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What does Helsinki need? Bread and circuses, yes, but at what cost the latter?

In January – after a study that cost the Finns a couple of million euros – the Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (est. 1937) indicated that it was favourably inclined toward the construction of a new art museum, bearing its name, in Helsinki. The leaders of Helsinki city council are aiming to make a positive decision as soon as possible.

The cost of the building, whose site adjoins the Presidential Palace in central Helsinki, is estimated at 130–140 million euros, with design costs of about 11 million euros. Unlike in the case of Berlin, no existing building is considered suitable; instead, an architectural dream must be realised, with plenty of wow-factor.

Its mere maintenance costs will be around 14.5 million euros a year. It has been estimated that the Helsinki Guggenheim’s income could be 7.7 million a year. In addition, a 20-year Guggenheim licence costs 24.6 million euros.

The project has provoked widely differing reactions. Proponents of the project believe that the Guggenheim brand would bring thousands of new visitors to Helsinki and that half a million people would visit it each year. Opponents doubt this, speak of a ‘Guggenburger’ franchising concept and of the fact that not even the existing art museums of Helsinki are particularly crowded.

The odd thing is, however, that the basic demographic differences between Helsinki and, say, Bilbao – where the Guggenheim museum has been a big success – are constantly ignored in the discussions: the population of Spain is almost 50 million and another 50 million visitors go there every year, while the corresponding figures for this most northerly part of Europe are five million inhabitants and visitors.

In Bilbao, moreover, there was no museum of contemporary art before the advent of the Guggenheim; Helsinki, on the other hand, opened Kiasma, a new museum of contemporary art (165,000 visitors in 2010) in 1998 and the neighbouring city of Espoo its Emma museum of modern art (82,000 visitors in 2010) in 2006.

Economic prospects on any level now offer little hope. The Finnish government, in the shape of the ministry of culture, has just cut grants to state-aided museums by three  million euros – the Museum of Cultures in Helsinki, for example, is closing its doors, and some 40 of the museum staff elsewhere will be sacked. The government is not promising any money to the Guggenheim.

How, then, to fund an annual deficit of 7 million euros? Finland does not have a great supply of art-minded millionaire sponsors, and no one has so far made any concrete offers on how to fund this project.

The Guggenheim Foundation itself is not taking any financial risks with this project. Neither has it announced in any detail what sort of art will feature in the museum’s temporary exhibitions.

People who live in the city are more preoccupied with, for example, the shortcomings of the health services: there are waiting lists for everything, often of many weeks, and the old university children’s hospital has outgrown its present space. There are cuts and shrinkages yet to come in the spending structure of  the country as a whole and of Helsinki – civil servants themselves estimate that the city’s budget is not sufficient to cover even the upkeep of basic services.

To judge by the public debate, the deep ranks of Helsinki taxpayers do not want a new monument, one for which it will be necessary to pay – in addition to maintenance – more than a million euros a year to an American brand for the mere use of its name, for more than 20 years.

Do the people of Helsinki wish to begin to pay additional taxes for the revival, yet again, of the age-old dream of guaranteeing Finland ‘a place on the world map’, in a situation where economic difficulties are a matter of everyday life for increasing numbers of them? (We believe, incidentally, that Finland already has an appropriate place on the world map.) Will their opinion be asked, or heard?

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

The focus was not on descriptions of the war itself – the archetypal ‘war novel’ material – but on the less discussed relationship of Finland with its temporary ally, Germany, in the war against Soviet Union, as well as the ideologically split home front.

In her essay Mervi Kantokorpi points out that what unites these thriller-like novels, written by three young women – Marja-Liisa Heino, Katja Kettu and Jenni Linturi – is microhistory and the portrayal of the history of states of mind.

Kaisa Leka

Suomen sarjakuvaseura (The Finnish Comics Society) has awarded its Puupäähattu Award 2012 to the graphic artist and illustrator Kaisa Leka.

The prize is not money but a honorary hat, and is named after a classic Finnish cartoon character, Pekka Puupää (‘Pete Blockhead’), created by Ola Fogelberg and his daughter Toto. The Puupää comic books were published between 1925 and 1975, and some of the stories were made into film.

Leka describes herself as a mouse named Kaisa. Both of her legs have been replaced with steel prostheses, and she has featured disability in her comics book, for example in I Am Not These Feet.

Artificial limbs haven’t stopped her from cycling, for example, from Finland to Nice in France; she has described this tour in her book entitled Tour d’Europe.

The award: Puupäähattu (‘Blockhead hat’)

(See a video of Kaisa cycling, by Lina Jelanski.)

Enkelten verta

The literary career of Johanna Sinisalo (born 1958) has embraced fiction, drama, sci-fi and children’s books. Her 2000 Finlandia Fiction Prize-winning fantasy novel Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi and the novel Linnunaivot (2008) have been published in English as Not before Sundown and Birdbrain respectively. In this new novel, set in the near future, the central role is played by bees: widespread beehive failures in the United States and the resulting drop in pollination have resulted in an enormous food shortage that threatens the world economy. Orvo is a loner, the father of Eero, his grown-up son. Sinisalo cleverly works in animal rights activist Eero’s controversial blog comments on animal rights and modern man’s flawed relation to nature. However, this is also the novel’s biggest problem, as the blogging starts to weaken the story, of three generations of men in a family. Both the mythic, parallel reality of the bees and the tough-and-tender relationship between father and son are strong indications of Sinisalo’s narrative skill.
Translated by David McDuff

Häväistyt

The tenth novel by Asko Sahlberg (born 1964) is reminiscent of the earlier works of this distinctive author: its principal characters are hardened by experience and lead their lives somewhere in the Finnish countryside during a recent period of the country’s history. The sentences are beautifully constructed, and the pace of the narrative is very slow – sometimes even too slow. The main role is played by a middle-aged man who is running away with a woman and a small boy. What they are running away from for a long time remains a puzzle, as does the question of who they are looking for, a man called The Master. In the flashbacks of the last part of the book all is explained, and the rhythm of the story quickens. Considering the book’s desolate, even fatalistic view of the world, it is  slightly surprising that everything eventually turns out as happily as in a fairytale. But perhaps this is Sahlberg’s tribute to his characters, and to all of us human beings, for whom he seems to care a great deal? His novel He (2010) will be published in February in England under the title The Brothers (Peirene Press).
Translated by David McDuff

Lizard

The air rippled above the pile of stones. The lizard twitched her hip and took up an s-shaped pose like an ordinary photo model. After a moment she changed her left side to a convex curve. The movement was quick and graceful; the lizard’s tail swished through a broad arc so quickly you could hardly see it. Her thin, blistery skin pressed against the surface of the stone. The lizard felt the rough, raised patterns through the thin skin of her belly. She felt unpleasant, but otherwise the place was good, and the lizard did not have the energy to look for a better one. She looked through her eyelashes at the fissured sky and saw the golden disc shining at the centre of the dome. She was happy. Everything in her life was good, the weather was pleasantly dry, the temperature exactly suitable.

The lizard rummaged in her string bag and found a pair of sunglasses. Through the glasses the sand looked dark brown and the trees lush and damp. The lizard took out her sun-cream and began to rub her skin with it. She smoothed the cream lazily, with light, circular movements and thought as she smoothed that her light complexion was delicate. She was thin-skinned, more sensitive than many of her friends, and of the lizards hers was the clearest lizard’s skin. She blushed with pleasure as she thought about herself, her round-kneed legs, her pretty nails, her tail. She slit her eyes and saw in the sky a black dot drawing a great figure of eight on the blue surface. Satisfied, the lizard adjusted her position. Then she changed her right side to a convex curve and sank into the white light. She no longer thought of anything.

And then came the hawk! It flew like an arrow over the pile of stones, falling straight from the sky, a feathered missile. It was a beak and a claw. A hawk’s shriek. A fluttering of wings. Then it was gone.

And the lizard!

Only her sunglasses, her towel and her string bag were left on the stone. The other lizards’ weeping and lamentations were already to be heard from a crevice in the rock. Someone had seen the lizard’s tail rising into the heights. There she now flew, a lizard without wings. The lizards sang a dirge about a hawk’s claws, how beautiful it is to die by their blades, how lovely it is to fly, how sublime a fate to be the prey of a hawk.

Red flowed on the stone, fresh lizard blood.

The blood smelt sweet and beckoned carrion flies.

Soon a green cloud with a shining shell buzzed over the stone. The flies stopped at the pool of blood and patted she with their flat fly snouts, sucking.

At that very moment the lizard crawled out from the hole in the stone and retrieved her string bag and towel. Blood flowed from her behind. Shreds of skin hung round red flesh. That looked awful, but she smiled broadly in the direction of the other lizards. Her whole tail had been ripped off.

‘It’s working again!’ the lizard said, showing her bloody behind.

‘It really is!’ shouted the lizards. They had stopped singing.

The lizard rummaged in her bag for a mirror and used it to examine her backside. The shreds of skin would soon heal. The bloody backside was the most sensitive of all; there was no skin there at all. Now she was no longer merely the most thin-skinned of the lizards, she was actually skinless, raw. Although the site of her tail was tender and hurt, the lizard was delighted. This was exactly what she had been aiming for, a perfect performance, swift and exact. She knew she was skilful.

The other lizards crowded round offering their congratulations. In her speed, her surprising strength and the grace of her movements this lizard was insuperable.

At the point where the tail had broken off the bloody surface quivered as the lizard moved. Only a few little red drops were still falling on to the stone, and the flies hurried to devour them like a musical, glittering cloud.

‘A perfect day,’ the lizard said.

‘A perfect performance,’ the other lizards said.

‘It’ll be another couple of days,’ the lizard said.

‘A week,’ the lizards said.

‘Then I shall do it again,’ the lizard said.

And the lizard lay down with her belly against the surface of the stone, spread her legs in all directions and listened to the quiet aching of the site of her tail. She was enjoying herself. The lizard turned her left side to a convex curve and recalled that among the elements of the performance’s climax had been the sickening, wild smell of the hawk’s belly-feathers. The smell of carrion and death. And blood.

And perhaps the sweet smell of a new tail.

 *

Sometimes fear and loss have

           a strange, stimulating enchantment.

Cheetah

The cheetah looked in the mirror. He had oiled his body carefully, the muscles of his limbs moved beneath his spotted skin and his strong shoulder blades protruded from his back like wings. His hips were narrow. The cheetah pulled on a sprinter’s tight shorts, spun round in front of the mirror again and tried to see himself from behind: how his tight buttocks quivered, how he could control every tiny muscle of his thighs.

The cheetah had shaped his body dedicatedly and, muscle by muscle, built up his body. He had concentrated particularly on developing strength and speed. Now he knew he was the fastest on the savannah.

‘I am the fastest,’ said the cheetah to his reflection.

‘I am the fastest,; said the cheetah’s reflection.

The big cat’s tail curled in the air. The dense spots of his coat coalesced, in his tail, into thick rings, which the cheetah particularly liked.

‘I have the longest tail,’ said the cheetah to his reflection.

‘I have the longest tail,’ said his reflection.

And because the cheetah was the fastest and most handsome, he had begun to hunt by day as well as by night. Thus everyone who wished to could see the cheetah’s astonishing hips and his firm muscles. For that reason the cheetah liked most of all the gently sloping and undulating savannah and its short grass. There he found himelf a termite mound, a stump or a fallen tree on which he sat down. Everyone could see the cheetah and the cheetah could see every pretty gazelle that passed by, if he wanted to look.

Gazelles are the best meat,’ said the cheetah to his reflection.

‘Gazelles are the best meat,’ said his reflection.

The cheetah was not interested in antelopes, guinea fowl, gnus or zebras, although he sometimes hunted even them, if nothing better was on offer. He was interested in gazelles. Their lyre-shaped horns aroused a musical feeling in the cheetah; as if the whole herd were playing the same composition. The gazelles’ white bellies stimulated the cheetah’s mind and the dark stripe on their sides made the big cat tremble. The mere thought of a gazelle made the saliva froth beneath his tongue.

‘The best and the fastest,’ said the cheetah to his reflection.

‘The best and the fastest,’ said his reflection.

For an easy prey was not enough for the cheetah. He chose the fastest, and the fastest was the gazelle. The gazelle was a cautious animal, but fearless nonetheless. He was as if made for running and he sped across the plains as light as wind across a meadow. The herd of gazelle ran boisterously to and fro trying to put a suitable distance between he and the predator that surveyed it from on high. Every gazelle believed that the herd’s light dancing improved the savannah’s atmosphere. And he was indeed true: the pop of horns and ankles also refreshed the cheetah’s mind. He loved the gazelles’ beauty. The creature was, in the cheetah’s opinion, just the right size, and it could be approached without being noticed.

‘I shall take the one I choose,’ said the cheetah, stretching languidly.

‘I shall take the one I choose,’ said the cheetah’s reflection.

When he was hunting, the cheetah crept. He hid in the grass and approached his prey carefully. His heart beat frenziedly as he crept through the short grass. His muscles tautened, his eyes stared steadily at his lightly dancing prey. With his paw he carefully pushed aside the grass, his tail curled and shook with excitement. And then, one-two! The cheetah leaped into the air, with a couple of bounds his speed increased giddily, the herd fled, but the prey ran awkwardly, and the cheetah was constantly gaining on it. The gazelle was fast, but the cheetah was faster. He was a practiced and extremely effective hunter.

The cheetah was a sprinter. He never ran long distances.

‘I love beauty,’ said the cheetah to his reflection.

‘I love beauty,’ said the cheetah’s reflection.

The cheetah looked in the mirror once again. For a moment it seemed as if he was his reflection’s reflection.

 *

Sometimes it’s worth running.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Katmandun unet. Kirjoituksia idästä ja lännestä

Tero Tähtinen’s second collection of essays is focused physically in the wilds of a Finnish national park and Nepal – where the author (born 1978), a literary scholar and critic, has frequently travelled – and mentally in the divergences of Western and Eastern thought, which Tähtinen, who is familiar with Zen and Buddhist philosophy, studies, occasionally by means of literary examples. The ‘Socratic ego’ of the Western egocentric, individual ‘I’, which strives in vain to understand the whole of reality by rationalising it, is his favourite bête noire. Tähtinen quickens the pace of his verbal virtuosity as he discusses both dogmatic, materialistic faith in science – as well as some of its representatives – and Christian faith: he considers that both, in their pursuit of an absolute and total explanation, end up in a metaphysical vacuum. Unlike them, Eastern philosophy, in which the individual ‘I’ is not the centre and measure of all things, does not give rise to the anxiety of compulsive cognition. The virtual narcissism of Facebook, a platform tailor-made for the Socratic ego, receives Tähtinen’s outright condemnation: ‘Facebook trivialises humanity,’ he declares. At the end of these passionate essays on the author praises silence.
Translated by David McDuff

Naisten mies ja aatteiden. Juhani Ahon elämäntaide

Of Juhani Aho (1861–1921) it is said that he created what have proved to be the most enduring descriptions of how traditional Finland began to be modernised; his most famous book is the novella Rautatie (‘The railway’, 1884) which portrays the arrival of the railway in the Finnish countryside. This new biography also shows once again how many international influences can be found in the work of Aho, who is often called a national author. Aho was active in student politics, and as a newspaper journalist. He was nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize twelve times, but for various reasons, some of them connected with language politics, lobbying on his behalf was not successful. Aho developed Finnish prose, bringing to it realism and impressionistic style. His experiences during a visit to Paris in 1889 form the basis of his novel Yksin (‘Alone’), which caused a stir in part because of its erotic flavour. This book by the author and literary scholar Panu Rajala provides a versatile insight into Aho’s personal story, the world of his ideas, his opinions on art, and his complex relationships.
Translated by David McDuff

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

But hang on, wasn’t this Carrie in the fantastically famous HBO television adaptation of Bushnell’s novel Sex and the City very much in her thirties, as were her three best friends – all with, yes, quite active ‘adult’ sex lives…? In Finland the series had a rather silly title, Sinkkuelämää, ‘Single life’.

Well, of course it would be foolish not to continue the fantasticaly famous money-spinning saga, so Bushnell has gone back in time, first to Carrie’s school years in small-town America in The Carrie Diaries (2010), then to her first years in NYC in  Summer & the City (2011) – and HarperCollins has pigeonholed them among its ‘teen books’.

Confusingly, the Finnish titles of these two books also contain the word referring to the television series:  Sinkkuelämää – Carrien nuoruusvuodet and  Sinkkuelämää – Ensimmäinen kesä New Yorkissa. As the Finnish publisher Tammi has attached TV title to them, the customer assumes these are books for ‘adults’ – as indeed was the original Sex and the City.

This makes one wonder what exactly ‘books for young people’ are. The main characters are teens themselves? If Bushnell goes still further back in time, we shall be reading about naughty Li´l Carrie hitting another toddler on the head with her doll, in a board book.

Kuningattaren viitta ja muita kiperiä kysymyksiä

The style of Maria Vuorio’s books demands quiet concentration – but you could get quite hooked on their slow, thoughtful, gentle story-telling. Vuorio carries on the tradition of classic animal fables, following in the footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen, but with a personal twist. She is masterful in describing different emotional states – whether evoking the inner lives of humans or of anthropomorphised animals. Her stories and fairy tales hand the reader a magnifying glass that brings into view even the smallest, most insignificant creature or thing. The entire universe is present in the stories, for example when an earthworm ponders the meaning of life, a bear breaks into the National Museum, or a noxious insect imperils cultural exchange between Finland and Denmark. Talvitie has drawn an allegorical picture for each tale.
Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah

Kahden maailman tyttö

Marja-Leena Tiainen (born 1951) has dealt with unemployment, immigration, and racism in her works, in ways that are accessible to her young readership. She researches her topics with care. The idea for this book dates back to 2004, when the author made the acquaintance of a Muslim girl who lived in a reception centre in eastern Finland; her experiences fed into Tara’s story. Tiainen’s central theme, ‘honour’ violence in the Muslim community, is surprisingly similar to Jari Tervo’s  Layla (WSOY, 2011). Tiainen’s is a traditional story about a girl growing up and surviving, but the novel’s strong points are the authentic description of everyday multiculturalism, and the intensity of the narration. The reader identifies with Tara’s balancing act, which she must carry out in the crossfire of her father’s authority, family tradition, and her own dreams. In spite of everything, the community also becomes a source of security and support for Tara. The narrative arc is coherent and, despite the numerous overlapping time-frames, the tension is sustained right up to the final, conciliatory solution.
Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah

Evoluutio

This non-fiction book, intended for 8- to 14-year-olds, takes as its main character Charles Darwin, who as a child begins to ponder where people came from. Various myths about the origins of the world, achievements of European natural historians and problems of early evolutionary theorists are explored briefly but elucidatingly; they are linked to the acquisition of new knowledge as the church fathers continue to trust in the Bible. The prehistory of the Earth, evolution and natural selection, animal populations, man and his ancestors are explained with the aid of plentiful and humorous illustrations. Scientific results are interestingly presented, but a separate fact box, for example, on the structure of the cell or the nature of DNA might have been useful. In the last picture, the 200,000-year-old Homo sapiens is seen scrawling his cave paintings: ‘so long as we are genetically unique individuals, our evolution will never cease’.
Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Jättityttö ja Pirhonen

Hannele Huovi and Kristiina Louhi, two eminent professionals in the field of children’s literature, have been collaborating for a long time. Their mutual trust is reflected in the way they grant each other artistic freedom, at times submitting to the text, at others to the illustrations. The depiction of the love story between a giant girl and a tiny man was an exceptional challenge for the illustrator; Tyyne’s tears nearly drown her tiny friend, and to see him properly, she needs a magnifying glass! Louhi has again kept her style economical, and she boldly paints large expanses of colour and forms. Alongside the unequal but happy love story, this picture book deals with tolerance. Tyyne’s enormous size effectively manifests her feeling that she is an outsider. The book also advocates a relaxed attitude to life and the avoidance of unnecessary strain. The example of the giant girl helps the reader to develop a sense of proportion and to realise the value of the everyday.
Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah