Search results for "herbert lomas/www.booksfromfinland.fi/2004/09/2010/10/riikka-pulkkinen-totta-true"
On the bridge
30 June 1993 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
From Saksalainen sikakoira (‘Schweinehund’, WSOY, 1992). Introduction by Tuva Korsström
From somewhere beneath the bridge – I still hadn’t managed to get across it, which may sound pathetic, or even ridiculous, unless you take into account my exceptional state of mind – or, rather, to one side, I heard a dragging, ominous grinding and rumbling. It stopped for a moment; then, after a short but clearly defined pause, there was a heavy splash. A snow-plough was emptying its load into the bay from the end of the pier. The mounds of snow sank deep into the black water; the tightly packed, sticky snow rose slowly to the surface in greyish-yellow blocks and clods; loose pieces of snow boiled and foamed in the eddies and melted before my eyes. My time was melting away, too, being junked, my remaining time… More…
Two men in a boat
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…
Nothing but light
30 December 2003 | Fiction, poetry
Prose poems from Huoneiden kirja (‘A book of rooms‘, Otava, 2003)
The ladies’ room
Behind the shining mirror twin girls are squealing, they disappeared inside the walls long ago. They had plaits, red pompons, bad moods – all of them moulded and twisted by wire coathangers from the very start. They gouged the house full of passageways, they hollowed out the paper walls with silver christening-spoons. They disappeared between the stairs on the staircase, saying: evil’s a gateway onto a void with hundreds of gateways inside. Now they’re in this room, behind this mirror. Now the sun’s rising over the firtree-tops, creeping step by step higher towards the overarching sky. Inside us there are two hundred girl-embryos, the girls shout, they’re handicrafts fashioned by themselves like us: out of pearls, blood, splinters of mirror, it’s these we were made of. If you don’t find us, you’ll not sleep a single night. Until you do you’ll wander about the house, astray with each memory, until your hands are thinner than your words, the days slenderer than your hands. More…
From the land of abundant reindeer…
17 March 2011 | This 'n' that
Rangifer tarandus, Finnish Lapland. Photo: Grand-duc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Grand-Duc)
Is Finland, a land of reindeer, ‘dense pine forests and deep snows’ also a ‘quiet literary landscape’?
Not exactly, as we at Books from Finland hope we are demonstrating. And over on the Bookslut website, Bonnie B. Lee comes to the same conclusion, after having mused about the reindeer (yes: in Helsinki you find tasty chunks of them in the freezer boxes of any foodstore) and reading three Finnish novels in English translation.
The novels Lee reviews are Purge by Sofi Oksanen (Puhdistus, 2008, translated by Lola Rogers, published last year), When I forgot by Elina Hirvonen (Että hän muistaisi saman, 2005, translated by Douglas Robinson, published in 2009) and The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna (Jäniksen vuosi, 1975, first published in an English translation by Herbert Lomas in 1995, reprinted as a Penguin edition last year).
We have just entered the Year of the Rabbit, in recognition of which Paasilinna’s book (about a man who rejects his old life and goes roaming the wildernesses with a hare as his only companion) has appeared on the tables of large bookstores in the US. ‘The Year of the Hare is only the most Finnish, and perhaps most antically Zen-ish, of a shelf-load of books that tell us to find and live by our own ideas of contentment,’ said The Wall Street Journal.
The traumatic experiences of war and Finland’s deep forests are the common feature of these novels, Bonnie B. Lee finds. She also opines that ‘melancholy pervades the Finnish psyche’, and that ‘Finland vies with Hungary for highest suicide rate in Europe‘. Oh, but this latter is no longer true: number one on a World Health Organisation suicide rates list is Lithuania, followed by Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia and Latvia – Finland is number six.
Lee is clearly intrigued by her travels in contemporary Finnish literature. ‘The search for identity, a reckoning with a troubled past, and an outsider’s view looking in,’ she comments, ‘are all the stuff of great writing, and Finland is poised to continue to produce poignant and introspective literature that we can appreciate now that English translators have begun the work.’
Poignant and introspective or occasionally funny and fantastical, this is the work we try to offer an early glimpse of, in translation, at Books from Finland. Stay with us!
Notes from underground
30 September 2003 | Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the crime novel Harjunpää ja pahan pappi (‘Harjunpää and the priest of evil’, Otava, 2003)
Killing a person wasn’t difficult. No more of a problem than killing a pigeon. It only needed a slight push – at the right time, of course, and in the right place. He if anyone had the ability to scent out the time and place, or rather perhaps they were revealed to him in a certain way; and, hey presto, the flesh did come off the bones and the veins burst open on the macadam, and vertebrae and joints rolled about like beans, and the life departed from all that filth that had turned a person into a devil of greed. Of course he knew that. He’d seen it and smelt with his own nostrils the stench of raw human flesh that gave you that sweet shudder. More…
The Cheap Contractor
30 June 1986 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
From Kauan kukkineet omenapuut (‘Long-blossoming apple trees’, 1982). Introduction by Arto Seppälä
The men who delivered the hot-water cylinder offered to do the installation as well. I asked how much it would be. They lolled about a bit, exchanged a few private looks, pretended to be thinking. Then one of them fired off a sum. It was three times the quotation I’d already had. They didn’t even look at the location. I told myself I wouldn’t even go to the end of the road with big-dealers like these.
The same evening I rang up ‘a little man’ and told him he could get started as soon as it suited him.
The cheap contractor turned up a couple of days later, driving an elderly van into the yard. I went out. He’d sat himself down in a garden chair near the white lilacs. The morning sun only partially reached there; so half his body was in shade, looking colder than the sunny half. More…
Across Europe
30 June 1990 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Mika Waltari (1908–1979) was a prolific writer, journalist and translator. In addition to historical novels, he wrote short stories, travel books, thrillers, plays, books for children, film scripts and poetry. The newly independent Finland of the 1920s, as it emerged from a traumatic period of civil war, declared that its windows were open to Europe, and Waltari’s first novel Suuri illusioni (‘The great illusion’), written in Paris when he was only 19, represents urban romanticism and the world of European capitals.The optimism and enthusiasm for modern life of the 1920s are strongly present in Waltari’s travelogue, Yksinäisen miehen juna, (‘Lonely man’s train’; 1929), an account, both ironic and engagingly naïve, of a great adventure in Europe after the post-1918 redrawing of the continent’s map. The book’s motto is a phrase from Paul Morand, a writer Waltari admired: ‘How is it possible to remain stationary when time slips like ice through our hot hands.’ This work of Waltari’s youth has never before been translated. The author travels by ship and train as far as Turkey; in the following extract, he has reached Hungary
Yksinäisen miehen juna (‘Lonely Man’s train’)
How adorable express trains are – the mighty engines, the rhythm of the rails, the sway of the carriages, the flashing-by of the milestones, the gravel embankments contracting into speeding lines. A train is the only place you can be completely at ease, free from heartache, free from longing, free from tormenting thoughts. Whenever I die, I hope it will be on a train flashing towards some unknown town at eighty miles an hour, with mountains looming on the horizon, and the points lighting up in the descending dusk…. More…
Gospel truths?
31 March 1999 | Authors, Reviews
Photo: Irmeli Jung
Lauri Otonkoski (born 1959) has the reputation of being a poet who passes attentively by and always has room for doubt.
He assumes a chatty tone, full of an irony often at his own expense, though his schooling as a music critic has given him a fine ear and the art of producing structures comparable to music.
Otonkoski has published six collections, two of them prizewinning. In 1996 he received the Nuoren taiteen Suomi-palkinto (‘The Finnish Award for Young Artists’), and in 1997 the Finnish Radio Poetry Prize, ‘Dancing Bear’. More…
Two Poems
31 March 1977 | Archives online, Authors, Fiction, poetry
Eeva-Liisa Manner, 1963. Photo: E. Lahtinen
Eeva-Liisa Manner (born 1921) has enjoyed a high reputation as a poet since the 50s. With Tämä matka (‘This journey’, Tammi 1956) she established herself as one of the leading poets of the period.
So far she has published 10 collections of poems. In addition, she has excelled as a playwright, novelist and
translator. Her three plays Uuden vuoden yö (‘New Year’s Eve ‘, Tammi 1965), Toukokuun lumi (‘Snow in May’, Tammi 1967) and Poltettu oranssi (‘A shade of burnt orange’, Tammi 1968) have acquired a permanent place in the repertory of many Finnish theatre companies. Her poetic drama Eros ja Psykhe (‘Eros and Psyche’, Tammi, 1959) has been published in German and a Swedish version of her novel Varokaa voittajat (‘Victors, beware’ Tammi 1972; Mainakes hundar, Schildt) was published in 1974. She was awarded the State Prize for Literature five times between 1952 and 1967, and has received two major prizes for her translations (the Mikael Agricola Prize in 1967 and the State Prize for Translators in 1975). Her poems reflect a deep feeling for music and a special interest in mythology. The influence of oriental philosophy is also clearly discernible. The strong intellectual content of her poetry and its disciplined technique have won her a circle of devoted readers, while her prose writings and her translations of Hermann Hesse and Oscar Parland have reached an even wider public. In a lighter vein, she has ventured into the field of detective novels. Her most recent work is one of humorous and satirical verse: the two poems below are from Kamala kissa (‘An awful cat’, Tammi 1976). While devotees of Old Possum will have no difficulty in recognizing the characters, those familiar with the present cultural scene in Finland may detect nuances never dreamed of by Eliot.
The poems have been ‘remodified’ into English by Herbert Lomas.
Jack, the Terror of the Thames
Jack was a yobbo who lived in an alley,
And his clobbering of rats could hardly be called pally.
He was one of pollution’s blackest of gems
And proud of his cognomen – the Terror of the Thames.
Big-shouldered he was, a good fifteen-pounder
And rejoiced in a furcoat that made him look rounder.
He’d an ear like an aerial, precise and pricked funny,
And only one eye, as hard as money. More…
The house in Silesia
31 December 1989 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Talo Šleesiassa (‘ The house in Silesia’, 1983). Read the interview
We set off, my brother-in-law and I, at the beginning of September. The tourist season was already over, and on the Gdansk ferry there was stacks of room for my brother-in law’s Volvo and the two of us.
We’d driven from his home on the shore of Lake Mälar to the ferry port at Nynäshamn, about fifty miles south of Stockholm. We’d driven in an atmosphere of cheerful resolution, accelerator down, but going steadily. The resoluteness was due to my brother-in-law’s decision after forty years’ absence to visit his childhood home. If it was still standing, that is – or whatever of it was.
‘Oh the house is definitely still in place there all right,’ he said: ‘I’ve got that sort of tickly feeling in my arse.’ It was a direct translation from the German – German humour of the vulgar variety centring round the bottom. More…
An evening with Mr Popotamus
31 March 2004 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
‘Hippopotamus’, a short story from Kävelymusiikkia pienille virtahevoille (‘Passacaglia for small hippopotami’, Tammi, 1958). Introduction by Tuula Hökkä
Someone came gasping up behind me at high speed, stopped, and thrust a bundle under my arm, whispering hoarsely and agitatedly: ‘Keep hold of this, hide it! They’re after me –’ And before I’d woken up to what was going on he’d disappeared round a corner.
I was holding a warm living creature, a hippopotamus. Presumably stolen from some zoo or some private person who loved hippopotami; perhaps the man was a sailor and had brought the animal from abroad.
However it was, the hippo needed a safe place. I decided to take it home; I’d had cats and dogs, hadn’t I? – and once a little marmot. I’d always longed for a giraffe. OK, a hippo was just as good. After all, I could put an ad in the paper later: ‘Found: a hippopotamus. Hippo returned on production of identification marks.’ More…
The Schoolmaster’s bicycle trip
30 June 2005 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from the collection Heta Rahko korkeassa iässä (‘Heta Rahko at a great age’, Otava, 1947). Introduction by Vesa Karonen
He was an old teacher, retired, mostly known as ‘the Schoolmaster’ in this small town. It was common knowledge that he’d always been a keen gymnast and sportsman, and after retirement he began pursuing his favourite pastimes in earnest. Evidently he revelled in moving about, like a baby on the crawl, or a feisty youth. He was a man with no personal ties, with no one to patronise or distract him.
‘You grow no wiser, even with age,’ the small-town folk kept sighing. In response to one of these groans, Porki the factory owner said what they thought was almost blasphemy:
‘When did old age ever produce any wisdom? It’s always demolished any little there was….’
And meanwhile, covertly envious, he watched the youthful-looking Schoolmaster striding along his path, lean, sinewy, stern-faced, his tuft of beard only reluctantly thinning and greying. Well, there was a person who’d realised life was motion – and believed it! But Porki and the other bigwigs in the town grew bloated and obese, huffed and puffed, and yawned. More…
Saikansalo the racing cyclist
30 June 2005 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from the collection Heta Rahko korkeassa iässä (‘Heta Rahko at a great age’, Otava, 1947). Introduction by Vesa Karonen
Saikansalo was a racing cyclist and the country’s best, unquestionably. His Achilles tendons were superlative.
So when he found no rival in his own country. the athletics bigwigs put their heads together and hinted at the idea of sending him abroad to win a further reputation somewhere in the south – France, Italy or the like. They warned him that he’d have to be in good trim because of the enervating heat in the southern climes.
‘Heat!’ Saikansalo said. ‘There’s an old saying “Heat never broke anyone’s bones”….’
‘But it melts you like lard,’ his chum kept claiming. ‘The sun climbs really high there – scorches right down on your topknot, and boils your brains….’ More…
Country matters
30 June 2001 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Peili (‘Mirror’, Tammi, 2000). Introduction by Suvi Ahola
I’m getting so old, my Master and Mistress no longer take note of when I’m on Heat. They don’t even notice when some moisture comes dripping out of my innards, as a sign of it, like they did in the good old days. Anyway, this time I really boobed, I dirtied my Mistress’s Christmas slippers with my secretions. So what could I do? – if it drips it drips. I happened to be lying on my Mistress’s feet at the time, she’d invited me there herself. ‘Spot, Spot, come and warm my feet,’ she said. Of course I went, I always have done when I’m called, it’s rather nice. Your belly gets nice and warm there, and if you’re lucky your Mistress scratches your back now and then with her knitting needle. I sleep and snore a little – it amuses my Mistress and Master. But then the warming of my belly led to this boob – a big dose of this wetness slurped onto my Mistress’s feet. It caused a sudden departure. My Mistress yelled, and my Master flung me out into the yard. I’d scarcely managed a squeak before I found myself in the snow. I shan’t forgive them, no. It’s beyond my comprehension.