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

Sari Airola's illustration in Silva och teservisen som fick fötter (‘Silva and the tea set that took to its feet’, Schildts) by Sanna Tahvanainen

The future of book publishing is not easy to predict. Books for children and young people are still produced in large quantities, and there’s no shortage of quality, either. But will the books find their readers? Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen takes a look at the trends of 2011, while in the review section we’ve picked out a selection of last year’s best titles

The supply of titles for children and young adults is greater than ever, but the attention the Finnish print media pays to them continues to diminish. Writing about this genre appears increasingly ghettoised, featuring only in specialist publications or internet chat rooms and blogs.

Yet, defying the prospect of a recession, Suomen lastenkirjakauppa, a bookshop specialising in children’s literature, was re-established in central Helsinki in autumn 2011, following a ten-year break. Pro lastenkirjallisuus – Pro barnlitteraturen ry, the Finnish society for the promotion of children’s literature, has been making efforts to found a Helsinki centre dedicated to writing and illustration for children. The society made progress in this ambition when it organised a pilot event in May 2011.

The Finnish publishing sector is undergoing changes, which also have an impact on books for children and young adults – even though such developments are not trumpeted. The number of small independents and self-publishers continues to grow. At their best, their products do not necessarily lag behind those of the big publishing houses. Even so, the professional editorial skills and long-standing expertise of the major publishers are reflected in quality as well as in the level of investment, both of which are increasingly consistent. But smaller publishers, too, reap fame and fortune through prizes and nominations. Karisto was particularly successful in 2011; over the last few years, it has invested in domestic books for children and young adults with renewed enthusiasm.

It remains to be seen how the recent merger of the two Finland-Swedish publishers, Schildts and Söderströms, will affect the amount of Finnish-Swedish children’s literature that is published. This language area has seen the emergence of many new and distinctive authors of picture books in particular.

The serial format has been on the increase since 2000, but it may soon be on the wane; authors themselves are already publicly and extensively questioning the excessive concentration on series. Domestic writing continues to reflect the popularity of fantasy, while authors are fortunately displaying growing willingness to replace international narrative patterns with variations on home-grown Finnish folklore. For example, Ritva Toivola makes use of ghost stories and folk tales in her historical novel for young adults, Anni unennäkijä (‘Anni the dreamer’, Tammi). In her collection of tales, Lymyvuoren peikot, (‘The trolls of Skulk Mountain’, Tammi, illustrated by Christel Rönns), Eija Simonen dives into the underground world of trolls and, at the same time, into the human unconscious.

Dystopia, fantasy that reaches out into the future, is clearly on the way to becoming a new and trendy subgenre of domestic fantasy. The best examples include Annika Luther’s De hemlösas stad (‘The city of the homeless’, Söderströms), as well as Routasisarukset (‘The frost children’,WSOY), the splendid opening volume of Anne Leinonen and Eija Lappalainen’s fantasy trilogy. Both novels contain trenchant criticism of society and of the destruction of nature.

The realistic novel for young adults is clearly going through a critical stage. The number of self-contained (non-serial) novels for young people is decreasing. This literary genre needs new, young authors, bolder than their predecessors, to work alongside old hands. In addition to descriptions of traditional growing pains, there is interest in topical subjects. For example, Marja-Leena Tiainen’s novel Kahden maailman tyttö (‘The girl from two worlds’, Tammi) addresses cultural differences and the adaptation of an immigrant to her new surroundings. The work deserved as much media attention as Layla, a comparable novel for adults by Jari Tervo.

Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen’s Valoa valoa valoa (‘Light light light’, Karisto), which won last year’s Finlandia Junior Prize, provoked sharp exchanges on the internet, as some older readers disapproved of the novel’s uninhibited depiction of sexuality. In fact, it is a good sign that literature aimed at older teenagers is coming close to matching the diversity of adult literature, and Huotarinen’s work satisfies the literary taste of the most demanding of adult readers.

Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah

The author, a scholar and critic, specialises in books for children and young adults. She runs a blog (in Finnish), in which she reviews new books for children and young adults

Review section:

Tuuve Aro: Korson purppuraruusu (‘The purple rose of Korso’, WSOY)

Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen: Valoa valoa valoa (‘Light light light’, Karisto)

Hannele Huovi & Krsitiina Louhi: Jättityttö ja Pirhonen (‘The giand girl and Mr Pirhonen’, Tammi)

Jani Kaaro: Evoluutio (‘Evolution’, Avain)

Leena Krohn: Auringon lapsia (‘Children of the sun’, Teos)

Annika Luther: De hemlösas stad / Kodittomien kaupunki (‘The city of the homeless’, Söderströms)

Sanna Tahvanainen & Sari Airola: Silva och teservisen som fick fötter / Silva ja teekalusto joka sai jalat alleen (‘Silva and the tea set that took to its feet’, Schildts)

Marja-Leena Tiainen: Kahden maailman tyttö (‘The girl from two worlds’, Tammi)

Maria Vuorio: Kuningattaren viitta ja muita kiperiä kysymyksiä (‘The queen’s cloak and other knotty issues’, Tammi)

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

In the new media it’s easy for our pet hatreds to be introduced to anyone who is interested. And of course everyone is interested, how else could it be? Jyrki Lehtola investigates

Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, how can we get the revenue model to work by using our old media, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, hey, what about that revenue model of ours, Twitter.

The preceding is a poignant summary of what the Finnish media was like in 2011 when the rules of the game changed like they have changed every year. And we still don’t even fully understand what the game is supposed to be.

As late as 2010 you could still discuss the existence, significance and utility of Facebook as if there could be many different opinions on the subject; the defenders’ argument centred on social interaction and community, while the detractors was more ‘why would I join Facebook, I have a life.’

But in 2010 there was no longer any call for such wrangling, because Facebook was life. People didn’t join it anymore, because they already had. On Facebook we looked for cleaning help, shared our Spotify lists, shared links, endlessly, and told all of our friends how depressing Mondays are, or, as you would express it on Facebook: ‘Isn’t it great that it’s Monday again?’

We also hated there – oh, how we hated. Facebook tried to make us positive by offering us a ‘Like’ button, not a ‘Hate’ or ‘Despise’ button. But we were people who hated and despised – how to fulfil that important side of our nature on Facebook?

Easily, and, what’s more, in a pleasantly communal spirit; Facebook was a social medium, after all, not a medium that just tells us what to think, and what about. In the name of communality we created groups where we hated things and told others what to think.

We hated people who thought differently than we did, people whose values didn’t match our own, people who said ‘no’ when they were supposed to say ‘yes’ and people who worked in parts of the media that didn’t live up to our conception as social media actors about what people in the media should think.

Social media brought us a new communal gift: lurking. We created groups that hated and boycotted media, viewpoints and people, and then we sat and followed those same things, even though the purpose was to boycott them. Whenever the object of our hatred made a mistake, we linked to that error on Facebook, and then we laughed with our friends about how impossibly stupid people are.

Facebook was supposed to bring us a new, joyful sense of community, but even Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t do anything about our nature; we adopted Facebook in order to lure our friends into hating the things that we hated.

In 2011 Twitter also became an important part of our lives, because it understood our limitations and offered us the opportunity to condense our feelings and knowledge down to 140 characters. Twitter was the text messaging service for those who really wanted to subscribe to our social messages and hear that today we were ‘drunk in Porvoo’, that tomorrow ‘I’ll find out about a secret project I can’t talk about’ and that ‘here’s a link for all my Twitter followers to a page I found interesting’ because there can never be enough links in the world.

Twitter also gave us the opportunity to speak out in a way that didn’t require anything of ourselves. When you’re expressing your displeasure with a politician, the media or an international corporation in 140 characters, reasons don’t matter much, what you think does.

At the same time, Twitter gave the old media something to think about. What do we have to offer anyone anymore, and how can we squeeze money out of it? Because of Twitter, those of us in the old media were always late. Tweets were the first announcements of the revolutions in North Africa, the London riots and the death of Amy Winehouse.

We came limping along so late it was embarrassing. The subheading for every newspaper and TV news website could have been ‘News for the slow’.

The world became a place where you never had to wait for any information; everything was always available.

Whether we need all that information as quickly as we receive it is another matter. The new media was supposed to be social, but nothing had changed. There we sat, still alone in front of the television, just with the addition of our iPads, where we constantly received new information about what was happening in the world outside of the television; and, instead of digesting that information, we did what we always do nowadays: we forwarded it on.

It isn’t very long since we descended from the trees, and our gait is still a little unsteady. Our brains have been forced to adapt little by little to an accelerating world. Now that world has become so fast and so manic that our brains can’t necessarily keep up anymore. You can read about the effects of that imbalance in the old media, where the number of news blurbs about disorderly conduct has been rising sharply.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Samuel, the creation of Tommi Musturi (featured in Books from Finland on 7 May, 2010, entitled ‘Song without words’)

Comics? The Finnish word for them, sarjakuva, means, literally, ‘serial picture’, and lacks any connotation with the ‘comic’. The genre, which now  also encompasses works called graphic novels, has been the subject of celebrations this year in Finland, where it has reached its hundredth birthday. Heikki Jokinen takes a look at this modern art form

Comics are an art form that combines image and word and functions according to its own grammatical rules. It has two mother tongues: word and image. Both of them carry the story in their own way. Images and sequences of images have been used since ancient times to tell stories, and stories, for their part, are the common language of humanity. The long dark nights of the stone age were no doubt enlivened by storytellers.

One of the pioneers of comics was the Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer. As early as 1837, he explained how his books, combinations of images and words, should be read: ‘This little booklet is complex by nature. It is made up of a series of my own line drawings, each accompanied by a couple of lines of text. Without text, the meaning of the drawings would remain obscure; without drawings, the text would remain without content. The whole gives birth to a sort of novel – but one which is in fact no more reminiscent of a novel than of any other work.’

Comics look extremely easy to read; their images and text seem readily understandable, sometimes even making a simple impression. They are easy to read superficially, and for the reader to have the impression that they have seen it all. But even the simplest comic strip demands of its readers a complex capacity to interpret and distinguish. They must be able to read both images and words. Visual codes are freer in form than textual codes. The grammar of images is not made up of firm rules, but is flexible and capable of innovation. In comics, form and content indeed interact very closely.

The language of comics has many equivalences with other modes of expression. It is most commonly compared with cinema, a contemporary of comics and, like comics, originally a mode of expression intended as innocent entertainment for the masses. Both proceed in time – unlike, for example, art or photography – and comics use photographic angles and close-up and distance shots, like film. Between the individual images of comics there arises a relationship that is more than the images themselves.

The centenary of comics in Finland is celebrated this year: 21 November 1911 saw the publication of the first Finnish comic-strip album, Professori Itikaisen tukimusretki (‘Professor Itikainen’s expedition’), drawn and written by Ilmari Vainio.

Comics began to interest Finnish makers particularly during the 1960s and 1970s: it was part of the radical Zeitgeist to question the old cultural hierarchies, and comics were considered part of popular culture, which was held in increasing value. Moreover, the developing copier technology enabled artists to produce their own magazines: comics became a popular hobby. In the 1990s, it became possible for comics makers to apply for government arts funding.

Fifty or more Finnish comics titles are published every year. Strip cartoons appear in most Finnish newspapers and periodicals; readers are interested in cartoons of many different genres and styles. Collected volumes of strip cartoons are sold in large numbers: Juba Tuomola’s Viivi & Wagner albums have sold more than a million copies. Finnish newspaper strips differ from the American mainstream, which often centre on harmless japes. The most popular Finnish strops are biting in their irony and even dare to speak of sex. Their world is not a hermetic universe of its own: society, politics and world events are often present. Comics books often feature among Finland’s best-selling titles.

Comics are a flexible genre which includes many different modes of graphic and narrative expression, and comics artists delight in exploiting this freedom. Content may be anything at all: information, humour, drama, human relationships, history…. Many comics are published on the internet, and this greatly increases audiences. With the exception of humorous strips, however, the Finnish comic rarely attracts mass audiences.

Since 2000, around one hundred Finnish comics books have been published in translation. This is a great deal bearing in mind both the volume of the genre and the number of Finnish translations published as a whole. Print runs, however, are often small, and funds limited. The best thing about it, however, is that it is not a question merely of a couple of stars, although the Moomin comic strip (1954–1975), drawn by Tove Jansson (1914–2001) and subsequently by her brother Lars Jansson (it was also published in the London Evening News and was syndicated to about 40 other countries) has enjoyed a vigorous second coming since the Canadian publication Drawn&Quarterly began, in 2006, successfully to republish the Moomin strips in bookform. All in all, translations have appeared of books by more than 20 Finnish comics artists.

This autumn’s most important work of the genre is Ville Tietäväinen’s Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’). This graphic novel, an impressive volume in terms of both its size and itscontent, tells the story of Rashid, a paperless migrant from Morocco to Spain. Through the story of one person, Tietäväinen speaks of important matters: poverty, human value and what keeps us going, hope. The book was well received and sold in, in Finnish terms, large numbers. It is also to be published in France.

Näkymättömät kädet sparked considerable literary debate. Its publisher submitted it for the country’s leading literary prize, the Finlandia Prize for Fiction, but it was not accepted. A graphic novel still does not count as a novel for everyone.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

The following extract is from Ville Tietäväinen’s Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’, WSOY, 2011):  click the pictures to make them appear enlarged on your screen (then click again for further enlargement). The main character, a Moroccan tailor called Rashid, is sacked from his job, which forces him to emigrate and live his life as an illegal alien in Spain.

Ville Tietäväinen (born 1970) is an architect by training, and now works as a graphic designer and illustrator. Näkymättömät kädet is his third graphic novel; it combines both fiction and facts he collected on his travels in Morocco and Spain. His previous book, the award-winning Linnut ja Meret (‘The birds, The oceans’, Tammi, 2003), is also published in France (2005).

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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

Who's been eating my porridge? From ‘English Fairy Tales’ by Flora Annie Steel (1918), illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The Project Gutenberg e-Book

In the classic fairy-tale, on finding their belongings were not as they had left them, the three bears exclaimed: ‘Who’s been eating my porridge?’ When our technology correspondent Teemu Manninen found someone else’s underlinings in the electronic text he was reading, he wondered: ‘Who’s been tampering with my ebook?’ Which led him to ponder how similar books and their virtual counterparts really are – and could his ebook really be called ‘his’?

A few months ago I was reading an ebook on my iPad when I came across an underlined passage. For a moment I felt strangely disturbed. My initial thought was that I had not made the underlining, and therefore this had to be a glitch, an error in the computer program that was the book, which meant that there was something wrong with my book. What made this thought disturbing was the realisation that the kinds of harm that can befall digital books – and the measures that one can take to prevent them – are no longer ‘in my hands’: that the book is no longer physical, but virtual.

The ebook is code, not paper; electrical charges, not ink. I need complex machinery to access it and make it visible, and this complex machinery requires a complex network of industrial design, production and technical support to function. I can’t – or at least I shouldn’t – throw it across the room or against a wall if I become frustrated with it. (I can, however, under certain circumstances, spill tea on it and it won’t stain.)

I had known all this, of course, but I had not felt it before. Now I had: for some reason, an error in a digital book felt like a different kind of entity from a tear in the page of a paper book. It was a strange feeling: as if what had before manifested itself in a series of relationships with tangible, discrete objects – the individual materiality of books, which could be comprehended through the sensation of touch and its bounded, in-my-hands nature – had given way to a relationship with another kind of entity, the abstract, boundless domain of ‘text’ (the cloud of virtual writing) which I could only glimpse and navigate through the ‘window’ I held in my hand.

Touching the device was not the same as touching a book, suddenly. I realised that my most immediate, sensible relationship was with my iPad: it had become the intermediary, the silent priest allowing me access to the intangible, spiritual medium of literature.

While this thought processed its way through my head I came upon another: what I was seeing was not in fact a glitch, but someone else’s underlinings that the Kindle ebook service had made visible. Someone, somewhere, had considered this passage to be noteworthy or important in some fashion – and a very short moment of relief gave way to a feeling of irritation, a kind of territoriality: who was this person interfering with my reading experience? How dare they make drawings in my book!

Then, a microsecond later, I had to recognise another alienating truth about digital books: it wasn’t my book that I was reading. I had merely bought indefinite grazing rights that allowed me to lounge about on this particular piece of literary real estate. Others could do so as well, and make their journey through the landscape visible by grafting such graffiti in the paragraphs of text along the way. Knowing that this feature could be turned off did not make things any less weird, since the ability to turn something on or off in a book served only to strengthen the uncanny difference that I have lately started to feel exists between virtual and material reading.

I know very well that I ought to think of these markings as being like those one comes across when reading a used book. And in truth, I used to like those traces of the physicality of reading: the marginal notes in old books that I would find on forgotten shelves in the university library, their indecipherable code phrases designating individual moments of clarity, hesitation or befuddlement; the heavy lines of colourful mark-up pens in school textbooks passed down from kids that had moved on to higher grades; the title-page dedications, the ex libris of ownership, and later, in my scholarship, the love I developed for the practices of the Renaissance, that period in the history of the private-and-yet-shared reading when only books that were copiously annotated by hand with all manner of marginalia were considered ready for proper use.

I still love those practices and disagree with anyone who thinks the pages of a book should stay pristine and untouched even by oxygen or dust. But virtual and material writing and reading are not the same thing. Like so many of the applications and products of information technology, the digitisation of literature is based on the idea of making a digital copy of an analog thing: translating a material object into an image of itself. Because our brains happen to be wired that way, and since images of objects can sometime mimic those objects almost to a fault, we humans often confuse these images with the objects they represent. A digital recording sounds – at least to an untrained ear – like an analog recording. A digital book has text just like a paper book has text. What’s the difference?

The difference is, literally, in the details. Everyone knows that looking at a painting in a gallery is not the same thing as looking at it on a screen. The one has a topography, the three-dimensional physicality of paint on canvas, our approach to it contextualised by the surrounding social ritual of attention in a gallery space; the other is two-dimensional, caught within the private meanings produced by all the other uses we have for whatever piece of technology makes viewing the image possible. The same applies for the production of material and virtual images. Drawing on a Wacom tablet with a digital pen is not the same thing as drawing on heavy rag paper with a piece of charcoal. The difference is, then, precisely in the fact that an ebook is an image of a text, while a book has text in it.

What made all these thoughts so very ironical was that the underlined passage occurred in a book by the science fiction author John C. Wright which portrayed a far future Earth where the wealthy could move through the world and see, remember, hear, taste and feel it in any way they wished, since information could be altered and sense perception filtered, memories rewritten and reality be reduced to ‘channels’ that you could either ignore or subscribe to, depending on your whims.

The book, called The Golden Age, was one in a series that told the story of Phaethon (yes, named after the earth-and-sky-scorching mythological son of Phoebus the sun-god). In Wright’s story, Phaethon was an engineering genius who was disappointed with humanity for having never ventured farther than the solar system. He wanted to change the world and shake it out of its complacency: to build a spaceship and ‘go where no one had gone before’ – to leave a life of virtuality behind in order to reach new frontiers in the material world.

It has been said that despite the advances in technology and science and culture of the last decades, we haven’t really invented or discovered anything really new in a long time. Everything we do is just an iteration or a more detailed, more efficient picture of the computer, the neurology of the unconscious, of rock and roll, of DNA, or the theory of relativity. And if our culture is just an image of the culture of previous generations, what does that say about the digital future of literature, these images of images? What kind of Phaethon will we need, when those days come to pass – or are they already here?

The photographs and texts are from the book Linnut lumen valossa (‘Birds in the light of snow’, edited by Arno Rautavaara. Design and layout by Jukka Aalto/Armadillo Graphics. Tammi, 2011)

Snowy owl. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2010

Markus Varesvuo

Birds of prey have incredibly sharp eyesight. I have had the opportunity to watch the snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) hunt in both its summer nesting habitats and on wide expanses of snow in the winter. According to my own observations, a snow owl can spot a small rodent at a distance of almost half a kilometre. (Montreal, Canada 2/2010. 800 mm+1.4x teleconverter, F11. 1/200 s, ISO 800)

Siberian jay. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2010

The Siberian jay (Perisoreus infaustus) is a sympathetic, curious and fearless bird.

Using a remote shutter release and a wide-angle lens, I managed to take a close-up photo of a Siberian Jay that gives its winter habitat a strong presence.

(Kuusamo region, Finland, 2/2010. 24 mm, F11. 1/250 s, ISO 800)

Goldeneyes. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2011

The sun shining in the blue sky, ice and glimmering crusted snow provide the best light possible for photographing birds in flight.

In this picture, the details of the lower body of male goldeneyes (Bucephala clangula) are shown in a fine manner and the blue of the background can be exposed to the correct dark shade.

(West Turunmaa region, Finland 3/2011. 800 mm + 1.4x teleconverter, F8, 1/1000 s, ISO 400)

Jari Peltomäki

Common redpoll. Photo: Jari Peltomäki, 2011

The common redpoll (Carduelis flammea) is an active visitor at winter feeding stands for birds. This male descended on a branch in picturesque snowfall, seen as long streaks in the photographs, because of the long exposure.

(Inari, Finnish Lapland 3/2008. F11, 1/60 s, ISO 400)

Tomi Muukkonen

Brambling, greenfinch, bullfinch, great tit. Photo: Tomi Muukkonen, 2011

The brambling (Fringilla montifringilla), the greenfinch (Carduelis chloris) the bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula) and the great tit (Parus major). After buying his first camera, a friend of mine took impressive photos of small birds taking flight from a feeding stand. His pictures of hawfinches and other passeriformes were on my mind for years, until I was finally able to interpret this theme in my own way.

(Saarenmaa, Estonia, 2/2010. 95 mm, F8, 1/4000s, ISO 1600)

Arto Juvonen

Blue tit. Photo: Arto Juvonen, 2011

Winter will soon be over; the catkins tell of late winter days that are rapidly becoming longer. In late March, however, winter still extends its grasp, but the blue tits (Parus caeruleus) are in spring mode, singing and showing interest in nesting boxes, and with guests at the feeder starting to disperse themselves through the woods. The strong and lucky individuals have managed to survive a hard winter.

(Loviisa, Finland 3/2011. 500 mm, F4, 1/3200 s, ISO 1600)

Translated by Jüri Kokkonen

Arto Juvonen (born 1957), Tomi Muukkonen (born 1958), Jari Peltomäki (born 1965) and Markus Varesvuo (born 1960) maintain  webpages (also in English) and have won many prizes in both Finnish and foreign competitions in nature photography.

Because I am not a historian and Googling this topic would take more than two clicks, I do not know whether Gutenberg was accused of ruining the future of young people and making adults even stupider.

There would have been reason to. The invention of the printing press took us away from what is truly important. The world was better before Gutenberg.

People knew themselves and each other; they were connected to nature and what really matters. After Gutenberg invented the printing press, those poor people were forced to read books, creating an ever-worsening state of helplessness.

New inventions are always bad for everything we could be.

Television made us stupid. It brought us TV dinners and put the family on the couch watching advertisements, even though everyone could have been in their own rooms reading Hegel.

Magazines made us stupid. They had short stories, gossip, and pictures about people other than Hegel.

Now we have this Internet thing. It made us incredibly, unbelievably stupid, although, on the other hand, not so much.

The power of the Internet to make people stupid has been discussed as long as we have had the Internet to talk about the power of it making people stupid.

Because the Internet is something new, the potential and effects of which we are just becoming acquainted with, it follows that it makes us stupider. Google’s automatic answer service prevents us from using our memories. Wikipedia removes from the pool of answers the one that the world is a complex place in which there can be many contradictory answers to the same question. The endless news stream takes away our ability to concentrate. Each of these and many more considerations have had articles and books published about them.

Then there is the other, somewhat amusing perspective that has clung to the Zeitgeist, according to which the Internet is the salvation that will teach our youth and children how to get along in the modern world. This view emphasises willingness to change, coping with speed, multitasking, and that reading books is just a hindrance in a world of flashing stimuli.

We have spent the whole beginning of the millennium discussing this. People who write books have argued for the dumbing-down affect of the Internet; people who make their living from the Internet argue about what a good place the Internet is for our coping skills.

One of the most recent additions to the conversation is Nick Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. According to Carr, the Internet is changing how our brains work. On the Internet you don’t concentrate deeply on one thing, instead jumping from link to link in such a way that our brains don’t stop long enough on one thing.

Carr’s book has naturally aroused a discussion in which the opposition has argued that, well, here we go again with another elitist author tut-tutting current developments without offering any other solutions that tut-tutting current developments.

Now that this discussion has been going on for so long, would it be possible reshape it, if only for a moment?

Are we making the Internet stupid?

The Internet is a global place that crosses all boundaries, where we can get the latest information, which we can delve into ourselves or read about how other people have delved into, and in which we can be connected with people and perspectives we may never have been able to encounter otherwise.

That doesn’t sound all that terrible: a place where we can become acquainted with ten different opinions on the financial crisis, connect with our friends, check tomorrow’s weather, and purchase Terrence Malick’s latest film.

It would be nice in a place like that, but then we show up, we humans. Or at least the confusion of the Internet’s commercial actors related to us humans – related to what we are like and what to offer us so we’ll stay on the Internet in a way that can be made commercially viable.

And so they tried to invent different ways we could be present on the Internet: open discussion boards, a continuous demand to take a stand and let our voices be heard, and the recognition of how confused we are in the face of life.

And that is why I find instructions, queries, and polls on the Internet that apply to me so well. How can I keep my erotic life interesting? (I either have to remember that a) the other party is also a person, not simply the object of my erotic desires and b) it’s always fun to try new things) When is the right time to buy a child a mobile phone? (Depends on the child and your situation in life.) What to do when a child masturbates? (Talk with the child without embarrassing him.) Why am I not losing weight? (I eat unhealthy foods and don’t exercise enough.)

We have the Internet, a source of limitless potential, and how do we use it?

We turn it into a book – a book for rather simple children that tells us things we already know. We turn the Internet into a place whose default assumption is that we’re stupid, into a place that always has the same old questions and answers.

The Internet didn’t make us stupid. It didn’t have time, because we had already made it stupid first.

Translated by Owen Witesman

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

Viljakansaari, Finland, 2008. ©Merja Salo

Do we live in the age of autopia, and if we do, what does that mean? On this earth there are now perhaps 800 million cars, all vital to our modern lifestyles. Professor and photographer Merja Salo observes landscapes through her camera with this question in mind

Extracts and photographs from Carscapes. Automaisemia (Edition Patrick Frey & Musta Taide, 2011. Translation: Laura Mänki)

The car may be the vehicle for the everyman, but not every man is a good driver. According to Hungarian- born psychoanalyst Michael Balint, good drivers have the psychological structure of philobats. With their sense of sight, they perceive space well and control it by steering their vehicle skilfully. Ocnophiles, on the other hand, are more at home as passengers. They structure the world through intimacy and touch. When driving, they cling anxiously to the steering wheel and do not perceive the continously changing situations in traffic.

New York, USA, 2008. ©Merja Salo

Introduced in 1908, the Ford Model T turned the car into an industrial product whose price fell nearly to a third of the original in 20 years. The car became a symbol of modern life, speed and mobility. Since the oil crisis in the 1970s, the car has also become a symbol of environmental destruction. Today, limited oil resources, traffic accidents, emissions and other environmental effects are seriously overshadowing the joy of driving.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 2007. ©Merja Salo

The car stands for speed and freedom. Cars realise what the French philosopher Paul Virilio calls dromology, the logic of speed and velocity. The modern world is characterised by ever-increasing speed, of which the various vehicles are symbols. Speed and velocity also influence the way in which we perceive and see scenery.

Photography with its technique has redrawn and brought to the fore the traces of speed. At slow exposure times, headlights are recorded on film as speed lines.

St Petersburg, Russia, 2009. ©Merja Salo

The flood of light created by traffic flowing on nocturnal city streets was already a symbol of modern life in the 1920s, when cars became common in the Western world.

In car advertisements, the photograph has fetishised the shiny metal and chrome.

As conquerors of the landscape, roads are also part of power politics. In the Germany of the 1930s, the building of the Autobahns was part of the Nazi regime’s Volks- motorisierung. Hitler, too, was a keen motorist: ‘I love the car. It has offered me the most beautiful moments of my life.’

Cars affect the landscape even when thay are not speeding down highways. In reality, cars stay put most of the time, parked somewhere: in the garage, in a parking  lot, by the side of the road. In the United States, 30 to 50 per cent of a city’s are is being used by cars, with the figure reaching two thirds in Los Angeles.

Assisi, Italy, 2006. ©Merja Salo

In Houston, the amount of asphalted parking surface per inhabitant equals 30 parking spaces. Annually, more than 600,000 hectares of farmland is engulfed by asphalt paving in the US countryside.

Cornwall, UK, 2005. ©Merja Salo

Parking affects the landscape at least as much as the road network does. It has altered the public space and architecture of cities. Cars fill up city squares and street space. To sum up the effect of parking on cities: form no longer follows function, fashion or even finance.

Carscapes is a collection of cars in a state of speedlessness: they have most obviously become part of the landscape – or they have started to produce their own landscape. A carscape.

Pallas (Lapland), Finland, 2010. ©Merja Salo

In the spirit of Virilio, one could talk about dromotopoi, places and spaces created by speed. The places in which speed has come to a halt are a part of the topography of the motorised landscape.

Valkeala, Finland, 2008. © Merja Salo

Springtime: the new graduates celebrate the beginning of summer. Photos: ©Jussi Brofeldt

Documentary film-making and photography arrived in Finland in the 1920s with pioneers like Heikki Aho and Björn Soldan, who founded a film company in 1925 in Helsinki. They also took thousands of photographs of their city; in a selection taken in the turbulent 1930s, people go on about their lives, rain or shine

Photographs from Aho & Soldan: Kaupunkilaiselämää – Stadsliv – City life. Näkymiä 1930-luvun Helsinkiin (‘Views of Helsinki of the 1930s’, WSOY, 2011)
Photos: Aho & Soldan@Jussi Brofeldt. Texts, by Jörn Donner and Ilkka Kippola, are published in Finnish, Swedish and English.
The exhibition ‘City life‘ is open at Virka Gallery of the Helsinki City Hall from 1 June to 4 September.

Aho and Soldan were half-brothers, Heikki the eldest son of the writer Juhani Aho (1861–1921; an extract from one of his novels is available here) and the artist Venny Soldan-Brofeldt. (Juhani Aho changed his original Swedish surname, Brofeldt, to Aho in 1907), Björn Soldan was Aho’s son from an extramarital relationship.

A moment in the sun: Esplanade Park in the heart of the city

As Ilkka Kippola writes in a catalogue article entitled ‘Documentary and photographic modernists’ in the book that accompanies the show‚ Soldan was Finland’s first professionally trained cameraman while Aho was an expert in post-production work.

Together, they produced hundreds of documentaries as well as thousands of photographs from the 1920s until the mid 1940s. Aho’s daughter, the photographer and documentarist Claire Aho (born 1925) continued the work of her father and the company until the 1960s.

In an article entitled ‘Helsinki in the 1930s’, the author and filmmaker Jörn Donner takes a look at the history and politics of the decade.

In the autumn of 1930 political unrest began to manifest itself in the abduction of the country’s former president K.J. Ståhlberg: right-wing forces planned to transport him across the border to Soviet Union.

The shape of things to come: this photo is from 1941; the men are saluting the closing of the Soviet Embassy in Helsinki in advance of the Continuation War against the Soviet Union, which began later that year

A large number of farmers had marched in Helsinki earlier that year to demonstrate, demanding more authoritarian order in place of parliamentary democracy.

The abduction proved a failure, and the Ståhlbergs were allowed to return to home. However, parliamentary democracy was not yet safe in a country that had only gained independence as recently as 1917, followed by a  bloody Civil War in 1918.

In 1932 an armed right-wing extremist rebellion also failed.

Summer flood? The Railway Square taken by surprise

Later a broader coalition of political parties was able to develop democracy – which proved vital later, as Donner points out, when, in 1939, the Winter War broke out.

The war caused the cancellation of  the 1940 Olympics, which eventually took place in Helsinki 12 years later.

Summer 2011 in Helsinki has been the warmest in several decades – the photos here give a few glimpses of sunny days in the city eight decades ago.

Sun is fun: a Helsinki beach in the 1930s. Photos: ©Jussi Brofeldt

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

Juhani Aho. Photo: SKS/Literary archives

Yksin is the tale of a fashionable, no-longer-young ‘decadent’, alienated from his bourgeois circle, and with his aesthetic stances and social duties in crisis. He flees from his disappointments and heartbreaks to Paris, the foremost metropolis at the end of the 19th century, where solitude could be experienced in the modern manner – among crowds of people. Yksin is the first portrayal of modern city life in the newly emerging Finnish prose, unique in its time.

Aho’s story has parallels in the contemporary European literature: Karl-Joris Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884), Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) and Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890).

The novella reflects the innovatory trends of the period. At the end of the 19th century the new prose was no longer interested in a story line that traced an individual’s course of life. The story was chopped, spatially and temporally, into sequences, which didn’t produce a connected narrative or create a well-constructed plot but sought recurrent situations, motifs, images and symbols, patterns and rhythm. Aho’s classic novel of 1884, Rautatie (‘Railway’) is still a product of realism; but the lyrical prose in Yksin is closer to the art of poetry than rapportage. This kind of artistry – which Aho himself discussed in the 1880s in his newspaper articles on Finnish prose – is connected to the pictorial art of the period. The facial profile of the adored Anna, who has rejected the narrator, is a recurrent, lyrical leitmotif.

Aho was personally but unrequitedly enamoured of the young upper-class beauty Aino Järnefelt. When her future husband, the composer Jean Sibelius, read Yksin in Vienna in 1890, he was so enraged he swore to write a letter challenging Aho to a duel. The letter was never posted.

The critics of the day were mostly confounded by the novella’s structural and stylistic innovation. Particularly indigestible was the climax, where the narrator spends Christmas Eve at Le Moulin Rouge in the company of a prostitute.

Aho’s bold Parisian sojourner stirred up public contention, precisely as the writer had hoped. In 1891, discussing literary prizes, the Finnish parliament had a vigorous debate on whether government bursaries were at all necessary. Yksin was soon published in Swedish as well. Observing the furore from Sweden, the Aftonbladet newspaper critic commented aptly: ‘It was a description of the kind of goings-on qui se font, mais qui ne se disent point (‘things that do happen but are not spoken about’).’

Aho also recognised the importance, from the beginning, of the translation of his works, which demonstrates his clear understanding of literature as a market-area that transcended national boundaries. Leafing through Juhani Ahon kirjallinen tuotanto (‘Juhani Aho’s literary oeuvre’, edited by N.P. Virtanen, 1961), one is amazed how much, and into how many languages, Aho has been translated.

There is, of course, a wide range in the languages in which Aho’s work has appeared. As generators of cultural production, Paris and London decided literary standards. Access to the markets of the metropolises meant not only the opportunity to reach the broad Anglo- and Francophone readerships, but was also a trump card that had its uses on the home market. The centres of the time remained cool toward Aho: he has been translated only a little into English and French. The German literary world, on the other hand, embraced Aho warmly. Many translations were published, representing the best of the writer’s work.

His most important market, however, was Sweden, where translations of Aho’s work were issued immediately, right up to his last book, Muistatko –? (‘Do you remember – ?’,1921). Aho’s reputation in Sweden became considerable as early as the 1880s and 1890s. It is difficult to say whether his fame rested only on its literary merits, or on the sympathy toward Finnish literature that Swedes felt toward little Finland during a period of intense Russification in the Grand Duchy. This big-brother attitude may well explain Aho’s later succes in Stockholm, when the Swedish Academy began, at the beginning of the new century, to give the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has become the world’s premier literary award.

The status of the prize is uncontested today, and there is perhaps no greater proof of the international convergence of literary standards than the global attention the prize receives every year. The prize is awarded on the basis of a long-term study of the writer’s work and literary statements from independent experts.

Aho had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize for the first time as early as 1902. From 1910, he was suggested regularly right up to 1921. Aho’s candidacy was at first marked by a benevolently positive attitude, which was felt, in particular, toward the aspects of his work which were felt to be idealistic.

In 1913 the history professor Harald Hjärne was appointed chairman of the award committee. Hjärne had a particular view of Finland’s cultural position, and in his literary summaries he repeatedly quashed the idea of awarding Aho the prize on the grounds that Finnish-language literature could not be thus recognised without simultaneously giving an award to Finland’s Swedish-language literature. When no individual named writers were proposed, the chairman himself suggested the Finland-Swedish poet Bertel Gripenberg. Since, on the other hand, no independent expert had suggested Gripenberg, it was logical, in terms of this masterly piece of prestidigitation, that the prize could not be awarded to Aho either.

Hjärne had no knowledge of the development of Finnish society; neither did he understand the increasing linguistic overlap that was developing in Finland despite the minor skirmishes of day-to-day politics. The Swedish-language writers Runeberg and Topelius had become part of Finnish-language literature, just as the Kalevala had become part of Swedish-language literature. Juhani Aho’s generation had also started a development in which Finnish- and Swedish-language literature were increasingly regarded as Finnish literature that was written in two languages.

The Aho internationalisation project demonstrates the strength of the period’s centre-periphery links as well as the inequality that was hidden in these structures. In order to achieve international fame outside the centres, it was necessary to seek the approval of markets in Paris and London. With any luck, the next stop was Stockholm. Successful tours were made later by many writers, such as the American William Faulkner, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and the Chinese Qao Xinjian.

Juhani Aho stepped forward from a very young literary tradition. He achieved critical success in his local environment, but never really made an international breakthrough. This is visible in the international canons of the period. They include, incontrovertibly, Ibsen (from Norway) and Strindberg (from Sweden), but not a single Finnish writer.

Aho’s internationalisation project, however, was the starting shot for a lengthy development after which now, a hundred years later, looks as if Finnish-language literature has attained international significance which is not limited to sales figures and film deals, important as they are.

Last year the young writer Sofi Oksanen received, in Paris, recognition that no other Finnish writer had earlier achieved. Having first garnered every possible Finnish literary award, then the Nordic Literature Prize, her third novel, Puhdistus (Purge, 2008) won, in the autumn of 2011, the important French literary award, the Prix Femina.

Puhdistus achieved the most important prize of all: it became accepted, recognised and admired by the Parisian literary establishment – like Aki Kaurismäki in film and Kaija Saariaho in music. The years to come will show whether Oksanen’s unprecedented success will be crowned by the hundred-year project begun by Juhani Aho and his generation, whose aim was to place Finnish literature and culture in the European time zone.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Right or wrong, my country? Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Big electoral turnouts are generally considered a good thing. But, writes columnist Jyrki Lehtola, in Finland the fact that the vote went up in the last Finnish general election caused a revelation. Educated urbanites and the media (perhaps near enough the same thing), are shocked by how 20 per cent of their fellow Finns think – and the ramifications caused tremors all across Europe

Listen up. Diversity is a resource. Except of course if it’s the sort of diversity that is a resource for the wrong people.

That sort of diversity isn’t the least bit nice. In Finland in the spring, we ran into the sort of diversity that even got the rest of Europe to start worrying. Out in the thickets and forests, diverse people had been springing up in secret, people of whose existence we urbanites were entirely unaware.

And they threatened to bring Europe down. Europe. Which was a bit much.

They wanted out of the European Union. They did not agree with helping those European countries that were groaning under the weight of their economic problems. They were True Finns, not Europeans. And Europe was worried: what if these few forest folk were to make Finland do a U-turn in its European policy? In Finland, backing a loan to another country demands a parliamentary decision. What if the other parties were to follow these forest folk? What if Europe were to be destroyed by the fact that a few True Finns would prefer to be by themselves rather than have a relationship with the rest of the world?

Before, those people had hidden their ideas on lavatory walls and Internet chat boards. On those infrequent occasions when they did come out, they had learned to remain quiet and politically correct, to accept that it wasn’t wise for them to speak of things they didn’t necessarily understand.

Then they suddenly opened their mouths, and those of us in the media down here in the South said in horror: Can you say that? You can’t.

And everything began with such an insignificant thing as their concept of art.

Perussuomalaiset, the True Finns, is a Finnish party born out of the protest spirit of those previously shut out of the political conversation. They received 20 per cent of the vote in the spring parliamentary elections, which has resulted in the unfortunate fact that now we have to get acquainted with the dispossessed among us instead of being able to assume that they must think about the world the same way we do. What kind of a nutter wouldn’t?

Before the elections, the True Finns prodded at the political elite with their folksy, anachronistic view of the world. They had different ideas about abortion, refugees, gays, and nature than us here in the liberal, urban media.

That didn’t really trouble us much yet. But then they published their election platform, which took on art. It was absolutely horrible: forest people mucking about with things that weren’t any of their business.

They hated contemporary art. They called it ‘postmodern fakery’, which the state shouldn’t be supporting. For them, true Finnish art was somewhere far away: in works that depict the Kalevala or Finland’s wars.

And thus began our media storm in a pipette. Facebook filled up with groups making ironic comments about the True Finns’ concept of art; arts pages weren’t able to discuss anything other than that there were people whose concept of art was a throwback to another time; columnists got stuck in place for a month like columnists do.

The anger of the elite towards the True Finns’ concept of art was something that could only result in one thing only: the part of the country who thought they were being discriminated against, began to despise the elite even more.

How could they fall to pieces over such a small thing? How could they react to one wrong idea with such frenzy? There were other things in the True Finns’ party platform, but this, their concept of art, is what you waded into. What’s wrong with you?

As a result of all of this, the True Finns were the indisputable winners of the elections.

Then life became even more confusing. They rolled into the capital. True Finns. Here they came on the train from their thickets, walking past the fashionable postmodernist facade of the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. How dreadful.

We just had to set upon them. To interview them, to run around after them, marveling at how exotic these primitives were.

Then one of them, a regular guy from the country who wasn’t used to sitting in big conference rooms full of stylized period furniture opened his mouth, and all sorts of things unfit for media consumption spilled out. He gave his opinion about refugees. He used the phrase ‘old negro’. He had exactly the wrong idea about everything.

We just had to attack him. To dig up all the information we could about him and question all of his ideas just because he had the temerity to say them out loud.

In Finland the leadership was trying to put together a government under difficult circumstances, but that was not nearly as titillating as one True Finn MP, a country boy, who had behaved improperly in the halls of power, without hiding behind silence or euphemisms.

It was utterly inappropriate. Uncouth, thoughtless, stupid in a sort of lazy way, but – please excuse me – so what?

Surely it’s OK to be stupid in your own way here? To think and speak the wrong way? To think just what you please about art, not necessarily knowing anything about it other than that everything was probably better in the past.

Yes, in a democratic country you should be able to think the wrong thoughts; that shouldn’t destroy our self-respect or image of our nation.

True Finns who shun refugees, gays, and the wrong kind of art do not necessarily approach diversity with the sort of understanding and tact we would hope. However, the problem for our southern elite appears to be that we can’t seem to handle the fact that there are people in our own country who think a different way than we do, and that now they have been given a voice.

How terrible.

Translated by Owen Witesman