Helvi Juvonen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(‘A new game’, 1952)

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

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

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

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

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

(‘Cup lichen’, 1952)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helvi Juvonen (1950s). Photo: WSOY

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

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

Cup lichen

Luke 17:21

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

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

From Pohjajäätä [‘Ground-ice’], 1952)

A strange tapir

In Borneo, in Borneo,
in the forest dense and lush
there sleeps a stone
of reddish hue
content, ablush,
concealed, a-hush.

A strange tapir
(the bi-coloured one)
a wondrous tapir
(the many-toed one)
circles the tree, goes round and about,
a small word hangs from the tip of his snout.
Thus speaks the odd tapir
(the bi-coloured one):

I know that you are there
content and ablush,
I know that you are there
stone of reddish hue.
You are round, you are red,
like the fairy tale said.
No snout gets crushed
by a sleeping stone
of reddish hue,
content, ablush,
concealed, a-hush.
In the forest dense and lush
in Borneo, in Borneo.

The tightrope walker

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

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

(From Kuningas Kultatakki [‘King Goldcoat’], 1950]

A new game

Phenomena and circumstances toyed with me,
and so I said to them:
You have become really dull.
Now I will start to toy with things myself,
and when I grow weary,
I will go away.

I will find a new habitat.
God the Father asks me thoughtfully:
Where should I put you,
you who have been capable
of neither goodness nor badness.
Then I will say it to Him,
then I will say it:
Let’s play that new game now,
the one in which we are happy
and everywhere.

Ground-ice

My joy is made of ground-ice.
It does not melt.
A vein of water runs deep,
inexhaustible,
the spring shimmers
over my silver ice
clear as glass.

You see my ice.
Do not touch.
After all it is cold,
spring water.

Look.
You see a human face,
you see your own,
a good face.

In this life

I tell of an enduring summer,
streams that do not run out,
trees that do not shed their leaves,
land on which grass does not wilt.

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

My friends, the chosen few,
I’m telling you
of truth’s enduring summer.

From Pohjajäätä [‘Ground-ice’], 1952)

The forest

I
Night swallowed day.
The forest was extinguished then.
Its green blackened,
and the empty paths
carried the day’s footprints
in their dreams
taking stopped time
into the morning.
But the wind got there first,
sounds rose.
The sleepy forest awoke,
not to sight,
not to light, to listen to itself
it ignited:
branches voiced their being,
treetops swished, leaves travelled,
not by means of tracks,
they moved only through sounds
from place to place
in the green of the shade,
hearing that which is truest
without the day.

II

In the morning, heaven’s weeping was visible:
its tear gleamed in the folds of leaves
like deepest pity,
which the day burns
when it begins a merciless heat,
a road through time.
The leaves twist and turn
and curl up with pain
when dust rains down
on the long road at whose end
evening’s sympathy is unchanging.

A fairy tale

A fairy tale is going round the forest:
A goblin child walks, a green scarf on her head,
and a harebell tinkles, a silver jingle.
At the places she touches with her hand, the grass revives,
the troll folk go into hiding  behind a tree stump.

A fairy tale is going round the forest in the guise of a goblin
the haircap moss is dewy and the hay is fragrant,
the white clover gives enough
nectar and gold-dust to the bumblebee.
The goblin eats nectar-bread and shares her joy
with the bumblebee.

Singing kettle

Singing kettle,
today you warmed my hand;
it was rigid from sleep,
numbed by morning.
Singing kettle,
why would a man
fail to meet amicably
the shape of a thing.

(From Päivästä päivään [‘From day to day’], 1954)

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

I would still give you
some small, dainty, green autumn poems
did you hear how the words
flowed
they were all like songs
each one sang one leaf
one leaf
as autumn blustered

(From Sanantuoja [‘The messenger’, posthumous, 1959. The last poem was dictated on 29 September, 1959. Helvi Juvonen died on 1st October.)

Little Bear’s winter dreams

‘Bon bons, bon bons.’ Little Bear inhaled air. ‘Bon bons, bon bons’. She dreamed of small suns and red spruce-cones. A bird had imprinted many small characters on the white snow, surely good and joyful, for they glittered like spring at the edges of the snowflakes.

When the sun returned, they would surely be living fairy tales in the forest. Until then, the forest was ruled by the bob-tailed, heavy-jowled Lynx Cat.

‘These are my own Northern Lights,’ Lynx Cat shrieked, arching her back. Then the whole of her fur crackled with multi-coloured sparks. ‘These are my own Northern Lights,’ Lynx Cat shrieked a second time and spat, for nobody in the forest was arguing.

‘Bon bons,’ Little Bear merely inhaled air.

Lynx Cat jumped off the tree and walked on the snow. Her paws imprinted round characters in the snow. Then the white witch came, pure gleaming white.

‘It’s time to rest now,’ she said and laughed. A playful whirlwind came directly and shook snow off the branches of many spruces.

‘Red cones, bon bons,’ Little Bear dreamed. Small suns shining quite golden on her fur. The same instant, her tummy started itching. She scratched her tummy and thought it was spring. ‘Bumblebees,’ she mumbled, ‘bumblebees are small bears who have been given wings. They eat honey drops. Honey drops are small, golden suns. They warm up your tummy. Bon bons, bon bons, I’ll lie this way round,’ Little Bear murmured, turning over at once. Then she began to snore and went on snoring till spring.

The snow melted and the bird sang: ‘Spring! Spring’s here!’

‘Spring,’ said the green goblin wife, who walked round the forest carrying a bunch of flowers to see if everything was all right.

‘Spring,’ Lynx Cat shrieked and snatched some cat’s-foot from the goblin wife’s hand with one of her sharp claws.

‘Spring,’ Little Bear yawned. The goblin wife had thrown bear’s-garlic at her and she realised she was squinting at the sun.

‘Yes, spring, isn’t it something of a miracle,’ the green goblin wife laughed, and in her laughter rang the harebells of all summers, small hare’s-foot stretched out and blackberries ripened. Lynx Cat laughed so hard that her beard trembled.

But Little Bear stared, matted and bemused, for her wits had been left under the cover of the forest. ‘Bon bons,’ she said and slapped herself, and then all was well.

Pincio

In November, the soul in a human being curls up to sleep for the winter and has nightmares, in the meantime, the joyless body does what it can during the short grey days. But just think: in early April someone will find the first blue anemone of the spring. Is that not wonderful? To find a blue anemone after all that winter. Does it seem incredible to you, too. And the sea has melted. Soon you can have a bunch of flowers. Wildflowers, which you can take to someone as a sign of spring, if you have anyone to take them to.

(From Pikku Karhun talviunet [‘Little Bear’s winter dreams’, 1974; fragments and fairy-tales, collected and edited by Mirkka Rekola. Little Bear is Juvonen’s  fairy-tale self-portrait.)

Translated by Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah

Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen. Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

A national favourite. Photo: Ville Koistinen

Here at Books from Finland central we’re celebrating, with the one Finnish literary anniversary that involves its own dedicated cake.

The fifth of February marks the birthday of the poet J.L. Runeberg (1804–1877)  – writer, among many other things, of the Finnish national anthem (actually unofficial, as there’s no mention of such a thing in the legislation), which he wrote in Swedish, Vårt land (in Finnish, Maamme).

Many of his poems inspired composers, and the songs became popular among ordinary people, both in Swedish and in Finnish. Two volumes of patriotic praise of the heroes of the Finland’s war 1808–09, Fänrik Ståls sägner (‘The tales of Ensign Stål’), were published in 1848 and in 1860; both were best-sellers, and as a result of their success Runeberg began to be called ‘the national poet of Finland’.

Runeberg’s birthday is celebrated among the literary community by the award of the annual Runeberg prize for fiction: jurors gather at the poet’s home (click the words ‘Astu sisään’, Come in, and see the pictures – sorry, text in Finnish only) in the picturesque town of Porvoo, about 50 km east of Helsinki eastwards, on his birthday to announce the winner. (Check this site on Monday, 8 February…!)

Everyone else celebrates by the consumption of the delicious ‘Runeberg’s cakes’ , which are available in the shops only in the dark days between new year and the beginning of February.

Tradition says that the recipe was invented by Mrs Fredrika Runeberg – heroic housewife, mother of seven, and a writer of some note herself – and that the sweet-toothed poet enjoyed them for breakfast, with a glass of sweet liqueur. But in truth these cylindrical cakes were first baked by a Porvoo innkeeper and confectioner, Lars Henrik Astenius, in the 1840s, and given Runeberg’s name when they became a favourite of the poet. Ekberg’s café in Helsinki (still in business, and a favourite of ours) began to sell ‘Runeberg’s tarts’ as early as 1856.

Fredrika's recipe book. Photo: SLS

Fredrika’s own recipe book includes a recipe entitled ‘Runeberg’s cake’, a kind of shortcake rather different from the tart we know – which actually isn’t a tart either, but more like a spiced cake.

For those who can’t get along to Ekberg’s, here’s our favourite recipe:
100g margarine
1 dl caster sugar
1 egg
1 dl flour
1 dl breadcrumbs or crushed bisquits
1/2 dl ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
1 drop bitter almond oil*
To decorate, raspberry jam and icing:
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tbsp water
2-3 dl icing sugar
Makes 12.

Cream the margarine and the sugar. Add the egg, beating well. Season the mixture with the drop of bitter almond oil. Mix the remaining dry ingredients together and add them to the dough; mix well. Divide the dough into 12 muffin cases (as you probably don’t have those cylindrical tins at hand) or a non-stick muffin pan and cook the cakes at 200C for about 10 minutes. Allow to cool. (If you like your cakes moist, pour spoonfuls of a mixture of water and amaretto liqueur or rum over them; in the original recipe, it’s water and arrack liqueur – probably available only in Sweden and Finland.) Mix the icing ingredients, make a circle of icing on the top of each cake, with a dollop of raspberry jam in the centre. Enjoy. No need to sing the national anthem.

* The bitter almond contains traces of prussic acid; the toxicity is destroyed by heat, but the sale of unrefined bitter almonds is prohibited in the United States, for example. Fifty unprocessed bitter almonds can be lethal. Refined, they can be used for almond extract and almond-flavored liqueurs. In Finland, bitter almond oil is sold in pharmacies; in this recipe it can be replaced by a teaspoonful of amaretto liqueur.

Poems from Yö aukeaa kuin vilja (‘The night opens like corn’, Tammi, 1978)

Of his early childhood, Hamlet really only remembered his father’s slightly crooked and gnarled index finger, pointing at the lowest branch of a holly oak. A small owl sat on it. It can’t see anything, it’s asleep now. It won’t fly off until night. These were the only words Hamlet remembered his father saying to him during the first six years of his life. Later, all he saw of his father was his back, bent over in study of agricultural conditions in a village called Jawohl or of waterside traffic on the river Vistula at the turn of a particular century. When it came to governmental matters, the king placed his trust chiefly in his unconscious and in wheat bread, thick white slices of which he devoured from the moment he awoke.

On long, silent winter days, when his father immersed himself in additional studies or demonstrations of learning, Hamlet would shut himself up in his room in order to rewrite history. He colonised countries and swapped their locations. At one stage he even thought of making the sun rise in the West and America encounter Columbus, but he restrained himself. He decided to forget certain dates completely; others, he turned upside down. He made Napoleon beat Blücher at Waterloo, and, lengthily and earnestly, he researched mercantilism from an eel’s point of view. He proved the part fescue grass had, via a certain hen and the protein and vitamins it produced, in ensuring Alfred Nobel’s name was inscribed in the annals of history. After that, he was inspired to praise the character of fescue grass, how it was humbly passed from field to dunghill by hand, like a string bag. He spiced up his history by means of short tales, like that of a certain female personage in St Petersburg who happened to peer into the secrets of Russian cuisine, which were then transported to Denmark in her apron pocket.

The Danish winter cannot be compared to anything, except perhaps the English one. It is a vast, icy baton that travels through fog, and the fog is so thick that you could cut it into pieces and store it on cellar shelves. In autumn, when the morning mist became dense and fell, splashing, on to the leaves of the trees and the ground, when the sunlight was pure honey, and leaves hopped like sparrows on the earth, the king began to manifest ever increasing symptoms of irritation. Trigeminal-nerve problems attacked the left side of his face in fiery, increasingly frequent waves.

Although he was a man in his place, although he had a hoof in his heart, his trousers began to hang regressively in the winter months, his ice-blue eyes to fade into colourlessness, like old blotting paper. Every morsel of food brought pain, occasionally he had to get up mid-meal and bang his head against the wall. He wandered night in, night out from room to room, he scarcely glanced at the queen.

Since there seemed to be no cure, the royal family’s personal physician asked if he could drill a hole in the king’s temple and take a peek at what was really going on in there. As to the outcomes of this operation, he presented two sure-fire alternatives: definitive removal of the pain and at the least a more or less mild form of unilateral facial paralysis, or death. The king refused absolutely.

During one routine check the doctor had indeed established that a hoof had grown in the king’s heart. This had actually happened in early manhood. Madame Queen had a drop-shaped but otherwise normal heart, or so-called ‘drop heart’, and a high, narrow palate like a church’s vault, which meant that her heartbeats echoed there. When the queen opened her mouth, it sounded like she had a clock underneath her tongue.

During the turbulent years of his youth, the doctor married a Polish dancer who had refused to utter a single word to anyone for the past thirty years. So the doctor spent the best part of his time on the table at his practice, listening to the workings of his gall bladder, conversing with his pancreas and liver. In this way, he had progressed so far in his profession that he was able to say what ailed someone before he or she had even crossed the floor to shake his hand.

He was a benign person who had gone through a lot, and because he and his silence-embracing wife had not been blessed with a single heir, he loved the royals like they were his own children. The king’s roars, an electric-blue curtain, sped along the corridors to his room, they belonged to winter like Northern lights in Arctic regions.

That meant that a new morning had begun. In his room, Hamlet pulled on dark-blue velvet trousers and buttoned up his dark-blue velvet jacket. Every morning he looked in the rippling mirror, with its dim surface, and combed his ash-blond hair from the front to the side, then backwards from the sides, and the last thing he always saw on the surface of the mirror was his round, nut-brown eyes.

The queen generally got up last. She sat in her bed and with the help of a hand-mirror carried out the painful daily ritual of finding the beauty spot that had disappeared. It was her pride and her adornment, but it had a bad habit of moving of its own accord. If, in the evening, it had been on the left cheek, then the following day it could be located on the shoulder, the neck, the sole of the foot or on the other cheek.

On Sundays, and sometimes also on weekdays, the royal family, along with Polonius and Ophelia and a group of Hamlet’s friends, made riding excursions to nearby oak- and beech-woods. The queen rode a shining black pony called Paul, whose mane and tail dragged on the ground. In tall grass, the pony disappeared totally from view, and the queen looked as if she were wading up to her waist through an emerald-green sea of grass.

In general, the members of the royal family interacted with each other in a friendly and cheerful way, as tundra wolves do with other members of the pack. But on riding excursions, the king could not tolerate the sight of Hamlet and ordered the latter to remain as far behind as possible. Hamlet sat on his saddle dangling the reins, his feet sticking outwards, and stared unseeing at the landscape that opened up between the horse’s ears. The horse, for its part, played now the tired spinner-woman, deliberately stumbling, and now the flax-weeder in the field, when it stood on its knees in a ditch.

And yet the prince was five when he was first lifted on to a saddle. There he had to sit, now facing the direction of travel, now the opposite way. He had to learn how to jump on to a horse’s back from behind, using the hindquarters for support and the gambrels as a spring-board. He had to learn how to stand on the saddle during all gaits, as well as how to fall from horseback at full gallop without injury. In general, exercises had begun early in the morning, when, first of all, two bucketfuls of ice-cold water were poured over the boy. Gymnastic activities followed, with various exercises for in between. In winter, these were replaced by cycle-rides over furrowed fields that were frozen rock-hard; according to the king, this activity strengthened internal organs and improved balance.

Hamlet strode in the cold wind; it tried to tear off his short jacket, which was blotchy with wear. Wet scraps of leaves flew in the wind, along with all manner of small objects. The shore’s sand was grey and dull like a shroud. In summer, when the sea finally warmed up, the sand glowed like white-gold, it shifted and glittered and carried with it the eggs of seabirds, whole nests with chicks, heaps of reeds, dried starfish, seashells hollowly sighing, and now and then some seafarer, swollen out of recognition. Among the populace it had sometimes been rumoured that baby Moses had been washed up just here, on this coast, and not into the reeds of the Nile. The people solved the mystery of shooting stars by believing that having fallen, the stars hid under the eyelids of a drowning person, to become replacement eyes, so that those who had perished could see to walk in the kingdom of death.

*

Oh, sorrow. In a night-blue dressing-gown, hems adorned with heavy, silver-coloured braid, Hamlet looked more distant, ever lonelier, ever paler. He was a star hurled into space, he travelled his course without a backwards glance. The murmur of strange tongues in his ears, the everlasting flame of love in his breast. Forehead like a snowy Alpine precipice; arm, in its slenderness, like underwater coral, independent music, detached from the body.

From January to January the colonel smokes cigarettes, cigarettes by the dozen, and in between a couple of panatelas. He walks in the upstairs rooms, he wanders in them as on summer nights and listens to the snow singing in the cellars. January is made of thin paper and apples, January smiles from every nook and cranny, and the colonel smiles back. January comes, with armfuls of medals and flower-baskets, it shoes the horses and shoots the hares. One of them is ready and willing, and hangs from the wall of the cowshed, its ears like folded sheets of paper. The hares, those small forest shrubs, are bundled up and taken away and January covers January like a napkin. In January, heaven holds dances, in January boy-children and butterflies are born. In January, the organ of autumn finally falls silent and the road is trodden only by moon and dog, that old soulless fisher who has never been told where the steps are that lead to heaven. January is also a serenade to a beautiful lady whose gaze is always muddled by sleep, but the colonel doesn’t know that. He sleeps, the sleepless one, dreaming that he is finally asleep and the lump of sugar in his glass sinks through the steaming tea towards the heart of the earth. The night carries the sleepless colonel and the sugar-lump on its shoulders and through the door there comes January, along with thousands of Januaries.

In cold seasons, blue tits erupt on the branches like warm fluffy flowers. This is the village of cherry blossom and cherries, which the birds cover at intervals like a vast dark wave, whose open field the falcon guards. This is Emilia’s village, hers, who long ago was lovely and sought-after, and Emil’s, who owned the finest peony shrub in the land. And the village of mad horses and of Paul, who shod them, and Kalle and Verner, dyed-in-the-wool horsemen and dead, the pair of them. Only the ancient staff officer is missing, who would fly alongside the greenly billowing corn-field, like an iron angel with flaring trouser legs. He would be as eternal as his bicycle, and if he were Socrates or indeed anyone and cycled with a fox under the hem of his shirt, his expression not wavering, saluting, then he would ride straight into a ditch at the former co-op. Or there would be a few horses running loose and a couple of old women watering them or even a curse which would rise up from deep within the forest meadow. But all the same, work and love are forgotten, joy and sorrow. There is nothing but the gold of the evening which flows from branches into the water, the cry of the falcon and the peony, flaming sun-like. And windows that are slowly covered by the cream-coloured blossom of the honeysuckle.

A poor dog has little to give to the moon. No luggage, no lighted rooms, no compartments hidden in the heart. It has only its heart. Only a bark, long and narrow like a tunnel, released from its brown muzzle. Like a small abandoned ice-cube it echoes from shore to shore. Strange, how the heart can be carelessly left behind in bed-linen, on long, endless streets, in dust behind curtains or in a glass, like teeth. Dogs ceased talking and received in place of a mouth an inky line, but man lost his heart, his ear can no longer pick out songs from inside a tree. He  swears criss-cross on his heart, he thinks it’s a distant island, or then he looks for it in his trousers; in many, the heart looks like a bottom and vice versa. But in dogs it is where it should be: just after the muzzle, boulder-like, baby-faced and willing.

Night, and stars side by side, enormous pieces of metal swaying above the alders. Trees and endless music and a bridge, against whose railing the young poet leant his coughing frame. You can still hear his short, gasping breath above the water. His brother fell from the sky like a bird, a bomb under his arm, into the midst of flowering July. A little after that or before it his sister, roses and all, was taken away from him. But the waters do not forget her, nor does the light, nor the faithful trees. Soon he too was nothing but pallid grass, dimly visible against the light, bending and bending as the wind played the short life that was given him. He wrote of the lake and of the light lingering over the lake, of the gulf which flows from far away in the past, passing generations. The heart had to travel in its bony cage for so many days and nights before finally it was free. Yet another small mysterious poem burst from his lips as he bent down over the trees, the light, the water. A small song like grass, like flowing water, like light, which rang out, rang out.

A small pine looks out from the thicket with coal-black eyes, stones sing hymns on the hillside. A tiny angel lives inside each of us, longing for a home of its own, and loneliness enfolds us as it does the woodland creature. It cannot be taken from us, nor the creature from the forest. Everywhere fields have curled up to sleep; the ant-track, the ant, and the fragile bird-bones are sleeping against the heart of the island. Trees have the snowy faces of ancestors, and on the road where dogs walk in their wind-blasted trousers, silence eats itself like silk. I play the typewriter, appassionata, where has everyone gone? Where were you at the time of the first snow, where now, when there’s nothing but snow all around, soon we’ll descend through the ice ages towards the final darkness. I leaf through the history of soil-covered poets with sooty fingers. A humbug my pillow, I listen to the hares peeling apple-trees at night, and in the morning, in the whiteness of the earth and the sky, a green woodpecker flies like a poor man’s field.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah (with Fleur Jeremiah)

Sirkka Turkka with a friend. Photo: Pertti Nisonen

Sirkka Turkka writes precise, lucid sentences, as if composing a treatise. But her poems often relate utterly loopy things; the work is playful, frisky. It is not based on explication or hidden themes. When it refers to abstract matters, it always couples them with concrete reality, with natural or everyday occurrences. ‘Trees have the snowy faces of ancestors, and on the road where dogs walk in their wind-blasted trousers, silence eats itself like silk.’

The poems contain numerous allusions to literature and culture, including popular culture. The tone can be parodic in these instances, but not critical; rather, a new point of departure is established, as when Turkka writes about Hamlet in her 1970s collection, Yö aukeaa kuin vilja (‘The night opens like corn’). ‘On long, silent winter days, when his father immersed himself in additional studies or demonstrations of learning, Hamlet would shut himself up in his room in order to rewrite history. He colonised countries and swapped their locations. At one stage he even thought of making the sun rise in the West and America encounter Columbus, but he restrained himself.’

Turkka (born 1939) has worked with horses and as a librarian, and made her debut as a poet with the collection Huone avaruudessa (‘A room in space’) in 1973. Tule takaisin, pikku Sheba (‘Come back, little Sheba’), for which Turkka won the Finlandia Prize for Fiction in 1986, is considered one of her major achievements as a writer. It is replete with traces of battles with natural forces, sometimes concrete traces: ‘On my right thumb, I have / signs of both Horse and Dog. / One made by a shoeing knife, the other / by, yes, a canine. / Out of scars, life grows….’(Translated by Anselm Hollo for Books from Finland 2/1987)

The collection is extremely physical, breathless, thoughts are experienced corporeally. The landscape is mythical, as if emerging from a struggle for creation, but at the same time it is firmly anchored in the Finnish countryside and in concrete things. Of cultural traces, music has the strongest presence, and is likened to storms or other natural forces.

In her later collections there is an increasing emphasis on the play between popular culture and loftier strains. Turkka quotes pop songs, rock lyrics, the Bible, folklore and proverbs. The quotations form an organic part of the poems, but still just a part; they are neither a mere effect nor a sign of linguistic incontinence, for Turkka’s own, strong voice is always discernible.

The prose monologues in the collection Yö aukeaa kuin vilja (‘The night opens like corn’, 1978) refer also to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger: ‘According to Martin Heidegger, man is a being who experiences care.This differentiates him from plants and animals. (…) I am a being with as little care as possible, an animal that looks back to the past. A mad dog that does not desist from grieving.’

Turkka replaces Heidegger’s emphasis on care (Sorge) as paramount with the idea of grief; that for her is the most basic, deepest feeling. Sometimes she sees through all grief, but even then grief is not static, simply a melancholy mood; through it, the world looks full of movement.

The constant presence of death is reminiscent of the early thinking of Heidegger concerning ‘being-toward-death’ (Sein zum Tod): only by remembering death can one live authentically. For Turkka, however, remembering death is not a requirement, an existential imperative that echoes in the void. Death is an active, functioning element that remains undefined. It is present now, not merely a harsh imposition waiting in the future. Death may be the big unknown, but even now it sets a lot of things in motion, and its presence stirs up animals, plants, and people.

What is most fascinating about the poems is a factor that cannot be explained directly; it could be called cadence (poljento), which in Turkka’s poems does not only mean rhythm. Cadence is an interpretation of language and has to do with the possibilities of language. The way words are ordered is crucial. Cadence involves the ability to create elliptical structures, recurring patterns, variations; and to keep all the ingredients together in a rhythmic whole. It means that tone is a key factor in a poem. Sarcasm, irony, and humour are blended with a solemn, high style, and so a colourful mixture is born, which functions on the basis of its cadence.

It is as if a savage had written these poems. They feel immediate, although they are multivalent. Turkka’s aesthetic can be deemed a kind of ‘realism of the mind’, for the poems are based extensively on associations and they follow the flow of thoughts freely – or they seem to follow nature itself, the current of a river, plants growing wild. But this impression is partly illusory; the incantatory tone often creates the impression that the mind governs nature as much as nature does the mind, and the language of the poems is polished to the utmost – no question here of a stream of consciousness.

The poems do not depict nature as it is; rather they present it as it is seen through our cultural coding. This coding is ironised, twisted and turned every which way, but still Turkka’s poems preserve their stamp as cultural products. They possess the rhythm of spells, elements of myth, a prayer-like note, but they are clearly distinct from primitive spells, and from the tone of revelry found in folk poetry. But all of these elements form part of Turkka’s poems. Cadence could be defined as this ability to form an original, rhythmic, effective poem which is firmly imprinted on the mind but which escapes analysis.

Sirkka Turkka has the ability to create a vision of the world by means of language; it is formed of landscapes drawn with both sharp, brutal slashes and soft, gentle brushstrokes.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah

Poems from Jumalan sumu (‘God’s mist’, WSOY, 2009)

SANTO PAN

These mornings when beggars
station themselves at church doors
and a little grace slips through
the fingers of some of us,
it seems for a moment good

That crows are flying about
and princes’ bones are clattering in huge sarcophagi

And now, with a basic shape planned
for the daily bread,

Early morning wakes up in Florence
with black flour in its fingernails

IF ONE LIVED

If one lived as a fakir
with spiky binary bits for a mattress
and some theory for a pillow
or a footnote under the bed,
or if one lived in thought,
shadowed by the brain’s convolutions
as in one’s gazebo of lilacs
with a glass of bubbling Hegel on the table
and Wittgenstein as one’s straw

or as a nail half-driven into a cross
and one lived one’s moment under the hammer
in the heat before
being forgotten in the depths of the tree
or as a rock on the shore, in a slow trance
making one see the horizon
rock like a swing
and the Pacific Ocean turn into a sand storm

or if one lived in the world’s flesh, in swarming cells
while fast-flowing bloody rivers
streamed hotly
towards the Niagara of the heart.

If one read the Bible –
and while rolling a fag
against the smoky stoneface of mental imagery
one grated on some verse

and dived into the misty psalmody
as if inside one’s bottle
to grope for one’s soul

If one lived on one’s will, towards
something better, always merely towards!
and how would one fulfill that will?
When the wind blows over the drawing table
a white paper remains

Or if one lived in one’s memory, in images
on the pages of an album
and found trust in the fact that
everything was gone,
everything was gone

or if one wandered asking nothing, with a bundle on one’s back
and a couple of words from a passer-by, the same
one could utter to him

Here we came under the stars
and the sky’s an accident,
and if your head’s in the stars, your feet
are solidly in their dust

THE FOREST

The image of man oxidized, the old paint is flaking off
Hopes were taken away, the holiness of dream
                                    was stamped to its knees with money
Now dreams, ghosts on fields of asphalt,
are harrowing up whirlwinds,
and beyond comprehension and bread
a hundred radio channels are broadcasting

Two people alone
              blest with their happiness
wander in the woods

and the black horns of plenty, they belong
to the holiest of holies

SINGING MASTER

My funeral was by no means
a quiet affair
but was celebrated in an unbelievably messy and literally
cacophonous sniffing, slurping
and shuffling, and even though
it was spring, that yearly rock bottom
for allergics, there were in fact
such tarred lungs and crapulosity there
as I’d never have expected
from those bright-eyes at school Christmas parties.
And if hymn-singing is bawling, is it
singing? No it isn’t. The difference between bawling and singing is
in the ending, and there’s no end to bawling, at least
not in the world I’ve left behind.
Song however goes on to its exalting end
with a beautiful balance, and one certainly doesn’t stand
open-mouthed, yowling at the woodshed corner.
I’ve always found a challenge
in Melartin’s The First of May, the one where
Larin-Kyösti ends every stanza with the words ‘so that
this song will ring out in heaven’s lofts!’
Good Lord! There’s certainly not going to be anything in heaven
comparable to a shingle-roofed building,
and if there is, with one mixed choir
and two time-beats I’ll sort it
into functionalism.

TO MAKE LOVE AND DIE

Day by day we’re growing old.
                                    It’s sweet, restful
You brew ginger tea,
           and I splash some Amontillado in
And so we’re able to make love
                             all this morning too

Yes, yes, you do remind me,
                                  our pulsebeats come from the forests
From fields, riverbanks and meadows
                    windblown from wood, stone and fruit
                                      the waves of our skin
raise their moments on the foam of desire

And today too as if on the very last day
                               for those seconds
          we’re always making love

Translated by Herbert Lomas

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda

Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book

Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy.

The project is a private one; no one else can order the book. You might ask why I would do something like this – however, a more interesting question, I think, is why it feels entirely natural and logical to do it.

These days everyone is talking about the way that traditional print media are dying because of the internet. But the internet itself has not stopped developing, and where it’s going in 2009 is surprising. The tech-wise and internet savvy are suddenly interested in plain old paper. What the most avid minds are talking about now is something called the ‘papernet’: the extension of the internet on to traditional paper media. But what would a papernet be like? Specifically, what would it mean for a Finnish poet working today?

Let me give you some examples. In 2005–2006, I became acquainted with some Finnish poets who were publishing their work on the web. Janne Nummela had been using search engines to trawl up bits of language from the internet to compose his imaginative, superbly funny surrealist collages. Karri Kokko had a project called ‘Varjofinlandia’ (‘Shadowfinland’), where he had been collecting sentences and bits of discourse concerning depression and anxiety to make a ‘confessional’ short novel. Inspired by these poets, I thought, could we go a step further and make the process of writing a poetry book ‘live’: an ongoing, public event available for comment?

My second poetry book, Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The dragon’s son’, 2008), evolved from a blog into a printed book published by Tammi, a traditional publishing house. In the process, many things changed; working with an editor, a graphic design department, and a publishing house with its own ways of doing things inevitably does that. I feel that the book lost some of its immediacy and resonance once it was taken off the net; it lost contact with the sustaining conversation that had produced it.

I do acknowledge the values of traditional methods of publishing. A good working relationship with an editor is integral for me, not to mention the resources for marketing and publicity, which the poetry scene, as a culture defined by an economy of scarcity, tends to want to downplay. Poetry is, after all, a bad investment for publishers. Then again, the amount of poetry this economy of scarcity makes available is only a tiny slice of what could be out there. Also, do we really want a handful of people (the editorial boards of publishing companies) deciding what’s worth publishing?

An answer to these questions came in 2007–2008, when the Finnish poetry publishing scene changed radically. First, the poetry organisation Nihil Interit began publishing poetry books with the pod publisher Kirja kerrallaan (‘A book at a time’), under the imprint poEsia. These books are available as downloadable ebooks or normal printed versions. Then the poet Leevi Lehto established his own pod publishing company, ntamo, with the aim of publishing more poetry than all the traditional publishing houses put together. The visual and conceptual poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s Ankkuri is a similar company.

And then one day I saw Karri Kokko, who had made an experimental ‘version’ of his unpublished poems using the internet pod publisher Lulu. We talked about the possibilities inherent in pod publishing, some of these being rather practical, as in simply making a collection of everything you have written to take with you to readings.

But other ideas soon became apparent: what would ‘podism’, the DIY publishing revolution with its new forms of production, circulation and consumption of printed materials, really mean for literary culture?

Enter the papernet: the internet as a platform for producing, on demand, paper products (maps, organisers, notebooks, social travel guides and the like). Imagine, for instance, that your printer had its own email-address, and instead of your newspaper delivered to your door each morning, your printer would print it out for you. Depending on what kinds of feeds you are currently following, your morning paper could be a mix of the best of New York Times, Helsingin Sanomat and Le Monde, for instance. (And I’m not talking about the kind of printers we have now, but much better ones; ones that could print out not only newspapers, but paperback books or broadsheets or even glossy magazines.) Imagine, also, that books were no longer tied to the cost-heavy machinery of traditional publishing houses, which can only produce one book in one edition at one moment of time. If the audiovisual industry is already changing because of electronic distribution, imagine when the same thing happens to books.

Except that these things are not imaginary. They are already happening. Perhaps the most interesting is the current idea of the ‘unbook’. The concept was invented by Jay Cross, an internet consultant known for his work on informal learning and systems thinking, and Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE, a ‘visual thinking company’, although both imply that they are only describing practices which already exist.

Whereas a traditional book is published in editions whenever it gets revised (or it has sold out), an unbook is released in versions (1.0, 1.13, 2.0 etc) which are never finished but always open to feedback from readers. Both Cross and Gray have written books by bringing the readers along into the process of editing their content even before publication. As Gray says, ‘the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.’

An unbook is, then, more like a community project between authors and their readers than the traditional one-way street of author->publisher->reader. Gray claims such a re-envisioning of the book-making process can change many things: ‘The author can engage readers earlier and respond to criticism faster. A publisher becomes an option rather than a necessity.’

It should be clear by now that my own unbook is not a self-publishing or vanity project. Rather, it is an un-book only in the sense that is un-done (I also happen to think that the name ‘unbook’ is a little too coy). What’s central to me is the idea of experimenting with the composition process, but also of taking more control over the material existence of what I write, of trying out ways of graphically representing my work in the best possible way. We writers aren’t usually very good at that; the history of the book trade is a history of outsourcing everything that’s material about writing to everyone else except the author. In the past, this has been necessary, because the technology simply could not be owned or mastered by one person. Now it can be, and you don’t even have to leave your house to be able to do it.

I don’t know if this experiment will lead me to new ways of making books. Poetry is, after all, very different from the kinds of things Cross and Gray are writing: books on visual culture and ‘e-learning’. Sometimes it seems to me that the most I might achieve is an understanding of how to design a book so that it can communicate something by its material form. But all this is so new. We don’t know where the papernet will go.

Sometimes I like to imagine that the papernet could represent a return to pre-print ideas of written communication, where important texts were compiled into ‘commonplace books’, or personal, annotated anthologies. They were singular objects made by their users to fit their personal needs. Text and authorship were malleable, pliant, and much more organic than in our time. What if the poetry books of the future were like that: ‘paper ipods’, or anthologies that readers could themselves compile and print?

Sometimes I’m simply reminded of the aura of singularity and originality surrounding authorial manuscripts as artefacts, something Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the early twentieth century, argued art lost when the age of mechanical reproduction began – but the manuscripts, I think, still retain that aura. Perhaps the unbook could be a way to let the printed book share some of the hand-written aura of manuscripts?

We must constantly invent new containers for books to burst out of, because they exceed their material form: books are never finished. And that’s a good thing for us readers.

Claes Andersson. - Photo: Johan Bargum.

Bror Rönnholm on the poetry of Claes Andersson

‘Use it or lose it,’ writes Claes Andersson in his latest collection of poetry, Lust (‘Desire’, Söderström, 2008). The collection deals not only with the flesh and bones of things, but with thoughts and emotions: ‘First you are unfeeling then cold / then insensible’. And just like hate, love and desire, you will lose friendship too if you don’t use it.

Perhaps after 28 books and an active life as a psychiatrist, a politician and a jazz pianist, Claes Andersson (born 1937) has reached the age at which he realises that desire, in the broadest sense of the word, is not a self-evident, constantly regenerating spring, but something to nurture and to fight for. It goes without saying that an older person’s perspective and the proximity of death run through the collection like an active undercurrent. Despite the title there is also room for plenty of apathy in this collection. Or, rather, desire also has its darker, complicated sides.

But passivity and alienation are very much in absence – Andersson puts up an energetic front against atrophy by offering us everything there is: the full range of emotions and reality, and a host of different linguistic levels. He moves rapidly between playfulness and profound seriousness, gives us glimpses of sarcasm, aphoristic exaggeration, musicality and old-fashioned, proper beauty; he allows paradoxes to open up new perspectives and irony to blossom.

The pursuit of opening poetry to all aspects of reality has been apparent since Andersson’s days as an angry young man back in the 1960s. It was back then that he began to develop the vibrant collage poetry that has been one of his most prominent tools ever since – for example, see ‘(easter)’.

The poet allows verses and strophes (or sometimes entire poems) to collide with one another in often drastic ways, mixing the private and the political, the trivial and the existential, the read and the experienced, the living room and the big wide world. Perspectives shift, linguistic clichés are turned on their heads, and a representation of contemporary human existence emerges from the collision of images, stories, voices and stresses.

The image that takes shape is broad and complex, the result of opposed movement in which Andersson encourages and shapes this multiplicity, just as the contradictory elements in the collage to bring the absurd and the untenable to the fore. On the one hand it highlights the multifaceted richness of human existence, on the other it is a critique of a lifestyle that, with its gross excesses, simplifies and blurs our values and makes the choices that could lead to a better life all the more difficult.

At times this critique can seem dark and direct, as when Andersson claims that, as a result of our ‘greed, our violence and our immoderation’, we have forfeited our right to live a good life in harmony with nature and ourselves. ‘Everything beautiful that we can touch and that could touch us, we have simply destroyed.’

The bitter stench of such resignation is contrasted with atonement and trust, the freedom that exists in music, and, not in the least, with those affectionate tributes to love and community – elements that, in all their desirous contradictions, are also prevalent in our lives here and now.

Translated by David Hackston