Search results for "2010/02/2011/04/2009/10/writing-and-power"
Talking to Andrei
30 June 1998 | Fiction, poetry
Poems from Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (‘After spending a night among horses’, Söderströms, 1997)
The snow is whirling over the roses of the inner courtyard
The snow is whirling over the roses of the inner courtyard.
Did not bring boots or scarf with me, leaf
through books, don’t know what to do with all this light!
You would not approve of the colours.
It’s too impressive, Andrei Arsenyevich, there is too
much, too much of everything!
You swapped your wings for an air balloon, a clumsy
contraption twined together from ropes and rags, I remember it well.
Earlier, I had a lot and didn’t remember. Hard
to keep to the point. Hard to keep to the point.
Hope to get back. Hope to get back to the principle
of the wings. Fact remains: the cold preserved
the rose garden last night. ‘The zone is a zone, the zone is life,
and a person may either perish or survive as
he makes his way through this life. Whether he manages it or
not depends on his sense of own worth.’* A hare
almost leapt into the vestibule here at the Foundation,
mottled against the snow; in the hare’s diary it’s October, after all.
You seem to be in quite a malignant humour,
and it is possible that none of this interests you.
On the other hand, you quite often complain yourself.
I’m writing because you are dead and because I woke up
last spring in my hotel facing the street in Benidorm to that wonderful
high twittering. One ought not to constantly say sorry, one ought
not to constantly say thank you, one ought to say thank you. Lake Mälaren like lead down there. The rest is white and red. More…
Among horses
30 June 1998 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Cato Lein
‘Now it’s really damned difficult to know whether these poems will be close to the reader, or strange,’ Tua Forsström said a couple of days before the publication last autumn of her collection Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (‘After spending a night among horses’).
Her previous collection, Parkerna (‘The parks’), published five years ago, found its readers and swept the board of literary prizes. The new poems, too, come close to the reader; the book’s Finland-Swedish publisher has sold out and the prize-boards have been swept again, including the Nordic Council Prize for Literature.
Writing the new collection took five years, as was the case with Parkerna. Tua Forsström writes slowly: nine collections in a quarter of a century. Her first collection, En dikt om kärlek och annat (‘A poem about love and other things’), appeared in 1972. More…
A poet of the fresh air
30 June 1987 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews
Sirkka Turkka. Photo: Pertti Nisonen
Sirkka Turkka is interviewed by Markku Huotari
Snowflakes are already covering the forest, and an angry wind is blowing off Lake Lohjanjärvi. It is autumn, and in the courtyard, at the roots of a stunted rowan, is a lounge chair, its paint already peeling.
‘I’ve left the chair there because my mother used to sit in it and knit.’
I start at Sirkka Turkka’s comment. In my mind is her last-but-one volume of poetry, Vaikka on kesä (‘Although it’s summer’, 1983); its poems sound a contemporary lament, occasioned by her mother’s death.
‘There’s nothing made-up in my poetry,’ says Sirkka Turkka.
Landscape, nature, the circular path of life – all of these have left their wounds in Sirkka Turkka’s poetry. But as she writes in Tule takaisin, pikku Sheba (‘Come back, little Sheba’, 1986), winner of the Finlandia Prize 1987, ‘from the wounds life grows’. More…
Extending the Bounds of Reality
31 March 1976 | Archives online, Authors
Christer Kihlman. Photo: Magnus Weckström
In any account of Finnish literature written in Swedish during the 60s, the name of Christer Kihlman stands out clearly. For long influential in his native Finland, it is only more recently that he has become well known in Sweden.
Apart from his verse, all his works have been translated into Finnish and several of his novels have also appeared in other Scandinavian languages. Of late he has been writing for the theatre. Christer Kihlman has received important Finnish and Swedish literary prizes and in 1975 was appointed a professor of the arts. Kihlman was born in 1930.
Christer Kihlman’s writing bears many traces of the left-wing radicalism that has characterized much of the literature of the 60s and 70s. He has contributed actively to the discussion of cultural and political issues, both in his novels and in the articles he has written on a wide variety of problems. He has endeavoured to eliminate the conflict that normally arises between an author’s political activity and his creative work, though this has been by no means a painless process. “Our field of activity is society as a whole. The written word, our principal tool, gives us only a limited opportunity to leave a tangible mark on social development, but we should not allow this to deter us from trying: the results of our efforts, after all, can never be determined in advance. Our aim is, and should be, the same as everyone else’s should be: an ever-broadening, everdeveloping democracy. To be an author is, as I experience it, to live one’s life as a social being in a social context, in the full consciousness of what this social context implies and what it demands in terms of intellectual awareness and moral preparedness.” More…
Home and solitude
30 September 1984 | Archives online, Authors
Eeva Kilpi. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro
By Eeva Kilpi’s own admission, the genre of the short story seems best suited for her themes. But she has also gained recognition as a novelist and poet, both inside and outside Finland. Among the many Finnish authors who have read and traveled widely, Kilpi assumes a somewhat unique position: the wider contemporary world with its interlocking problems can be sensed as the broader context of her writing; yet the foreground actions of her stories, with a few notable exceptions, take place in Finland, often in the backwoods of the Eastern border districts. Likewise, her main characters are unmistakably Finnish, from teenagers spouting Helsinki slang to old folks lapsing into a colorful Karelian dialect.
Eeva Kilpi was born in 1928 in Hiitola on the Karelian isthmus. Her latest novel, Elämän evakkona (‘Life’s refugees’, 1983) demonstrates again the author’s capacity for casting into the foreground gripping individual life stories while opening up in the background the epic journey of Finnish Karelians, uprooted in the last war from home and village and sent wandering around Finland in search of new livelihoods, homes and roots. Kilpi’s story is poignantly Finnish and reflects the journey she herself at the age of eleven started with her family from Hiitola. But it fits into the larger context of our own time, which produces growing numbers of evacuees and refugees with stories largely untold. More…
The report
30 September 1984 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Kesä ja keski-ikäinen nainen (‘Summer and the middle-aged woman’) Introduction by Margareta N. Deschner
Dear Colleague,
First of all, I want to thank you and your wife for the pleasant evening I and my wife had in your summer villa in August. Briitta (since we are old acquaintances: with two i’s and two t’s, remember?) especially wants me to mention that she will never forget the half moon climbing the hill behind your sauna, surprising us with its speed. The next time we looked it was half-way up the sky! Without doubt, your fine tequila had something to do with the matter, one shouldn’t forget that. Even so, it was quite a show, just like the time a bunch of us guys had gone skiing and you bragged that you had arranged for the barn to catch fire. I hope that you and your wife – I mean Alli – will be able to visit us next winter and taste a superb Mallorca red wine called Comas, which we brought home. It is by far the best red I have ever tasted and indecently cheap to boot. I hope you will come soon. The wine won’t keep indefinitely, as you well know. We’ll save it for you. So thanks again.
Out of my hands
10 November 2011 | Articles, Non-fiction
Who's been eating my porridge? From ‘English Fairy Tales’ by Flora Annie Steel (1918), illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The Project Gutenberg e-Book
In the classic fairy-tale, on finding their belongings were not as they had left them, the three bears exclaimed: ‘Who’s been eating my porridge?’ When our technology correspondent Teemu Manninen found someone else’s underlinings in the electronic text he was reading, he wondered: ‘Who’s been tampering with my ebook?’ Which led him to ponder how similar books and their virtual counterparts really are – and could his ebook really be called ‘his’?
A few months ago I was reading an ebook on my iPad when I came across an underlined passage. For a moment I felt strangely disturbed. My initial thought was that I had not made the underlining, and therefore this had to be a glitch, an error in the computer program that was the book, which meant that there was something wrong with my book. What made this thought disturbing was the realisation that the kinds of harm that can befall digital books – and the measures that one can take to prevent them – are no longer ‘in my hands’: that the book is no longer physical, but virtual. More…
Journeys to nearby places
18 April 2013 | Authors, Interviews
Workmates: Virpi Talvitie and Katri Tapola. Photo: Teos
Short texts and vibrant illustrations merge composing capricious situations in Katri Tapola and Virpi Talvitie’s adult picture book. Mahdollisuuksien rajoissa. Matkakirja (‘In the realm of impossibility. Travel book’, Teos, 2013) turns the ordinary pleasantly askew
It is a different kind of travel book: instead of faraway places, it explores things nearby, where our gaze and our thoughts don’t usually pause – the little things at the bottom of a pocket, in a dark closet full of outdoor gear, quiet moments in noontime traffic.
The travellers are perhaps Nobody in Particular, or somebody called Random. We keep on travelling, but we don’t get any farther than the corner store. What’s small becomes large, what’s supposedly large shrinks. Our self-image is off-kilter, there’s a hole in our CV, and the world is pleasantly tilted.
A-L E: The book is in the form of short prose – a page, half a page. What was it like to write these compact texts?
K T: I love having constraints; the short form is very rewarding. Focus and compactness make your whole life clear. And this has been good for me to learn because I’m naturally prone to long, extended forms of expression. More…
Get out of my Face(book)!
23 June 2010 | Columns, Non-fiction, Tales of a journalist
Much is made of the importance of Facebook and the other social media. But what are they, asks journalist and self-confessed internet cynic Jyrki Lehtola in his regular ‘Journalist’s Tales’ column; and, more important, is there any point to them?
This journal and this text appear only on the internet, and you can comment upon the elegant style of this text, as well as its fascinating content, at the bottom of the piece. If worst comes to worst, the apathy it arouses can even give rise to debate.
Does all that mean that I’m a part of… the social media? And if so, could someone tell me what social media mean and how I can get out of here? More…