Search results for "2011/04/2010/05/song-without-words"
Like it, or else
23 January 2014 | Non-fiction, Tales of a journalist
Illustration: Joonas Väänänen
Hitting the ‘like’ button is not only boring but also working its way from Facebook deeper into society, says Jyrki Lehtola. Surely there must be some other way of solving the world’s problems?
At the end of the autumn the theatre critic of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper panned Sofi Oksanen’s stage adaptation of her novel Kun kyyhkyset katosivat (‘When the doves disappeared’, 2013).
That’s life. Artists struggle with their projects, sometimes for years. Then a critic takes a glance at the result and crushes it in a matter of hours.
Then there’s a huff about unfairness, the use of power and all the things artists blow off steam about when they feel that their creations have been treated unfairly. The debate is held between injured authors and sometimes the critic, but generally few others participate, and just as well. More…
Plain sailing
31 March 1996 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
An extract from Alastalon salissa (‘In Alastalo’s parlour’, 1933). Introduction by Kai Laitinen
A letter from the translator:
Dear Editors,
Reluctantly (I really have tried) I have been driven to conclude that Alastalon salissa is untranslatable, except perhaps by a fanatical Volter Kilpi enthusiast who is prepared to devote a lifetime to it. To mention only one of the difficulties, there is no English equivalent to the style of the Finnish ‘proverbs’ (real or imaginary) with which the main character Alastalo’s thoughts are so thickly larded. Add to this the richness and, yes, eccentricity, of Kilpi’s vocabulary, and the unfamiliarity of much of the subject-matter, centred as it is on the interests of a sea going community that hardly exists any longer, even on the islands, and you have a text that is full of pitfalls for the translator. As for the humour, I’m sorry to say that it depends so much on the idiom and presentation that it doesn’t come over at all. If I did any more, I’m afraid it would just have to be a laborious paraphrase, and I don’t think I’m capable of making it effective, or even readable, in English.
Apart from that, although I’m very grateful for your explanations of the many unfamiliar words and phrases, I’m very unwilling to commit myself to the translation of any of them on the basis of a mere ‘gloss’ (technical word): I need to know the associations, and possible sound-echoes, of every one of them before I can be sure of getting it right. And getting it right affects the rhythm of every sentence: it’s not just a matter of filling in blanks with ‘equivalents’ provided by someone else.
I’ve no objection to your using my version of the opening pages. If you decide to follow it with some kind of comment, do borrow, if you need to, from my remarks above, giving the translator’s point of view. Sorry to have failed you so badly.
Yours, David Barrett More…
The bodyguard
31 March 1991 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
An extract from Henkivartija (‘The bodyguard’), winner of the Runeberg Prize, 1991. Introduction by Suvi Ahola
When spring comes Ossi’s sister tries to reach him on the telephone. She is worried; it sounds as if Ossi is partying constantly. Mostly she is told that Ossi is asleep, Ossi has just gone out, Ossi does not feel like talking. Unknown women call her a whore, tell her to fuck off. In the background she can hear muffled roars, shouts of laughter, music, shouting, the clink of glasses.
Ossi’s sister is irritated to have been left to arrange the practical affairs relating to her father’s death. There will not be much to be had from the smallholding, squeezed between two roads, and the fields have long since been sold. All the same, you might have thought that Ossi would be interested in this possible source of funds; it isn’t as if he has a job, at least not a permanent one. More…
And the winner is…?
27 March 2012 | This 'n' that
Playing your cards right: Todd Zuniga talks to Riikka Pulkkinen on 20 March in Helsinki. Photo: courtesy/T. Zuniga
The writer Johanna Sinisalo’s words lash the stage like the tail of Pessi the troll in her best-known novel. The novelist Riikka Pulkkinen bursts into deconstructive dance. The singer Anni Mattila translates the poet Teemu Manninen’s explosive poetic frolics into rhythmic dictations and the Finlandia Prize-winning author Rosa Liksom’s conductor’s glittering moustaches see the audience off on a train journey to Moscow.
On a March evening, a Literary Death Match has begun in the Korjaamo Culture Factory in Helsinki’s old tramsheds. The creation of the American author and journalist Todd Zuniga, the Literary Death Match combines an evening of readings with stand-up comedy as well as the judging familiar from reality TV shows.
‘It all started with me eating sushi with two of my friends and talking about some of the readings we’d been to. We all loved literature and loved to listen to writers reading from their own work. But the audience was always the same circle of people. We wanted to expand it beyond literary circles,’ Zuniga explains. More…
On presence and absence
30 December 2004 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Irmeli Jung
The calm, precisely defined atmosphere of Sanna Karlström’s poems is interlined by the fragility and seriousness of the ‘I’, suggesting a certain sorrow. The clarity and purity of Finnish modernism’s tradition shows up in her controlled style; one may detect glimpses of the classically modernist images of Paavo Haavikko (1931–2008) in her poems. Karlström’s collection, Taivaan mittakaava (‘The scale of the sky’, Otava, 2004) does consider ‘the scale of the sky’, but her gaze is more centred on what is close at hand, the small. The ‘scale’ she works on is that of windows and rooms, which reflect both the self and ‘the other’. More…
The legacy of a self-made man
29 October 2010 | This 'n' that
On camelback: in the exotic part of Veijo Rönkkönen’s concrete cosmos there are animals and palm trees, side by side with the living plants of the northerly latitudes. - Photo, left: Veijo Rönkkönen; photo, right: Veli Granö
Some of our readers may remember a story entitled ‘Self-made man’, published in Books from Finland in April 2009: Veijo Rönkkönen, who lived his entire life on a small, isolated farm in eastern Finland, built a garden inhabited by five hundred human and animal figures made of concrete.
Rönkkönen worked in a nearby pulp factory for 41 years. He lived in a small house in the middle of the garden, surrounded by his sculptures, which he had started making in the early 1960s.
Photographer and writer Veli Granö introduced the life and works of this self-made artist in his book Veijo Rönkkösen todellinen elämä / The real life of Veijo Rönkkönen (text in Finnish and English, Maahenki, 2007).
Contemporary folk art in Finland goes by the acronym ITE, from the words itse tehty elämä, ‘self-made life’. The French called it art brut; the English-language term is ‘outsider art’. The artists are ‘unschooled visionaries’ who make their art independent on any societal requirements or definitions.
The sculpture park became the most notable tourist attraction in Parikkala, visited by as many as 26,000 visitors every summer. Rönkkönen, however, refused to turn it into business. He never talked to visitors voluntarily either, but the park was open and free to all. He was awarded a state prize for artistic achievement, the Finland Prize, worth €30,000, in 2007, which he accepted.
Veijo Rönkkönen died last spring at the age of 66. The estate – Rönkkönen’s siblings, living elsewhere in Finland – offered the unique park to the county of Parikkala, which declined the offer because it’s upkeep was estimated to be too expensive.
In October businessman Reino Uusitalo bought the place for €140,000, with the intention of founding an administrative committee for the upkeep of the park. Rönkkönen’s extraordinary ‘total work of art’, will thus stay open – at least until nature – lichen, moss, creepers – claims what it considers it own. 500 sculptures: a self-made man’s open-air art
Time difference
30 December 2003 | Fiction, Prose
A short story from Kalliisti ostetut päivät (Dearly bought days, Otava, 2003)
She arrived at the airport too early, as always. The reason was not that connections from the small town in which she lived were slow and difficult, or even that she liked the airport’s atmosphere of swift departures and long waits. No; she wanted to spend time at the airport to see that the planes took off and landed without anything awful happening. She wanted to see that a departing plane’s acceleration was rapid, that the plane left the asphalt of the runway elegantly, that its tail did not hit the ground as it rose, break, the plane explode, catch fire, but that, like an arrow fired into the air, following its flight path, it curved upward and, sunlight glancing off the metal of the body, disappeared from view. She wanted to see that the landing gear of a descending plane was out, as it should be, that a tyre did not burst as it hit the ground, at that there was no ice or oil on the runway; that the brakes worked, and that the fire engines at the edge of the airfield stayed in place as a sign that all was well. More…
Animal farm
30 December 2005 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Miriam Ramirez
Kaarina Valoaalto is a writer who obviously adores rolling around in language – in the same way as one of the dogs in her new novel, Nooakan parkki (‘Noahannah’s barque’, Tammi, 2005):
‘Mother dog gets up off her fat tail and trundles over to the slope in the yard for a bit of a roll around. There’s rough gravelly ice on the bumpy road surface. She rapidly wiggles her rotund body from side to side, thrusting her legs against the kerb to generate enough power, and a contented half-purr half-growl issues from her chest, enough to melt the ice in the most irascible mistress’s heart. This is undoubtedly the sort of thing a mother feels about her baby’s first gurglings.’ More…
Music of the heart
30 December 2003 | Authors
Photo: Irmeli Jung
The short stories of Raija Siekkinen (1953–2004) – she very rarely wrote long fiction – are almost always about women. Something has happened, or is about to happen, vague, unspecified. The change is all-engulfing, and often to do with men. Memories are summoned, or stirred, in the effort to face the future.
‘Throughout the day, memories re-entered her mind, densely, as if in a high fever, drifting from one image to the next, aimless, directionless,’ runs the narrative in the title story from her collection Kuinka rakkaus syntyy (‘How love begins’ 1991), ‘and somewhere behind the clear realisation that moments are long, endlessly expanding, and life is short.’ Resolution, if any is offered, often lies beyond the end of the story, beyond the printed page, in the mind and heart of the reader. More…
To sleep, to die
30 September 2004 | Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Unelmakuolema (‘Dreamdeath’, Teos, 2004)
Dreamdeath
Who would not like to cheat the grim reaper? Ways are known, of course, both scientific and non-scientific, but all of them are uncertain and temporary. Except for the simplest: to get there first oneself.
The refinement of this idea was Dreamdeath’s business idea. ‘Dreamdeath – because you deserve it!’ went Dreamdeath’s slogan.
The Dreamdeath home offered those who wished it the means to the most pleasant, even luxurious realisation of an autonomic death in an atmosphere of moral approval, against a suitable fee. At Dreamdeath the client himself decided when and in what conditions he would leave his mortal clay. More…
Johan Bargum’s analyses
30 June 1982 | Archives online, Authors
Johan Bargum. Photo: Irmeli Jung
Few Finland-Swedish authors can make a living by their writing. A readership of little more than 300,000 cannot support a large number of writers, and only the most successful books sell more than a thousand copies. Writers have thus no choice but to seek other markets, notably in Sweden or among the Finnish-speaking population.
Both alternatives present problems, but popular writers like Henrik Tikkanen and Christer Kihlman are tending more and more to publish simultaneously in all three markets. Since the publication of his novel Den privata detektiven (‘The private detective’) in 1980, which even became the Book of the Month in Sweden, Johan Bargum has joined this group. Enthusiastic reviewers have since speculated on the possibility of translations into other European languages.
Born in 1943, Bargum grew up in Helsinki and, like so many other writers with their roots in the Finnish capital, he comes from an upper-class family. Politically he belongs to the left, while artistically he has benefited from family tradition: both his grandmother, Margit von Willebrand-Hollmerus, and his mother, Viveca Hollmerus, are well-known authors. Writing as a family tradition is actually quite a common phenomenon in Finland-Swedish literature.
A social conscience
Thanks to his skill as a dramatist as well as a prose-writer, Johan Bargum has been able to live by his pen for the past ten years. Early in the 1970s he had a success with Som snort (‘A cinch’), Bygga bastu (‘Building a sauna’) and Virke och verkan (‘Material and the making’), all specially written for Lilla Teatern, the Swedish-language theatre in Helsinki. In this trilogy he was concerned with the difficulties encountered by small businessman in their struggle against large monopolies. His text is characterized by a strong ironic humour. More…
Poems
31 March 1983 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Claes Andersson. Photo: Johan Bargum.
Claes Andersson (born 1937) became, during the 1960s, one of the few authors to free themselves from the modernist tradition so firmly established in Finland-Swedish writing in the 1920s to create poetry of a more distinctly personal kind. Claes Andersson’s poems are coloured by his training as a psychiatrist; he uses technical language in which scientific terms are exploited as an expressive device. His work also sometimes contains black humour and an ironical element calculated to shock the reader; they reflect the contrast between the dream of beauty and love and the grim reality of evil . To date, Andersson has published eleven collections of poems and a considerable number of plays for the stage, cabaret and radio. He has also written three novels, the latest of which – entitled En människa som börjar likna sin själ (‘The person who began to resemble his soul’) – is to appear in the autumn of 1983. For an introduction to Claes Andersson’s work, see Thomas Warburton’s article in Books from Finland 3/1979. Claes Andersson’s poems have recently appeared in translation in Poetry East, Seneca Review, Scandinavian Review and Grand Street.
Loneliness
My love, the moments I spend
in your cunt I forget my
migraine aching joints drinking problem grand mal paralysis
hallucinations pain between the shoulderblades short-
ness of breath hiccoughs dandruff dry skin vertigo bedwetting
impaired hearing chafed lips pustules liver
spots leg sores bleeding gums flatulence
sciatica crying fits thoughts of suicide swol-
len ankles pathological thirst Angst baldness double
vision facial twinges difficulty concentrating
cross eyes burning in the urethra running ears ring
ing ears cramps throat pain itching allergies
strange subcutaneous lumps cold hands nail-
biting hoarseness obesity jealousy vomiting
constipation sleeplessness noctural crying fits
failing memory pus in each nasal sinus and gout.