Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Poems from Laulu tummana tulevi (‘The song comes darkly’, 1976). Introduction by Pentti Saaritsa

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                      I have longed for you
as the burning heath for rain,
                      I have asked for you
as fingers of moss for shade,
                      I have yearned for you
as the dusty mind for tears,
                      and I have loved you
as distant lightning the dark,
                      I have been in you
as flowering pine in the wind.

The blue will-o’-the-wisps dance,
strangers stitching happiness.
Silvery the spring mornings,
the trumpets bright in summer,
the autumns cranberry-red,
the white legend of winter. More…

Poems from I de mörka rummen, i de ljusa (‘In the dark rooms, in the bright ones’, 1976). Introduction by Kai Laitinen

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He covers his grey floor with glowing carpets.
He has bought them cheap. No one sees they are fakes
except The Great Specialist – but he never comes.

He covers the windows with curtains like waves of silk
and wraps himself up in his food with a blind look of hunger.
Those who follow him – the wife, the children – have to run.

He goes quickly through the dark as though it were hounding him.
He is right: it is hounding him, it catches up with him
when he wakes defenceless in the night. He is abandoned:

all the time there is a noise in the rooms, a burglary,
he is afraid and does not move but in the dark holds
his hand to his eyes, it is cold and strange.

Each day he goes to his life and comes from it.
He is like a wagon. A wagon has its uses.
It trundles heavily past sidestreets and down to the harbour.

He stops: it is light over the sea, a light
hidden by clouds. As though he had seen it once, before.
What he sees is nothing, stretching far away.

There are waves, but they are all standing still. More…

Jarkko Laine. Photo: Kai Nordberg

Jarkko Laine (born 1947) writes both prose and verse. He is the author of several hilarious and highly imaginative novels and a pioneer of the generation of Finnish underground poets. One of the most productive of younger Finland’s poets, he draws on the language and forms of mass commercial entertainment, comics, and pop music to write about people of today.

He is currently the editorial secretary of the literary periodical Parnasso. The poem below is from his latest collection Viidenpennin Hamlet (‘Fivepenny Hamlet’, Otava 1976)

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In Turku again
the taxi’s travelling East Street
whose wooden sides have gone,

the radio’s laryngeal with static, VHF, the driver’s
telling me the tale,
the ice hockey season’s on us already,
even though there’s rain, green in the park,

I’m staring at the lifted houses
stuffed with sleeping persons,
the landmarks are going out one by one, all of them,
you might as well be
in the middle of the sea in a rubber dinghy,
soon I shan’t recognize anything here but
the cathedral, the castle,
my own name in the telephone directory. More…

Pentti Saaritsa playing chess. Photo by Otso Kantokorpi, 2006.

Pentti Saaritsa (born 1941), author of six collections of poetry, is one of Finland’s leading left-wing poets, who writes about a wide range of individual and social themes. An outstanding translator, he has had a major role in making Latin American literature, especially the work of Miguel Angel Asturias and Pablo Neruda, known and admired in Finland. He also translates from Russian. The first five poems below have been taken from his latest collection Tritonus (‘Tritone’, Kirjayhtymä 1976), and the last two from his Syksyn runot (‘Autumn poems’, Kirjayhtymä 1973). His poems have appeared in various anthologies abroad and are now being translated into Swedish, English and French. Pentti Saaritsa is a member of the editiorial board of Books from Finland.

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From the bowels of each apartment house
always that one unknown sound is borne.

Sometimes like drily dripping water, sometimes
as a stone might bite a lump out of itself,
Or a child awake in the dark might learn the word hair.

And a tenant listens, makes a note of it
perhaps to punctuate the interrupted writing of his consciousness
when it makes him restless:

What now, again so soon, is it coming from me
or from the dead building.
An alarm-bell. Did anyone else hear? More…