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

Henriikka Tavi. Photograph: Heini Lehväslaiho

In recent years volumes of contemporary Finnish poetry have offered readers the chance to enjoy excellent cover artwork. Right down to the typographical layout, the visual aspects of recently published volumes of poetry – by small and large publishers alike – have turned these books into highly refined, almost holistic works of art.

In such a way the poetics of the language and, in particular, the thematic starting point of the poems are lent a platform that both enhances and strengthens them.

Decorated with images of butterflies, the mournful grey jacket sleeve of Toivo (‘Hope’, Teos 2011), the third volume of poetry by Henriikka Tavi (born 1978), conceals the book’s bright yellow covers and an illuminated woodland path winding its way across them.

In this way the troubled central theme of this multi-disciplinary, collage-style work is immediately reflected in Camilla Pentti’s cover design.

Tavi is one of the most significant poets of her generation. Her debut collection Esim. Esa (‘Esa, for ex.’, 2007) represented a fanciful fusion of the Finnish language and the latest ideas in experimental poetry, a veritable tutti frutti. In her second collection Sanakirja ‘(Dictionary’), she explored the expressive possibilities of different languages juxtaposed with one another. This time she continues her exploration of the language of emotion – her mother tongue – and in Toivo she extracts a variety of extremely beautiful, rhythmical and typographical potential from the core of the language itself.

The principle inspiration for Toivo is the Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009), perhaps the most influential experimental poet of her generation. Like Toivo, her collection Sommerfugledalen (‘The butterfly valley’) brings together the dual themes of grief and longing with childhood memories and the poetic landscape of a summer meadow filled with butterflies. Both poets explore the process of metamorphosis through the metaphor of flying insects: the life span of hungry grubs, coffin-like pupae and the stunning beauty of butterflies.

Cover design of Toivo: Camilla Pentti

A variation of sonnet form, Christensen’s collection receives its own homage in Tavi’s work: Toivo begins and ends with a four-strophe, sixteen-line ‘Lullaby’. The words of these lullabies are a rhythmic, resonant list of butterflies and moths. A translation of these lullabies may be out of the question, but it would appear that the most beautiful Finnish compound names for these insects have here been brought together in song.  ‘Sysiyökkönen, synkkänopsa, / kuutäplä, kiertokiitäjä, / kiiltoyökkönen, kirjovaski, / lyijysuomu, kilpiruuni’….

Henriikka Tavi writes about generations – grandparents, parents and children – and the areas of sorrow and hope that exist between them, the grey areas that it usually takes a lifetime to process fully. These winged lullabies sensitively expand the boundaries of interpretation into a series of pupa cradles and metamorphoses.

‘The symmetry of grief’ is one of Christensen’s recurring butterfly metaphors; Tavi translates this as ‘the balance of grief’. This symmetry is represented in the stunning colours of the Mourning Cloak or the Red Admiral: bright colours against a dark, velvet background and vice versa. In these terms, some may think this too aesthetic a starting point for a collection of poetry, but the author of Hope is serious. She turns into verses and strophes two-page stories or death, of people who have departed more or less of their own accord, of the years of their births and deaths. Suicide represents the lack of hope, the abortion of life, the breaking open of the pupa cradle before the metamorphosis is complete.

‘I do not write / to air our family’s business to all and sundry. / Let me / say this as clearly as possible: / You died in vain.’ Here the poet addresses all those who have died ‘in vain’ and one figure in particular, someone whom we might interpret as a father. The poet is also like a young migratory salmon on its way towards the sea, a place where its past and future can become one. She wants to make the lost visible: ‘I’m trying to put a spark in you. / I’m writing so that you’ll come and visit / me. I remember things so little.’

Writing, making pictures, art – all these bring into view things that would otherwise be left unexpressed: ‘Take a photograph of me, one that records my fatigue. As a legacy I’ll leave you a leaking rowing boat, the unfinished renovations and innumerable hours of missed sleep.’ The poet peers towards the closest relationships she remembers as a child, memories that now remain so distant. ‘In the shadow of our own dusk, anything can be shaped once again,’ she says and by the very act of writing enters into a series of metamorphoses spanning from one generation to the next.

Where, therefore, is there room for human hope in poems that so wholly inhabit the valley of sorrow? The collection responds to this question by dropping in the full abundance of the poet’s sense of language. The dark background sucks in the bright stripes in the collage of dialect poems, rhymes, stories in the style of recited folk songs – anything that come close to the reader. Tavi revives the intimacy of speech and locality in poems entitled ‘shavings’, including her grandmother’s memories of childhood written in an endearing, touching vernacular.

The brightness of the thematic figure in the collage that makes up Toivo is open to all; it leaves ample room for interpretation and appeals, shamelessly, to the reader’s emotions.

Translated by David Hackston

Poems from the collection Toivo (‘Hope’, Teos, 2011)

Mourning cloak

I will tell you, though you cannot hear it.
This is a story that you will come to forget.
I have gone, but there is no departure. And as
the meadow of absence begins to lapse into grief:
Do not grieve.

I was here a moment ago and
soon will be between the dermis and the epidermis.
I stand in a row behind myself; I am a memory of you.
Oh, you weak spark! You powerful
desire to turn into a fortune!
You were the crowd in my head.

I am serious, you only imagine me.
Don’t disappear. Leave and stay.
I’ll be no further than this.

This is a sacrilege of sorts.
My intention is to blur the boundary between the living and the dead.
My intention is to smear that line till it’s all smudged.
I’m trying to put a spark in you.
I’m writing to you so that you’ll come and visit
me. I remember things so little.

we forgive ourselves
we bury you in graveyards
we cast a blind eye on our mistakes
we let you take your reasons to the grave

Living men bear the coffin, lower it into the ground,
remove the straps, release their grip; there is a thud.
Three spadefuls of earth: The Father! The Son! And the Holy Spirit!

But I write not to release my grip; I’m writing
to hold on to you. Perhaps you too need contact,
though you no longer exist. Perhaps you’re cold,
though you no longer exist. Perhaps you feel ill,
though you are no longer. Though you are no longer, I
shall write to you. I remember what you look like.

I remember things so little.

I’ve heard this many times before: Take a photograph of me, one that records my fatigue. As a legacy I’ll leave you a leaking rowing boat, the unfinished renovations and innumerable hours of missed sleep. Sleep now. But I don’t want to sleep. Sleep now. I’m not at all tired. I’m writing to you; perhaps it’ll cheer you up. I don’t know what kind of person you are.

You are older than me; be even older.
People are absorbed into one another. And the further
I write, the further away everything shifts.

I break a cloud, but the cloud will not break. Then you shift
your weight to the leg that’s in the air and say:
‘Now I’ll lean into the emptiness that will
carry me back. Is empty a good or a bad thing?’

And everything goes on just as before. Everything has to go on just as before. There is nothing else: there is my mother, my sister and me. And the roads that run carry us towards what is to come, so that you can remain lying there on your orange blanket. The falling is my father, then that too falls away. Best do without.

I am my own father.

My mother is my father.

My sister is my father.

I cannot remember you at all.

I try to remember even less.

I am the man in our house. I am our mother’s father, and my sisters’ father, and our father’s father, and the gravel pit’s father. But dear father, I am a bad father, born of every womb. My mother is my mother, and my sisters are my mothers, and you are my mother, and all the objects in the universe are my mothers.

I am a king of sorts, donkey’s ears of sorts.

Everything I touch is imbued with the closeness that keeps mother and child alive.

Translated by David Hackston

Translator at work: St Jerome, translator of the Latin Bible in the late 4th century, is the patron saint of translators and librarians. Leonello Spada's 1610s painting, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Picture: Wikimedia

Why translate, asked the late Herbert Lomas thirty years ago in an issue of Books from Finland (1/82) – the pay’s absurd, one’s own writing suffers from lack of time, it’s very hard to please people. And public demand for translation from minor languages into English was almost non-existent.

But he also admitted that translating is generally a pleasurable experience: ‘You have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.’

For Bertie Lomas, translating equalled putting on a mask and finding a self you didn’t know you might have: ‘In these solitary theatricals one actually does become creative: it’s not merely a job of transposition. It’s a job of invention: in each poem you have to invent a new personality.’

From time to time translators ponder their work in writing, and discussing translation of poetry seems to dive deepest. For example, as English (Teutonic syntax!) has a much larger vocabulary than Finnish (Finno-Ugrian syntax!), Lomas found that ‘crucial decisions are being made with every word’.

Tarja Roinila,who translates from Spanish, describes in a recent article a process of making a Spanish poem – with her co-translator Coral Bracho – out of Harri Nordell’s poem. The fact that Finnish is a synthetic and Spanish an analytic language makes Nordell’s inventive use of compounds particularly difficult to translate. What would valokupolikiihko (valo = light, kupoli = cupola, kiihko = fervour, passion, frenzy) be in Spanish (Romance syntax!) – what does the word mean? What’s the object of this passion or frenzy, is the cupola made of light or does it just reflect it? The final version, éxtasis-cúpola de luz, sounds rhytmically interesting, says Roinila, as the emphasis of the two first words is on the first syllable, which is rare in Spanish.

A translator has to abandon the letter of the original poem, and this destroys the poem. But it is the letter that the translator is able to work on. The translation of a poem is not possible or impossible – the task is to create a new poem.

The question of why poetry should be translated is cultural and political, Roinila concludes, and the answer must be cultural and political too. ‘Our language needs it, our literature needs it, it enrichens our ecosystem.’ Neither is translation some ‘extra task performed on the original work, but an organic part of its life. Translation, like reading, is part of poetry’s way of breathing.’

In his later life Herbert Lomas admitted that the situation has changed a little for the little better. The pay might still be absurd, and it’s still very hard to please people, but interest in reading translated poetry – which implies that there is interest among publishers bringing it about – has slowly grown, and not just in England.

For a poet, translation is like playing scales on the piano, he said; ‘it may extend one’s knowledge of what poetry can be.’ For non-poets, poetry extends one’s knowledge of what language and literature can be.

Here’s an example of Bertie Lomas’s rare skill of inventing a form: a poem by Kirsi Kunnas for children. Bertie has translated rhyme, fun and play – as well as the idea of the original (which will be particularly appreciated by those who can read Finnish).

Starfish

Starfish, living on the ocean bed
with tons of water
on her head,
           said:
     'I don't dread
     any load.
        I've pointy thumbs
        a plumb flat bum
and lots of pressure-proof brats!'

Meritähti

Eli merenpohjassa Meritähti
tuhat tonnia vettä yllä.
      - Minä jaksan kyllä,
      sanoi Meritähti.
      - On terävät sakarat,
      ja litteät pakarat
ja paineenkestävät kakarat!

Gösta Ågren. Photo: Studio Paschinsky

The latest poems by Gösta Ågren, in the collection I det stora hela (‘On the whole’, Söderströms, 2011), are a continuation of the poet’s lifelong striving to unite the realm of private and personal experience with the domain of the shared, the social and the universal.

Ågren, born in 1936 in Ostrobothnia, on the west coast of Finland, has published twenty-eight collections of poetry. I det stora hela is the latest in an apparently inexhaustible series of books that reflect upon life and death, mostly in terse, aphoristic blocks that are hewn out of the poet’s own existence.

In the background of nearly all his poems is an Ostrobothnian childhood which, in its remoteness and solidarity with his close relatives, sets him apart in the same way as the Swedish language in which he writes sets him apart within a Finnish cultural context, though perhaps not in a Finland-Swedish one – for he shares not only its linguistic heritage, but also its traditional concern with the polarity and ultimate reconciliation of the individual and the community.

To achieve the synthesis that is the hallmark of his poetry, Ågren makes reference to the universalising quality of classical Greek drama, and especially to its anonymous chorus – the symbol and realisation of mankind in general. In these concise and often painfully intricate epiphanies we are confronted with an extension of the meaning expressed by the German classic poet Friedrich Hölderlin in his four-line poem Die Linien des Lebens (The lines of life): Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen (‘What here we are, there a God can complete’).

The joys, sorrows, failures and celebrations of individual lives are the token of cosmic events that take place elsewhere, on the other side of the gulf that separates the living from the dead. It is a process that we are sometimes dimly aware of in the processes of nature: in the eyes of a cow that is being approached by two people, the poet sees an affirmation of being that is primordial, and goes beyond the immediately human: She observes them / as she observes everything / that moves in the night’s white / peace, for nothing is quite / guiltless; everything that is, / is ancient, and seeks. (Kons ögon, ‘The cow’s eyes’)

Poems from the collection I det stora hela (’On the whole’, Söderströms, 2011)

Father’s hands
(1945)

Father’s hands were like stiff
gloves; a furious
kettle had bewitched them
in his childhood. We ride
from the church’s tall letter
along the river’s long sentence
to the parenthesis of the bridal house,
and the thunder of three hundred hooves
fills the space beneath the clouds.
I saw father driving through
his life with those numbly
gripped reins, and later,
right now, I think of the
life-long body in which a man
comes, is wounded, and goes.

Inner happening

Ignorant and young as
a hero he walks,
and the summer night is
higher and softer than the day.
He has left, but no
and doubt still remain
in each other. Rather
than consciousness they are
his slow
going. To take
decisions is not possible,
they grow as roots
grow beneath the coming
trunk!

In nocturnal light

The fields are thin; through
the worn green blanket
earth is glimpsed. But already
a leaf flutters to the ground
like a loosened flame. A car
passes. The headlights are
grey, the engine whispers.
The nocturnal light
makes everything become
meaningful. As he goes
along the road, this fallen
gravel column without origin
and goal, he is
for a moment in
a June minute of 1951
carried by something other
and eternal. At that moment,
under the clouds and
the halls, he meets
the freedom
in the word
I.

Soul and gravel

So thought the youngster: The soul
must be a sleep. First
when you touch it,
it awakes, and thus becomes
a waking sleep, a sort of
dormant marsh that
receives and buries. It happens
when you are fifteen.

He thought: Life is bigger than
its meaning, a mysterious gravel
of grey days where no one is able
to stay without the help of the
mechanical routine that dries out
the soul’s marsh.

Sauna

Foxtails crept out from
the dry wood. A floor
of smoke settled under the roof.
Slowly, degree by degree,
the sauna became alive.

I felt I was walking
into a body. The warmth
in a century-old smoke sauna
is not new: it is only sleeping,
and is woken by the fire!

Four or five enormous years
I had lived when I saw
poor people turned
to jewelry against the logs’
velvet!

The meeting with the chorus

The chorus’s song is wordless
and clear. They come
along the street, but are
not going anywhere;
their lives have always been
deeper than the future.
A tall woman is choregos.
She directs them, calm
and inaccessible
as kindness.

The song of the chorus

One cannot be born
without breaking.
Lower your words, poetry’s
crest has no wall
below it. We need
other walls, higher
and stronger
than feelings.

The exhortation of the choregos

The road through iron and mockery
is easier than these people’s
arduous way beneath
the pity of those they meet, but
do not check your pain.
You need
it.

The repose

There is a repose
long before death;
a blue chamber, high
above the years. There what
happened has no force;
you see it as a pilot
sees toy houses and the rivers’
silver threads. One is
at last ruler
over one’s life, and all
attempts stand still
forever.

Translated by David McDuff

Herbert Lomas. Photo: Soila Lehtonen

Herbert Lomas, English poet, literary critic and translator of Finnish literature, died on 9 September, aged 87.

Born in the Yorkshire village of Todmorden, Bertie lived for the past thirty years in the small town of Aldeburgh by the North Sea in Suffolk. (Read an interview with him in Books from Finland, November 2009.)

After serving two years in India during the war, Bertie taught English first in Greece,  then in Finland, where he settled for 13 years. His translations – as well as many by his American-born wife Mary Lomas (died 1986) – were published from as early as 1976 in Books from Finland.

Bertie’s first collection of poetry (of a total of ten) appeared in 1969. His Letters in the Dark (1986) was an Observer book of the year, and he was the recipient of several literary prizes. His collected poems, A Casual Knack of Living, appeared in 2009.

In England Bertie won the Poetry Society’s 1991 biennial translation award for one of his anthologies, Contemporary Finnish Poetry. The Finnish government recognised his work in making Finnish literature better known when it made him a Knight First Class of Order of the White Rose of Finland in 1987.

To Books from Finland, he made an invaluable contribution over almost 35 years – an incredibly long time in the existence of a small literary magazine. The number of Finnish authors and poets whose work he made available in English is countless: classics, young writers, novelists, poets, dramatists.

Bertie’s speciality was ‘difficult’ poets, whose challenge lay in their use of end-rhymes, special vocabulary, rhythm or metre. He loved music, so the sounds and tones of words, their musicality, were among the things that fascinated him. Kirsi Kunnas’ hilarious, limerick-inspired children’s rhymes were among his best translations – although actually nothing in them would make the reader think that the originals might not have been written in English. A sample: There once was a crane / whose life was led / as a uniped. / It dangled its head / and from time to time said:/ It would be a pain / if I looked like a crane. (From Tiitiäisen satupuu, ‘Tittytumpkin’s fairy tree’, 1956, published in Books from Finland 1/1979.)

Bertie also translated work by Eeva-Liisa Manner, Paavo Haavikko, Mirkka Rekola, Pentti Holappa, Ilpo Tiihonen, Aaro Hellaakoski and Juhani Aho among many, many others; for example, the prolific writer Arto Paasilinna’s best-known novel, Jäniksen vuosi / The Year of the Hare, appeared in his translation in 1995. Johanna Sinisalo’s unusually (in the Finnish context) non-realist troll novel Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi / Not Before Sundown, subsequently translated into many other languages, appeared in 2003. His last translation for Books from Finland was of new poems by Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen in 2009.

It was always fun to talk with Bertie about translations, language(s), writers, books, and life in general. He himself said he was a schoolboy at heart – which is easy to believe. He was funny, witty, inventive, impulsive, sometimes impatient – and thoroughly trustworthy: he just knew how to find the precise word, tone of voice, figure of speech. He had perfect poetic pitch. As dedicated and incredibly versatile translators are really hard to find anywhere, we all realise our good fortune – both for Finnish literature and for ourselves – to have worked, and enjoyed with such enjoyment, with Bertie.

Poet Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1956) was not a self-avowed follower of Zen, but his last poems, in particular, show surprisingly close contacts with the philosophy. ‘Secrets of existence are revealed once one ceases seeking them’, the literary scholar Tero Tähtinen wrote in an essay published alongside Bertie’s new Hellaakoski translations in (the printed) Books from Finland (2/2007). Bertie was fond of Hellaakoski, whose existential verses fascinated him; among his 2007 translations is The new song (from Vartiossa, ‘On guard’, 1941):

The Night of the Arts, 2009. Photo: Sasa Tkalcan

Helsinki becomes a busy cultural city in every August: Helsinki Festival, Stage Theatre Festival and Poetry Moon festival, for example, have a great variety of happenings on offer.

Also the seventh annual Helsinki Poetics Conference – an international and interdisciplinary conference for poets, writers and literary scholars – takes place on 27 and 28 August.

The organisers are the poetry organisation Nihil Interit (the publisher of the journal Tuli&Savu, ‘Fire&Smoke’) in collaboration with the Finnish Literary Research Society, and it is a part of the Runokuu / Poetry Moon international poetry festival.

And The Night of the Arts, of Helsinki Festival, takes over the city – for the 23rd time, tonight.

Heli Laaksonen. Photo: Otava/Irmeli Jung

In the 21st century, poetry written in various dialects has drawn new audiences to poetry readings. A common feature of, for example, Sinikka Nopola’s short prose about the family, written in the dialect of the Tampere area, and Heli Laaksonen’s poetry, which is written in the dialect of south-west Finland, is the enormous popularity of live performances by the authors. Their audiences love to hear them read in dialect, because the texts are funny, and they sound even funnier when read aloud.

Heli Laaksonen (born 1972) has, ever since her first collection, Pulu uis (‘Pigeon swimming’, 2000), been Finland’s best-selling poet. Her three collections and audio books have achieved sales figures that are astonishing in the Finnish context – tens of thousands of copies. Her fourth collection, Peippo vei (‘The chaffinch took it’, Otava, 2011), has been at the head of bookseller’s sales lists throughout March and April.

Laaksonen writes in the dialect of south-west Finland, which is the Turku-born poet’s ‘mother tongue’. She is an excellent performer and undoubtedly the best interpreter of her own poems. In the wake of the folk poetry tradition, Finland has a strong tradition of poetry reading, but what is new about the Laaksonen phenomenon is considerable marketing, extensive performance tours and the presence of the media.

When Heli Laaksonen’s book of poetry Sulavoi (‘Melted butter’) was made public, in a chock-full Helsinki Railway Station in 2006, the wall of the station lobby was covered by an enormous image of the writer. The poet leaped from amid her fans into a poetry train to go on a reading tour. Laaksonen will likely be performing her Peippo vei at around one hundred venues a year. A tour office promotes readings whose tickets cost around twenty euros apiece. Platform shows with videos represent Laaksonen’s skills as a performing artist at their best, and large numbers of her books are sold at these events. Her poetry business has, naturally, not gone without criticism, but on the other hand she is at the moment the only Finnish poet who can survive on the proceeds of her poetry without financial assistance.

What, then, is it about Laaksonen’s poetry that attracts its listeners and readers? She succeeds extraordinarily well in combining the implicitly authentic and natural images of dialect speech with similar subjects and themes. She writes partly about past ways of life and the everyday life, nature, old people, warm human relations of the countryside, in other words about all that nostalgic quotidianity that is unavailable to modern urban life. The majority of Laaksonen’s readers and listeners are women who have reached retirement age.

Heli Laaksonen has said that she avoids both the capital, Helsinki, and foreign travel. There is, however, no nationalist leavening at the root of her poetry. When she was studying in Estonia, the poet became interested in the local dialect poetry, which is one form of the international cultural phenomenon derived from indigenous peoples and languages which is known as ethnofuturism.

If poetry was the mother tongue of humanity, as defined by the German romantics, then dialect poetry is the mother tongue of local culture. But there is some more general image of nakedness and sauna-cleanness that explains why eastern Finns, too, so like to listen to poetry written in south-western Finland.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Poems from Peippo vei (‘The chaffinch took it’, Otava, 2011)

First early

From the potato patch there rose a human seedling, too.
Winston, I called it
as it was Winstons I’d sowed in this row

Whole,
beautiful,
unmarked by hoe or blight.
I put it in the basket with the others.
It sat there in the quiet pile, at the edge,
looked on while I slogged away,
gnawing a little bit out of the side of a potato.

What was it thinking?
What could it be that earlies think about?
The first summer sparrows are fresh out of the oven.
I so wish they’d only think about nice things.

I try to look happy
to give them a good start.

I sure know you

Who told you
to put a fox costume on
when you’re so sweet on the inside?

Your zip is stuck at the back
and you won’t let me help.
I secretly cut a hole in the side
and feel around a bit with my paw.

I knew it!

There’s a silky-smooth pig’s tail
and a friendly wet snout.

There’s no law that says
you can’t pretend to be a beast
but then it’s no use feeling sorry
because no one dares
talk to you without a fur coat made of wolf.

Don’t ever go clubbing with a housewife

Doe from next door
this is the last time
I’m taking you with me!

Take your hoof off the drummer’s thigh!
You drink wine from glasses, not tumblers!

A hundred and two kilometres an hour in the cycle lane
then one leap over the bonnet;
lift your ankles, too!

Hair standing on end, the birch tree
stares after you
and doesn’t dare open its eyes
all spring.

So is it supposed to be some kind of explanation
that you’d spent a couple of days
at home with the kids?

Forecast

Over the house flew
a swan
that meant summer.
A crane meant luck
a crow home-sickness
a hen difficulties in sowing
a scaup rain
a chaffinch soup
a pie-eyed flycatcher light summer cloud.

An eider duck meant bachelors
a pigeon, a bun
a woodpecker, death
a jackdaw, laughter.

And we got almost all of them by autumn.

Nature is wise!

Past my foot
went a mallard
and said hi.

Soul-poem

I bought a ticket on the train
for the pet carriage
I wanted my soul to have its own seat

have you met my soul
it’s a curly-stemmed
outdoor cucumber
it has a clean apron and a bright laugh
it’s made up its eyes in a dark car
by memory and by feel

we have a pot-plant on the carriage window-sill
and plenty to do before Pieksämäki
furtively mocking the train announcements

I don’t get bored of its company
but I do get terrified
and wistful
and embarrassed
but it’s not dull
and if it could have a say
every seal would have pyjamas
every father a child

Lullaby

Don’t worry weasel
I’ll show you how small the bear is,
just a picture on a glass jar,
how can you have been afraid of that?

If you can’t reach
I will get all the best yesterday’s papers
from the recycling bin
and read the titles aloud by the light of the head lamp

I took a golden ball to the back yard
to hang on the lower branch of your evening pee tree
there you can spatter
looking at the glistening.

Don’t worry weasel
you’re so short you can’t fall.
Now fall into sleep.
It’s land you can see,
not worries.

(Kehtolaul

Älä murhetu murmel,
mää näytän sul kuin piän karhu o,
klasipurkin kyljes kuva vaa,
kui sää simmost olet peljänny?

Jollet uletu,
kurkotan sul paperinkeräyslaatikost
kaik parhama eilise lehre,
luven otsiko ääne ottalampu valos.

Vein takapihal
su iltapissakuuse alaoksal kultapallon killuma,
voit siin suhistel
ja kattella kimmellyst.

Älä murhetu murmel,
olet nii matalaki ettet korkealt putto.
Nyy putto une.
Maat näkyvis,
ei murhei.)

Translated by Hildi Hawkins and Soila Lehtonen

Bo Carpelan. Photo: Irmeli Jung

The coolness on the mountain
streams of water, black forests
in the west a growing light
foreboding sleep

These lines are from Gramina, the twenty-second and last collection of verse by the Finland-Swedish poet Bo Carpelan, which appeared last summer.

The short poem captures much of what was typical of Carpelan’s poetic style: a visually sharp and objective image which juxtaposes the world we see with a sense of something different, undefined. Time the unstoppable, which changes everything, was his central theme, and it also figures here.

Carpelan (1926–2011) made his debut in 1946 and was hailed early on as a renewer of the modernist tradition that in Finland began in the early 20th century with Edith Södergran (1892–1923) and Elmer Diktonius (1896–1961). He combined the Finnish-Swedish heritage of reflective nature poetry with imagistic stimuli from Swedish- and English-language modernism.

Carpelan’s breakthrough came with Den svala dagen (‘The cool day’, 1960). It expressed the cool existential heat that became his hallmark in ‘Autumn walk’, one of his best-known poems:

A man walks through the wood
one day of shifting light.
Encounters few people,
stops, considers the autumn sky.
He is making for the graveyard
and no one is following him.

In his poem Carpelan had already found the characteristic means of expression which he later deepened but did not fundamentally change – the short, condensed form, the clarity of method, the collegial interaction with other poets who had gone before, usually the classical masters.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was of the opinion that one should not devour books. If reading made one forget the outside world, it was better to stop and look around. Books should be a stimulus for one’s own activities – and judged by Emerson’s criteria, Carpelan is a model example. When he reads, the result is not only thoughts but also poems and aphorisms which give his reaction to what he has read. For this purpose he created a genre called ‘marginalia’, which he developed, for example, in the collection Marginalia till grekisk och romersk diktning (‘Marginalia to Greek and Roman poetry’, 1984).

In Gramina Carpelan derives inspiration from Horace, Virgil and Dante, and he comments on their work in lyrical form. ‘Gramina’ is Latin for grass, and it can be interpreted in various ways: as the poet’s own poems, sprouting among the tall classics of antiquity; or as the vitality which in Carpelan’s poetry always survives, beyond the passage of time and great events:

The grass passes over the earth,
over the gentle hills,
over the silent graves,
stops at the sea and sees
waves, as if they stood still.

For Carpelan the classics are at once contemporary, timeless and the way to a distant past. This is reflected in his poetic approach, which may equally adopt the baneful social criticism of Horace, the brutality of Virgil’s battle scenes, or the basic existential questions of Dante.

Gramina is a commentary on some of the greatest poets of world literature, and it provokes a desire to return to them. But the collection is much more than this: the numerous short poems, many of them consisting of only a few lines, gradually grow into a mighty whole. Most of Bo Carpelan’s major themes – time, memory, perception, the ‘you’ addressed in the poem – undergo further variation here, and acquire new life in language. In a fleeting world Carpelan helps us – just as Horace did two thousand years ago – to preserve something of what is essential.

Translated by David McDuff

Poems from the collection Gramina. Marginalia till Horatius, Vergilius och Dante (‘Gramina. Marginalia to Horace, Virgil and Dante’, Schildts, 2011)

Surf on the net –
in the net you are
with mouse and waiting spider

Fills life’s piggy bank
until it is emptied

The paved road of envy
where you stumble

Be sufficient unto oneself?
And who is this ‘self’
who doesn’t introduce himself?

Chance conducts
from an accurate score.

Sloth, friend Virgil,
has a deep and rich soil.
Diligence dries like clay
when drought reigns.
The water, it flows, flows
like sloth, in succulent verdure.

Revered gods of oblivion,
your absent-minded power
makes memory’s landscape bright,
clear and pure, scrubbed
like the floor of truth.

Outside the poem the indescribable world,
terrified of all that is boundless,
the crazy idea, the wind, the bird,
the scent of the meadow’s wild flowers.

Anxiety’s repose on the wads of banknotes.

Golfers, beware!
Do not fall down
into the last,
black hole!

(From the Horace [Horatius] section, ‘Satirer och epoder’, ‘Satires and epodes’)

If in the dream
I move about on the sea
my next day
is a longing to be gone.

Lived as if on the eve of the last day.
It came, unexpected.

Free winds on fields,
with rape golden yellow,
sky of clouds
in childhood’s summers:
pass away, time!
But time replies:
it is not I
who is passing away.

Say goodbye, say goodbye!
But to whom, to whom
when all have already gone?
To yourself, my dear,
to yourself.

That I have no sense of reality? What reality?
The one that sneaks away into the nearest dark entrance
or punches you on the nose in a fight at the pub?
The reality that sooner or later kills you
or what you remember of a tenderness forty years ago?
Reality right now, as if now there were anything at all,
all the talk of carpe diem? Seize the day. What day?
The one that saw you born or that sees you die?
This day has gone to its fathers. Sense of reality?
Seize it, pickpocket, take reality by the scruff of the neck
So you will see what happens, how it bites back.

(From the Horatius [Horace] section, ‘Oden’, ‘Odes’)

The horses saw us,
raised their heads
then continued on the dewy pastures
in the heavy scent of greenness
as though we had not been there
and were not there

To free oneself from oneself,
be merged in the poem, unite
in deepest friendship

(From the Vergilius [Virgil] section, ‘Aeneiden’, ‘The Aeneids’)

No other company
than the grass’s scent
gramina
the beloved’s image

(From the Dante section, ‘Den gudomliga komedin. Helvetet’, ‘The divine comedy. Hell’)

Never fondled as a child
declares proudly:
there is no solace!

If a part of us
already dead
follows us,
walks about

Paradise’s
smiling pedantry

When the light no longer dazzles
that’s where your home is
and your rest

(From the Dante section, ‘Den gudomliga komedin. Skärselden’, ‘The divine comedy. Purgatory’)

Translated by David McDuff

Aila Meriluoto. Photo: Tiina Pyrylä/WSOY

One of the more attractive aspects of Finnish literature is the juxtaposition of poetry-writing generations. 2011 sees the debut of both the 82-year-old Martta Rossi and new poets born in the 1980s.

Compared to them, the 87-year-old Aila Meriluoto is an old hand: Tämä täyteys, tämä paino (‘This fullness, this weight’, WSOY, 2011) is her 14th volume of poetry.

Since her first collection, which appeared 65 years ago, the grande dame has published more than 20 works: poetry, prose, diaries, books for children and young people, biographies and translations, among them poetry by Harry Martinson and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Meriluoto’s profile as a writer is an interesting combination of the much-lauded young writer and the critically acclaimed middle-aged, unrestrainedly confessional mother. Her first collection, Lasimaalaus (‘Glass painting’, 1946), was much loved by a wide public as a work that united the entire younger generation that had experienced the Second World War.

The adoring support of the great literary authority of the period, the poet and academician V.A. Koskenniemi (1885–1962), was instrumental in building a Meriluoto cult, and this connection was to cost her dear later in the 1950s. The young modernist generation saw her as an exponent of the older rhymed poetry and the conservative world of values that was associated with it.

Meriluoto’s prose work, too, had a mixed response in its time. After moving, together with her four children, to Sweden in 1962 following her divorce, the writer published a number of works describing her difficult marriage to the poet Lauri Viita (1916–1965). And that was not all: she also wrote about her erotic dreams and her new relationships with men in a way that did not accord with the literary taste of Finns.

Her intimate confessions of a mother-of-four and her descriptions of her difficult marriage to a fellow artist, however, gained a new audience in the 1990s: feminist thinking and literature had schooled new generations who considered Meriluoto courageous as a writer. It is interesting how the autobiographical writings of the Finland-Swedish writer Märta Tikkanen (born 1935) about her marriage and family have experienced the same kind of rise and fall in their literary reception.

In her new collection, Meriluoto continues to write in a limpid world characterised by the search for balance and the power of light. When the poems speak of the ‘stubborn altitude of a summer’s night’ and of ‘independent light’, we find ourselves once again face to face with the woman hungry for life, insistent upon her right to exist, who has been present in Meriluoto’s poetry all along.

The collection follows themes of ageing, renunciation and death, but all through the poet’s characteristically tough, slightly ironic gaze. Relationships between men and women still beguile her; the paradoxical ‘black light’ is linked with this eternal love affair between day and night.

The woman of the poems is an ‘extreme ballerina’ and a ‘white lily’, who still gazes into the mirror and ponders the relationship between the image and the perceiving subject. The girl in the mirror is now standing on her head and an old woman steps out of the wall.

The woman in the mirror is a poetic figure already familiar from Aila Meriluoto’s first collection: in ‘Kahlaajatyttö’ (‘The wading girl’), a man suddenly destroys the mirror of the water’s surface. In the new collection’s title poem, a wise speaker advises practising patience, calm, slowing down, and thus accepting the eternal present, the unbroken duration of present beauty.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

We live in strange times
my skull full of echoes.
The rose has throbbed
the heart flowered.
In the mirror a girl on her head,
from the wall steps an old woman,
all of them familiar,
none remembered.

Suddenly here.
Fully present.
Eighty-five years.
Hands wrinkled, shaky legs.
And alive to the brim.
And over. Dripping.

Surging.

I sprinkle memories around me
like roses.
The freshness, the presence!
Soon I shall be covered in them.
Greetings from life, ye mortals!

My love, whatever your name may be,
life always rolls over itself, jostling.
I should like to be one, simple.
But what to do about the layers,
All those names, colours, memories,
since nothing fades.

So just an unmarked stone, please.
Peel the names away, grind it smooth,
I do not wish for anyone any more.
Not even myself.

The dizzying sky of a summer night
above the dark outlines of the city.
Only one lighted window.
Far away there the light descends
over the whole landscape, up and down.
Abandons the levels.

But secretly everywhere
a stubborn altitude.

Have you finally reached your zenith,
light of the summer night?
Extreme ballerina
on the tips of your toes?
Do not stop moving.
Come down slowly, slowly.

The dance of living: sheer clumsiness
without that stagger of death.

Words move like birds.
I look at the flocks disappearing beyond the horizon.
Soon I shall be mute as the forest.
The trees fall silent, no rustling,
no twittering.
What is there left to express myself with?

Am I losing my music?
Hearing is hearing,
but even my inner being can sing.
Can sing without sound,
without words
deep inside is a stone that sounds.
To itself.

No words. A smile.

A very slow, broad note,
perhaps largo.
The white lily remembers against the window,
another, budding, is as yet only beginning to experience.
Everything has a meaning.
To understand it like this!
Not suddenly – slowly, holding back
to open oneself like a bud.
This fullness, this weight.
Linger a little, wait.
Ripen. Only now will it happen,
still yourself, do not squander.
Do not be content with the passing second.
Now it is born.
The eternal present.

I have edged my dark window with stars.
In the middle quivers a blue butterfly.
Much happens these days.
Someone is talking about unimportant things
on the blue screen.
So much goes missing
when it is constantly present.
Dangerous, dangerous.
Set the alarm clock
so that the angels cannot surprise you.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

She was made of plastic strips, metal bits, artificial skin, implants, circuit boards. Her heart pumped blood like a real one, her eyes watered as necessary. She was made free and loving, and almost soulful. But the soul is a quirk, said the Creator, a human mistake causing pain and death. And confusion. And the degradation of this world. They left out what they couldn’t say, what they were unable to say. They said: your name is Carmen, go forth, find your balance on threads across the world, you are a meek machine, built to love everything except just one man. You are glowing wires, bright shiny strips of plastic, a mind made of images and tones, your step is light, go, go.

The mall’s scintillating youth choir
(gesticulating in the manner of a musical)

JOSE WALKS ACROSS THE SQUARE AT THE SHOPPING CENTRE

I can see her sequined shadow, her skin, the shadow of her laugh. She touches every man, places her hand on the shoulders of every woman. She smiles at everyone, belongs to no one, I say, look away, then back again. I stroke my jacket lapel, such joy, condemned to solitude, to ugly endings, to endings at all. But she looks at me as if she could see, shakes her head at someone and laughs. She needs no pity, nothing, a person like that doesn’t dance because someone’s holding a knife to her throat or stomach but despite this. And it’s terrible to watch.

CARMEN ENCOUNTERS JOSE IN THE OPULENT JEWELLERY STORE *

The hand as it smokes
a surging jewel
if my desire
eventually nothing left

You have a strong hand it shakes
everyone’s fingers
you say: ‘it is to steal here
to do it deftly.

And though your body
so cleanly shop
face window balance
You can open your mouth.’

And my voice asks: ‘well, how much does your fluttering heart cost, it’s on offer, how can such clean, pure water cope, the riverbed stones shining through and all the coins therein that someone casts in at night in the hope of something great?’

AND THE CHOIR TOO SINGS:         you tart
                         the guy is yours, now nick his heart

CARMEN’S TRALLALLA

Tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa
deluded with desire
he arrives who doesn’t know what he wants
your name, a blow to the breastbone
beneath the soul dimly flutters
ribs nailed to the clouds
and someone blows
into the sky’s tattered bellows

Tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa
and staples space fast
and everything is light dance
and in the flight of some waltz or other
the ground is forgotten
its unbearable call, the soil
we forget how to turn back
as the ankle won’t bend
and the earth won’t give way
no one can own another, no one

but the world melts in our hands
in the heat running from the sky
into the floor, its flame colours
crawling up your legs
oozing lava into your arms
and slow, hot fingers along my neck
yours, yours and yours
tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa

FOLK-SONG CHOIR

Weather like a fair bride, so they say:

The verdant trees, the hush of leaves
the smell of rain
the world’s grey rush all around, hands wet
the sky flows into the bed of the earth
water goes into the bed of the sea
which home would you go to
with the wrong man,
the right one on the tip of your tongue.

JOSE’S SUMMER

Carmen, the summer promises much, but when you count the days one at a time there is nothing left. I can’t take you anywhere, to the cottage, to the shore of the lake, to my home, but to ocean liners, paper planes, perhaps not even there, I can’t take you there, but in my dreams you have a room, it is here. Your hair, the shadow of your hair against the wall like the sun, quick steps, with the blade of grass in your mouth you taste of the lawn, the smell of the earth, the soil, the sharply rising sun in whose light night, jasper, beryl. The dark carnelian night. A soft breeze. A ruby lip. Innards, pulsing. The room in splinters the floor charred, desks blackened with smoke, a vitrine in the corridor shattered glass, the smell of petrol pierces the class, the window sliced, the bright day, the sun, a glowing tiger’s eye.

CARMEN ASKS JOSE

My dear boy, what does that gesture mean
that closes my path, try to smother the glow in my eyes
your reluctant face, its sheer hatred, your narrow sky
how that too, so pure, collapses, the mended curtain
the sky, folds of velvet

I take a tentative step away from you, a step
that requires a long pause, consideration
carries you far. Farther still

farther
bird vetch, pine cone, forget-me-not, violet, conifer, grass, buttercup
man witnesses too much, pain, prediction, grief, but joy
a soap bubble climbing in the wind
I stand on the heath, and blow

JOSE MEETS CARMEN AT SUNRISE

All at once I can’t bear the sight of her, I can’t bear her anyway, she comes to me with hands smelling of flesh, drenched in the sun, and sees how I recoil. We have to put a stop to this, I say. And she simply throws herself on the bed and stays there. Her scent, of sand and skin and tobacco. And I clench my hands into fists, and I. We are a knife slicing through a splintered world, a spiral of deeds.

CARMEN SAYS WHAT SHE REALLY IS

You ask where I spent my night, you don’t
want to know, don’t ask.
I slithered with the snakes, many times
penetrated by words, I have almost burst.

Sequins in the clouds, love leads to tragedies
I understand sorrow but don’t know the play
The tight, wrong stitch of endings, ended by force.
Every movement, turns learned, the prompt’s support,
Repetition changes the structure, listen:

I am yours, yours, yours too. I scatter warmth over everything,
into anything, the mirror glow of the sun.
Though the human in me is lacking, my innermost
nothing but binary codes, strips of plastic, letters falling into the heat
smudges of ink, blood, splashes, still, don’t talk about a soul.

Rhythms, notes, pictures, hay, water
freedom, compulsion, language that only becomes real through singing.
Tra-lal-lal-la-la-laa.

JOSE AND ONE HOT DAY AMONG THE OTHERS

This is not real.
This is one hot day among the others.
The yellow flaking corner of the house, the grass faded in the sun’s glass
the dreamlike echo of footsteps on the pavement
as if we had lost that moment and were listening from outside.

This is not real.
When I thrust the knife into her stomach
I can feel her chest, her hill of Venus
her blood, its thick smell
it makes me dizzy
the knowledge that all blood smells the same.

This is not real.
This is more real than anything.
She flows towards me
and at this moment, at this very breath
she is mine more than anyone. Her hair is mine.
Her last whisper, her scream and prayer.
Her convulsing body, the tremble of her legs
as they trembled after making love
when everything became somehow uncontrollable
and I couldn’t make her stop, as she wept
and said that had forgotten to eat, that’s all.

This is not real.
The day is hot and fitful.
And I have a thought that slashes through the stage

warm gods
shale, fragments of roof, fragile tiles
a hot evening, a sandy wind
the girl has a soft step and there are stones on the path
shards whip up into her eyes, the swallows fly low
a black and damp smoke drops from the mountains
the sea casts everything in front of her
the dim rainbow descending from the sky
the jade-coloured stones, the tile with the drawing of a flower

the stone with writing upon it
the human in the way of others’ deeds
the sun that travels along outstretched arms

*) The poem ‘Carmen encounters Jose in the opulent jewellery store’ has been composed in such a way that the first three stanzas of the original poem have been translated (using online machine translators) via numerous different languages, then back into Finnish. The final poem is a reworking of these retranslated versions.

Translated by David Hackston