Agony uncle?: Jean Sibelius during his travels in Germany, in 1889

Jean Sibelius on how to keep your mojo

The main music critic of Päivälehti (‘The daily newspaper’) in the 1890s was the celebrated composer Oskar Merikanto, writes Vesa Sirén in Päivälehti’s successor, Helsingin Sanomat. Often, but not always, Merikanto praised first performances of works by the yet more stellar Jean Sibelius.

June 1895, however, saw the publication of Merikanto’s I sommarkväll (‘Waltz for a summer’s night’). ‘Tomorrow’s Päivälehti should have a review by Sibelius!’ wrote an excited Merikanto.

The short review duly appeared the following day, attributed not directly to Sibelius but to ‘a certain prominent composer’. In it, Sibelius hints that its uses may be more than strictly musical:

This waltz is extraordinarily pleasant and clever in both form and content. The introduction immediately reveals the composer’s intentions. This waltz contains an extraordinary passion. It is like our sky, which seems so grey, but which reflects that grey light that is born in black eyes when one is with one’s beloved. Everyone should buy it, for it is the shortest route to acceptance by one’s beloved and to one’s true desires.

Anyone for a waltz?

Helvi Hämäläinen. Photo: Literary Archives of the Finnish Literature Society.

This week, an excerpt from Helvi Hämäläinen’s gorgeously sensuous novel Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable tragedy’,1941)

Right at the top of the list of untranslated Finnish masterpieces, for me, is Helvi Hämäläinen’s monumental Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä.

Written in the fateful summer of 1939, as the world waited for war, this story of love among the Helsinki intelligentsia is at the same time both a roman a clef – it caused a sensation on publication as the real people behind the fictional characters were recognised – and a vivid picture of its age. The falling cadences of its luxuriantly proliferating phrases offer a voluptuously aesthetic poetry of the senses as they slowly tell the story of love lost and then, gradually, regained. And the book answers the question, what was it like to be alive then?, with incomparable vividness. In this extract, the novelty of apartment living in the 1930s, the colours and smells, the new social habits, are all brought to life with extraordinary intensity.

We also republish a selection of poems published much later in Hämäläinen’s life, many of them impassioned elegies for the lives lost in the Second World War, giving voice to the sheer weight of sorrow, of grief for those who were lost.

If you’d like to read more, Soila Lehtonen’s evocative essay on Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä accompanies another excerpt; while a glimpse of its sequel, Kadotettu puutarha, (‘The lost garden’, 1995), follows the story onward to an elegiac description of the parts of Karelia that were ceded to the Soviet Union in the Second World War.

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 396 articles and book excerpts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

F.E. Sillanpää in his home receives the news that he has been awarded with the Nobel prize in literature in 1939.

This week, a short story from Finland’s one and only Nobel laureate, F.E. Sillanpää

Time has largely forgotten Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888-1964), but in the interwar years of the last century this complex writer – biologist, realist, mystic and proponent of ‘life-worship’ – was one of the most prominent in Finland. His work, intriguingly archaic and modern at the same time, is well represented by Järvi (‘The lake’, 1915), the short story we publish here.

Finland’s only Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, perhaps not coincidentally, in the fateful year of 1939, and when Sillanpää travelled to Stockholm to receive his award, the Soviet Union had already attacked Finland. After the award ceremony, Sillanpää stayed in Sweden to raise funds for his beleaguered country.

Read the short story

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 393 articles and book extracts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Runar Schildt

It’s a period that seems sometimes to have disappeared from view – Helsinki in the final years of Russian rule – but Runar Schildt’s short story brings it vividly to life. The characters – Sahlberg the baker and his mortal enemy, Johansson from the customs service; the restaurant-owner Durdin and Elsa, daughter of a commissionaire at the Senate, around whom the story revolves – spend a lazy but sexually charged summer Sunday in their villas just outside Helsinki, their hidden emotions all too familiar to those of a later age…

As the story’s translator, the formidably erudite George C. Schoolfield, remarks in his introduction, Runar Schildt (1888-1925) has often been hailed as a Finland-Swedish classic. There’s a quality of aesthetic decadence in his work that makes him very much a product of his time. There’s nothing, in Raketen, with its solid, belle epoque atmosphere, to foreshadow the change that was so soon to engulf Finland, with the granting of independence in 1917 and the bitter civil war that followed. Schildt was in Helsinki during the months when it was ruled by the Red side in the civil war; afterwards, he served as a clerk in the terrible detention camp for Red prisoners of war on Suomenlinna island. It was a new world, in which all the old certainties were questioned. Timid, conservative and something of a dandy (his friend Hans Ruin said he always looked as if he had stepped out of a bandbox), Schildt may well have felt out of tune with the times. By 1920 he had ceased to write the prose at which he excelled, and had turned to drama, with which he had much less success.

Schildt shot himself, in 1925, in the courtyard of the old university clinic in Helsinki. He was not yet 40.

Read the short story

Kullervo’s curse. Painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1899)

Finland’s national epic adapted for the stage by Finland’s national writer: best known as the author of the first significant novel in Finnish, Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870), Aleksis Kivi (1834-1972) also turned one of the Kalevala’s grimmest stories, that of Kullervo – a tale of incest, revenge and death– into a five-act tragedy.

The translation is by one of Books from Finland’s most long-standing collaborators, David Barrett (1914-1998), a true linguistic genius with a speciality in Georgian as well as Finnish in addition to classical Greek; as well as his work with texts in Finnish and Georgian, he made extensive translations of Aristophanes for Penguin Classics. Barrett felt, as he argues here in his introduction, ‘that Kullervo, if suitably translated, might succeed where Seven Brothers had failed, in bringing Kivi’s genius to the notice of the English-speaking world’.

Was he right? It is up to you, dear readers, to judge.

For a very different, demythologized, view of the Kullervo story, we also publish a manuscript by the modernist poet Paavo Haavikko (1931-2008) from his television adaptation Rauta-aika (‘Age of iron’, 1982).

The Kalevala is in development as a film by the Finnish entertainment company Rovio, of Angry Birds game, and the Finnish-born video game company Supercell. It remains to be seen how the Kalevala take to the big screen.

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues, with a total of 372 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Martti Joenpolvi.
Photo: Janne Aaltonen.

We first published this short story by Martti Joenpolvi, an acknowledged master of the genre, in 1989; it comes from the collection Pronssikausi (‘The bronze age’, 1988), which was nominated for the Finlandia Prize.

The subject – the story is about a man taking his mistress on a secret visit to his summer-house – provides plenty of opportunity for sly humour. But it’s a more unsettling read in 2015 than we’re guessing it was twenty-five years ago – not so much for the plot itself, which makes ironic fun of the idea of woman-as-chattel, as for the characterisation, which subtly places the woman exactly where the story does.

Enjoy!

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues, with a total of 375 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Action man: Väinämöinen fights the Hag of the North. Painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, 1896 (Turku Art Museum). Wikipedia

The Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, is the inspiration for a grand-scale film trilogy project. It involves employees of several entertainment media companies working on it in their free time. The Finnish entertainment media company Rovio that became famous for its Angry Birds game, and the Finnish-born video game company Supercell have sponsored – with other 13 media companies – the trailer: see IronDanger.

Financing is still in the planning stages, but it is hoped that the first part will be ready in 2017 when Finland celebrates its centenary year.

According to Rovio’s Chief Marketing Officer, Peter Vesterbacka, the film will be ‘adequately’ faithful to the original work. In an interview published on 19 November on the website of the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE, he says that even if the landscape will look very Finnish, the intention is to ’tell the story to make it clear that it’s not about a bunch of old pensioners. These are young, heroic, epic heroes‘.

So, vaka vanha Väinämöinen – ‘Väinämöinen, old and steadfast’ – , the main character of the epic, the great shaman and the bard, the tragic hero, is to be kicked off the cast, because he’s, well, elderly?

Funny that the bearded wizard Gandalf of Lord of the Rings was not dismissed from the film due to his age, even though he does indeed looks as old as the hills of Gondor. (By the way, Väinämöinen has been ‘identified as a source for Gandalf’…)

It remains to be seen how the younger Kalevala crowd will deal with all that action. Who, for example, is going to sink the impetuous Joukahainen into a bog by singing, then?

Kaarlo Sarkia (1902–1945). Photo: Ivar Helander (The Literary Archives/Finnish Literature Society)

Joie de vivre, dream, death, love: Kaarlo Sarkia’s rhymed poetry made him one of the Finnish classics, even if he only had time to publish four collections. Like several unfortunate poets of the first half of the 20th century – among them Edith Södergran, Saima Harmaja, Katri Vala, Uuno Kailas – he died of tuberculosis. Poems from Unen kaivo (‘The well of dreams’, WSOY, 1936)

From the point of view of both form and content, Kaarlo Sarkia’s poem ‘Älä elämää pelkää’ (‘Don’t be afraid of life’, 1936) is among the best examples of Finnish poetry. It crystallises several typical themes and features of his work: a declamatory absoluteness and existential courage, a faith in beauty, and the presence of death.

Don’t be afraid of life,
don’t shut out its beauty.
Invite it to sit by your fire,
or should your hearth expire,
to meet it outside is your duty.
– – –

Älä elämää pelkää,
älä sen kauneutta kiellä.
Suo sen tupaasi tulla
tai jos liettä ei sulla,
sitä vastaan käy tiellä,
älä käännä sille selkää.
– – –

Sarkia (1902–1945) is a Romantic. For him ‘beauty grows from under weights of pain’: the awareness of death gives rise to an ecstatic love for life and the flowers of a garden glow most intensely just before the autumn frosts. Art is sacred, and the longing for the unattainable produces a mysterious happiness: ‘the unattainable remains / the only thing that is your own’.

In Sarkia’s poetry the emotions spring from the dream and from death. The titles of his four collections of four names reflect the core of his work: Kahlittu (‘Chained’ ,1929) , Velka elämälle (‘Debt to life’, 1931), Unen kaivo (‘The well of dreams’, 1936) and Kohtalon vaaka (‘The scales of fate’, 1943). Powerful contrasts dominate the cosmos of the poems: darkness and brightness, ecstasy and pain, hope and despair. Recurring motifs are the road, the window and subjects drawn from nature, especially flowers. The ‘I’ of the poems is fully conscious of its fate, which is often associated with the experience of strangeness and alienation. One of the reasons for this – observed by later research – was Sarkia’s homosexuality. In ‘Kuvastimesta’ (‘In the mirror’) the speaker is a stranger even to himself, and the poem can be read as a portrayal of the divided ego: Strange and truly wondrous / in the mirror you look at me. / All I really know is / that you I cannot be.

In the spirit of the Romantic tradition, love is fateful and usually hapless. The lovers have been forced to part for reasons that are not disclosed, and tragedy intertwines with memories of happiness, creating a ‘a beauteous / sorrow’. Some of these poems, like ‘Erottua’ (‘Separated’) have lived on as classics of Finnish love poetry. The poem ‘Paennut’ (‘The one who fled’) refers to the riddle that separates the lovers: Did I love you? / That I do not know. / In my soul I trembled / when you turned to go.

Kaarlo Sarkia has remained in the history of Finnish poetry as a composer of words: his poems are masterful in their euphony and rhythm. In their metrical structure they not only employ end-rhymes but also chains of assonances and rhythmic repetitions that cross the verse lines and create the impression of musical echoes and patterns. It is not surprising that many of Sarkia’s poems have been set to music – by, for example, the composers Erik Bergman and Kaj Chydenius – and neither is the fact that they have remained almost untranslated. When modernism conquered Finnish poetry in the 1950s, metrical verse became unfashionable; on one occasion Sarkia’s formal virtuosity became the target of parody by the eminent modernist poet Eeva-Liisa Manner.

Some of Sarkia’s poems imitate the rhythm of the actions that they portray. For example, ‘Rukkilaulu’ (‘Spinning song’) uses the rhythm of the spinner’s foot kicking the wheel to make it rotate and carry the yarn. The poem presents two images at once: on the one hand an idyllic childhood memory of the poet’s mother treading the wheel, and on the other a view of human destiny as a spinning wheel, of life at the mercy of a kind of wheel of fortune.

A skilled translator, Sarkia focused in particular on Finnish versions of French and Italian poetry. Among the poets he translated were François Villon, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Gabriele D’Annunzio; his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau Ivre’ is considered brilliant. The Swedish Romantic E.J. Stagnelius and the French poet Alfred de Musset were among his kindred spirits.

Although to the modern reader Sarkia’s language sounds old-fashioned and his burning idealism may seem unfamiliar, many of his poems are still fresh and thought-provoking. A good example is ‘Älä elämää pelkää’, whose ethos (or aesthetic pathos) of living in the moment and fearlessly confronting life is ageless.
– – –
Do not ever say:
this is mine alone.
Drink from life’s cup
and once again give its pain up.
If you never beg to own,
the world’s riches are yours today.
Be bold, stake all on one card:
ahead you will always see death’s gate unbarred.

Älä koskaan sano:
‘Tämä on iäti minun.’
Elon maljasta juovu,
taas siitä, jos tarpeen, kivutta luovu.
On maailman rikkaus sinun,
kun mitään et omakses ano.
Elä pelotta varassa yhden kortin:
näet aina avoinna kuoleman portin.

Translated by David McDuff

Minna at 50. The Finnish flag is flown on her birthday: 19 March has been named the Day of Equality. Canth also flies on the tail of one of the aircrafts of the Nordic airline Norwegian: the fleet carries portraits of ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ of four Nordic countries (the other Finn is the 19th-century poet J.L. Runeberg). Original photo: Viktor Barsokevich / Kuopio Museum of Cultural History

Herkkä, hellä, hehkuvainen – Minna Canth
[Sensitive, gentle, radiant – Minna Canth]
Helsinki: Otava, 2014. 429 pp., ill.
ISBN 978-951-1-23656-6
€40.20, hardback

There are two sure methods of preserving the freshness of the works of a classical author in a reading culture that is increasingly losing its vigour.

The first is to give a high profile to new interpretations of them, either in the form of scholarly lectures or of artistic re-workings, such as dramatisations, librettos or film scripts. Another unbeatable way to keep them alive as a subject of discussion is an updated biography, through which the author is seen with new eyes.

Minna Canth (1844–1897) is now celebrating her 170th anniversary, and she is fortunate in both respects. Having begun her literary career in the late nineteenth century, she still continues to be Finland’s most significant female writer.

Her influence on the role of women in society and, in particular, her promotion of girls’ education, is the cornerstone of Finland’s social equality. In the twenty-first century Canth’s plays are still receiving new interpretations, and they have also been made into operas and musicals. (Read her short story, ‘The nursemaid’, here.)

One play often performed is Anna Liisa (1895), the tragedy of a young girl who kills her newly born child. Its Dostoevskian, guilt-focused ending has remained open to interpretation to this very day. Another long-time favourite is Työmiehen vaimo (‘The workman’s wife’, 1885), a didactic play that portrays the radical urban working class and the struggle for women’s rights. The play brought about a change in the law when in 1899 women in Finland ceased to be regarded as their husbands’ property. Recent performances of it have included a version by Helsinki’s Avoimet Ovet (‘Open Doors’) company in the spring of 2014.

The vitality of her fiction lies in its modern characterisation, the centre of which is usually a girl or woman on the threshold of a new era. The principal themes of her work are class distinction, poverty that drives people to madness, repressed sexuality and double standards.

Engaged: Minna and Ferdinand in 1865. Original photo: Kuopio Museum of Cultural History

One topic of discussion in the anniversary year is Minna Maijala’s (born 1975) new biography Herkkä, hellä, hehkuvainen – Minna Canth (‘Sensitive, gentle, radiant – Minna Canth’). It is critical of the earlier biographies of Canth, especially the book by Lucina Hagman, who in the years 1901–1906 wrote the earliest extensive work on Canth’s life. It canonised an image of her that has lasted to this day, of a writer as a female victim who fought her way to the centre of literary culture.

In Hagman’s biography Minna Canth’s husband, and the father of her seven children, is demonised as a tyrant. Their marriage is portrayed as a young woman’s prison, in much the same way as Canth herself portrayed the fate of the women in her fiction, which early commentators viewed as being autobiographical.

The image of Minna Canth as a wife and mother fighting her way up from her subordinate status fitted the requirements of Lucina Hagman in her role as pioneer of the Finnish women’s movement better than it did the Minna Canth – equal, supported by men – who is documented in Maija Maijala’s book. This new study shows that in fact Ferdinand Canth provided continuous support for his wife’s work for women’s emancipation and published her earliest articles on the subject in the newspapers he edited in Kuopio, a town in north-eastern Finland, where the family lived. He also quickly made his wife his working partner in the newspaper of the Young Finnish Party [the liberal Fennomane movement].

Earlier portrayals of Minna Canth have seen her as a woman released from family hell when her husband died suddenly, after fourteen years of marriage. Not until then did the 35 year-old single mother of seven children become a controversial author who was also a successful cloth merchant, when she began to take care of her parents’ family firm.

A view from the steeple: Minna was given the key to the tower of the Kuopio Cathedral as she liked to excercise by going up and down the stairs. Her home is at bottom left. Original photo: Kuopio Museum of Cultural History

The new biography portrays Canth’s loss of her husband as a major crisis in her life. When she became a widow she was expecting her seventh child, and she became seriously ill in childbed – almost to the point of psychosis. Minna Maijala provides some interesting commentary on the attitude taken by earlier biographers to Canth’s mental collapse. According to them, she overcame her anxiety by sheer will power because she was an Amazon with fighting spirit. Maijala, on the other hand, highlights the author’s sensitive nature, and points out that she had difficulty in achieving mental balance throughout her adult life. She suffered from hypochondria, nervousness, and a variety of psychosomatic disorders.

Maijala’s book is the story of the writer behind the martyr legend, and it gives an excellent account of Minna Canth’s religious thought. She had adopted a scientific world view, and was known as a critical social thinker and polemicist. At the same time, however, she was also a professing Christian for whom the New Testament doctrine of love was the most important value. While for a naturalistic author it was a rare combination, it is also aptly illustrates the borderland between old and new that Minna Canth inhabited.

Translated by David McDuff

‘Emmi, hey, get up, don’t you hear the bell, the lady wants you! Emmi! Bless the girl, will nothing wake her? Emmi, Emmi!’

At last, Silja got her to show some signs of life. Emmi sat up, mumbled something, and rubbed her eyes. She still felt dreadfully sleepy.

‘What time is it?’

‘Getting on for five.’

Five? She had had three hours in bed. It had been half-past one before she finished the washing-up: there had been visitors that evening, as usual, and for two nights before that she had had to stay up because of the child; the lady had gone off to a wedding, and baby Lilli had refused to content herself with her sugar-dummy. Was it any wonder that Emmi wanted to sleep?

She was only thirteen. And in the mornings her legs always ached so badly that for a while it was very hard to stand up. Silja, who slept in the same bed, said it was because she was growing. She ought to have them bled, in Silja’s opinion, but Emmi was afraid it might hurt. They were thin enough already, without having blood taken from them. They never ached while she was asleep, but the moment she woke up they started again. If she managed to get to sleep again, the aching stopped at once.

Now, as she sat up in bed, they were painful all over, from her knees right down to her heels. She felt the weight of her head pulling her down towards the bed again: try as she might, she could not lift it. Would she ever, in this life, be granted a single morning when she could sleep happily as long as she needed?

Emmi rubbed her legs. Her head had fallen forward, her chin touching her chest; her eyes would not stay open. In next to no time, she was asleep again.

The bell rang a second time. Silja dug her in the ribs with her elbow.

‘For pity’s sake, why can’t the little hussy do as she’s told? Up with you!’

She gave Emmi another shove with her sharp elbow, and it hurt so much that the girl cried out.

‘How many more times do you have to be chivvied, before you’ll get up?’

Emmi clambered out of bed. She felt dizzy, and almost fell.

‘Splash some cold water over your eyes, it’ll help to clear your head’, was Silja’s advice.

But Emmi had no time to do this, for the bell was ringing yet again. She quickly pulled on her petticoat and skirt, smoothed back her hair with both hands, and hurried in.

‘I have rung three times’, said the lady.

Emmi said nothing, but simply lifted Lilli from the lady’s side and held her in her arms.

‘Change her wet things and then put her in the cradle. She won’t go to sleep again anyway, if she comes back beside me.’

The lady turned on to her other side and closed her eyes. The cradle was in the adjoining room, into which Emmi now carried the baby. She changed its napkin, and then began to rock the cradle and sing. Every now and then some thought or other would come to her. Not a very big or complicated thought, but it was enough to interrupt her singing.

‘Sh, sh, sh. Ah, ah, ah. Sleep little one sleep. Rock-a-bye-baby, on the tree top. When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. Oh, lord, how sleepy I feel. Bye, baby bunting, daddy’s gone a-hunting. Silja’s still in bed, asleep, lucky devil. Daddy’s gone a-hunting. Sh, sh, ah, ah…’

Lilli dozed off. Emmi lay down on the floor beside the cradle, put one arm under her head, and was soon fast asleep. Unknown to her, Lilli had woken again almost at once, and was now rubbing her nose and gazing round her in puzzlement, as there seemed to be no-one with her. The child tried to sit up, but could not manage it; instead, she turned over on her side and got her head over the edge of the cradle. Seeing Emmi, she chuckled delightedly and reached out to touch her. Over went the cradle, and out tumbled Lilli, striking her forehead on the base of the cradle as she fell.

A piercing yell had everyone awake in seconds.

‘Jesus bless us!’

Emmi, finding the baby on the floor beside her, went as white as a sheet. She snatched her up, cuddled her, showed her the fire, and rocked her in her arms, all the time horrified by the thought that the lady must have heard. And in her panic she did not think of looking to see whether the child had been injured, or was just crying from shock.

The lady opened the door. Emmi felt faint, the whole world went black before her eyes.

‘What’s happened to her?’

‘Nothing.’

Emmi did not know what answer she was giving. Instinctively she stammered out words, any words that might save her.

‘Why is she crying like that, then? There must be some reason.’

Emmi made desperate attempts to quieten the baby.

‘Give her to me’, said the lady. ‘Oh, my poor baby, my darling one, what’s the matter? Good heavens, there’s a great bruise on her forehead.’

She looked at Emmi, who just stood there helplessly.

‘How did that bruise get there? Tell me, I want to know. Are you dumb?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘You dropped her, that’s obvious. Out of the cradle, was it?’

Emmi said nothing, and stared down at the floor.

‘You see, you can’t deny it any longer. What a useless, careless creature you are. First you drop the baby and then you lie to me. I’m sorry I ever took you on. Well, I’m telling you now, you’re not staying on here next year. Get yourself another job, if anyone will have you. I’ve had enough of you, I’d rather do without a nursemaid altogether… Sh, sh, my darling, mamma’s own sweet one, yes… Mamma will get you a better nurse next year, don’t cry, don’t cry.’

Lilli stopped crying, as she found the nipple and began to suck; and after a little while she was smiling contentedly, though teardrops still sparkled in her eyes.

‘There, there, my precious, are you giving Mamma a lovely smile, then? My own dear child, how sweet she is. What a nasty horrid bruise on her forehead!’

Lilli did not cry again that day; she was just as happy as before, perhaps even a little happier: smiled at Emmi, put her finger into Emmi’s mouth and pulled at her hair. Emmi let the child’s delicate little hand wipe her own wet cheeks, down which teardrops as big as cranberries kept trickling all day long. And when she thought that in six weeks’ time she would no longer be able to hold this soft, delightful child in her arms, or even to see her, except perhaps for an occasional glimpse through the window as she passed down the street, a rejected outcast – when she had these thoughts, or rather these feelings, the tears flowed so fast that they became a stream, and made a little puddle on the table.

‘Oh dear, just look at that’, she said to Lilli, who at once began to mop it up with the palm of her hand.

Later that morning the lady had visitors. Fru Vinter the doctor’s wife and Fru Siven, whose husband was the headmaster: very grand and elegant, both of them, though not nearly so grand as our own lady, said Silja, and Emmi was inclined to agree.

When Silja took in the coffee, the lady sent her with a message to Emmi, to bring Lilli in to be shown to the visitors. Emmi dressed her in her prettiest bonnet, and a brand-new hand-embroidered bib. The child looked so beautiful in these that Emmi had to call Silja to have a look, before she carried her in.

How those ladies cooed with admiration, the moment they appeared at the door!

‘O, så söt!’ ¹

And eagerly they took turns to hold Lilli in their arms, kissing her and squeezing her, and laughing delightedly.

‘Så söt, så söt!’

Emmi stood in the background, smiling quietly. She did not really know the meaning of all this ‘så söt, så söt’, but evidently it was high praise indeed.

But suddenly they became very serious. The lady was telling the visitors about something, Emmi did not know what, as it was all in Swedish. But she guessed what it was when she saw the horror on their faces.

‘Herre gud, herre gud, nej, men tänk, stackars barn.’²

Three pairs of eyes, full of pity and concern, turned simultaneously to look at the bruise on Lilli’s forehead, and then, with shocked disapproval, at Emmi.

‘Ett sadant stycke!’³

Emmi stared at the carpet on the floor, and wished that something would fall from the ceiling on to her head, crushing her to pieces and at the same time burying her deep beneath the earth. Surely she was the wickedest, wretchedest person who had ever lived. She did not dare to look up, but she knew, and felt in every toe and fingertip, that their eyes were still upon her. Those grand, elegant ladies, who never, never, did anything wrong themselves. How could they, when they were so wise and clever, and so far above other, ordinary people?

‘You may take Lilli away,’ she heard her employer say.

Emmi’s arms had suddenly become so limp that she feared she might drop the child if she picked her up.

‘Did you hear?’

‘Där ser ni nu, hurudan hon är.’⁴

Emmi lurched forward and somehow managed the few steps to where the lady was sitting. The desire to get out of sight and back into the nursery gave her just sufficient strength to go through with her task. Or was it just out of long habit that her arms now obeyed her and fulfilled their function as before?

She lowered Lilli into the cradle and sat down on a stool close by to show her a toy. But Lilli had raised both legs in the air and was holding on to them with her hands. This game she found so amusing that she laughed out loud. Emmi would have laughed too, but for the distress that gripped her throat and made laughter impossible.

Sitting there, she thought with surprise that she had not, that morning, remembered the trick she had so often used in the past to combat sleepiness: pricking and scraping herself with a needle. And just because of that, all this had happened; this great, irremediable calamity, that had now ruined her life.

Late in the evening, when everyone else had gone to bed, Emmi went out into the yard. All was grey in the fading light, but overhead the stars were shining. She sat down on the bottom step to think about her present and future situation. Not that thinking about it made it any clearer: it remained as dim and grey as the evening itself.

Casting her own cares to one side for the moment, she looked up into the blue-grey sky, where heaven’s candles were burning so brightly. What happy souls, she wondered, were up there with the stars? And of the people now living, who would go there? Would there be any nursemaids there? she asked herself doubtfully. But the gentry – they would be there, of course, all of them. Obviously, since they were so immeasurably better, even here. She wondered, too, who had to light those candles each evening, the angels or the people? Or did the people all turn into angels when they got there? And what about little children who died young? Who nursed them and looked after them? But perhaps they didn’t need looking after any longer, once they were in heaven.

Silja opened the door and hustled her inside.

‘What the devil are you sitting out here for, in the cold?’

As she undressed, Emmi turned to Silja and said: ‘Why is it we’re so wicked, we servant-girls?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll tell you, then: it’s because we have to stay awake so much of the time. We have time to commit more sins, half as many again as other folk. Look, the gentry can sleep on in the morning, till nine or ten o’clock; there’s not so much time left for them to do bad things in.’

Well, perhaps that was it. If she had been able to sleep a little longer that morning, Lilli would have not fallen out of her cradle, all because of her.

The following Sunday was the third Hiring Day. Emmi was given her employment­ book and sent down to the church.

Outside the church there were lots of people: would-be employers and would-be employees. They stood about in large groups; all of them seemed to have friends and acquaintances everywhere, and to be in league with each other.

Emmi felt forlorn and lonely. Who would want to employ a frail little creature like herself?

She stood by the churchyard wall with her employment-book, and waited. Ladies and gentlemen walked past her, to and fro, but none of them ever glanced at her.

There was a group of youths sitting by the church steps.

‘Come over here, girl,’ one of them called. The others laughed and whispered together.

‘Come on, come on, what are you waiting for? Come and sit here with us.’

Emmi blushed and moved further off. Just then a lady and gentleman came up to where she was. Well, not exactly gentlefolk, perhaps: the lady was wearing a headscarf and the gentleman’s clothes were very shabby.

‘What about this one?’ said the gentleman, pointing at Emmi with his stick. ‘At least she doesn’t look as if she’ll demand much in the way of wages. Eh?’

‘Whatever you like to pay me’, said Emmi quietly. ‘I’d be content with that.’

A shy hope sprang up within her.

‘What good would she be? She could hardly manage to carry a tubful of water.’

‘Oh, I could.’

‘And could you do the washing?’

‘I’ve done that too.’

‘Let’s have her, she seems quiet and clean,’ said the gentleman.

But the lady still had her doubts.

‘She looks sickly to me. See how thin she is.’

Emmi thought of her legs, but dared not mention them. If she did, they would certainly turn her down.

‘Are you sickly?’ enquired the gentleman, glancing through Emmi’s employment ­book, which he had snatched from her hand.

‘No’, Emmi whispered.

She made up her mind that, however much her legs ached, she would never complain.

Putting the book in his pocket, the gentleman gave her two marks as hiring-money, and the matter was settled.

‘Come to the Karvonen farm on All Saints’ Day, in the evening, and ask for Mr and Mrs Hartonen’, said the lady. ‘On All Saints’ Day, remember.’

Emmi went home.

‘That’s a bad place you’re going to’, said Silja, who knew the Hartonens: living conditions mean and squalid, and the lady such a shrew that no servant ever stayed a full year. And the food, she had heard, strictly rationed and pretty small rations at that.

Emmi flushed, but quickly recovered and replied: ‘Well, those good jobs are hard to come by, there aren’t enough of them for everybody to have one. Some people have to be content with the worse ones, and thank their good fortune that they’re not out on the street.’

She took Lilli into her arms and pressed her face against the child’s warm body. Lilli seized hold of her hair with both hands and chuckled ‘Ta, ta, ta.’

Translated by David Barrett

This translation was first published in Books from Finland 2/1994

Kirjailijoiden Kalevala

The Kalevala is the Finnish national epic, compiled from oral folk poetry by Elias Lönnrot. It has provided a source of inspiration to Finnish culture since 1839. Kirjailijoiden Kalevala continues a project entitled ‘The artists’ Kalevala’, started in 2009. To start with, four scholars examine, from different viewpoints, the influence of folk poetry and the Kalevala on literature. Some twenty Finnish-language authors then approach the epic with original thoughts and literary means. The result may take the form of reminiscing, of a short story, poem or cartoon. In some texts the Kalevala is present only indirectly, in others some character of the epic is placed in the focus – Väinämöinen, Kullervo, Lemminkäinen or Aino. Kirjailijoiden Kalevala offers a multifaceted collection of viewpoints; aptly, the editors, in their foreword refer to the epic as a literary sampo, the mysterious, mythical object of the Kalevala that generates wealth and riches.

Aale Tynni (1913–1997). Photo: WSOY

Finnish poetic modernism, which with its freedom of rhythm came to dominate the literary mainstream of the 1950s, posed a particular challenge to the poets of the classical metrical and romantic poetic tradition. Aale Tynni (1913–1997) is not a poet of any one school or form, but rhythm is the deepest foundation of her poems, whether expressed in metre, free verse or the speech rhythms that characterise some of her poems of the 1950s and 60s, as well as those of her final years.

An Ingrian Finn, Tynni left Ingermanland near Petersburg for Finland as a refugee after the First World War, in 1919. The war and the period of uncertainty that followed it are present in her poems as an allegory, sometimes appearing as a dance of death or a carnival. At other times they emerge in the myth of Phaethon, who with his sun chariot is in danger of throwing Mother Earth off her axis, or as a game of chess in which God and the angel Gabriel play with the planets and moons as pieces. The poet makes use of mythic and cosmic references to widen her scope and to portray Man in the stages of history and the present age.

Aale Tynni was a poet of love; she portrays love in terms of natural imagery, sensations, emotions and spiritual experience. Her poems of the 1940s are about the poet’s vocation, patriotism, the family, maternal love, and the relationship between man and woman. She found effective poetic images for motherhood and even for the rarely depicted physical experiences of childbirth and breast-feeding.

In some of the poems the sense of confusion, expressed in metaphors, may be connected with the cultural pressures of the time and the change in society’s values. Tynni is also a poet of conviction. Her work evinces a belief that individual courage and protest matter, and that the views expressed by poems are important. In ‘Ballad of the importance of poetry’ the playing of an ordinary reed pipe on a market square reveals the secrets of the powerful. Myths and the visual arts can be used to reflect on modernism, as in the free verse poem ‘The fox climbs a wooded mountain’, a surrealistic study in perspectives.

Tynni’s work as a translator of world poetry, from the medieval European folksong through Shakespeare and the Edda to the French Modernists, helped her to maintain her own poetic profile. As a translator her goal was always to preserve contact with the rhythm of the original by imitating it and avoiding paraphrase.

The collection Ylitse vuoren lasisen (‘Over the glass mountain’, 1949) surprised many readers with its skilfully shifting rhythms and free use of ballad and story material. Tynni inflects the ballad, with its sorrow at the fortunes, passions and death of human beings, in many different ways. The poems are tinged with a humour that the contrast between verse and refrain often renders dark or absurd. Instead of writing conventional ballads, Tynni creates her own kind of poem in which only a thin thread, a title, a refrain or other pattern refers to the ballad form. In ‘Ballad of the miller’s son’ the well-known fairytale of Puss in Boots with its happy ending is gradually discharged in the tragic world of the ballad.

To mark the centenary of the birth of Aale Tynni an expanded edition of her Kootut runot (‘Collected poems 1938–1987’) and a biography entitled Aale Tynni. Hymyily, kyynel, laulu (‘Aale Tynni. A smile, a tear, a song’) were published in 2013 (WSOY). The elegant, frank biography is the work of Tynni’s daughter, Riitta Seppälä, and her grandson, Mikko-Olavi Seppälä, who have done much to revive the general reputation of a poet who was hitherto mainly known for her poem ‘Kaarisilta’ (‘The arch bridge’), an all-time favourite of radio poetry request programmes. The book discusses the life of the classic poet and academician in the context of the time and its conflicts.

Aale Tynni’s poems are marked by a rolling perspective of densely alternating sounds. The poetic ‘I’ contains an addressee, especially in the poems of yearning that Tynni produced in her old age, which are written to her dead husband, her soulmate. The collections Vihreys (’Verdancy’, 1979) and Vuodenajat (‘The seasons’, 1987) contain poems where the intuitive landscape of memories suggest the unmistakable presence of another person, as in ‘I don’t know if you’re there’.

The dialogue-like quality of the poems also has a basis in biography: Aale Tynni and P. Mustapää (the pseudonym of Martti Haavio [1899–1973] – they were married in 1960, each for the second time) were inspired, from the late 1940s onwards, by each other’s work. They wrote about their love for each other in poems that represent a secret lyrical conversation.

Translated by David McDuff

Portrait of an artist: Joel Lehtonen, sketched by Pietro Annigoni in Florence, 1931. Picture: literary archives of the Finnish Literature Society

Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (Princess Margaret, 1930–2002), Joel, Master of Putkinotko (1881–1934), and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (born 1921) met in the same museum case in Florerence in October, when an exhibition of the work of the artist Pietro Annigoni (1910–1988) was opened.

The morganatic juxtaposition of the English royals and the Finnish writer is based on Annigoni’s reputation as one of the best-known portraitists of the 20th century, in whom the royal courts of England and Denmark, among others, placed their trust.

Joel Lehtonen, author of the novel Putkinotko (‘Hogweed Hollow’, the name also refers to a place) and classic of Finnish literature, is included on account of the fact that, in celebrating his fiftieth birthday in Florence in 1931, he partied throughout the night with students from the Accademia di Belle Arte ‘to the rhythm of an excellent Chianti’.

Also present was the young Piero Annigoni, who, in a cellar restaurant, took out his working tools. A red-chalk portrait of Lehtonen was the result, along with a series of dancing girls drawn in Indian ink. ‘It was five in the morning before I realised,’ Lehtonen wrote back to Finland.

Lehtonen had already spent a year in Italy in 1908 translating Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which, to his annoyance, was censored by the publisher. He published a volume of poetic prose based on his Italian experiences, Myrtti ja alppiruusu (‘The myrtle and the rhododendron’), of which one section is dedicated to Florence, that ‘glittering, passionate city of the spirit’.

Young Florentine artists were used to world-class artists. When the poet Dylan Thomas visited the city in the 1940s, the poet and author Luigi Berti – an acquaintance of Lehtonen’s – complained that ‘poets travelling in Italy no longer give themselves the airs of “milords” – behave like Lord Byron.’ Lehtonen, however, was able to party stylishly and thoroughly in a way that appears to have pleased the sons of Florence.

As he set off on the return journey to Finland, Lehtonen wrote to his wife: ‘An embarrassing day is over’, ‘I am in fine spirits! Heat the sauna.’ He brought with him Annigoni’s works, which are now in the archive of the Finnish Literature Society.

The curator of the Florence exhibition found more sketches of Lehtonen in the Museo Annigoni: in the current show, they are placed alongside sketches of Princess Margaret and Prince Philip.

The opening of the exhibition, in the premises of the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, was attended by 300 of the city’s elite. It was as if the nobility of the portraits of the Uffizi art gallery had stepped out of their frames to honour Annigoni, whose paintings continued the traditions of the renaissance. The Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica gave prominent coverage to the event. The young politician and Florence mayor Matteo Renzi said in his speech that in northern Italy Annigoni’s significance to art is parallel to that of Olivetti to industry.

Annigoni’s early portraits of Lehtonen are shown in a section entitled Opere rare o inedited. The 240-page catalogue also includes brief description of Lehtonen as a writer and an account of that night in Florence in 1931.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Kirjeet

In his poetry, plays and masterly novel Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870), Aleksis Kivi (1834–72) laid the foundations of Finnish fiction. Kivi died an early death, impoverished and mentally ill. In this critical edition seventy of his letters and three letters received by him are presented with notes and an introduction. Most of the book consists of background articles and supplementary items. Professor Jyrki Nummi provides an interesting analysis of biographies of Kivi. The other authors discuss, for example the literature Kivi drew on in his own works: he had read world classics in Swedish, but in Finnish there was not yet much to read apart from the folk poetry. Other topics of discussion are Kivi’s skill in using Swedish – the language of the educated class in Finland – and what his letters reveal about his network of acquaintances. The letters are grouped in chronological order, with introductions by Professor Emeritus Juhani Niemi. Most of the letters are comparatively short, sent to relatives and friends. They reflect Kivi’s attitude towards his own work, as well as his worries about his financial situation and declining health.
Translated by David McDuff

Helsinki: view it from different angles! Photo: Leena Lahti

Helsinki is relatively young city, Finnish literature even younger.

Flushed with a huge wave of migration at the beginning of the 20th century, the capital and its people went through the dramatic times of gaining independence and the Civil War (1917–18). The capital – since 1812 – and the life experiences of its inhabitants have been plentifully featured in Finnish fiction.

In his doctoral dissertation, Lieven Ameel has concentrated on a period of Finnish literary history. His Moved by the City: Experiences of Helsinki in Finnish Prose Fiction 1889–1941 (2013, Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki) examines more than sixty novels, collections of short stories and individual short stories portraying the city: how do the characters experience this urban public space? (Popular – crime fiction, for example – and children’s literature are excluded.)

‘This period constitutes what is in effect the first half century of literary representations of Helsinki in Finnish-written literature, starting with the very first texts thematizing the Finnish capital (Juhani Aho’s Helsinkiin (‘To Helsinki’, 1889) [–] and ending with the disruption caused by the Second World War.’ Ameel argues ‘that around the turn of the twentieth century, literary Helsinki was approached from a surprisingly rich variety of generic and thematic perspectives which were in close dialogue with international contemporary traditions and age-old images of the city, and defined by events typical of Helsinki’s own history.’ Among the authors he discusses are Arvid Järnefelt, Maila Talvio, Mika Waltari, Joel Lehtonen and Helvi Hämäläinen.

In our book Helsinki: a literary companion, compiled and edited to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the capital in 2000, Aho’s novel Helsinkiin (‘To Helsinki’, 1889) was the first text written in Finnish that we featured.

Ameel concludes: ‘In prose texts that appear during the first decades of the twentieth century, Helsinki is experienced as a space in motion. The Finnish capital is depicted as an expanding and transforming city [–]. ‘The socio-political conditions particular to Helsinki in the early decades of the twentieth century infuse the literature of the Finnish capital with an unmistakable and distinct atmosphere, setting it apart from other contemporary literary cities. Other elements, too, can be singled out as distinct for literary Helsinki in the early twentieth century. Apart from a few exceptions to confirm the rule, most literary characters in Helsinki novels in Finnish in the period 1889–1919 are outsiders to the capital [–].

Ameel notes that in the 1920s and 130s the ‘urban experience is increasingly aestheticized and internalized. [–] New city districts assume the role of central environments in the city novels and prose stories during these decades, and the importance of the city centre gradually diminishes.’

Helsinki: a literary companion includes Helsinki literature written in other languages (Swedish, Russian, French and English) by both native and foreign writers as well as non-fiction and poetry from the 1820s to the 1990s. In the literary samples from the second half of the 21st century the city expands further: suburban experiences of the writers and the characters become part of the Helsinki story, ever changing.

….You are no more, there’s stone, iron, steel
there’s a new city of brick, glass and cement on your grave, old Rööperi
There’s a city stippled with seagulls, clouds, trails of smoke
there’s a city reflecting its face in the sea water
ever and always making its face anew.

(Arvo Turtiainen’s poem from Minä paljasjalkainen, ‘I was born here‘, 1962; translated by Herbert Lomas, published in Helsinki: a literary companion; The Finnish Literature Society, 2000)