Search results for "2010/02/2011/04/2009/10/writing-and-power"

Life in the mist

30 December 2001 | Authors

Tove Jansson

Photo: C-G Hagström

Although most famous for her classic Moomin tales for children, Tove Jansson (1914–2001) also wrote extensively for adults. Maria Antas is surprised by the unexpected coldness of many of these stories of art and solitude

It was easy to love Tove Jansson. The creator of the Moomin characters, painter, author of children’s books and books for adults, she was the public symbol of a rare combination of pure wisdom and human kindness. Finns needed her. As she records in the fragmentary letters that make up the short story ‘Meddelande’ (‘Messages’), people turned to her in order to ask for advice on the most diverse matters: how does one become a good artist, help me to understand my parents, my cat has died: help me! More…

A respectable tragedy

30 June 1988 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

An extract from the novel Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable tragedy’, 1941). Introduction by Kaija Valkonen. The central theme of the novel is love: young, old, passionate, innocent, proper, improper. The main characters are a middle-aged couple, the doctor and his wife Elisabet, his sister Naimi and the love of her youth, Artur. Hämäläinen’s fine irony, careful and thoughtful psychology and colourful language have made the novel a bestseller. Naimi, an aesthete and an uncompromising character, has left her husband Artur twenty years ago because of his infidelity. But slowly she begins to forgive: this tragic but compassionately told love story, not without tragicomedy and humour, ends in reconciliation

Embalmed passion

In that new Helsinki of the ‘thirties, which had opened like a garden flower, gaily coloured, sunlit, practical and impractical, in love with every novelty of the moment, which it thought astonishing, lived Naimi Saarinen, back from her exile, where she had been driven by wounded passion twenty years before. More…

Taking a line for a walk

30 March 2000 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Paul Klee, who is often cited as a pioneer of abstract art, often gave his works names associated with literature. We do not know whether these names arose before he began work, or only as he looked at the finished painting. Probably both.

Klee was well-versed in literature and also wrote himself. In addition to his essays and diaries, he wrote music and theatre criticism. He was also a professional musician, playing the violin in various ensembles. His literary and musical background is clearly visible in all Klee’s work. It is difficult to consider him a purely abstract painter in the traditional sense of the word. Paradoxically, the pioneer of abstract art defies a strict categorisation as abstract or figurative. Behind almost all his works lies a figurative and literary development. And of course music, its transposition into painting.

Klee was in the habit of writing the name of the work, in his fine handwriting, along the bottom edge of the painting, and underlining it. This suggests that he did not consider the associative power of the name of the work trivial or insignificant. It was not, however, intended to direct the viewer, and often the name functions in counter-point to the content of the image. The viewer is both directed and led astray. He sets out to seek correspondences between image and title but finally uncovers his own imagination.

This is an invitation to play. Not so much with the associations and experiences of the artist, but with those of the viewer. Bo Carpelan has accepted the invitation. It is, to my knowledge, fairly rare for a poet to take as his muse the names of an artist’s works. And apparently without particularly examining the works. The wrapping-paper is recycled. Such recycling creates, in his book Namnet på tavlan Klee målade (‘The name of the picture Klee painted’, 1999), a frankly tropical atmosphere, although some of the names of Klee’ s works are transposed directly into Finland-Swedish surroundings. The tropical gaudiness of the poetic images is born with the help of continual metamorphoses. They recall, unbidden, the masterpieces of African recycling in which the renaissance of some worn-out object is celebrated – for example, an empty sardine tin is miraculously reborn as an oil lamp. More…

Poems

30 December 1998 | Fiction, poetry

From Gården (‘The courtyard’, 1969)

The brown tablecloth hung over the edge.
I sat below there unseen in the odour of cabbage and warmth.

The sky hung on rusty hooks, the women of the courtyard shrank.
They were the only flowers the summer had.
They carried pails to the back yard where there was no sun.

Father read the newspaper, in the middle drawer of the writing table were
bills, promissory notes, pawn tickets, the rent book, everything in order. More…

Afterthought

30 June 1999 | Archives online, Essays, Non-fiction

From Novellit (‘The Short stories’, Otava 1985). Interview by Maija Alftan

The short story is a matter of expectancy and reception. So it has to offer surprises. It has to reward the waiting.

The surprises are caused by the known and the familiar. Often some mis­hap is needed; the most crucial can be some social fix. The story’s limited space provides three states, brought about by a change in the environment: the past, the future and the passing moment. They create a special, unique phase of life for one of the characters. A return to the past leads to the new – not to the previous, situation – and this isn’t in anyone’s control. Short stories often contain arbitrariness. More…

Goodbye to all that

30 September 1996 | Archives online, Authors

It is a couple of years since the appearance of Monika Fagerholm’s Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (’Wonderful women at the sea’), which has been bought by a number of foreign publishers. Now Fagerholm’s nostalgic and accurated description of the moodscape of the 1960s has received a companion volume which records the objects of the 1970s and opens the dark record and clothes cupboards of a different young person.

Kjell Westö’s Drakama över Helsingfors (’Kites over Helsingfors’) is, nevertheless, more extended in its trajectory than Fagerholm’s novel because it reveals how the events of the 1990s were included in the values of the 1970s and were born directly from them. More…

The stages of Aleksis Kivi

30 September 1984 | Archives online, Authors

The organic unity of written and performed drama is today considered an unarguable truth especially in acting circles. The work of Aleksis Kivi appears, on this view, anachronistic to say the least: he created the basis of Finnish drama at a time when the indigenous Swedish-language theatre was taking its first faltering steps and theatre in Finnish was not even dreamed of. And more: his most important works still inspire interpretation after interpretation, and audiences continue to flock to see his plays.

Kivi’s drama is no mere paper art, scribbled by an artist in a garret. Details from contemporary accounts reveal that Kivi was naturally drawn to acting, and presumably he had some gifts in that direction. Some of his friends thought him a good mimic. Kivi had marked out his first stage as a boy on the slopes of the Taabori mountain close to his home. His first play concerned the weekly trip to church; he sketched his own satirical version of the sermon and the reading of the banns. As a schoolboy and a student he invented and organised brigand plays in Helsinki and Nurmjärvi; scholars believe that his model was Schiller’s Die Räuber. In Siuntio he read Shakespeare aloud, in Swedish, to his saviour and patron Miss Charlotta Lönnqvist, and to her students of household economy – ‘although, of course, a lot had to be cut out.’ More…

The miracle of the rose

30 June 1997 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extracts from the novel Naurava neitsyt (‘The laughing virgin’, WSOY, 1996). The narrator in this first novel by Irja Rane is an elderly headmaster and clergyman in 1930s Germany. In his letters to his son, Mr Klein contemplates the present state of the world, hardly recovered from the previous war, his own incapacity for true intimacy – and tells his son the story of the laughing virgin, a legend he saw come alive. Naurava neitsyt won the Finlandia Prize for Fiction in 1996

28 August

My dear boy,

I received your letter yesterday at dinner. Let me just say that I was delighted to see it! For as I went to table I was not in the conciliatory frame of mind that is suitable in sitting down to enjoy the gifts of God. I was still fretting when Mademoiselle put her head through the serving hatch and said:

‘There is a letter for you, sir.’

‘Have I not said that I must not be disturbed,’ I growled. I was surprised myself at the abruptness of my voice.

‘By your leave, it is from Berlin,’ said Mademoiselle. ‘Perhaps it is from the young gentleman.’

‘Bring it here,’ I said. More…

A Note on Nine Contemporary Poems from Finland

31 March 1987 | Archives online, Articles, Fiction, Non-fiction, poetry

Contemporary Finnish poetry, translated and introduced by Anselm Hollo

The last couple of months, it has been my pleasure to browse around in a tightly ­packed shelf of books of poetry published in Finland in the last five years. On the showing of these, and of the excellent anthology Modern finlandssvensk lyrik (‘Modern Finland-Swedish poetry’, 1980), edited by Claes Andersson and Bo Carpelan, poetry certainly seems to be alive and well in the old homeland. In a way, the sheaf translated here is just first travel notes, individual works that struck my fancy seemed translatable: thus, by no means a ‘representative selection’.

Claes Andersson’s poem ‘When I was born, Helsinki was…’ was quite simply a direct hit (perhaps an unfortunate metaphor in that it deals, in part, with the WW2 air raids on Helsinki) – it brought back personal memories from my early childhood. But beyond those immediate circumstances, it is also a very moving evocation of the magnificent and terrifying world of magic children inhabit. Helena Anhava’s ‘These years…’, with its marvelous image of the great hinge turning in the human psyche at certain points familiar to anyone who has lived into middle age, seemed a fine example of her impressive body of meditative lyric poems, sharing a tenor of wistfulness not uncommon in Finland’s poetry with Bo Carpelan’s ‘You drive up…’, which is also a poem of the pangs of change. In Carpelan’s text, the clash between ‘wonderful clear Vivaldi’ on the protagonist’s car radio and the perceived tawdriness of the environment is beautifully balanced between genuine revulsion for the latter and a self-irony directed against the self-declared ‘finer sensibilities’ of the class that can afford them. Tua Forsström‘s ‘Do you want to hear something’ moves in a lovely dance figure from myth to everyday present: we see the interior world that is Nausicaa’s island shimmering through the exterior in which ‘someone’s/ balcony door whines all night like a cat’. More…

Word and non-word

31 December 2007 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

For the poet Gunnar Björling (1887–1960), writing was experence, not complete, finished thought. One of his contemporaries, the writer Hagar Olsson, said: ‘Björling doesn’t write Swedish, far from it, he simply writes Björlingian.’ Trygve Söderling introduces the world of his poems, translated into English by Fredrik Hertzberg

Strange tensions and fields of energy exist between words. In the work of the Finland-Swedish modernist poet Gunnar Björling (1887–1960), with its separation of the barriers between them and its re-creation of grammar, the magnetism of words, their attraction and yearning for one another, becomes visible. More…

Life and sun: the writer and his time

30 June 1988 | Archives online, Authors

Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888–1964), one of Finland’s most read authors, was born in the parish of Hämeenkyrö, amid the farmlands of Western Finland. In forty years he published twenty works: novels and short stories. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1939; his works have been translated into more than two dozen languages. His centenary year produced exhibitions, lectures, publications, readings, radio and stage plays, radio and television programmes.

Sillanpää, biologist, realist and mystic: literary scholars in Finland have always disputed about his qualities as an author. Depth psychology, D.H. Lawrence, nature lyricism, Henri Bergson, deep-rooted peasant philosophy, intertextuality, life worship – all can be found in Sillanpää’s work. Modern or old­ fashioned, a regional writer, or an internationally renowned Nobel Prize author?

From time to time the world press prints survey assessments, rather like score cards, of the Nobel literature prizes. They are usually intended to rap the knuckles of the Swedish Academy, but at the same time they attach a value on the international literary market to the recipients of the awards.

Finland’s only Nobel laureate, F.E. Sillanpää, who received his prize in 1939, seems at present to rate low internationally. Writers awarded the prize at around the same time seem, it is true, to have suffered a similar fate: his predecessor Pearl S. Buck, and his post-war successors Johannes V. Jensen and Gabriela Mistral, although the latter do have their own purely local importance. There are some literary histories that allow Sillanpää just a couple of lines along with other regionalists and describers of peasant life, such as the Pole Władysław Reymont, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz of Switzerland, and Jean Giono of France. More…

The comi-tragedist

30 June 1988 | Archives online, Authors

Early March, Rome. Mimosas and cherries are in bloom. Few tourists are about as yet. On a street corner close to the Spanish Steps I bump into Juhani Peltonen. He and his family have been to see Pompeii the day before. We agree to meet again back in Finland.

The journey into the world of Juhani Peltonen passes through clean, white snow. Two big dogs are barking in the garden of the yellow house. They are familiar from Peltonen’s books. The dogs are as friendly as their master.

In the house there are many rooms, many beautiful things, many paintings, framed book jackets and theatre programmes, books, books, books, an old-fashioned typewriter that is still in use, an aged grand piano, flowers. The stuffed birds on top of the book case are so life­like that they look as if they have just alighted for a second to listen to our conversation before flying off again.

This is not just a house. It is also a fantasy world. In these spacious rooms it is easy to believe that Juhani Peltonen began his career as a romantic with leanings towards surrealism. More…

Into the animal kingdom

31 December 2000 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews, Reviews

In her first novel, Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (‘Not before sundown’, Tammi, 2000), Johanna Sinisalo has developed a new science, that of trollology, discovering in the northern forests a new mammal species, the troll. The novel takes its readers into a world beyond taboo. where human beings may fall in love with non-human creatures – and mortal danger may ensue. Introduction and interview by Soila Lehtonen

There are still wild beasts in the forests of northern Europe. It is still not far from the cities to the forest -and the forest is no manicured parkland. where the mark of man is everywhere visible. A berry-picker may encounter a bear, a schoolchild see wolf-tracks in the snow. But the territory of wild creatures in shrinking, and it is becoming more difficult for them to find food; and so they are making inroads into the human landscape. There are a thousand bears in Finland, one for every five thousand people; more than one hundred licences to shoot bear were granted this autumn. More…

Two men in a boat

25 June 2014 | Fiction, Prose

The meaning of life, Bob Dylan, the broken thermostat of the Earth, the authors Ambrose Bierce and Aleksis Kivi…. Two severely culturally-inclined men set out to row a boat some 700 kilometres along the Finnish coastline, and there is no shortage of things to discuss. Extracts from the novel Nyljetyt ajatukset (‘Fleeced thoughts’, Teos, 2014)

The red sphere of the sun plopped into the sea.

At 23.09 official summertime Köpi announced the reading from his wind-up pocket-watch.

‘There she goes,’ commented Aimo, gazing at the sunken red of the horizon, ‘but don’t you think it’ll pop back up again in another quarter of an hour, unless something absolutely amazing and new happens in the universe and the solar system tonight!’

Aimo pulled long, accelerating sweeps with his oars, slurped the phlegm in his throat, spat a gob overboard, smacked his lips and adjusted his tongue on its marks behind his teeth. There’s a respectable amount of talk about to come out of there, thought Köpi about his old friend’s gestures, and he was right.

‘Sure thing,’ was Aimo’s opening move, ‘darkness. Darkness, that’s the thing. I want to talk about it and on its behalf just now, now in particular, while we’re rowing on the shimmering sea at the lightest point of the summer. More…

Year of the cat

13 November 2014 | Fiction, Prose

Extracts from the novel Kissani Jugoslavia (‘Yugoslavia, my cat’, Otava 2014). Introduction by Mervi Kantokorpi

I met the cat in a bar. And he wasn’t just any cat, the kind of cat that likes toy mice or climbing trees or feather dusters, not at all, but entirely different from any cat I’d ever met.

I noticed the cat across the dance floor, somewhere between two bar counters and behind a couple of turned backs. He loped contentedly from one place to the other, chatting to acquaintances in order to maintain a smooth, balanced social life. I had never seen anything so enchanting, so alluring. He was a perfect cat with black-and-white stripes. His soft fur gleamed in the dim lights of the bar as though it had just been greased, and he was standing, firm and upright, on his two muscular back paws.

Then the cat noticed me; he started smiling at me and I started smiling at him, and then he raised his front paw to the top button of his shirt, unbuttoned it and began walking towards me. More…