually dies. And at the same time I missed Thomas, the man from my second novel, who had not yet been brought to life. I couldn’t bring myself to shelve Thomas, to leave him in a no-man’s-land somewhere between my head and the stuff on the page.

Reality finally gave me the kick I needed, as I daydreamed and emoted and wrote at leisure. In the summer of 2009 I was to turn sixty. I found myself thinking about this on New Year’s Eve and realised that I had to pull myself up by the scruff of the neck, up and out of the swamp. I began writing the novel using all the material that had accumulated over the years, and the moment was ripe. I achieved the kind of flow that brought my material together and honed it. I would write for many hours a day, barely having a shower or getting dressed.

Now a character called William N. is demanding my attention. He expresses himself in an irascible, croaky voice, because he’s not a particularly nice character. For personal reasons it has been weeks since I was last able to pay William any attention, but by this point I believe and know that, in my subconscious, he will be writing himself all the while.

Perhaps it is this sense of trust that keeps me going as a writer. It goes without saying that I hope I can have the mental and financial peace to concentrate fully on my writing. And it is not a question of having to meet publishing deadlines. Publishers and the literary world may try to pressure writers, but fictional characters couldn’t care less about such things.

I recently took comfort from watching a documentary about the filmmaker Wim Wenders. He confessed to being a very taciturn person. His friends and former wives said much the same thing. His latest wife, Donata, said that at first it felt as though Wim were not really listening to what she had to say. But a few days later, after giving the matter due consideration and without using any superfluous words, he would respond. In our hectic modern lives, such slowness and economy of expression seems very attractive.

If you’re not Wenders’ wife, that is.

Translated by David Hackston