The eye that sees. Photo: Rauno Koitermaa

In this essay Katri Mehto ponders the enigma of the horse: it is an animal that will consent to serve humans, but is there something else about it that we should know?

A person should meet at least one horse a week to understand something. Dogs help, too, but they have a tendency to lose their essence through constant fussing. People who work with horses often also have a dog or two in tow. They patter around the edge of the riding track sniffing at the manure while their master or mistress on the horse draws loops and arcs in the sand. That is a person surrounded by loyalty.

But a horse has more characteristics that remind one of a cat. A dog wants to serve people, play with humans – demands it, in fact. With a dog, a person is in a co-dependent relationship, where the dog is constantly asking ‘Are we still US?’

A dog’s self-esteem isn’t threatened by its boundless desire to please – its self-worth is built on humans. If there’s a tiny drop of Wolf still left in a Dog, it’s escaped to the farthest tip of a hair, looking on in disbelief and shame at its fawning kin.

A Horse and a Cat have no desire to serve, but they will consent to it. A cat will accede to humans, but on its own terms, always ready to walk away, to disappear. A horse will defer to a human’s terms, submit quietly and with dignity like an old family retainer. A horse is like a butler, a valet, a maître d’. It takes orders without a word, does what is asked of it, but at the same time knows the secrets of the one it serves thoroughly. If it wanted to, it could demolish it all in a moment. It wears its loyalty, carries it without complaint. It looks a person in the eye and says: ‘I know who you are.’

A horse looks at the world and at humans with the gaze of Christ, with a whole history’s worth of knowledge, and weariness. It carries on its back bouncing little girls and heavily armed soldiers, country boys and conquerors, men and women decked out in colourful coats, skins, silks and tassels, armour creaks, clanks, clunks, rages, rushes, terror, greed, cruelty, pride, love and bravery. Noble causes and debased thoughts. It consents to pull heavy, creaking wagons, gigs, carts, ploughs, and of course guns. It submits to humans’ games and consents to pull death behind it.

The history of humanity lives in the eyes of the Horse. If those eyes were once bright and happy, now they’ve seen too much. The eyes of an old servant.

In every horse, even the most docile, lives a hysteric. And when an out-of-control horse weighing six hundred kilos gets moving, a person learns something. About the laws of physics, if nothing else. But that’s the only thing about a horse that the slightest bit Newtonian.

The horse’s tendency to hysteria is a mystery. Why? Why is it that when a twig cracks on a forest trail or a car drives too close to the riding path, the Horse decides to give up its horseness and become a projectile? When characteristics were handed out to the animals closest to humans, was the Dog given such an abundance of enthusiasm that the extra had to be installed in the Horse, the dignified Horse? Clearly the Cat has no such interest in the dog’s leftovers.

From eye to eye: a Finnhorse and a Finn. Photo: Topi Ikäläinen

Horses stand silent in their paddocks. Then they decide to show passers-by a moment of horsiness. They back up a step, stand up on their hind legs, stretch their front legs in the air, land, shake their heads and manes. And then it’s over.

Like a current that can be turned on and off.

Horsecurrent.

A moment of power.

Passing Nordic walkers look on in admiration, estranged from nature. ‘What a fine animal. Frightening. So terribly big.’

Maybe the hysteria that bubbles up in the Horse from time to time is the price it pays for covering up its true being. Maybe the Horse is acting. Maybe it plays the part of the Bucker, the Bolter, the Obstinate, the village lunatic of the riding arena, so that people won’t see what a Horse really is. God’s spy.

The Horse is God’s spy. All the animals are. But the Dog’s role was exposed long ago – dogs can’t keep secrets. The Cat, for its part, isn’t terribly interested in the subject of its espionage. It’s more devoted to its own quality time. The Horse is a Master Spy. A Horse gets the job done. A Horse is God’s eyes and ears, God’s hooves and withers.

Bridled, and licenced to… carry. The Horse is more than a spy, it’s a double agent. A horse acts like a horse acting like an animal so no one will know it’s a god. A Horse is a human-bearing god watching silently with ancient eyes as a human lifts his gun and shoots it in the forehead.

The horse and its little brother, the donkey, the four-legged sparrow of the south. Maybe Caligula, who named his horse a senator, wasn’t crazy after all. A person should meet at least one horse a week to understand something. There should be a horse in every high school classroom, every local council, every parliament. A horse breathing eight times per minute. A horse whose heart beats twenty-five times per minute. In a world whose pulse takes a person’s very life away.

A horse is watching me from the paddock, still as a statue. It looks me right in the eye and pricks up its ears. It knows I’m talking about it. It lifts the base of its tail and calmly shits. We all have to stick to our roles.

Translated by Lola Rogers

This essay was published in the book Hevosvoimat (‘Horse powers’, edited by Katri Manninen, Maahenki, 2011). This illustrated volume contains 31 of the best contributions to a writing competition organised by Maaseudun Sivistysliitto, the agricultural museum Sarka and the newspaper Maaseudun Tulevaisuus in 2011. The horse – first and foremost, the cold-blooded Finnhorse – has played an important role in the Finnish history, both in the agriculture and in the war, and later the horse has gained popularity as a trusted companion to families and young people, girls in particular

Harri Nordell's poem from Huuto ja syntyvä puu (‘Scream and tree being born’, 1996)

Translating poetry is natural, claims Tarja Roinila; it is a continuation of writing it, for works of poetry are not finished, self-sufficient products. But is the translator the servant of the meaning – or of the letter?

I am sitting in a cafe in Mexico City, trying to explain in Spanish what valokupolikiihko, ‘light-cupola-ecstasy’, means. And silmän valokupolikiihko, ‘the light-cupola-ecstasy of the eye’.

I take to praising the boundless ability of the Finnish language to form compound words, to weld pieces together without finalising the relationships between them, never mind establishing a hierarchy: the eye is a light-cupola, the eye is ecstatic about light-cupolas, light creates cupolas, the cupola lets out the light, the eye, in its ecstasy, creates a light-cupola.

I am meeting the Mexican poet Coral Bracho for the nth time in connection with a Spanish-language anthology of contemporary Finnish poetry that we are working on for a Mexican publisher. Over the past weeks and months – together with my fellow editor Jukka Koskelainen – I have been selecting poets and poems and have produced a number of Spanish-language drafts: literal renderings along with explanations, lists of alternative ‘equivalent’ words or lines, suggestions for translations of whole poems. I have sent them to Bracho, and she has worked on the texts further. Now for the final stage: we sit at a table together and polish up the final versions.

Spanish is an analytical rather than a synthetic language. And Harri Nordell’s poems are a love letter to the synthetic quality of the Finnish language. Nordell creates innovative compounds that often go against linguistic norms: powerhouses of words, seamless distillations of meaning whose parts are linked in a relationship of inexhaustible mystery.

At what is the ecstasy aimed? Is the cupola made of light, or does it reflect it? The form is tight, but the meaning shimmers. You can’t do the same thing in Spanish. The parts of the word have to be spread out over the page and prepositions placed between them.

In a way, one cannot say anything about a poem; one can only reproduce it. This, in fact, is what makes a poem a poem. Now, unpacking a Finnish poem to my colleague Bracho, what I really want to do is read it aloud to her. But since she does not know Finnish, I cannot repeat the words of the poem, or its rhythm, with my mouth, but merely spout explanations. The literalness of reading aloud is replaced by a description of how the Finnish language arranges its building blocks.

I get on to the subjects of cases, phonetics, echoes of The Kalevala. I speak of word order and alliteration, how a line deviates from a normal sentence here, how poetry becomes prosaic there. How Nordell’s text tests and breaks the limits of grammar. I talk about images and our form of modernism, about how a compound is more kaleidoscopic than the usual poetic image: the reader can turn it over herself and create images, take part in the continuous birth of meaning.

I talk about the Finnish language, Nordell’s language, and the Finnish literary tradition. These three things at least are at play in a close reading of a poem, when translation is the aim. And of course I talk about my own interpretation. In fact, that’s what all of this is about.

Talking to Bracho, I realise that this is perhaps the first time I have made a concrete list of the elements involved in my reading experience. Normally I do it in my head, in the silence of my study; now I am doing it here, in a busy cafe where there are two translators present. It’s like that bad joke about a pair of dim policemen: one of us can read, the other write.

When I translate alone, a large part of my work is intuitive, and I do not need to reveal my train of thought to anyone. The finished translation provides the only documentation of the reading process. In contrast, the two of us have a lot to talk about, for we need to reach a common way of reading. Our shared task is to write a poem which is in the same language as, and in a different language from, the original: in Nordellian and in Spanish.

Bracho creates poetry in her mother tongue. ‘How about that?’ she suggests, and quite often I reply: ‘That’s great. But can’t this tone or that shade of meaning somehow be introduced?’ I’m almost ashamed at times by how frequently I say ‘but…’.

The same dialogue hums in my head when I am translating alone. I read the poem closely, make notes, draft lines in Finnish. I read by writing and I write by reading. The writer makes a suggestion, and the reader nods: not bad, but…. ‘But’ is important; it is a ball the reader returns to the writer, having looked at the source text once again.

The translator is a ‘multilingual reader’. When we translate a poem, we expose it to linguistic difference. Bracho’s questions make me notice things I would not, as a monolingual reader, notice; they make me perceive how meaning is formed at the level of ever smaller details. Linguistic difference is always radical; it illuminates the source text in a new way.

The meeting in the cafe on a San Ángel square is a staging of the translation process. The translator-reader and the translator-writer play different roles, but they analyse the text together. This collaboration is indeed crucial for success. The translator’s expertise does not lie in reading or in writing, but in the simultaneity of the two, or close alternation between them. In this process, the reader urges the writer on, and vice versa. In the translator, reading and writing unite to form a unique activity that gives birth to a new work. Often, this work brings to its own language a way of saying things – a style – that is alien to its tradition.

The source text supplies everything that is needed to make a translation, but it does not offer a single direct answer as to how to do it.

Tú eres bella / éxtasis-cúpula de luz / del ojo, te miro / desde el yo-silencio (‘You are beautiful / the ecstasy-cupola of light / of the eye, I look / from the I-silence’). Sinä olet kaunis / silmän valokupolikiihko / minähiljaisuudesta / sinua katson: these are the first two verses of the original poem. The translation makes significant changes to the original’s use of space. ‘Eye’ has dropped to a different line from ‘light-cupola-ecstasy’; ‘I-silence’ is now at the end of the second verse. In the new poem, ‘eye’ and ‘looking’ are next to each other in the same line, giving rise to a new meaning. Del ojo, te miro also means: ‘I look at you from the eye’. Yo-silencio is a radical formation, more so than the Finnish minähiljaisuus, since Spanish does not generally use hyphens. The same goes for éxtasis-cúpula, whose rhythm is arresting because both words have the stress on the first syllable, rare in Spanish.

Are the ‘seamless’ compounds in Nordell’s poem – or in his poetry – an indispensable feature? Do we lose too much in sacrificing the organic unity of the constituents of meaning, the word-clusters that are as solid as objects?

Let us imagine for a moment that prose and poetry are clearly distinguishable from each other. The translator of prose can imagine that she is translating the meaning of the text, coding it through another system of signs. She can abandon the letter of the source text and convey its spirit. The poetry translator gets entangled with the letter. The more the text experiments and renews form, the more she does this. In a poem, meaning and letter are inseparable. Or as the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry puts it: poetry is an incessant hovering between sound and meaning.

It is often said that poetry translation is impossible for this reason: one cannot translate poems because one cannot translate letters. The translator has to let go of the letters of the original, and then the poem is destroyed.

But one can work with the letter. This is not a matter of copying or reproducing, but rather of ‘drawing attention to the games the letters play’, as the French translator and theorist of translation Antoine Berman writes.

A translated poem does not come about through one person building the base, the other adding the decoration, because poetry is not simply normal language dressed up. That is why Bracho and I sit at a table together, learning Nordellian.

It is not enough for a translator to understand passively. She has to acquire an active knowledge of the language, she has to become a poet. We aimed to internalise Nordellian to the point that we could write poems in it.

In the best case scenario, a new form presents itself from the jungle of written Spanish – or from the Mexican rain forest – one that differs at least to some extent from previous known forms. The poetry translator is all about biodiversity.

Nordell’s Tú eres bella is ready. I look at the pieces of compound words spread out all over the page:

éxtasis-cúpula
de luz
        del ojo,

and suddenly I understand to what extent Nordell’s poems speak of the wound and of separation, of silence and the yearning for sameness. As if translation, too, were written into them. As a possibility, a choice: shedding the old, adopting the new. Perhaps the unpicking of word-seams does fit Nordell’s aesthetic, perhaps we haven’t gone against it.

The last line of his poem puts it like this: La otredad ha venido a través de nosotros. ‘Otherness has come through us.’

Translation is often thought of in terms of (non-fiction) prose. The whole idea of translation is based on the notion that meaning can be transferred over the language barrier. Ideally, factual prose serves the message effectively: the language does not pay attention to itself, rather it yields to the meaning and serves it. The language moves along. The thought is extracted from the source language and is given new clothing, one fitting the rules of readability in the target language. Thus the meaning is conveyed clearly, free of the foreignness of the source language.

If poetry is taken as a model for translation, things become more complicated. At first it seems that one cannot say anything about poetry translation. Thinking about translation presupposes that form and meaning can be separated. A poem, however, resists this division; the ‘content’ of a poem is nothing without rhythm, harmonies, the arrangement composed in the source language. The tie between meaning and letter is unbreakable.

A concept of translation that has prose as its model is founded on a distinction between form and content. Poetry challenges this conception, but does not escape it, for one cannot speak about translation without differentiating between the letter and the meaning. Antoine Berman claims that translation indeed embodies this Platonic division, which is parallel to the body/soul divide. The soul of the text – the meaning – is higher than the body, and the translator is the servant of the meaning.

The union of meaning and letter in a poem makes translation impossible in two senses. The meaning of the poem cannot be dissociated from the letter, and so one cannot translate it. It is precisely this that makes the poem different and unique, and so one must not translate it. One cannot touch the poem or else it will break. Or looked at another way: what kind of a poem is translatable? Isn’t untranslatability the mark of a ‘real’ poem?

A classic response to the problem of poetry translation: it is not possible to produce a translation of a poem, only a new poem – which is the prerogative of poets.

Probably we cannot get away from Platonism, but let us not accept it without question. First of all, from Romanticism onwards, modern literature has overturned the distinction between prose and poetry. Secondly, my own experience of translation privileges poetry over prose as a prototype for the process, if one has to choose between the two. I have realised that poetry in fact teaches us more about translation, and I have come to apply the lessons it teaches to the translation of prose, too.

This realisation is at odds with Platonic conceptions of translation. Even though Platonism does touch on something essential about translation – I do not dispute that – it also hides a fundamental truth: that translation involves working with the letter, the form of a text.

Realism, the reference to a common reality, generally plays a lesser role in poetry than in prose. In a poem, the creative and renewing power of language breaks loose; the poem creates its own reality. Poetry often serves as a linguistic laboratory from which prose too draws inspiration. For this reason, poetry could be better suited than prose as a ‘model’ for translation. The poetry translator cannot side-step the letter and claim she is only conveying the meaning.

And yet we talk disparagingly of literal, word-for-word translation. Or of the dead letter. It is only when the text feels lifeless or when there is a problem with the translation that we talk of the letter of the text.

Poetry is translated all the time. Literature leads a multilingual life. Is it not time that we change our understanding of translation to one better suited to practice, rather than forcing the work of the translator into too narrow a mould? Are we perhaps afraid that a conception of translation that pays attention to poetry will enable the translator herself to enjoy poetic licence?

Why should poetry be translated? This is a matter of cultural politics and it demands a cultural-political answer. Our language needs it, literature needs it, it enriches our ecosystem.

A poet’s texts realise one of the numberless possibilities opened up by language. In the translator’s hands, this creation itself becomes a possibility, a field of enquiry which contains the seed of a poem in another language. By bringing a work into contact with another language, the translator renews the creative process; a new linguistic being comes to life in the receiving language. The chain stops there in that the translation does not itself spawn further translations, but it continues in that the new poem enlivens its own language and its poetry.

Recently I had a conversation with the editor Alice Martin, who referred to Finland as ‘a translation superpower’. This was startling and pertinent; we do indeed have an exceptional culture of translation, perhaps in part the result of the ‘foreignness’ of the Finnish language, which is granted by its difference, its non-Indo-European-ness. Given that the structure of Finnish differs so radically from almost all source-language texts, the translation process has to be analytical and creative. There are no short-cuts to a translation into Finnish, it will not work just to ‘mimic’ the surface of the text without profound rewriting.

Our wonderful translation culture, which has developed in just over a century, is a national treasure that we need to cultivate. Poetry translation in particular deserves protected status, since it constructs language and literature just as much as writing poetry does. In addition, the uncommercial nature of poetry translation means that it is threatened.

The significance of poetry and literature as art forms is immense, because they are made of the same language as the one we live in. Because language is our home, we need people who will make it more habitable and richer. Each ‘invention’ produced by the poet and the translator enriches the repertoire of all language users, for the whole linguistic community breathes the same air.

That is a fundamental thing.

There is another answer to the question of ‘why translate poetry’, and it is contained within it: in poetry. Works of poetry want to be translated because they are not finished products or self-sufficient. Translation is not an additional activity to be carried out on the original work, but rather an organic part of its life. It is as important as writing poetry, its natural continuation.

Translation, like reading, is poetry’s way of breathing. It is self-evident, simple, and unavoidable, for poetry’s own reasons. A poem calls for translation.

Together, we have to do our utmost to create the best possible circumstances for the call to be answered, to be met without the risk of starvation. And for poems to reach books, shops, libraries. Everyone.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah

This essay, entitled ‘Ääni vai merkitys, merkitys vai ääni’ (‘Sound or meaning, meaning or sound’) was published in Liittolaiset. Nuoren Voiman Liitto 90 vuotta (‘Allies. The 90-years-old Young Power Association’), edited by Eino Santanen & Aki Salmela (WSOY, 2011)

The poetry anthology – edited by Jukka Koskelainen and Tarja Roinila – mentioned in the beginning of the essay is entitled Habla la luz con voz de corneja. Once poetas finlandeses, published in Mexico by Conaculta, 2004

An essay from Kulttuurin sekakäyttäjät (‘Culture-users’, Teos, 2011)

If a film camera had stood outside my home from the time when it was built, I would rewind the movie it made from the end to the beginning. The story would begin with my children, one autumn morning in 2011, walking backwards home from school. The speed of the rewind would be so fast that they would quickly grow smaller; I, too, would get thinner and start smoking. I would curiously seek out the point where my wife and I are seen together for the last time, stepping out of the front door, back first, and setting out on our own paths, to live our own separate young lives.

At that time my grandmother still lives in the house with her two daughters and their husbands, and lodgers upstairs. The next time I would slow the rewind would be the point where, at the age of 18, finally move out of the house. The freeze-frame reveals a strange figure: almost like me, but not quite. In the face of the lanky youth I seek my own children’s features.

When I let the film continue its backwards story, I seek glimpses of myself as a child. Even though we lived in distant Savo [in eastern Finland], we went to see my grandmother in the city of Tampere relatively often. We called her our Pispala grandmother, although her house was located to the west of the suburb limit, in Hyhky. I follow the arrival of my grown-up cousins, their transformation into children, the juvenation of my grandmother and her daughters, the changing lodgers. At some point the film becomes black-and-white.

My grandfather moves in when my mother is 11. I follow the young family’s life with interest up to the point when the house’s inhabitants move out and demolition begins. There are many people on the job, for the work is done carefully from top to bottom; planks are removed one at a time until all that is left is the house’s skeleton, which is itself soon dismembered into its parts. At the end of the film all that is left is an empty site. There my grandfather walks backwards sketching the external dimensions of his future – or, in this version of the story, his former – house.

When you increase the speed of the movie, you realise that many people go in and out of the house’s doors. It looks as if a revolving door has gone made and is, by turns, sucking people in and chucking them out – them and their belongings. The changing seasons follow their even cycle, leaves changing from browny-red and –yellow to deep green and then pale buds, finally disappearing completely into the wrinkles of the bare branches. The colour of the house brightens and fades, and the birch trees that stand outside it atrophy to saplings that are then dug up and carried away.

I derive particular pleasure from seeing the pastel-coloured two-storey buildings that went up behind the house in the 1980s and 1980s demolished; in their place rise little wooden houses with vegetable gardens. At some point, too, potatoes grow in the garden of my house.

I have been told that gazing backwards is an activity that increases with age. People begin to seek explanations of themselves in the past, their family roots, the places they have visited. Perhaps, in every person’s life, there is a watershed; once one has passed it, one turns one’s gaze back in the direction from which one has come. I myself am still travelling with my gaze fixed firmly forward, but on the level of ideas I understand the wisdom that is hidden in history. It is clear that I would not be as I am if I had not lived the kind of life I have lived, if my parents’ backgrounds and choices had not been those they were. And I would not be myself if I had not lived where I have lived, moved from place to place and finally ended up in the family home, the same house where my grandmother brought up her family and where my parents celebrated their wedding. My family’s path is a circular one, and I have clearly been unable, or perhaps even unwilling, to stray from it.

As well as revealing the ingredients of the individual identity and the youth of the built environment, looking at the past backwards demonstrates the fact that history is constant motion. People travel in groups of different sizes, first in aeroplanes, cars, trains and ocean-going ships, then in horse-drawn waggons and finally walking backwards, toward their place of birth, their starting point, their home. Stopping is always temporary, a break in the torrent of history.

If you continue rewinding far enough, there is no trace of nation-states, civilisations, cities or villages, not stone upon another stone, not even the first sign of them. If the camera had stood in the same place before my home since the ice age, I would be able to follow backwards human life right back to the appearance of the ice masses. Standing on the best crossing-point on the ridge between Lake Pyhäjärvi and Lake Näsijärvi, Hyhky was already an important route for the people of the stone age.

In his essay Die grosse Wanderung (‘The great migration’), the German essayist and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger examines the world from the top of a great pile of books. His pen encompasses both the movement of nations on the surface of the earth and the most secret aims and motives of individuals. Enzensberger writes directly in the tradition of European knowledge and understanding.

At the beginning of his essay, Enzensberger leafs through a world atlas: ‘Clusters of blue and red arrows that thicken into eddies and then disperse in opposite directions.’ The freeze-frame of a page of the atlas toes not, however, reveal turbulence to be the normal state of the climate. The same is true of the population of the globe, Enzensberger comments. The history of the world is the history of great migration.

In his essay on the great migration Enzensberger is attempting – so I believe – a dynamic image of a dynamic phenomenon. One method he uses is some human experiments he presents as a thought experiment: There is a train compartment in which two travellers are sitting. The train stops, and two new travellers attempt to enter the compartment in which the original travellers, irrespective of whether they already know each other, feel their position to be under threat: ‘They appear, in the eyes of the new arrivals, to form a group. The compartment is their territory. Every new traveller is, for them, an intruder.’ The essay’s characters are, of course, theoretical constructions whose intention is to demonstrate social laws.

The essayist knows how to package the phenomena he describes as aphorisms: ‘Group egoism and xenophobia are anthropological constants which existed before reasons for them were expressed. Their global spread speak for the fact that they are older than any known social form.’ In a masterly way, the essayist’s pen shapes a rational explanation of complex historical developments such as the birth of hospitality. Its taboos and rituals were invented, Enzensberger comments, ‘to make it possible for even minimum exchange and communication between different clans, tribes and ethnic groups’. The mechanisms and dynamics of the great migration, with their causes and consequences, are drawn for the reader in broad, convincing strokes.

But where is the essay’s narrator? Although his gaze is unlimited in terms of either time or geography, it does not appear to be located anywhere – unless the European essayistic tradition is considered some kind of point of view.

I test Enzensberger’s writerly location by exchanging my fixed historical camera for a divine perspective. I rise to the height of a satellite and orbit the Earth beneath me in whatever way I wish. Oceans and deserts, forests and cities flash by, blue, yellow, green and black on the surface of the ball as it spins on its axis. If I notice something interesting I zoom in to look at it. As I examine people on the move I narrow my eyes until all I see is motion, currents, streaks of light. Seen from a suitable distance, the Earth’s crust begins to live like the surface of an ant-heap. I am a great and powerful anthropographer; I see the forest but not the trees, the torrent but not the droplets.

As a celestial statistician I am able to see at one glance that 214 million people live permanently outside their native lands. I am able to abstract the movements of groups of human beings into arrows pointing from south to north, east to west. The stream is, however, the strongest in the southern hemisphere. The demographic calculations I make confirm my visual observations: among the lands people are leaving Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia are the top three, while the best results for receptor countries are Pakistan, Syria and Iran.

As an all-knowing narrator, I have the ability to move in time. I set the clock of history so that I am able to follow the complex movement of peoples across the Earth. Migrations that have lasted centuries take place before my eyes in a few minutes. I watch as people spread throughout the world, encounter one another, settle down and then continue on their travels, endlessly. I focus on situations in which two peoples approach each other from opposite directions. I see mergings into one, trade, exchange of ideas and goods, but also battles and wars, genocides and conquests. The movements of peoples on the atlas of history, however, do not move me a great deal, for what, seen close up, forces one to ponder the senselessness of human activity is, from the cosmological perspective, a meaningless glimpse in the rushing stream of time.

Enzensberger, too, emphasises the importance of scale: ‘It is difficult to imagine big numbers.’ Charities offering help in catastrophes, too, focus on ‘just one small child with its big, inconsolable eyes’. Nevertheless, Enzensberger does not ponder the role of science, and the tradition of thought that he represents does not question the position of the narrator. The fact that the essayist examines the world from the outside is such a well-worn device that it is no longer considered a device. We are unable to wonder at the omnipotence, the impartiality, of the writer who comments on the world as God.

For this reason the essayist must write himself into the story, must step into and inhabit the world he wishes to describe and understand.

The return to the surface of the ant-heap is not easy, for the powers of vision of the almighty have intoxicated me. Whereas, just a moment ago, I was examining human life at the scale of the universe and understood the insignificance of the individual in the torrent of history, now I stand, toes numb, in the autumnal garden of my home, the burden of meanings on my shoulders. I gaze around me, but in every direction my gaze founders on trees, hedges and houses squatting in their gardens. I can no longer see farther than my everyday life. There is no sign of the historical movie camera, there is only this moment, which itself dissolves second by second beyond reach.

Absentmindedly, I move the children’s bikes strewn around the garden to lean against the walls of the house, out of the way of cars. Just a moment ago I unscrewed the auxiliary wheels and pushed both children, turn by turn, along the nearby park road, until, after many falls and tears, they learned to ride without support. Fortunately I still have time before the revolving door of history chucks them out of our home.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

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

Portrait of the author: Leena Krohn, watercolour by Marjatta Hanhijoki (1998, WSOY)

In many of Leena Krohn’s books metamorphosis and paradox are central. In this article she takes a look at her own history of reading and writing, which to her are ‘the most human of metamorphoses’. Her first book, Vihreä vallankumous (‘The green revolution’, 1970), was for children; what, if anything, makes writing for children different from writing for adults?

Extracts from an essay published in Luovuuden lähteillä. Lasten- ja nuortenkirjailijat kertovat (‘At the sources of creativity. Writings by authors of books for children and young people’, edited by Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen; The Finnish Institute for Children’s Literature & BTJ Kustannus, 2010)

What is writing? What is reading? I can still remember clearly the moment when, at the age of five, I saw signs become meanings. I had just woken up and taken down a book my mother had left on top of the chest of drawers, having read to us from it the previous day. It was Pilvihepo (‘The cloud-horse’) by Edith Unnerstad. I opened the book and as my eyes travelled along the lines, I understood what I saw. It was a second awakening, a moment of sudden realisation. I count that morning as one of the most significant of my life.

Learning to read lights up books. The dumb begin to speak. The dead come to life. The black letters look the same as they did before, and yet the change is thrilling. Reading and writing are among the most human of metamorphoses.

Soon after that morning, I opened another book, a collection of poems by Saima Harmaja. My mother used to recite to us a few lines from one of the poems, ‘Nuori enkeli’ (‘The young angel’), by way of an evening prayer. But she had never read aloud the stanza that I now read. It is engraved on my memory: ‘How hard was the journey, how bewildered the brain / As one the world spoke, in the language of pain’. I felt I understood what was meant by those words, though at that point I had seen so little.

The third important book of my early childhood was my sister Inari’s first-year reading book, which also taught basic arithmetic. There was a short story in it about a girl who was given six cherries, delicacies I myself had never laid eyes on. The girl was supposed to share the cherries with her sister, but she claimed she had been given only four cherries. She gave two to her sister, and ate up four herself.

To me, this was like a thriller or a horror story. As a five-year-old who had learnt to share everything equally with my sister, I had never read of a more appalling crime. I began to see that there was a difference between right and wrong and that a person needed to learn what the difference was if she wanted to avoid suffering a great deal, and causing others to suffer.

Reading was the most important thing in my life when I was at school. I would never have called it a hobby, though; it was something much greater and more important than that. Going to school was secondary, and that showed in my marks; I was always a poor student, right up until sixth form. A musical child knows early on that she’s in training for her future career, but I had no idea. I wasn’t in training to be a writer; I read for the sheer pleasure of it. Of course, I later understood that it’s only through reading that you learn how to write. And I didn’t feel the need to talk about what I’d read to anyone else; books were too private for that. It is with books, and not people, that I spent the most pleasurable moments of my life.

Around the time I was learning to read, we were given Zacharias Topelius’s Lukemisia lapsille (‘Reader for children’) in a deluxe edition illustrated by Finnish and Swedish artists. I was still reading it when I was at my single-sex secondary school in Helsinki, along with the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen is still one of my great role models. It is often said that children need happy endings. Just last summer, I reread Andersen and realised how amazingly often his stories end unhappily, at least in the conventional sense. Children die in them, and so do lovers, and the one who loves the most stays behind, alone. And still the stories provoke hope and insight.

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, which I was given as a seven-year-old, is still among the books that are most dear to me. Many of the scenes in the book will stay in my mind forever. Some of them are fast-paced and funny, like the japes and scrapes of the conceited Toad. Others possess the pure magic of poetry. For example, the scene in which Mole feels homesick. His abandoned former home sends him a message, which he obeys. There’s also the Water Rat’s wanderlust, the lure of the unknown South, and the words of the wayfaring rat: ‘I will linger, and look back; and at last I will surely see you coming, eager and light-hearted, with all the South in your face!’

In his work, Grahame captures the sacredness of experience and the spirit of nature. This places his work in a higher and nobler class of children’s literature – and world literature.

I don’t see a clear difference between writing for children and writing for adults. It’s just that when I write for children, I’m writing for everyone; when I write for adults, I’m only writing for some people. In everything I write, I try to be ‘brief, clear, and rich’, to quote Andersen. The question ‘What is true?’ is fundamental to my life.

During the morning devotions at school, we would often sing: ‘Spirit of truth, guide us’. And in our reading book, we were our told: ‘Child, shun lies, always tell the truth. Always tell the truth, in play and in earnest’. At the beginning of the 20th century, the realists thought you should only write what is true. How can a writer who writes mainly fantasy, or something called sci-fi, abide by such instructions? In my view, it’s not impossible. Art is a game and a lie, but as such, it approaches truth. That’s the paradox of art.

Literary fiction couldn’t exist without imagination or rational thought. In my opinion, the imagination is the basis of all rationality. It is also the basis of conscience. A person needs to be able to imagine the consequences of her actions both for herself and others. Art or literature cannot, then, be separated from moral choices.

Reality, and above all the human world, is made up of impossible connections. Fiction and reality exist in a symbiotic relationship. What could be clearer proof of this than money, which once again has recently betrayed its unstable, ghostly, and fictional nature? It’s quicksand, and something even more deceptive. I’ve termed such phenomena tribars, after the impossible objects devised by the physicist Roger Penrose. A tribar is an image of human reality, which brings together truth and untruth, symbol and matter, rationality and irrationality, to form a construction that is logically impossible.

My books do not exactly take place at a certain time or in a certain place. Like Angelus Silesius, I believe that you are not in a place; rather, the place is in you. I don’t see myself as writing national literature, nor have I ever dreamt of writing the great contemporary novel. I have always wanted to write short books that nonetheless have the spirit of truth in them. National literature was at one time necessary to create a spirit of togetherness for a new state, and a collective symbolism, but I believe that it has had its day. It is sometimes said that all good literature is political. Maybe so, but then good literature is also always cosmopolitan.

It cannot be denied, however, that place shapes people in powerful ways, since memories are of course anchored in place and time. Place, time, and language are the foundations of identity. Of necessity, a writer draws on her own life experiences when writing, even if they are not obviously apparent in her books. All of one’s personal history, all of one’s life experience – and that includes what one has read – are there in the writing. You don’t have to go and write about things you haven’t personally had contact with – but I use ‘personally’ in a very wide sense. Still, writing is for me a forgetting of the self – the individual abandoning herself to the greater sum of things. In writing you go back and forth between private and public zones. You can only relate the most private things publicly, and in a common language.

I think of world literature as both shared and indivisible. Children’s literature is also world literature. All literature involves sharing and reciprocity, giving and receiving gifts. All works, whether they are written for children or adults, in whatever language and country, form one and same world literature, in which all works exist in relation to each other. Completely autonomous works don’t exist, and every book has many authors, both dead and alive. Literature is intellectual capital that is not used up or diminished through distribution.

The first obligation of the writer is to write as well as possible. In fact, thinking about it, that is the writer’s only obligation.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah

Words and images from the book Leikin varjo / Guises of play (Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova and Musta Taide, 2011)

‘Ring dance’ by Ulla Jokisalo (pigment print and pins, 2009)

The playing hand is true as only the human body can be true, but in play the hand is something else. It is a new creator, accepting and gentle, arousing the lifeless to life. Everything has its meaning, for play is always about something, something of significance. Play is a mysterious celebration for at least one person. It is passionate improvisation on a long-term dream.

‘Invisible hand’ by Ulla Jokisalo (pigment print, original: cut-out paper, watercolour, 2005)

In play, everything is given a name and the connections of things are revealed in the fresh naturalness of a new-born world. The mysterious alliances and mergers of play feel as if they had always been intended for each other.

Play chooses its own means, metaphors and details. It selects its illusions and secrets. It cannot and must not be ordered by anyone. It is always on the side of dreams, reverie, ideas and possibilities.

In play, rules give freedom beautiful, harmonious, transient, and thus vanishing, form. Enveloped in harmony one can even bear chaos. The right hand of someone in my left hand, the left hand of someone in my right. The rhythm is the same, gazes meet and cross within the circle: the same and truly shared play for all of us. No one gives orders, for the circle is shared in a perfect manner by all its members. The players are enthralled by the dance, but in a shared and joint manner. The circle rises and takes flight, for no one restrains or disturbs the play. It has a conscience, and for that reason, too, it is absolutely real.

Playfulness expands our idea of what is real or contiguous in life. What is meaningful? Play gives the answers. Play with perfect motion is replenished all the time, in its order, content and narrative. Play stops us from sinking into indifference or numbness. It is the arch-enemy of asceticism, denial of life, and being a bore. It defends mad order, the lack of discipline, unruliness, anarchy, utopia.

Scissors and thread

We embroidered and embroidered, stitched and stitched, heads lowered, backs bent, cheerfully looking out of the corners of our eyes, losing our sense of time….

‘Marjatta. Point of view III’ by Ulla Jokisalo (embroidery, thread and needle on pigment print, 2008)

The sound os the scissors is best heard against a tabletop: they bite chew and crush the cloth. The tabletop amplifies the sounds, lent rhythm by the metallic clash of the scissors. The solid surface of the table is revealed from under the cut fabric….

‘To stand on her own two feet’ by Ulla Jokisalo (cut-out pigment print, embroidery, thread, needles and pins on fabric, 2004)

You know you have to look out for a needle. A weapon and means of torture, yet something that heals and mends.

But thread is even more. Fear can be touched within beauty. Thread can be a soft support, giving way and breaking if it’s really necessary. It can be a slashing line, cutting without mercy. Twist it the wrong way and you can separate its strands to be seen. Long ago it was tamed into the cells of waffle cloth, when it played one-dimensional, curved to make angles and pretend to obey. Cross-stitching also put magic thread in place, shackled it and made it serve images.

Poetry

According to Francis Bacon, ‘poetry is as a dream of learning’. Unattainable, coherent and true learning lies somewhere in the depths of dreams. Poetry has the ability to reveal it, byt only for a fleeting moment that cannot be expressed in words. But after that moment one will no longer desire the frightened obedience of the weather-vane. This moment freezes history into a smiling face whose forginving honesty hurts the heart. Let it hurt.

Translation: Jüri Kokkonen

‘Well-read’ by Ulla Jokisalo (cut-out pigment print, embroidery, thread, pins and needle on fabric, 2010)

In this series Finnish authors ponder their profession. If this is writing, there’s no method in its madness: Markku Pääskynen finds he wants to write as life allows, not bend his life to suit his writing

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

You get the picture? A translation error in China. Photo: Leena Lahti

Why just three per cent? Translator Owen Witesman seeks an explanation for the difficulties of selling foreign fiction to the self-sufficient Anglo-American market. Could there be anything wrong with the translations?

I am a professional translator, and I have a secret: I don’t read translations.

I’m not alone. The literary website Three Percent draws its name from the fact that only about 3 per cent of books published in the United States are translations (the figure for Germany is something like 50 per cent). There are various opinions about why this is, including this one from Three Percent’s Chad Post writing at Publishing Perspectives.

Why do I say it’s a secret that I don’t read translations? Because people expect me to read translations, as if as a translator it were my sacred duty to show solidarity with my professional community. Or maybe I can’t be cosmopolitan otherwise.

But here’s the cold, hard truth: there are some 350 million native English speakers in the world, most of whom live in the United States. Among them there are a lot of writers. And while for a very few readers translated literature is a category unto itself, for most of us translated literature is competing with everything else on the fiction shelves.

Does anyone get turned off from translated literature by a Henning Mankell? No. It’s usually a Kafka or Márquez, challenging enough in the original, sometimes made incomprehensible in translation. (Luckily for big names like those, a new translation usually comes along.) We read Mankell for the puzzle – the language just has to not get in the way. We read Márquez for both the story and the language.

Take how many people have had a bad experience with a translation that made the foreign seem alien, add the language barriers between foreign books and domestic agents and publishers, and then put this in the context of stiff domestic competition, and you get only 3 per cent of books published in the US being translations.

The ironic thing about the 3 per cent figure is how tremendously important translated literature is to the Anglo-American literary consciousness. Ask anyone who paid attention in high school who the greatest authors of all time are, and you’re almost certain to get at least two Russians, a Frenchman or two, a Spaniard, two Chileans, and a Brazilian, plus an ancient Greek or three.

Despite my dirty little secret, my favourite novel is a translation. When I was eighteen, I read Narcissus and Goldmund, by Hermann Hesse. However, and with all due respect to the English language translator, Ursule Molinaro (and whoever her editor was), even as a teenager, and without any reference to the source German text, I knew the translation wasn’t the best it could be. But as this is my favorite book, so whatever deficiencies there are in the translation or with the original work, the virtues of both far outweigh them for me. And this is one of the most beloved books by a Nobel Prize winner who had been honing his conceptual expression for decades – what happens to the average book that ends up in a translation in which an eighteen-year-old can see deficiencies? In my case it doesn’t get read. I read a paragraph, I start editing the grammar and punctuation in my mind, perhaps rephrasing the dialogue, and I get bored.

Consider the path a (Finnish) translator walks to arrive at his profession. First comes a connection to Finland, one that surprisingly often comes either by chance or fate, depending on one’s cosmology. Then comes what we might call an infatuation: the nascent translator becomes obsessed with Finnish language and culture, which leads to improved language skills and literary awareness. By the time the literary translator really breaks into the profession, his Finland hobby has likely been going on for a decade. If the translator works with Finnish literature by day professionally, and then continues to read Finnish literature, follow Finnish news, and keep up with Finnish friends during his free time out of old habit, how current is he likely to stay with literature in his native language? Taking myself as an example, I know exactly what’s going on in Finnish literature right now, but I haven’t really the slightest idea about what’s going on in American literature.

Translation is rewriting a book from another language in your own. The author takes care of the plot and the Finnish, and I’m supposed to take care of the English. Reading Finnish doesn’t help with that. Reading other translators’ work probably won’t help either, and may even hurt. However, every word of English-language literature I read can improve my ability to manipulate the English language in the way that Finnish authors manipulate Finnish. To my mind, reading in his own language should be a literary translator’s primary professional development activity.

The importance of professional proofreading and editing cannot be overstated. Publishing translations without multiple reviews by native linguistic experts is professional suicide for everyone whose name is on the title page. A publisher or agent who sends out material without multiple reviews by native linguistic professionals doesn’t want to make money. Sample translations and promotional materials should be top quality, not an afterthought – see this post by Emily Williams.

Literature in translation can and does compete with native literature, even in demanding markets. I don’t expect to see any ‘breakthrough’ that permanently changes the 3 per cent figure cited above, but that doesn’t mean translated literature has failed to find a readership. It just means that there is a lot of competition and that every book succeeds or fails on its merits, not on the reputation of the overall field. Whatever momentum one big hit may create is likely to be short-lived. Yes, there are aspects of the book trade that make breaking in difficult, but every new author faces these challenges. Perhaps the greatest disservice any of us involved in translation can do is to adopt a sort exceptionalist attitude, as if the success of a book or author in Finland, or wherever, should give the book a free pass from all of the normal requirements for finding a publisher and an audience. Hype will only get you so far.

The beginning of this essay is a lie. I do read translations. I want to read translations. But you, the translator, and I, the translator, must understand that I like television and films and music and my bicycle and my garden and my dog as much as I like books. I like my wife and my children and my church even more. I read the books I’m supposed to in order to be literate, but I also read science fiction and fantasy and espionage. I’m not a captive audience. You have to win me over. Please win me over. You can’t say the Finnish or German or Chinese or whatever made you do it. You have to be a translator. Take responsibility. Win me over.

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)

If you sit in your garden and feel a bit like you’re tucked uncomfortably at the end of the dock in a guest berth, the reason is this: the garden hasn’t yet found a place in your muscle memory. Because it is only at the point when the garden has settled into your muscle memory, into your senses in as many ways as possible, that it will feel like your own. And that, of course, takes working in the garden, not just sitting in it.

So you should know your rose – not just its lovely smell but also the memory that you get from the shovel handle of when you planted it, or even the memory of the prick of its thorn on your finger. You can anchor every little detail in your senses, and it doesn’t even take much imagination. The scent of thyme on your fingertips, the downy fluff of a pasque flower against your palm, the silken glow of a peony opening in the morning sunlight – or the sumptuous mist of the wee hours of a summer morning twining over everything, and the rare experience of wading through it.

Etching a garden into your muscle memory and senses doesn’t happen in a moment, or two moments; it’s a long-term project. If you’ve felt the yard work in your limbs many times, you can take consolation in knowing that without going to that trouble the garden will never be known to you, never be your own. Overdoing it, of course, is another matter. There’s no need to  break you back for the sake of your muscle memory (says the woman who has made that very mistake). We sense things at a different pace than you might think; we need to give our senses time, they need to be awakened. When, at the end of winter, we feel oversensitive to the light, the scents and sounds, it’s because we’re partly frozen. The long period in the sterile indoors has done its work.

A gardener is happiest when she’s worked on a spot for a long time and sees it come to fruition.  A yard can be got ready-made, but a garden is another matter. If you start at the very beginning, every square metre of the plot can be connected to muscle memory. The bite of a shovel here, shifting a stone there, planting, raking, perhaps edging a flower bed. You feel it in your bones, in your core – why not in your muscle memory?

It’s moving to hear how precisely garden people remember their garden tasks. The journey from planting your first apple seedling to the time when the tree produces its first edible apple. Or when, after twenty years, you finally see the candlestick blossoms of a horse chestnut tree, long after giving up hope. Or when a peony grown from seed has enough roots to divide, to grace the ages. I never tire of hearing garden stories.

When I run into an elderly friend, I feel a great gratitude: they’ve passed many a baton to me in one way or another. The world is  a very narrow place when all our doings are with people our own age. We should strive to live in both directions: reaching to what has been as well as ahead, to what will be. When we abandon old people to their own devices, in institutions or in other ways, we abandon our own future selves. With those kind of deeds we make our own future grim –  can we really afford that?A garden often functions as a calendar, a sort of an open, illustrated diary for those who work it. I maintain that for many older people the garden also stimulates the memory. The aesthetic experience that surrounds us in the garden arouses the senses, anchors images in our minds, calms and delights us, enlivens and makes whole again things that we thought we had lost. Memories are carved out of places, people, and things. People want to carry these things with them, as part of their identity. They don’t weigh us down at all, yet there is nothing more weighty. The moment we lose them, we lose ourselves. An inherited garden, passed down in the family, is a rare thing. It may be in the muscle memories of numerous generations, and that is really something. If you have the privilege of taking care of such an inherited garden, it can function for future generations not just as a garden, but also a bit like poems that the gardener has hidden away here and there. Each person will interpret it in their own way, though there are always those for whom such a poem holds no interest. When I see a bulldozer and builder’s booth in a fine, old garden, I’m overcome with an inexpressible sadness, even though there may be a good reason for it – serious matters like real estate sales, new apartments or roads. When an old garden goes, more than one garden is nullified.

A worker at the dump once told me what the saddest sight in the world is: photo albums in the trash. So many homeless memories that no one has time to grieve an individual photograph.

Plants don’t grieve, they generally grow where they are planted, or else they stop growing. They don’t remember us, but we remember them. New life will come to take their place, whether we like it or not.

I’m sitting in the evening on the largest stone in my garden, on Derelict Hill. There are so many mole tunnels that I wouldn’t wonder if the stone disappeared into the earth and took this green-thumb with it. I guess that would stay in my muscle memory, too.

Translated by Lola Rogers

On the first day we played getting-to-know-you games. On the second day we played real Finnish baseball out behind the university. On the third day we travelled to the countryside. Classes started sometime at the end of the second week. We watched the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The professor slurped Coke, chain smoked, and rewound the video back and forth: Nurse Ratched’s plump face filled the screen and then in the next image where her face had been there was a basketball Jack Nicholson was squeezing.

It was the autumn of 1992, and I was studying film and communications theory in Copenhagen.

The excursion to the country frightened me, a shy bacteriophobic neurotic. The Danes thought the camping centre’s shared mattresses and group cooking were hygge – cozy. There is no way a dictionary translation could ever cover all the forms of cosiness the Danes achieve together. I fled the camping centre on the first morning. On the train to Copenhagen I recognised all the usual post-escape feelings: shame, fear, guilt, loneliness and overwhelming euphoria.

I did not learn Danish. I only knew one phrase fluently: ‘En hotdog med sennep, ketchup og ristet løk.’ I used it daily. After a few weeks I stopped attending lectures at all. Instead I sat in the Finnish language department’s small library room and ate pretzels and wrote short stories, long laments about loneliness and homesickness. I didn’t even bother to read them myself.

On one rainy afternoon late in October, I was once again sitting in the Finnish language department’s library idly flipping through the Copenhagen phone book. I noticed that there were five hundred Erik Hansens living in the city. I started thinking about what these Hansens think of each other. Did they feel a sense of solidarity? Did the more outgoing among them want to meet other Erik Hansens?

I wrote a new short story about loneliness and homesickness, this time such that the first person character suffering from loneliness had ended up on a summer outing with sixty Erik Hansens. I was completely saved from having to describe the loneliness because it was otherwise clear from the story that the others had a strong, obvious connection that my protagonist was condemned to be excluded from. I found that this was how I had always felt among people.

The short story about the Hansens’ summer outing finally ended up in my first book. Since I had become acquainted with the Hansens in such pleasant circumstances, I continued to think of them often. I felt like we had a lot in common. I imagined the Hansens as workaday Danes, cheerful and scrupulous. I did note the special cases – the Olympic canoeing champion Erik Hansen and the actor Erik Hansen and the artist Erik Hansen – but as I understood it, most of the Hansens lived perfectly ordinary lives somewhere in the suburbs of Copenhagen.

A couple of years passed. I was studying in Tampere and didn’t hear anything about the Hansens. That is until one day I read in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper column ‘People of the world’ that Interpol had issued a warrant for Erik Hansen. He had committed some crimes abroad, stirring up trouble for the other Hansens, too: according to the report, an innocent Erik Hansen had been detained in Mexico because he had been confused with the Hansen the police were after. The Mexico Hansen had sat locked up in the airport jail for a day and then had been flown to London and locked up in a cell there. Around the same time, a third Erik Hansen had tried to go on a wine tasting trip to Chile – he had ended up locked up at the Santiago airport.

At the end of the news report it told how the Danish police were now considering outfitting all of the innocent Erik Hansens’ passports with a special stamp to demonstrate their innocence.

I sat in my studio apartment in Tampere’s Pispala neighbourhood thinking about all the Hansens that were travelling around the world committing crimes and tasting wine and vacationing. I also thought about the innocence stamp that the Hansens would soon receive: I imagined how they would go to the police station, and the police would applaud their innocence and give them the stamp, and how afterwards they would sit around with the policemen in the break room and chat about this and that and everything would be hygge. These thoughts made me melancholy. I would have liked an innocence stamp too. I would know how to appreciate it. It would have been nice to look at it on sleepless autumn nights.

I also thought about the constitutional principle that a person shouldn’t be forced to testify to his own innocence, but rather that others should testify of his guilt, and about how this principle of justice had always sounded somehow rotten, since it would be most pleasant if no one had to be involved in this business of testifying about people’s guilt at all. I also reflected on how unjust it was to force all of the Hansens to go to the police station to get an innocence stamp when the vast majority of them lived peacefully in their homes and certainly weren’t being driven to any old Chile by their wine addiction.

That one visual narrative detail from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the cut from Nurse Ratched’s face to the basketball, ended up being the only new thing I learned at the film school in Copenhagen. My other memories from that autumn are of city streets, of endless bicycle treks around windy Copenhagen. I still don’t know where I was going. I just rode. Cycling enthusiasts are always delighted to remind us how on a bicycle you can get close to the landscape, to the centre of life, but I just rode by. I rode by homes and parks and cafes; I rode by containers and cranes at the harbour; I rode by office buildings, empty lots, and demolition sites, past castles and red brick factory buildings.

When I returned to my digs in the evening, I left my bicycle in the dim cellar of the apartment building where dozens of reflector cat eyes glittered in the light falling from the streetlamps. Then I went up the stairs to the fourth floor, tiptoing past the landlord’s closed door and shutting myself in my room. I sat there eating cookies of the Kammerjunkker brand and reading the books I’d borrowed from the Finnish language department.

In November I wrote to Finland to ask a friend for a pulla coffee bread recipe. My intention was to bake in my sublet apartment kitchen the same kinds of long loaves as my grandmother in the 1970s. The rising phase failed. A couple of weeks later I got excited when I found a familiar pre-packaged liver casserole at the corner market. I bought a one kilo carton in a fit of homesickness. Back at the apartment when I ladled the casserole into the frying pan, it looked strangely smooth. It was Danish liver pâté.

My autumn as an exchange student should have ended at Christmas, but I fled for home on Independence Day, December 6. It was raining in Helsinki. The empty streets looked desolate. I was happy.

Since then I’ve visited Copenhagen three times and always found that it isn’t like before, that the enigmatic, inexplicable melancholy of my youth has disappeared completely from the city. Instead of the wastelands of the outer city and a dim bicycle cellar, I now notice the pedestrian street cafes and the whipped cream caps on the tall cups of cocoa. Drinking cocoa in those cafes, I’ve thought that I wouldn’t like to live my youth over again, that I would want to live someone else’s youth.

I’ve never met a single Erik Hansen, not on my trips to Denmark or otherwise. One or more Hansens may of course have happened to walk by on the bustling streets of Copenhagen, but they have melted into the anonymous, unfamiliar Danes.

Translated by Owen Witesman

‘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

The landscape of words is in constant motion, like a runner speeding through a sweep of countryside or an eye scaling the hills of Andalucia.

The proportions of the panorama start to shift so that sharp-edged leaves suddenly form small lakeside scenes; a harbour dissolves into a sheet of white paper or another era entirely. Holes and different layers of events begin to appear in the poems. Within each image, another image is already taking shape; sensory experiences develop into concepts, and the text progresses in a series of metamorphoses.

This kind of landscape is one of the primary tools in the poetry of Olli Sinivaara (born 1980): he allows sensual experiences to flood his text, while imagination simultaneously shapes, conceptualises and moulds the verbal landscape. The reader is moving through a baroque, labyrinthine world of images within images, through a sensory landscape that is constantly being born and reborn. In Sinivaara’s poetry, images are only in the process of coming into existence and reality is not yet complete.

Spindrift is flinging far out over the breakwater.
Glistening-horned oxen of multi-metrical waves
flood the streets of the palace precincts. The sun’s polished gold glitters
and spreads, turquoise’s myriad hoof-tints paw the sand.
The sky’s incredibly bright and gleaming, silver-blue.
The bellowing of those foaming ridges travels far,
sounding down to the depths of the veins,
carrying over the sickening deathly silence of millennia.
When the palace’s last remains have been trampled away,
my rainforest-footed oxen depart and settle down within
the walls of the building-site hut that’ll take the palace’s place.

As a reader, I experienced the illusion of stepping into Sinivaara’s consciousness and walking alongside him through this verbal landscape – almost like watching a film entitled Being Olli Sinivaara. I had no idea that things could be so fascinating inside someone else’s head! It’s a place where things are in constant motion, and that’s why it is best to read Sinivaara’s Valonhetki (‘A moment of light’, Teos) collection slowly; one poem a day is enough.

Exploring borders

The birth of reality is approached from a rather different perspective in the work of Aki Salmela. Salmela (born 1976) is acutely aware of the ways in which metaphors can lead us astray and how traditional turns of phrase smuggle into our minds the sort of values and presuppositions that should be taken with a pinch of salt. His collection Yhtä ja samaa (‘One and the same’, Tammi) retains this healthy sense of scepticism, but does not settle for mere irony. Salmela has a far more ambitious goal: to maintain a deconstructive hold on the text while, for instance, talking earnestly about love. Like a tightrope walker, the work is delicately balanced between irony and moments of the utmost seriousness. I say this even at the risk of finding that there is in fact no rope beneath the tightrope walker’s feet.

That said, Salmela makes constant use of metaphors – sometimes in jest, sometimes in all seriousness, for homo sapiens has no other means of approaching the unknown. Salmela questions his own metaphors. At the risk of sounding nihilistic, he pulls a new metaphor from his pack of cards and thus the motion continues, because ‘reality doesn’t consist of ideas; it consists of events, which are adept at giving rise to ideas in the minds of those caught up among them’. In Salmela’s prose poems, reality is unfinished and open; it is built from piles of useless junk upon old ruins. The project is condemned to failure, yet the work carries on regardless.

Love, like a hundred little hearts floating snowlike amidst the winter darkness. Love like a snowman in a happy family’s yard. Love like a soft knife against a hard heart. How could a poem go on indefinitely without some love-metaphors, however groundless. How could a way of speaking, how could a style of phrase. How could life, in this phase of life. And let’s assume a cloud shaped like a beautiful face floating in front of a heart-shaped moon, and glowing. And let’s assume. Love, like a carelessly kept promise, like a frail-looking seal fixed to the rest of one’s life, this little postal parcel, being carried by eternity.

Both Aki Salmela and Olli Sinivaara are products of the experimental poetry magazine Tuli & Savu (‘Fire & Smoke’); they both edited the magazine during the early 2000s. As poets, however, their paths have diverged: Salmela is interested in the classical avant garde, the American tradition of ‘language’ poetry and other post-modern trends, while Sinivaara has provocatively come out as a defiant exponent of modernism.

Where Salmela demonstrates the deceitfulness of language – the ways in which language guides and confines our thought processes – Sinivaara writes dazzlingly beautiful poetry, overflowing with images, poetry whose sheer baroque abundance makes any attempt to control it utterly futile. At first glance, it would appear that these two chaps’ aesthetic worlds have nothing in common. However, both of them write texts that exist on the boundary between language and reality – if, indeed, such a boundary is even discernible, given that we all live within the confines of language and cannot escape. It seems, however, that this is precisely what both these poets are trying to do.

Technology sometimes comes between the human body and our sense of reality in such a way that technology itself becomes our reality. Satu Manninen’s second collection of poetry, Sydänfilmi (‘Heartscan’, Gummerus), also exists in a borderland. Manninen (born 1978) has studied at the media art department of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, and I believe that the influence of her studies can be seen in her work.

Manninen examines humans’ relationship with technology; her poems feature all manner of gadgetry – photocopiers, hospital equipment, monitors, screens and electric cables that in a variety of ways connect humans and their senses to machines. Our view of the world becomes fragmentary, as does our view of the body as time and space become increasingly non-linear. Images and sensory experiences collect, one on top of the other, or separate away from one another, and suddenly the human body no longer exists in a unified world.

The body is full of new extremities and probes that shape our experience of our surroundings: ‘On a dark road the mind goes into overdrive, / the link between the left and right lanes is broken. / I drift on to the white area of your ironed shirt, / I open the buttons and read the map of liver spots.’ There is an intimate feel to Satu Manninen’s collection, yet it deals with the kind of all-encompassing change that, unnoticed, affects our very existence with every passing moment.

How would it be to find oneself in a painting of the Fall of Man. I try to cover up the traces, paint a messier and messier dilapidated garden over it, but a garden hose twists in my belly. For so long hope swayed in the wind, and now they’re building a golf course on it, a board game loaded with hotels. The eye of a surveillance-camera eye tracks the bistros being carted along the corridors, hearts beat on the plates.

Pictures of time

In the past few years, the Finnish poetry scene has seen a great deal of so-called ‘search-engine poetry’, which makes use of our collective language hovering in the ethers of the internet. In his debut collection, Hajoamisen syyt (‘Reasons for decomposing’, ntamo), Markku Aalto (born 1970) extracts a portrait of our times from linguistic material he has found on Google; he collides different ways of speaking with one another and lets them reflect ironically upon themselves: this is the linguistic world in which we live today. Aalto  works with his material in a skilful yet cynical way.

Just love

It’s always nice to get to know new people, both possible future friends and sex mates. Free love’s on offer, love crossing class and language barriers, hopeless love and so forth. In the latest phase nervous people go weak at the knees when they’re shut up in a dark cell.

Pottering about with the course of one’s life it’s possible to produce an outline of the journey of life; typically the summer of adult life is spent in a whirl of romance. In it mature adults work for a good cause, until the woman’s on the front page of every tabloid, and then, having had a taste of the limelight, she’ll fling off her clothes as well and appear stark naked for the gaping eyes of the public. Thus death and heaven, too, will assume their appropriate places in the chronological continuum.

A mere feeling of love won’t reach further than the bridal bedside. The world falls apart – and changes, actually the very next morning. Folk sit round a candle and reminisce about people, animals etc. that have passed away. They might say aloud, in turn, that ‘I long for you – sign here – and I’d like to say to you… for example, that you’re important to me etc.’ Then they can compose themselves for prayer.

Tabloid past

Forty years ago, everything was still in a state of fermentation: traditional gender roles were breaking down; the world was changing; conservative society was confronted with a belief in progressive values. Henrika Ringbom charts the collective language of the era in her collection of prose poems entitled Händelser (Ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974) (‘Happenings. [From Nya Pressen 1968–1974])’, Söderströms). She has come up with a fascinating working method: in preparation for this collection she has reread old editions of the Swedish-language Nya Pressen, a newspaper that, in her childhood, was an important source of information for her.

A woman in space

Why not send a woman into space? Why not send her on a really long space flight? She would be forced to function. She would have to function as a functioning member of the crew. She would not be taken along as a guest. Already here on earth woman has shown that there are tasks for which she is better suited than a man. She can go from one home to the next, cut up meat, bread fish, fry fillets and freeze the dainty bits. At the wheel of the car she is best naked! The woman and the corset are a lethal combination! Unmarried mothers have more difficult childbirths. Unmarried and mother are a lethal combination! But the housewife has a dream. Her dream begins with the perfect contraceptive pill. And her dream ends. Her dream ends with the perfect water-jug. Why not send her into space? Why not send her on a really long space flight?

Ringbom explores subjects such as the ennui of many a housewife, free sex, the Vietnam War; she follows the moon landings, terrorism, hippies and the growth of affluence just as they were depicted in the pages of Nya Pressen. Ringbom’s method is brilliant: Nya Pressen’s tabloid language takes readers back to the age of innocence that existed forty years ago, but Ringbom’s winks from our contemporary perspective lend the collection an exciting cross-lighting. Rarely have I experienced moments of such clarity as while reading Ringbom’s collection.

Archetypal choices

Jarkko Tontti (born 1979) also delves into the annals of history, though not through a use of historical language but through his protagonist in Jacasser (Otava), a chattering (jacasser, Fr.) oaf (jackass, Eng.) called Jacasser. Is Jacasser the poet’s ironic alter ego, a middle-aged, sceptical, lonely man, who secretly dreams of acts of heroic bravery, though he sees the history that results from them as nothing but a trail of mindlessness? Jacasser is more of an archetype, a kindred spirit of Henri Michaux’s M. Plume, a man who wanders through history at times as the Greek teacher of Emperor Domitian, at other times as a merciless bishop in 17th-century Tartu, his relation to power remaining throughout one of both faithful servant and silent critic.

When Jacasser was old he cast his skin and renewed it like a viper, wrapped himself up as a delicate parchment, a white sheet embroidered with lace. Under his new skin Jacasser was strong and alone. In the evenings he recalled restless African states he didn’t have the courage to visit, houses whose doorbells he’d avoided in fear of an electric shock. Now he’d have time for it all, he’d and he’d. Old and in his skin Jacasser often returned to the water’s edge, sorrowed over the disappearance of the water plants and clear lake water. In the old days it would have been unheard of, the turbidity of an algae lake is the farmer’s gift to future generations. Jacasser also thought about the bottom, the new skin would keep the moisture out, all through that journey.

Tontti tells the story of his trickster protagonist in the third person. With Jacasser’s help, he compares different eras and, in an almost tragicomic light, makes his readers assess the significance of an individual life against the historical backdrop: our relationship to our fathers, to friends, love, to dreams and the seasons. The collection reaches its climax towards the end through a dramatic turn of events; all masks are removed as Jacasser exits the stage. The final poem in the collection is narrated in the first person, as close to the reader as it can possibly be: ‘I remained alone, between people.’ It doesn’t matter whether the speaker is Jacasser, Jarkko Tontti himself, or someone else. What is most important is that he is speaking.

Rules of life

In Stendhal’s classic novel The Red and the Black, the protagonist is caught between two paths: should he follow the Christian path or should he live the life of a soldier? Sinikka Vuola’s poems seem to exist in a limbo between God and our instincts; we are caught between two evils. In her collection Musta ja punainen (‘Black and red’, Tammi), Vuola (born 1972) makes extensive use of archetypes, but takes a further step into the unknown, a mythical wonderland beyond historical time.

Colours have other meanings too, which everyone who has ever gambled will surely know: only red and black can win. In Vuola’s collection, the game is a metaphor for life governed by a strict set of rules. However, those rules are of little use when our destinies are guided by coincidence, leaving us powerless to prevent death, cruelty and violence. The King and Queen of the card game fulfil their archetypal roles; they dutifully uphold the rules of the game, rules that change without our noticing. They step across a chequered stone floor, unable to escape the chessboard.

The troops are iron and steel, their weapons gold and silver
   the general, the aide-de-camp, the vehicles, the cannon, the cavalryman, the foot-soldier,
the rook, the king’s bishop and the knight,
   The king moves with dignity, a square at a time,
he cannot hurry
   and the walking stick is patched up in three places,
The castle, designed and built
    In the grandest rooms the floor
with squares too regular
   for me to feel good,
He looks at death, death at him with its bottle-green eyes: the enemy
   follows my moves but
                     illness and death don’t,
   they move wherever they want             Like the Queen
the rest are counters: hardened gold, silver and steel,

So, reality is uncontrollable: ‘the enemy / follows my moves but / illness and death don’t, / they move wherever they want’…. The theme of control is also apparent in the form of these poems. Vuola paces her texts with great precision, creating a finite whole, but lets go of the reins at top speed and allows the lines to flow, so much so that it’s frightening: as if someone suffering from insomnia had stopped obsessively organising their pills and fallen into a deep sleep.

Translated by David Hackston

Poems translated by Herbert Lomas, with the exception of A woman in space, which is translated by David McDuff

What’s the meaning of life? There are those who seek it in religion, while for others that is the last place to look. The scientist Kari Enqvist ponders why some people, including himself, seem physiologically immune to the lure of faith. Perhaps, he suggests, we should look for significance not in the big picture, but in the marvel of the fleeting moment

As a young boy I must have held religious beliefs. However, I cannot pinpoint exactly when they disappeared. At some point I eventually stopped saying my evening prayers, but I am unable to remember why or when this happened. ‘I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why,’ writes the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet.

When I was reading the Christmas story aloud, I didn’t believe in it. Although I know it cannot be true, I have the feeling that I have in fact never believed in God. My memory does not stretch back as far as my childhood so I cannot say what I thought back then or what kind of child I was. It is as though I have forgotten myself, as though the connection to that little boy is nothing but a construction, a play that in the deepest recesses of my ego I perform for my own gratification. It is for these reasons that my religious Bildungsroman is not a story of relinquishing but of forgetting.

What do I believe in? I believe that the universe is an infinite physical system without goals or objectives of its own. I believe that life on Earth is the result of serendipitous coincidences: our planet happens to be located a suitable distance away from a suitable star. I also believe that life may be found in many of the solar systems in our galaxy, but that intelligent life is a very rare occurrence. At the same time, I know that I do not know these things but that they are beliefs.

I believe that my ego is a process, a capitalist system of molecule factories lacking a concrete core, a five-year plan or a designer that I might call my ‘self’. Its seat is not in only in my brain, rather my whole body takes part in preserving my sense of self. I believe that my experience of my ‘self’ has been stitched together from smaller parts, that I have been many people and that at this very moment different versions of this self are present in my brain, versions that assume prominence according to need and situation. I believe that my will is not free but that my every action, opinion, desire and thought is born of the dance of atoms and molecules that obey the laws of physics and are unguided by the spirit. I believe that the word ‘I’ is a calming lullaby, selected via a process of evolution, a narrative echoing through my consciousness, constructed by my brain to maintain an illusion of continuity and control. I consider religious faith to be a meme that can easily take root in the mind, and I believe that religions do not answer any of the big questions facing the human race but that, for people of faith, religions offer the sense that these problems are being answered.

And I also think that these views do not in any way lessen the value of humanity; they do not lead to nihilism or to the disintegration of ethical values. On the contrary, I believe that regardless of these views – or even because of them – I am on the whole an optimistic, cheerful person, a mild pacifist equipped with a conscience that, compared to that of many people of faith, is highly social.

It is often said that science answers questions as to what the world is, while religion provides the world with meaning; science tells us how, religion tells us why. In this way, science and religion can be seen to complement one another. In the words of Archbishop Jukka Paarma: ‘Science examines the mystery of the birth of the world and the development of nature and humanity. Faith trusts in the notion that God’s will and His love for human kind is behind everything.’

But what exactly is the meaning that religion gives us? What does the archbishop mean with the words ‘behind everything’? Does he mean that God has created the world and its laws? And what, then, is the significance of this belief? That human life has meaning because God has a plan that He is hiding from us? Isn’t such a manner of thinking merely an example of the simple contention, ‘faith has meaning for me’? But what significance does religion attribute to a loved one’s brain haemorrhage? What meaning can be hidden in my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease? What significance can we read into the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers or the detonation of the atomic bomb above Nagasaki? Once again, people of faith are confronted with a fundamental theistic problem in attempting to establish a correlation between the meaning of God and the significance of individual events.

Indeed, is it not the case that religion cannot offer explanations of the meaning of human life, and that rather, in the face of disasters like the 2004 tsunami, it must accept that these are such incomprehensible events that all prayers simply evaporate on our lips? Why did the Burma Plate slip on Boxing Day 2004? Neither texts deemed to be holy nor the most fervent man of prayer can provide an answer. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that there is no glorious core that can be considered the source of religious meaning. Rather, there is simply a selection of practices that have assumed the stamp of religiosity. At times that stamp can fade away, while at others it can become strengthened through influence of strange coincidences in the surrounding society or human life. It is as though religion were a means-tested stencil for which the logic guiding its use is both fuzzy and passed down through generations.

This is the stance espoused by, amongst others, theologian Ilkka Pyysiäinen, who argues that Lutheran practices provide Finns with a religious prototype. They represent a yardstick by which other religions can be recognised as religions. ‘After this, there is a widening, never-ending sphere of phenomena that resemble religions to a greater or lesser degree. There is no clear boundary between religion and non-religion; there are only phenomena, some of which seem religious, while others do not,’ writes Pyysiäinen.

The small amount of religiosity that I was able to make out in my parents was also largely ritualistic in nature. As a family we never went to church. At Christmas we had a tradition of reading the Christmas story aloud before eating. This was designated my task, and perhaps my parents were hoping to achieve something almost holy as they listened to their only son’s clear voice as he read fluently and with conviction (and over the years with a certain level of theatricality) the familiar story of Emperor Augustus’ decree. As a child, my mother used to read my evening prayers with me, but on the whole it was as though the mere mention of religion was, by some unspoken agreement, deemed improper. The words ‘Lord’, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ were never used. I believe that my grandmother’s Pentecostalism must have been lurking in the background as an example of the dangers that can be associated with religious language, as though devout religious practice had, thanks to my grandmother, become synonymous with failure, misery and insanity.

It seemed that, over the years, my father’s attitudes towards faith became increasingly indifferent. In this he was very much the product of the age, a century marked by the marginalisation of religious life in industrialised countries. Religion is dying away. It long ago relinquished its place as a guiding beacon for all human life, but its memory lives on in religious practices and rituals. My mother, whom I believe to have been more religious than my father, would sometimes use expressions like ‘such is our lot’, though I am unsure whether there was any deep, religious sentiment behind these words or whether they too were merely part of a ritual of sorts.

Although the focus of faith may be something supernatural, the seat of faith is firmly in the flesh. Though it is often said (in my opinion, erroneously) that thoughts are more than simply the sum total of electrical brain impulses, faith itself remains firmly anchored in the real world and in the laws of physics. It resides in the brain’s neurons and synapses. It rattles along the cortex and flies like a bird over the corpus callosum. It is both electrochemical and molecular biological. In our consciousness, it is physically present in the same way as memories, predilections or next week’s shopping list.

The analogy to a virus is particularly apt in the case of religion, as faith can be transmitted unwittingly and spontaneously. Unlike purely physiological viruses, religion is a virus of psychological reality or, more specifically, a collection of viruses – or memes.

Memes contain some element that makes them easier to remember. However, we cannot say with any certainty what that element is. Why some books become bestsellers while others are flops is a mystery that every publishing editor would dearly like to solve. One can only surmise that the architecture of our brains, their physiological structure and the ways in which they are filled with memories, opinions and personality traits make us particularly susceptible to certain memes.

Once the faith meme has been transmitted, it already has the power to spread itself. ‘Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations,’ it commands us. As a result of this, sparing no expense, people will get into their cars, drive around ringing the doorbells of complete strangers and asking whether they would like to hear about Jesus. More importantly, however, it commands us to baptise small children and to implant the meme in their minds. Were this not a question of religious faith, such brainwashing would seem wholly immoral, making, for instance, the British scientist and writer Richard Dawkins’ outrage over the religious labelling of children seem perfectly reasonable. Dawkins argues that talk about Christian or Muslim children is grotesque, for what is at stake is not the children’s faith but that of their parents. Still, the faith meme does not listen to such reasoning, but tells us that this is all for the good of the children, that in this way those children will be saved.

Seen from this perspective, faith is a collection of practice that is descended from one generation to the next as a meme. Its longevity is assured by the subsidiary belief, namely that the prize of such ritualistic practice is everlasting life and that to deny this will be punished with eternal suffering. The faith meme carries with it a package saying that faith is always the morally right choice and that non-belief is wrong in the most profound manner. This branding bears painful similarities to Microsoft’s saturation of the computer technology market.

Dawkins famously argues that DNA is selfish; its only concern is to reproduce itself. If we consider the faith meme in the same fashion, the various characteristics of organised religion seem suddenly to fall into place. The faith meme does not jump from one mind to the next as physical matter (doctrine), rather it is transmitted with the help of associated subsidiary beliefs (‘it is right to believe’, ‘faith will be rewarded’) and rituals. If the spread of Christianity had relied solely upon its muddled theology, the church would have dwindled away and become a mere curiosity centuries ago. But the image of the crucifixion or the thought of life after death, a life in which we will be reunited with our loved ones, awakens such powerful physiological reactions within us that faith is transmitted almost by force. All of a sudden we are saved – and who wouldn’t want to go out and spread the good news? It makes no difference that the doctrine itself is incomprehensible and riddled with inconsistencies. Why does a benevolent God allow evil to exist? How can one God become three? Why do we eat God – quite literally – at communion? But what of this! This is why faith has no core to speak of, for ultimately what we are dealing with is simply a group of practices that help the meme to reproduce and that caress and calm the human mind. Faith does not reveal the meaning of life and neither does it provide answers to the why-questions so despised by scientists, but regardless of this it gives us a strong sense that these questions have been answered.

One occasionally hears the contention that, whereas the genes written into our molecules are real, memes are nothing but words and, as such, are every bit as real as the tooth fairy. However, it would be wrong to imagine that memes have no physical being. They inhabit not only the world of the imagination, for thoughts and beliefs are firmly rooted in physical matter. When a belief takes root in our minds, it does so in a very concrete sense. Changes occur in the structure of certain nerve cells; the chemistry of our synapses is altered. The trace of a memory is a physical trace left on our molecules themselves. In fact, memes are probably far more complicated affairs than genes, as an individual belief is not isolated to one single molecule, rather, with all probability, it affects collections of different molecules in different areas of the brain. A meme is therefore a configuration made up of certain molecules. Neither is it necessarily an unambiguous one: different configurations can, in principle, correspond to the same beliefs.

The American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett had argued that, though we cannot identify the physical manifestation of a given meme in different people’s brains, this does mean that the meme itself doesn’t exist. All in all it is a question of how matter is arranged. We might consider memes as intricate mobiles suspended in abstract space, something that can grow or crumble as beliefs change. That being said, certain constellations can be very stable indeed and can latch on to brain matter with relative ease. If, by virtue of their structure, they strive to build similar constellations in other brains, they are behaving like viruses.

The genetic information stored in our DNA is copied from one molecule to the next using, for instance, messenger RNA, which transports the structural drawings of proteins into the cytoplasm around individual cells. Copying and transporting the faith meme is a more complicated affair: the meme causes an electrochemical reaction that is released in the form of preaching and chanting, practices which in the recipient’s brain trigger a construction process resembling the constellation of the original meme.

In the manner of real viruses, the faith virus can be easily transmitted to children whose immune systems have not yet fully developed. Children can be infected at the drop of a hat. The elderly are also in the high-risk group. This too fits the picture.

In theory, viruses can spread easily, but there is always someone who is immune to them. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but of crucial importance is the fact that the reason for their immunity is physiological. Certain parts of that person’s certain cells are structured in such a way that the virus – which is itself nothing more than a longish molecule – cannot latch on to other cells or reproduce itself in the way it is programmed to do (though, naturally, viruses do not have a free will of their own). Alternatively, in some people the body’s defence mechanism is so exceptionally effective that it even produces molecular structures that can neutralise the effects of the virus.

Similarly, the faith virus doesn’t infect everyone. The reasons for this must also be physiological, as recent neuroscientific research suggests. It has been discovered that religious experiences activate certain areas of the brain, leading some neuroscientists to talk of the ‘god module’. And although such a module may not exist, ultimately the phenotype of religion, anything from singing a hymn to reciting the creed is, as has already been ascertained, the expression of brain activity. Non-religious people are therefore people who, because of the architectural make-up of their brains – and therefore, by chance – demonstrate an immunity to the faith virus. In non-religious people, the meme does not trigger any kind of reaction.

Non-religiosity is not a wholly rational position either. People do not become non-religious merely from the weight of the scientific evidence. The unresolved problem of evil or the wrongs of history are not enough to snuff out religious sentiments, though of course they have played a role in developing atheists’ opinions. The philosophical semiotic analysis of religious language is, I assume, of even less significance. For non-religious people, their beliefs do not represent the rational acceptance of a certain doctrine, but what their heart tells them. I cannot reasonably claim that I decided that faith doesn’t have any emotional significance for me. This is simply the way things have happened, thanks to the architectural make-up of my brain. This is the way the molecular machine of my ego has worked: it has created certain chemical changes in my cells and synapses, the manifestations of which we call beliefs. It therefore follows that I do not believe my will has been free in the vulgar sense of the word.

When the city of Espoo celebrated its 550th anniversary, every home – including mine – received a little booklet from the church entitled Safe: An Espooite’s Faith. The booklet consists of short tales, which are a mix of high literature in the style of the author Bo Carpelan and texts by ordinary people. According to the text on the back cover, their aim is to ‘make the reader think about life and its meaning’. Well, I read it and I thought hard. Little booklets like these provide a far better window into the everyday religious life than the learned and carefully honed epistles of bishops. (An essay fragment by the pastor and writer Matti Paloheimo remembers to mention Wittgenstein, but who among us would not have committed that same sin?)

I had forgotten quite how anguished religious language can be: ‘One day this sorrow and wretchedness will end.’ Many of the texts in the booklet make repeated reference to ‘fear’ and ‘shame’. The assurance of joy and happiness, the climax of most of these texts, sounds like a mantra, just as a tightrope walker crossing a ravine might repeat to himself, ‘I will not fall, I will not fall’. Exaggeration and the obsessive exaltation of mercy speak of a terror that, despite the beatitude of faith, lurks on the edge of consciousness. These writers are at their most sincere as they thank the parish for the sense of security it offers, being able to cuddle up to someone else, protected from the dark, just as our ancestors at the dawn of humanity must have warmed themselves in their caves at night.

For me this booklet did not serve to anchor my everyday life; it made me sad. I felt bad for these people because of the anxieties they experience. They offload this anxiety by writing to one another: once I was lost, living in fear of death, adrift on a churning sea, but now I am safe. But why do people feel the need to repeat these matters ad infinitum? Why did not a single text take joy and love as its starting point? The only exception to this was a text written by an 81-year-old former deacon, offering an  uncomplicated account of his working life. I felt almost embarrassed for the editors of the booklet. For once they had the perfect opportunity to reach the vast majority of people in Espoo for whom religious life means very little. And yet I get the sense that, in that respect, they have been unsuccessful. What invigorates those in the hermetic common rooms at the parish, wilts under the broken light of the indifferent outside world into something banal.

These small vignettes about moving from the darkness into the light do not touch me, because I do not live in constant fear of death, I do not feel shame, sorrow or wretchedness. The average day is not perfect and my life includes unfortunate events, but it is not constructed around fear and shame. In this respect, I do not believe that I am in any way exceptional.

When we look for life’s meaning, we should not look for it in the overall structure but in life’s constituent parts. This is by no means a new observation but one that dates back to Horace when he shouted ‘Carpe Diem’! The words ‘seize the day’ may sound somewhat business oriented, but they can also be understood as a Zen microscope focussing on a single moment in order to separate it into as many elements as possible. This is also what natural science teaches us.

In fact, nature only teaches us if we examine it closely, with as fine a resolution as possible. In this way, nature reveals the mysteries of both matter and the cosmos, thus uncovering the world’s secrets, everything from the atomic bomb to the physiology of proteins. In science, people often say that the devil is in the details. But perhaps something else is hidden there too.

A pragmatist might argue that, if human life is the sum of its experiences, one would be well advised to maximise those experiences. However, this does not refer only to extreme experiences: hang-gliding over the Antarctic, riding on dolphins or travelling to Mars. In this instance, less can often be more. Perhaps it is enough to watch the Sun casting a beam on the wall; an autumn butterfly warming itself there; a cloud high in the summer sky; the wind scattering leaves; a hand holding a book. You need only watch people hurrying along the street to the Market Square; people spilling out of commuter trains at the station; people in far off countries sitting behind their stalls, hopeful and expectant; people that every day, with every step, carry life’s light burden with them. It is enough to listen to the sound of your breath, just enough that you can say to yourself: I am here, I am alive in this moment, this fleeting moment like a diamond between two strikes of the clock. ‘Not altogether bad,’ as the Brits say.

And perhaps it is at moments like this that we can disregard our destiny, forget the past and the future, and feel, if only for a brief moment, the burden of sorrow lift from our shoulders.

Translated by David Hackston

In May 2009, after a year of writing, I held in my hand the manuscript of a novel whose plot and characters were complete. There was a subject, theme and the occasional good passage, but something was badly wrong.

When I swapped roles, writer for reader, I realised that my text did not touch the skin, and certainly did not get under the skin. I had wanted do more than raise a smile; I had thought I was writing a book that would make its readers want to turn the page, I had wanted to provoke, to cause laughter and even perhaps tears. Now all that my text provoked in the reader – me – was embarrassment and boredom.

What was wrong?

The narrative device was bland. Through it, the language of the entire book, and thereby the spirit of the entire book, was wrong.

The novel was based on a three-part television series which I had written earlier, and on the second reading I realised how clearly that original version was visible in the text. What had been intended to work as images and scenes simply did not breathe as prose. What had been genre-typical structure in the television script felt, on paper, like plot devices that had been forced on to paper.

I knew what was expected. The drama had to be made to work in its own terms as prose, the images had to be turned into language, visual nuances into linguistic ones, but I did not know what to do to make all this happen. The book was scheduled for publication the same autumn, so time was short.

I did a rewrite, but could not find the right angle or the right voice. The text felt like an unwieldy pile, and the right place for it was the oven. I called my editor and told him that this might not make a book for next autumn, it might not make a book at all, that perhaps this writer’s career would turn out to last all of eight years. ‘It will. It always has. You’re doing something that has never been done before.’

A big ask, and a lot of trust. But the trust of others doesn’t help when you don’t trust yourself. I requested an extension. I went to the loo. I grabbed a book from the shelf on the way, and sat on the seat. Without glancing at the book’s cover, I opened it at random.

God sat in a filling-station café in a Helsinki suburb. A couple of pages later Marlon Brando wandered along a street of post-war housing in the same city, looking at Finnish family home-owners.

God in Pakila? Marlon Brando in Maunula?

The book was Kari Hotakainen’s Sydänkohtauksia (‘Heart attacks’), and in an instant those few pages untied the tangled knots in my narrative strategy.

I had seen walls and limits in places where all limits are absent, where everything is allowed, where the setting can be Egypt, the Second World War, Pakila, space, a village school or a witch school. In prose, a dead person, or one yet unborn, can speak, decades can pass in one sentence or it can take four hundred pages to describe the events of a single minute. As I writer, I have the powers of a circus ringmaster, a clown and an emperor.

When you write prose, you don’t have to consider the price or location of a scene, you don’t have to think about the text’s relation to any other reality than the reality it creates. Its foundations can be made of cement, marshmallow or feathers, and the structure stays in place if the reader so wishes. The book is born in my head; it lives its life in the reader’s.

I have written five novels, and in each of them the same thing has happened, in slightly varied forms. The act of writing progresses from the conventional, from unwilling work, toward liberation. In the best case, language, story and writing itself combine to offer an element of detachment and surprise that is the same thing as the work’s spirit. The only limitations of the novel’s content are the covers; the space between them devours between 77 and 1500 pages of anything at all.

I began the book again; the voice was taken by the figure of the Trainer, who is a combination of the wise old Indians of B-movie Westerns, god, the devil and perhaps myself. I sweated it out before the book was ready, but in the end I beat the deadline. One reader said that he read the book at a single sitting and found himself out of breath. For a sports novel, that is some feedback.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins