Search results for "ilpo tiihonen"

I was born here

31 March 1997 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems, introduction by Ilpo Tiihonen

Bloggs

You work eight hours a day,
sleep thirteen.
Three hours are gone in eating
and telling dirty stories by your bed.

When they say, ‘If only you’d
read something, mate –
you’re dribbling your life away,’
back you come with:
‘Living like this 1 make everything mine.’

Bloggs, Bloggs,
should the world be changed for you?

                            From Tie pilven alta ('The way out of the cloud', 1939)  More...

Street-corner man

31 March 1997 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

In the first part of a series on writers and their inspirations, the poet Ilpo Tiihonen writes about his early hero, the poet Arvo Turtiainen

My first concrete encounter with the poet Arvo Turtiainen, the kind of encounter where the poem comes alive and declares itself to be electricity, sound, flesh, part of the atmosphere, took place at Christmas 1967. The poet’s work Hyvää joulua (‘Merry Christmas’) had just been published. My parents received it as a present from my big sister’s boyfriend, then a strict radical. There is a slight sense of apology about the greeting the giver scrawled in the book: ‘This is not a Christmas Present, not a protest, but an opinion.’ For my parents, low-ranking civil servants who had been through the war and embraced middle-class values, Turtiainen did not really exist, preferably not, at least. With a sotto voce cough the book, unread naturally, was slipped on the dark side of the bookshelf, whence I was welcome to take it as far as possible from the living-room.

More…

On the waves of our skin

4 December 2009 | Fiction, poetry

The poems in Ilpo Tiihonen’s new collection, Jumalan sumu (‘God’s mist’) – about fakirs, beggars, poets, lovers and life – are tinged with a gentle sense of the ephemerality of human life (see Gatecrashing the universe)

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 More…

No place to go

30 March 2008 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extracts from the novel Lakanasiivet (‘Linen wings’, Otava, 2007)

The clothesline swayed in the wind. Helvi closed her eyes and felt herself flutter into the air with the laundry. She flapped her white linen wings, straining higher, now seeing below the whole small peninsula city, its damp rooftops glittering in the morning sun, the blue sighs of the chimneys, the steamboats toiling on the lake and the trains chugging on their tracks. The whole of heaven was clear and blue; only far off in the east were there white pillars roiling – whether smoke or clouds, Helvi could not tell.

She flew north on her linen wings and saw the great bridges leading to the city, on whose flanks the hidden anti-aircraft batteries gasped the fumes of gun oil and iron, and continued her journey over the land, following the straight lines of the telephone wires. She flew over wooded hills and deep green fields, finally arriving on the slope of the great hill where her daughter now lived, in hiding from the war. More…

Mouth first

31 March 1993 | Archives online, Authors

llpo Tiihonen was born in the industrial town of Kuopio, in the north of Finland, where his father was a postmaster and his mother a post-office clerk, but he soon evoked the streets and flats of Helsinki, and later the seaport of Hanko, as well as the mystery and nightskies of the country.

Two of his plays, one for adults and one for children, have recently been running to full houses at the City Theatre in Helsinki. His first television opera, Angelika, is due for screening shortly.There has always been a theatrical, playful, childlike and lyrical tone in his verse, and so it is not surprising that – though the qualities are shared with Shakespeare – he is sometimes considered a lightweight. But I agree with Auden, another serious and playful poet, that the significant new poet is likely to reveal himself through his delight in language. More…

Burnt orange

30 September 1992 | Archives online, Drama, Fiction

Extracts from the play Poltettu oranssi (‘Burnt orange‘): ‘a ballad in three acts concerning the snares of the world and the blood’. Introduction by Tuula Hökkä

The scene is a small town in the decade before the First World War 

Cast:

DR FROMM
an imperial,bearded middle-aged gentleman
ERNEST KLEIN
a moustached, ageing, slightly shabby leather-manufacturer
AMANDA KLEIN
his wife, well-preserved, forceful, angular
MARINA KLEIN
their daughter, shapely, withdrawn, wary
NURSE-RECEPTIONIST
open, direct, not too ‘common’

ACT ONE

Scene two

After a short interval the receptionist opens the door and ushers Marina Klein into the surgery. Exit the receptionist. Marina immediately goes to the end of the room and presses herself against the white wall. The white surface makes her look very isolated in her ascetic black dress. The Doctor, who now appears to be headless – an impression produced by the lighting and the yellowish background – half-turns towards her. More…

No country for young men

30 March 2008 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

When men go off to war, women must do their best to take their place at home. Lauri Sihvonen examines two fictional accounts – written in 1950 and 2007 – of women in the Second World War and its aftermath

When the Continuation War broke out in June 1941, Finland was in dire need of strength to fight the Soviet Union. Field Marshal and commanderin-chief of the armed forces Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim wrote to the Finns in an order of the day as follows:

‘I call upon you to embark with me upon a holy war against the enemy of our nation. The fallen heroes [of the Winter War, 1939–1940] will rise again from beneath the summer hillocks to stand beside us this day, as we set out on this crusade against our enemies, firm in our purpose to ensure the future of Finland, with the glorious military might of Germany at our side and as our brothers in arms.’

Sirpa Kähkönen (born in Kuopio in 1964) has taken this wild bit of zombie fiction as the basis for her new novel; Mannerheim gets exactly what he ordered.

Lakanasiivet (‘Linen wings’, Otava), the fourth independent instalment in Kähkönen’s novel series, tells of Kuopio on 1 July 1941. This was the only day on which this largest city in northern Savo, 400 kilometres northeast of Helsinki, was bombed during the Continuation War (1941–1944). More…