Search results for "herbert lomas"
Onward, downward!
31 March 1994 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Lauri Viita (1916–1965) was one of the self-taught writers who made his debut after the Second World War. His extensive, realist novel Moreeni (‘Moraine’, 1950) taking place in Viita’s native Tampere, begins with this prose poem
…over wolds, hummocks, ridges, between boulders, under branches, from cabin to cottage to manor, from coppice to fen, and ditch to puddle – down it drew us, the sloping earthcrust, southward the magnificent granite ploughland slanted.
Paths linked to paths, brooks joined brooks. Onward, downward! The roads widened, the currents strengthened. Bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier were the loads they could sustain. More and more trees, bread, potatoes, butter, meat, people and gravestones, huge boulders, rocks, went into the maw of those channels, and the hunger only redoubled. From channel to strait, from hour to hour, the lines of barges crawled along; from day to day the broad rafts of logs passed their sleepless summer on the long blue strip of Lake Näsijärvi. Spruce, pine, birch, aspen – different pieces for different purposes. How vast the supply and how vast the need! The months and days went by; in the depths of the lake, layer after layer, there wandered the shades of clouds, ships, faces. More…
Manmother
31 December 2002 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Granaattiomena (‘Pomegranate’, WSOY, 2002). Introduction by Kristina Carlson
The journey
Mother had sent her son to the island of Rome.
She’d sent him for pleasure and recreation, and also to have a little time by herself. Even though their life together was on an even keel, it was sensible to have some time away from each other. She herself was sixty-eight, and her son an unmarried hermit in his thirties, on sickness allowance for the last couple of years. He was afflicted with chronic depression. The doctors had been unable to identify the cause. The origin of a disorder of that sort was often looked for in some infant trauma; but the boy’s childhood, from all appearances, had been harmonious. One doctor suspected the time of his father’s terminal illness, when the boy had had to nurse his father for a long while. More…
In the north
30 September 1988 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Luvaton elämä (‘Forbidden life’, 1987). Introduction by Tero Liukkonen
I
I went up north in a sleeping car. It was a relief to see that even in Tampere there was a sign on the car saying ‘Kemijärvi’. That meant I could sleep the whole way. I had the lower berth; a couple more like me were sleeping in the same compartment – just ordinary women. I was nevertheless silent and reserved, so that neither of them would want to make me into a travelling companion. And they did leave me in peace.
I read for a bit, till I began to feel more at home, and settled down to sleep with my woollen socks on. I deliberately went almost to sleep while not wanting to drop off completely; and I gradually reached a point where I didn’t know which direction the train was going in. That was liberating. It was all the same which direction we were going in. The motion of the train got through to my nerves and started releasing things. More…
Poems
31 December 1978 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems from Kuolleet vedet (‘Dead waters’). Introduction by Aarne Kinnunen
1
A faraway tucked-away room
Leathery harness odour
An obscure carriage house
A mighty delay
And out through a narrow gate slipped childhood
And a pony cart was coming to get us
swishing on the sand
White gloves on the coachman
and ornamented with a whip, the lash sounding
We were driving through spotted leaves
Lustre, dolour, lustre,
remembrance, snow
And suddenly the driver was gone
and nothing but hands were gripping the horse
and they were leading me I don’t know where. More…
That remarkable man
31 December 1988 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems by Lauri Viita. Introduction by Kai Laitinen
Alfhild
Mothers alone, endowed
with hope, see God.
They’re given strength and given will,
to climb in dream from under the cloud,
and look from a higher hill.
Alfhild, she who gave me birth,
nightly sailed away from earth
to where her Eemeli growled his say,
coming and going, as he did in his day.
Now they walk
the bright star track,
father and mother, looking back
at the little hill and the family home,
the cats, the dogs, the people they’ve known,
waving and calling as best they can
lest any of us trip on Pispala’s stone.
On a distant planet on a garden swing
under a rowan they linger and cling
and silently remember their light and dark
as a courting couple in Tampere Park –
and if it was payday, the extra fun
of tucking away a coffee and bun. More…
Becoming father and daughter
31 December 1990 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A father kidnaps his 10-year-old daughter and flees to the western extremity of Europe, to Ireland, to begin a new life under new names. In the following extract, the girl is in a state of shock after witnessing an event organised by a religious sect in which animals are driven over a cliff to their death. The year 2000 approaches, and with it clarification of the relationship between father and daughter. An extract from Olli Jalonen’s novel Isäksi ja tyttäreksi (‘Becoming father and daughter’). Introduction by Erkka Lehtola
He begins leading his daughter back the way they came, along the hillside and the lip of the precipice.
The blare of the Legion’s display carries far, till finally the voices are scrambled in the bluster of the wind. The electricity crackles in the loudspeakers, and the thundersheets rumble out to the audience. ‘Be silent!’ come the roars from the plat form: ‘And look at each other! Each is fearfully following his way, each is a venue of good and evil, each is inscribed with God’s name!’ More…
The 101-year anniversary celebration
30 September 1989 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
From the collection of short stories, Saksalainen vävy (‘The German son-in-law’) , 1988. Interview by Erkka Lehtola
Järvinen thought he must have turned up at the wrong place when he saw an iron cross on a grey concrete wall. Surely the library couldn’t be holding its celebration here?
He groped in his breast pocket for the map the librarian had sent him. No: there the landmarks were, he’d followed them, he was at the right place.
He drove on a bit and saw there were cars parked behind the building. He parked next to them and got out. All the other cars were shiny, as if they’d just been washed; his was the only dirty one, its chassis a dusty grey. Rosinante came into his head, and he started wondering what Rosinante’s colour was supposed to have been: just the sort of knowledge he could fit in somewhere. Grey, he guessed – just as General Sandels’ horse in the Runeberg poem was white. And what colour was Pegasus? Didn’t know that either – it hadn’t ever even occurred to him to wonder. Almost certainly it would be there in the mythology. More…
The attentive lover
31 December 1988 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
In this short story, from his collection Pronssikausi (‘The bronze age’, 1988, on the Finlandia Prize shortlist in 1989), Martti Joenpolvi takes up the subject of the problematic transportation of a human cargo
He braked abruptly; the woman lurched forward, straining against the seat belt, and the car drove into the parking space. The only vehicle parked there was a solitary trailer loaded with timber: a resinous pulpwood-odour came wafting through their open window, so physical, it was as if someone were snooping into the car’s most intimate interior. When they stopped, they got the whiff of a yellow refuse bin, incubated in the heat of the day.
‘What’s up?’
‘We’ve got a problem.’ 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…
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...
In the wars
31 March 2005 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Jussi ja Lassi (‘Jussi and Lassi’, WSOY, 1921). Introduction by Pekka Tarkka
One winter evening, Lassi, who was six, asked: ‘Can’t we go out, mother?’
‘It’s late already,’ she said.
‘We’ve been inside the whole day practically,’ said Jussi, who was seven. ‘It gets on my nerves.’
‘Gets on your nerves, does it? Well, boys, you’ll soon be off in bed,’ she said, ‘so you won’t need to get nervy.’
‘Not off to bed – not yet, it’s not yet, not…’ Lassi broke off, trying to work it out.
‘It’s not six yet,’ Jussi said.
‘No, it isn’t,’ their mother said; ‘but you’ll have to stay in your room and not go charging about here, because visitors are coming.’ More…
Season’s greetings
31 December 2002 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
An extract from the novel Kolmastoista tuoli (‘The thirteenth chair’, Atena, 2002)
The start of the Christmas season was difficult for everybody, but it was one big upset for Ron and Dan, the twins. At Christmas, apparently, their whole world, all their schoolmates and backyard-mates, the whole gang of them, were avoiding the twins. No one seemed to be even talking to the twins, who said everyone was just concentrating on ‘being nice’.
‘Nice!’
The pain on the boys’ faces looked the real thing. They were without chums, and the reason was even more annoying.
‘They have to be nice, for they’re expecting presents from Father Christmas.’
Christmas was coming and was having a weird effect on the youngest. For the twins, effort and a reward for a good try were completely foreign concepts. At this point, their lives were sheer adventure. They were lavished with overflowing care and love – and not one Christmas present. More…
Gatecrashing the universe: the poems of Ilpo Tiihonen
4 December 2009 | Authors, Reviews
Ilpo Tiihonen – Photo: Irmeli Jung
Ilpo Tiihonen defies definition: he is, at one and the same time, a cosmopolitan poet who draws his influences from Latin America and the early Soviet avant garde, and a local poet for the whole of Finland, a fabulist who plays with language and a rough-hewn romantic of everyday life.
In Tiihonen’s selected poems, Lyhyt oodi kaikelle (‘A short ode to everything’, 2000), readers are invited to admire the prospekts of Moscow and Paris’s Montparnasse.
Most fondly pictured, however, are spring work-days wherever Tiihonen (born 1950) is living – in recent years, the working-class Helsinki suburb of Kallio, which has on the one hand scrubbed up to become a favourite of students and the more bohemian middle-class and on the other gained notoriety for its bread-lines, prostitutes and street winos. More…
Arrest
31 December 1990 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
An extract from the novel Jäniksen vuosi (‘The year of the hare’). Introduction by Mirja Bolgár
About mid-June Vatanen’s travels had taken him as far as the road to Nurmes. It was raining. He was cold.
He’d just hopped out of the coach from Kuopio, now on its way to Nurmes; so here he was, stuck on a rainy highway, getting soaked because of a snap decision. The village of Nilsiä was miles off.
The hare’s back leg had mended. Almost full-grown it was, now, that hare: good job it still fitted into the basket.
But, anyway, round the comer was a house: a bungalow with attic space – not a bad-looking set-up. Might as well call, Vatanen decided, and see if there’s a night’s lodging going. A woman in a raincoat was scratching away at the garden, her hands black with soil. And old woman – and a picture of his wife flashed though his mind: there was something of his wife about her. More…
The funeral
31 December 1988 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Hannu Salama’s short story Hautajaiset (‘The funeral’) – taking place in Pispala, Tampere – in the volume Kesäleski, ‘Summer widow’, was published in 1969. Introduction by Pekka Tarkka
On Tuesday Venla came round: as Sulo was being lowered into the grave Vihtori had had a heart attack. The next day a letter arrived from father: funeral on Sunday, and Gunilla and Timo want you to speak at the grave. I telegraphed back: ‘Vikki too close to me. Unable to speak.’ Outside the post office I realised I could have sent fifty words for the same money.
Irma ordered a flower arrangement. Did I want to put an inscription? Part of the last stanza of a revolutionary song went through my head:
Sowing makes the corn come into ear:
Hundredfold higher that happier age will be.
I said not to put anything, I’d say something at the grave if it seemed the thing to do. I told her to put mother’s, father’s and Heikki’s names on, and we’d take these off if they’d sent their own wreath. More…