Search results for "2010/05/song-without-words"
Mortal song
30 December 2005 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Irmeli Jung
Names or cultural references suffice to convey meaning to the reader: classics, movie stars, brand names, myths and Joe Bloggs coexist in them. In this sense, Jarkko Laine’s poems are ‘cultural’ and testify to a belief in a shared cultural reality and in the existence of a shared civilisation. Furthermore, they assert, in an Eliotian spirit, that the canon of ‘great books’ and great works is still alive. In the manner of a learned humanist, Laine is not afraid to appear pedantic but is willing to emphasise his points with italics or footnotes whenever necessary. More…
Finlandia Junior Prize 2010
26 November 2010 | In the news
The Finlandia Junior Prize has gone to author Siri Kolu and illustrator Tuuli Juusela for the novel Me Rosvolat (‘Me and the Robbersons’, Otava); they will share the award of €30,000 (see the Prize jury assessments of the shortlist here). The winner was chosen by actor and writer Hannu-Pekka Björkman.
Awarding the prize on 25 November he said: ‘It caught my attention that in none of the six shortlisted children’s books are there any so-called nuclear families, at least not for long. The main characters constantly live and grow without something – the lack of parents or the attention of an adult is a serious matter to a child. However, in these books there is always someone who cares, not perhaps a stereotypical mom or dad, but an adult nevertheless.’ In Björkman’s opinion Me Rosvolat, with its rich language and a whiff of anarchy, presents the reader with moments of realisation and wonderment.
Snowbirds
2 November 2011 | Extracts, Non-fiction
The short winter days of the northerly latitudes are made brighter by snow cover, which almost doubles the amount of available light. Reflection from the snow is an aid for photographers working outdoors in winter conditions. A new book, entitled Linnut lumen valossa (‘Birds in the light of snow’), presents the best shots by four professionals, Arto Juvonen, Tomi Muukkonen, Jari Peltomäki and Markus Varesvuo, who specialise in patiently stalking the feathered survivors in the cold
The photographs and texts are from the book Linnut lumen valossa (‘Birds in the light of snow’, edited by Arno Rautavaara. Design and layout by Jukka Aalto/Armadillo Graphics. Tammi, 2011)
Snowy owl. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2010
The last melody
30 September 1995 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Kadotettu puutarha (‘The lost garden’, WSOY, 1995). Introduction by Riina Katajavuori
Their sojourn at the villa extended into the autumn of 1944; the schools did not go back as usual on the first of September. Repair of the university buildings progressed rapidly; the work had begun immediately after the bombing. The Doctor went to town from time to time, but nothing bound the family to it, and he returned to his desk in the attic room and to his solitary walks by the lake. His heart troubled him from time to time. It did not like these walks, did not like exertion; but he had succeeded in concealing the matter from Elisabet. After one particular attack, he had secretly seen a doctor in town, and now, instead of camphor tablets, he always had those little buttons in his pocket, the breast pocket of his waistcoat. He swallowed one from time to time on these expeditions, a pain in his wrists and his eyes staring dimly at a clump of ferns that seemed to have become hazy, or a tree-top that seemed to be falling toward him. He did not wish Elisabet to know. Not this, in Elisabet’s world, not this, in air that was suffused with grief for their dead son Leo, with well controlled and beautifully expressed emotion, with concern for the remaining boy, who was there, on the frontier, with the burdensome and universal tragedy that filled the air as light filled it in daytime. More…
Briefcase man
31 December 2000 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Aura (Otava, 2000). Introduction by Mervi Kantokorpi
He was born in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland the year the world caught fire. He learned to read the year of the revolution, and spoke two languages as his mother tongue border – language and enemy language, as he often used to say. He was proud of only one of his languages; the other, he loved secretly. He spoke one loudly, the other softly, almost in a whisper.
At night, on the telephone, he spoke far away – you could see it, even in the dark, from his expression, his half-closed eyes sometimes breaking into song. It was so beautiful and soft that I wept under the blankets and hated myself because of the effect that language had on me.
Stinking tinker Karelian trickster Russian drinker, little Russky’s dancing in a leather skirt, skirt tears and oh! little Russky’s hurt.
Count to ten, he said. But count in Finnish. Or Swedish, that’ll baffle them. And if they call you a Swedish bastard, it’s not so bad. I’ve taught you the numbers in Arabic and Spanish, too, but I don’t think you’ll be able to remember them yet. More…
The strike
13 December 1980 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
An extract from Täällä Pohjantähden alla (‘Here beneath the North Star’), chapter 3, volume II. Introduction by Juhani Niemi
With banners held aloft, the procession of strikers moved towards the Manor. It was known that the strikebreakers had arrived early and that the district constable was with them. Just before reaching the field the marchers struck up a song, and they went on singing after they had halted at the edge of the field. The men at work in the field went on with their tasks, casting occasional furtive glances at the strikers. Nearest to the road stood the Baron and the constable. Uolevi Yllö’s head was bandaged: someone had attacked him with a bicycle chain as he left the field at dusk the evening before. Arvo Töyry was in the field too, the landowners having agreed that those who had got their own harrowing and sowing done should lend the others a hand. Not all the men in the field were known to the strikers. The son of the district doctor was there they noticed, and the sons of several of the village gentry, as well as the men from the smallholdings. More…
It takes a life to say
31 December 2007 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems, published in You go the words (Action Books, Scandinavian Series, Indiana, 2007). Introduction by Trygve Söderling
|
We go and search it is not words * You go the * And spread out To only * The song * One time I have a name * a longing * A morning’s * Words are words But word’s image Alas stay not * Fly out, my day
fly, fly day to meet
fly, fly, you the wretched's
their, everyone's
in all times
peace and day
on ground's floor
floor ground
o you
in man's name
* Suneveningspring * Dog bolts happy * And to not speak more it takes a life to say but – as the everyday moment O no beauty But your light – a smile what and to know * And allthesame The white day * |
Vi går och söker det är ej ord * Du går de * Och bredd ut Att endast * Sången * En gång Jag har ett namn * en längtan * En morgons * Ord är ord Men ords bild Ack stanna ej * Flyg ut, min dag
flyg, flyg dag till möte
flyg, flyg, du de armas
deras, allas
i alla tider
lugn och dag
på marks golv
golv mark
o du
i människans namn
* Solaftonvår * Hund skenar glad * Och att ej tala mer det tar ett liv att säga men – som vardagens stund O ingen skönhet Men ditt ljus – ett leende vad och att veta * Och alltjämt Den vita dag * |
Translated by Fredrik Hertzberg
Age before beauty?
5 April 2012 | This 'n' that
Buranovskiye Babushki: Udmurt originality. Photo: Wikipedia/Larisa Gorbunowa, 2011
We can’t be the only ones to have a secret fondness for the Eurovision Song Contest– however cheesy the offerings, however rigged or outright political the voting, however bored or drunken the presenters (or maybe that’s only in the UK). Camp, innocent, calculating, so ugly it’s beautiful (or vice versa). In fact, we suspect that’s why we like it so much.
In the 57th Contest, to be held in Azerbaijan in May, Russia is to be represented by the song ‘Party for everybody’ by a group of eight old ladies, the Buranovskiye Babushki, from the republic of Udmurtia, deep in the heartland of the Russian Federation, some 1400 kilometres from Moscow. More…
Why translate?
28 January 2015 | Essays, Non-fiction
Down by the sea: Herbert Lomas in Aldeburgh. – Photo: Soila Lehtonen
‘People do not read translations to encourage minor literatures but to rediscover themselves in new imaginative adventures‚’ says the poet and translator Herbert Lomas in this essay on translation (first published in Books from Finland 1/1982). ‘Translation is a thankless activity,’ he concludes – and yet ‘you have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.’ And how do Finnish and English differ from each other, actually?
Any writer’s likely to feel – unless he’s a star, a celebrity, a very popular and different beast – that the writer is a necessary evil in the publisher’s world, but not very necessary. How much more, then, the translator from a ‘small’ country’s language.
Why do it? The pay’s absurd, you need the time for your own writing, it’s very hard to please people, and translation is, after all, the complacent argument goes, impossible. I’m convinced by all these arguments, and really I can’t afford to go on; but I don’t regret what I’ve done and, looking back, I can find two reasons for translating Finnish writing, one personal, the other cultural. More…
Compelled to write
30 June 2000 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Marica Rosengård
Kjell Westö (born 1961) is one of a generation of younger, urban Swedish-language writers who are at home in both Swedish and Finnish. An extract from his novel Vådan av att vara Skrake (‘The perils of being Skrake’, Söderströms, 2000), which traces the fortunes of the Helsinki family of Skrake from the 1910s to the present day. Here, Westö is interviewed by his alter ego, the discontented poet Anders Hed, editor of the cultural journal Bokassa (now sadly extinct)
Anders Hed: So, to get us going: do you write any poetry at all nowadays?
Kjell Westö: No. The last poem I wrote comes at the end of the title story in Fallet Bruus (‘The Bruus case’). And that book came out in 1992.
It’s a poem about human face and the search for ‘the Thou’, isn’t it?
Exactly. More…
Success after success
9 March 2012 | This 'n' that
The women of Purge: Elena Leeve and Tea Ista in Sofi Oksanen's Puhdistus at the Finnish National Theatre, directed by Mika Myllyaho. Photo: Leena Klemelä, 2007
Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, an unparalleled Finnish literary sensation, is running in a production by Arcola Theatre in London, from 22 February to 24 March.
First premiered at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki in 2007, Puhdistus, to give it its Finnish title, was subsequently reworked by Oksanen (born 1977) into a novel – her third.
Puhdistus retells the story of her play about two Estonian women, moving through the past in flashbacks between 1939 and 1992. Aliide has experienced the horrors of the Stalin era and the deportation of Estonians to Siberia, but has to cope with the guilt of opportunism and even manslaughter. One night in 1992 she finds a young woman in the courtyard of her house; Zara has just escaped from the claws of members of the Russian mafia who held her as a sex slave. (Maya Jaggi reviewed the novel in London’s Guardian newspaper.) More…
Death of a poet
31 December 1989 | Archives online, Articles
Over the last two decades, contemporary Finnish opera has not only become popular at home but has emerged as a significant force on the international music scene. Aulis Sallinen’s The Horseman, The Red Line and The King Goes Forth to France, and Joonas Kokkonen’s The Last Temptations all had their premieres in the 1970s and 1980s and have already earned respected places in the repertory of the Finnish National Opera and the Savonlinna Opera Festival, where performances are sold out months in advance.
The visit by the National Opera to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1983 attracted widespread attention from press and public alike, and its productions of The Red Line and The Last Temptations were for the most part enthusiastically received. Finnish opera earned further international prestige from the joint commissioning of Sallinen’s The King by the Royal Covent Garden Theatre in London and the Savonlinna Festival, and from later performances by companies in Germany and the United States. More…
Still alive
31 March 2000 | Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Maa ilman vettä (‘A world without water’, Tammi, 1999)
The window opened on to a sunny street. Nevertheless, there was a pungent, sickbed smell in the room. There were blue roses on a white background on the wallpaper and, on the long wall, three landscape watercolours of identical size: a sea-shore with cliffs, a mountain stream, mountaintops. The room was equipped with white furniture and a massive wooden table. The television had been lifted on to a stool so that it could be seen from the bed.
The bed had been shifted to the centre of the room with its head against the rose-wall, as in a hospital. Between white sheets, supported by a large pillow, Sofia Elena lay awake in a half-sitting position. More…