I nurse a very small, perfectly formed child. It’s a girl. She smiles openly at me, even though she is so small. There is no doubt, neither about that nor anything else. The girl is the size of a nib pen, and just as exclusive. The nursing is going very well, it doesn’t hurt, and she can suckle without any problems. We are both at ease and yet awake, not introspective. The girl has intelligent eyes.

The milk keeps flowing.

Nothing runs dry.

Everything is obvious and neither of us is surprised. Just the fact that she is so small. Like a fountain pen. She is swathed in strips of bird cherry white bandages – like the ones mum had in her summer medicine cabinet – a cocoon, a chrysalis, but she’s not cramped, just secure. It smells good around us. I nurse my daughter who is perfect and the right size.

One night I give birth to puppies, a whole litter.

One night in the fourth hour, during the dog watch on a boat, I give birth to puppies and don’t think that there’s anything at all amiss here, nothing that’s gone awry. Not an iota that I wouldn’t want to acknowledge my silky smooth offspring. I am, conventionally, bursting with pride and happiness.

They’re dachshunds.

I rejoice even more over the fact that I, despite having well-manneredly and conformistly spawned this most Finland-Swedish of breeds – upper middle class, Ullanlinna, almost on the border with Eira¹, it depends how you measure it, everything depends on how you measure it – I have nonetheless also demonstrated independence and a touch of rebelliousness. My dachshunds are not wire-haired, as they should be. They are long-haired.

I, with my motherly silky softness, sit in the middle of the silken litter. Shiny eyes dark as a pond.

I do other things than have children. I’m not just a full-time mummy and pet owner. Sometimes I smuggle weapons to liberation armies. Heavy automatic weapons. That’s exciting too.

Dreams reveal things, and it is not by any means just our own shameful secrets that come out into the light of day. Last night I found out that Astrid Lindgren² had nappies much too small for her children! Too short and stuffed too hard, hard as stone, sullenly crocheted white rolls. Knots.

What a scandal, she’s a national treasure, she’s children’s best friend!

The revelation rocks the foundations of all I hold holy and true.

It’s dangerous, and I don’t dare think about the consequences for society that this knowledge would have if it leaks out: hospitals closed, prizes and awards abolished, booksellers bankrupt, empty shelves in libraries already threatened with closure, an entirely literary genre dragged through the mud.

Of course I have to safeguard children’s literature, I’m not planning on telling anyone.

Sometimes you have to bear your share of social responsibility, keep quiet.

But shame on you Astrid!

Ear against another cushion, no initials, we’ve never been here before. We have saved, slowly approached from the north. Then a sudden decision, a trip at a few days’ notice. In the Eternal City we are just visitors, but perhaps it’s big enough to be a living room for everyone.

Universal right of domicile.

Asylum granted to all who need it.

Tourists are people too, people with dreams. Dreams aren’t just banal.

There’s an island in the Tiber, it’s called Isola Tiberina. There’s a bridge that takes you there. Bridges are good. Street musicians with sleeping dogs play on the bridge.

On the island there’s a church. There’s a maternity hospital there where the city dwellers gather around like waiting wandering doves, like approaching larks ready to soar high into the sky as soon as the first cry of a newborn is heard.

We walk around the island, the stairs down to the river banks and the generously wide quay is right next to the gate to the birthing suites. There is grass. The delicate grass has started to grow at the edges that surround the quay, young people cuddle in circles of daisies, daisies which my mother-in-law calls ‘tinies’.

We also throw ourselves down. More grown up but close.

I think of my girl. I think of my mother. I think of bridges, of ties, of bird cherry white bandages.

The first night after Rome is full of song and music. I lie in my home-bound ship, swaying, rocking in my bunk. Leonard Cohen sits leaning against a tiled wall. In front of him he has an urban meadow with all kinds of flowers, roses too. I pass on the street outside, chicken-wire with clinging vines between us, I praise his plants. Leonard isn’t sociable any more, but like all gardeners he softens when the topic of his flowers comes up.

I ask him to sing something, just like that. Leonard says that he doesn’t want to sing, but he can play so I can sing.

I don’t know what he’s playing, he has so many strings on his lute, but I know that I can’t sing. I can’t even sing in the dream, I who can otherwise do everything, I who gives birth to children and puppies one after the other, I who nurse and understand physics, I can’t sing.

Leonard grows fascinated by my lack of ability, he changes into the ladies’ man he is, and now gives me all of his tender attention. He suggests that we swap, he’ll sing and I’ll play.

Take one of my songs, he says. Take two. But sing first, choose the simplest.

I sing Hi and ho, Deckhand Jansson, the morning wind’s already blowing, last night has rolled by, and Constantia is about to go.³

It goes well. It goes so well that I get into the Theatre School with it! It’s the one I squeeze in with in the scary but obligatory singing element. The jury like my death-defying pluck.

So does Leonard. I had almost forgotten that one, he says. I wrote pretty good stuff in my youth, thank you for reminding me! Let’s hear you play now.

I know all of Leonard’s songs, so I do so willingly. This one has, like all the others, three chords. I play Frog went a-courtin’, and he did ride, Uh-huh…and Leonard is completely smitten. You make me feel like a new man, he says.

And it’s far from Death of a Ladies’ Man.

And it’s far from my inability.

Pick a rose, says Leonard. Take two, the garden is large.

Translated by Claire Dickenson

_________

1. Ullanlinna is a district in Helsingfors (Helsinki) with the reputation of being slightly posh, Eira even more so
2. Swedish author of works including Pippi Longstocking, the Emil books and The Brothers Lionheart
3.  a sea-shanty by the Swedish poet Dan Andersson

Who will tell me?

Who will tell me why white butterflies
strew the velvet skin of the night?
Who will tell me?
While people walk, mute and strange
and they have snowy, armoured faces,
such snowy faces!
and the eyes of a stuffed bird.

Who will tell me why in the morning, on the grass,
the thrushes begin their secret game?
Who will tell me?
While black soldiers stand at the gate
in their hands withered roses
such withered roses!
and broken tiger lilies.

Who will tell me, quietly in the sun’s shadow
how to bare my heart?
Who will tell me?
Come to me over the fields
Come close and softly
so softly!
Open the clothes of my heart.

Speak to me of love

Speak to me of love
but not until tomorrow
for if you speak today, you will be speaking to a dark river.
Its water does not stop
no merry lantern in the boat
no weird, happy choir of the fish.

Look at me tenderly
but not until tomorrow
for if you look at me today, you will be looking at a pale moon.
Its light does not warm
no swallow’s feather circulates in its blood
never does it taste of May lilies.

Come closer to me
this very day
for if you leave today, you will leave me forever.
And I will not find you
I will never learn to know you
never listen to the voice of your heart.

Come closer to me
this very day
come and talk to me, touch me, look inside me.
My sorrow will not go out
if you leave without touching my hand
my sorrow will not go out, if you turn away from me.

You, you do I love

You, you do I love.
The night presses a dark garland to my brow
so I may not see you.
How do the birds fold their wings!
How do the waters rush beneath the rocks!
How do the forests rise with the winds!
And the clouds’ rains turn to stone.

You, you do I love.
The night presses a dark garland to my brow
so I may not see you.
How the universe calls to me!
How the stars scream through my temples!
How the children weep on the world’s shores!
And above the sea rises the smoke of hearts!

You, you do I love.
Like a boat on an early morning river
moves your soft hand.

Whose side are you on?

No my friend, love is not born into the world
as you wait for mercy from heaven, the pity of the powerful.
No my friend, as long
as all that is left of bread are crumbs in the baker’s palm
let speaking of love remain the ravings of priests.

Let the Lions keep their sweet-baskets!
The non-aligned humanists their fine phrases!
This wrong cannot be fought with flowers.
This blood cannot be staunched with soft sympathy.
The bellies of the hungry cannot be filled with kisses.

Whose side are you on?
Whose flag do you carry?
Love cannot be born without justice,
justice cannot be born without struggle,
struggle without a united front.

From Maallisia lauluja (‘Earthly songs’, 1974)

The children run away

The children run away.
But the mothers
walk silently in their back gardens.
My mother, too, eternally carries
an ash-bucket to the roots of the berry bush.

The children run, they run away.
But the mothers
still sit somewhere on a porch.
My mother, too, eternally peels
earthy potatoes in a corner of the porch.

The earth cracks, the sky freezes.
I cannot find the way to the end of the universe.
But mother, she is in the garden,
she walks across the August evening
to cover my pumpkin-head with a tea-towel.

From Seitsemän rapua, seitsemän skorpionia (‘Seven crabs, seven scorpions’, 1979)

Peloponnese

From the hustle of Patras
I came to old Corinth.
On a horse’s torso I rode
in to the ruins
to listen to the space of time.

I did not seek the footsteps of the apostles,
not Paul’s reproaches,
but words of love,

that which is never lost.

And so shadows ran
on the ancient steps,
and so feet hurried on the marble,
and arms, like ivy,
embraced the existent without which
life cannot be lived,

and in the museum case the doll quivered,
the translucent statue staggered
and hailed its companion,

for the gods’ flights
left us this giddiness
which is called love,

and in its glowing sun
the whole of the Peloponnese glowed.

From Kolmas sisar (‘The third sister’, 2011)

Lake Päijänne

In November Päijänne blackens.
But under the water gleams
the starry sky of vendace galaxies.

The reindeer moss sleeps. The porch grows cold.
The twinflower’s path becomes invisible.
By the sauna a timid gnome
sniffs the dry trace of smoke.

Gloomy, bleak snaps Päijänne.
The darkness fluffs the island’s mane.
And the wind rises, the silver birch’s
hem unravels.
In the morning dusk the first frost of winter
sticks to the fox’s paws. 

In November Päijänne blackens.
But under the water waits
the blind, unborn summer night.
Free, massive splashes Päijänne.

(2012–2014)

Enchantment

Enchantment,
you who fly and lift,
splash the soul like water,
do not ever disappear.

Take me with you, detach me from the earth
as a mist lifts,
as steam rises from horses on a frosty morning
and a folk song runs towards me
in a red-hued dress,
take me with you, dazzle me and throw me
over the edge,

over everything pallid and anaemic,
over the murky and the mean,
over the narrow and the haughty,
to where the night sun
rises onto the roof and pisses gold.

Enchantment,
you elf’s cap,
you lily of the valley’s doorbell,
you swallow’s sledge, you holy giddiness,
you blessed leap into the lilac’s fire.

(2012–2014)

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Illustration by Aulikki Oksanen

IN THE MIRROR

Strange and truly wondrous
in the mirror you look at me.
All I really know is
that you I cannot be.

With my eyes you survey me,
with my lips you smile, too,
what I see in the mirror
is not me, but you, just you.

Whoever you are – astral morning,
eternal night – in the frame
like a wraith, a ghostly phantom,
invisible I remain.

CHIAROSCURO

I heard the words my dreams spoke with their soul:
Who views his life with hatred, mad is he,
like one who whips and tears at his own flesh.
Life is a soil, from it your dreams break free,
and beauty grows from under weights of pain,
and when you rise to throw off matter’s reign
your dreams, too, meet their end within that mesh,
and darkness floods in all, devours it whole.

You must, must love your life,
for that is why your father fathered you,
and that is why, through all the shame and strife,
your mother carried you and brought you through,
was grateful to her life because of yours
which she could place outside the open doors.

My life, I want to praise and thank you now:
Thank you for bearing me from emptiness,
a member of the beauteous human race,
for giving them to me, these human eyes
that many generations made
for seeing beauty under vaulted skies,
thank you for filling them with dreams that flow
until the number of my days shall end you, life,
and I am harvest for the reaper’s scythe.

Power of life, I want to love you still,
because I wandered long in mazes, made
to feel despair and fear without a will,
because you early took and caused to fade
what was for me the finest of your gifts,
love you because you took my strength to kill
and let it lie in chains that weakness laid,
because your wine could also change and be
the vinegar of pain and death for me,
because when I will long for shadows tall
and give you back your gifts, and dying fall,
then it will turn, my soul, and take from you
another day, another morning, new.

THE ONE WHO FLED

Did I love you?
That I do not know.
In my soul I trembled
when you turned to go.

I know that you left it
with reason to flee.
No way to deny it,
necessity.

From my soul was lifted
the innermost veil.
You could not bear it,
butterfly, you set sail,

fled from the gloomy
enigma in fright:
in front of you opened
a pitch-black night,

deeper than leagues, you saw the dark pit,
– and then you fled
the cruel sight of it.

Did I love you?
That I do not know –
in my soul I trembled
when you turned to go.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF LIFE

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.
Don’t turn your back on its strife.
Don’t go away to the graveyard to hide
for death’s door will stay opened wide.

Like a bird you should fly,
not dwelling on past life’s ruins.
Turn your attention to now,
let what has been take a bow.
Let them lie in the grave, your doings,
then face the future, and try.
Be free as the wind, unfettered, unbroken,
the gate of death is always open.

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.

Translated by David McDuff

With us on the cruise was
an old, old man.
We wondered what
he was doing there.
He sat at a table by himself.
Silent. Drinking water.
Never turned up at the cabaret
or the ballroom.
Once he asked the receptionist,
rumour had it, if it was possible
to go out into the fresh air,
there beneath the stars.
‘No stars tonight, sir!’
said the man in the hatch.
The old man wasn’t seen again
until we reached land.
Wonder what happened to him.
Not that it’s any of our business.

Write about what really happens.
Write if you dare.
About things that simply happen,
things that happen all the time.
If you dare.
But to what end?
Poetry, by definition, has fled,
fled from things that
happen all the time.

If all goes well,
if I don’t slip in the street,
if I don’t trip on the carpet
or on my own socks,
don’t contract
a rapidly degenerative disease,
can I once again
encounter the spring,
see the anemones raise their eyes,
see the hills, golden with cowslips
casting their bonnets to the wind
to greet the summer
and the future.
But if things don’t go well,
I simply want to amble
invisible along the hillside.

I think of death
as a bonfire in a garden in spring.
The past is translated
to a fine, blue smoke
wafting in a clear sky.

‘Dear Passengers!
We have arrived.
Time to say farewell.
Everyone must disembark.
Captain Nemo and his crew
trust you have had
the wonderful cruise
that you’d hoped you
deserved, especially as
it will be your only one.’

The journey was long and it brought
both lulls and storms.
The sun occasionally showed his face.
Time, that I mostly spent asleep.

Set amid the crop fields,
sliced by the passing train,
you can see peculiar little islands,
sparsely covered with ash or aspen.
There are old, exhumed graveyards,
secured now for plough and harrow.
Straw smoke rises up in autumn,
to the memory of our fathers,
sometimes.

If you depict a sea voyage,
you can’t incorporate
the view from a train.
One might expect poets
to know better than this.
Porridge is one thing, gruel another,
bread a third.
‘Ate bread with his porridge!’
replied the man sitting in the stocks
next to the church one Sunday,
as someone asked the question
why.

Gloaming hangs soft
over the fields at Storkyro
and the meadows of Limingo,
gently, as if tucking in a sick child.

It is April
and the dusk promises
soon it will be summer.
All we need to do is sleep a little first.

Translated by David Hackston

Finnish translation: Ei tähtiä tänä yönä, sir. Translated by Pentti Saaritsa. Siltala, 2013

The arch bridge

From Ylitse vuoren lasisen (‘Over the glass mountain’, 1949)

And God said: to others I’ll give other tasks, but the task I’ll give to you
is to make a curving bridge, my child, with an arch that’s round and true.
For everywhere around the earth human beings are laden with gloom,
and they’ll come to cross an arching bridge in their anguish and their doom.
Make a bridge that spans the precipice, a bridge over the abyss,
one that shines to my glory with radiance, sparkling like this.
I said: They will come with heavy boots, and heels caked with clay –
how can my bridge withstand their weight, yet also shine this way,
not tarnish or break apart as their crowding presence nears?
And God said: well, it can only be done by means of blood and tears.
Your heart is stronger than mountain rock, the ore that’s buried there –
Put a piece of it into the bridge support, and you’ll get the bridge to bear.
Add a piece of the hearts of those you love, and I know they won’t condemn,
but will surely grant you forgiveness if you make a bridge for them.
Make a bridge to the glory of God, my child, make a bridge with arching light
that will span the depths and shine for ever, with radiance sparkling bright.
Don’t lock the sorrow out of your heart as the bridge you make appears.
Nothing gleams more beautifully than the brilliance of pure tears.

Arachne

From Yhdeksän kaupunkia (‘The nine cities’, 1958)

My lambs grew in the mountain meadow,
my lambs drank the water of springs.
I did not envy anyone
and did not shrink from anyone.
I dyed the pale wool of my ewes
with purple of Tyre, with blue of herbs.
To the pillars of the West I fastened the cloth,
stretched my warp
across the arching vault of the sky.
When I struck my reed, the Pleiades rang,
Orion’s dog barked,
in the thicket rustled
Leo and Capricorn.

But you, Destructress,
why have you shattered my loom?
You have broken my warp, I do not recognise my rags.
Remove, remove
these spider’s webs,
this sad cobweb
that unwinds and runs
only from I to I
and that the Messenger
mockingly dyes
with purple of Tyre, with blue of herbs –!
Give me back
my lofty loom,
I will make you a picture, a true picture,
of what in vain
the Chaldeans spied from their towers.

The fox climbs a wooded mountain

From Maailmanteatteri (‘The theatre of the world’, 1961)

In the heart’s naiveté (but we lose it)
 up a wooded slope the fox climbs
 fiery red amid deep green
 and the fox is immense
                     the mountain tiny
 if he wanted to he could leap across
 and the fir tree spreads its sparse branches
 making the number of needles clearly visible
 like a film developed in a darkroom
 the ravine ascends to the clouds the slope sinks
 and the mountain is immense
                    the fox tiny
 when the forest turns black the trees are numberless.

Ballad of the importance of poetry

From Balladeja ja romansseja (‘Ballads and romances’, 1967)

One or two poor musicians,
 one or two wanderers,
 what power could we ever have,
 who’d be afraid of us? 
                    The reed, the brown reed.

We shall play in the market,
 and when our reed pipes wail,
 everyone will laugh
 and the King will turn pale.
                     The reed, the brown reed.

What use will be the black walls,
 the sentries at the door,
 what use the muskets and the spikes,
 the orders stern and dour?
                     The reed, the brown reed.

The King hid his secret,
 put a helmet on his head,
 and the castle’s poor barbers
 because of that lay dead.
                     The reed, the brown reed.

To keep his life one promised
 never to say a word,
 only once on the sandy shore
 he dared to make it heard.
                     The reed, the brown reed.

But from the sand the reed grew,
 and the reed moaned and sighed.
 And now every reed pipe
 tells that secret far and wide.
                     The reed, the brown reed.

What use will be the black walls
 the sentries at the door,
 what use the muskets and the spikes,
 the orders stern and dour?
                     The reed, the brown reed.

For now every city
 and every village hears
 the King's hidden secret,
 the King’s ass’s ears.
                     The reed, the brown reed.

Ballad of the miller’s son

From Pidä rastaan laulusta kiinni (‘Hold on to the thrush’s song’, 1969)

Whatever is too wretched
at first brings no grief at all.
On the knoll the mill is empty,
its sails rise and fall.
Wings in the wind teeter,
an empty, whishing sound,
stepping over and over
the empty steps go round.

I had boots, a hat with a feather,
my only hat I twirled,
when with my cat I wandered
into the big wide world,
I had boots and a hat with a feather,
thought money would amass.
Whose are these spacious wheatlands?
The Marquis of Carabas.

I had boots, a hat with a feather,
but the boots they soon wore out,
and my cat died of hunger,
hard times, without a doubt.
The wind blew off my feather,
and my hat, too, fled in the blast,
until on the head of a scarecrow
I planted it at last.

The airy castles shattered,
I forgot the princesses there.
the grass was burnt and shriveled,
the forest’s trees lay bare.
To the knoll I am returning,
I can see the desolate land.
The mills grind slowly onward,
large and silent they stand.

Sails in the wind, teetering,
continue their rise and fall.
Whatever is too wretched
doesn’t make one grieve at all.

I don’t know if you’re there

From Vihreys (‘Verdancy’, 1979)

I don’t know if you’re there,
maybe you are not.
Like plants and animals
we decay and rot
and perhaps the soul
is evanescent, bright,
like Alchemilla gleaming
in morning’s radiant light.

And then to you I talk,
the way I used to do,
when night arrives I climb
the high tower to you,
the ladder made of silk,
the winding stair of dreams,
where lovers have no weight,
and all’s not what it seems.

Bowed over a book
a dark, familiar head,
the air is blue and gold,
the breeze a gentle thread.
You raise your head and smile,
your reading you forgot,
and yet I do not know
if you are there or not.

Translated by David McDuff

A fig wasp’s life

She squeezes in. The opening closes and the world overflows. She swims in the sweet flowing moisture. In the sycamore fig tree, a myriad of delicate white blossoms have burst out. For her eyes alone, a damp garden, alabaster-clear. The home she’s been longing for. There she lays her eggs, empties her pouches. Tiny little pollen grains for the tiny little blossoms. Membranes form round the eggs, they live off the sweetness, it rocks them gently. Fine, frail swaying thicket of embryos

*

In one of the eggs in one of the capsules, she is taking form. In another egg in another capsule, he is taking form. The fig moisture evaporates, membranes harden, capsules shrink, small hard spheres. He bites his way out of his and straight in, in to her, into hers. Still inside his capsule he extends his organ and fertilises her, still inside hers. She becomes pregnant before she has hatched. The roundworms, too, hatch in the solidifying goo, force their way into her; they eat her slowly, letting her live, they need her. Along with her, inside her body they reach the glimmering white smile

*

She flies that evening. The journey of her life. In the air, a mild, fleeting scent. Around her swarm female fig wasps; they fly like her, allowing themselves, like her, to be led by the barely perceptible thinness. They are eaten by birds, ants, beetles, lizards; get stuck in spiders’ webs, encased in silken threads; become living provisions. If she makes it, if she gets there, finds her way, she will squeeze in. In the garden, swaying clusters of tender unseen blossoms heavy with sweet nectar. Perhaps this one is close by. Or else she will be carried on the wind over Africa’s sweat-red savannah and green-edged riverbeds towards the highlands looming blue in the honey night

I come rushing up, intending to make a train: it comes from the days just after the war and my mother is on it. When the train arrives at the station I hurry on board, so terrified of missing her. My father is also on the train, but at the other end. The train is packed but I manage to catch sight of my mother in the crowd. She’s just sitting there, so young. I hurry over to her and call out, ‘Mum, it’s Henrika! It’s Henrika! I’ve rushed here from the year 2011!’ She looks up, smiles, looks happy but surprised. She is so young and healthy. I wake up. Afterwards I can barely bring myself to recall this dream: it makes me distraught. I got to see my mother again, while she was enclosed in her own life. After the war she was seventeen or eighteen years old, hadn’t met my father yet, and I wasn’t even contemplated. Now I could have been a mother to the woman I’d met on the train.

Don’t think you know what’s happened

Don’t think you know what’s happening

Don’t think you know what’s going to happen

Don’t get in the way of your soul

Try not to run away

You’ve got to learn to take care of yourself

You’ve got to clear out your own cupboards

With a few minor injuries you can get around out there in the world

When you want to put your head through a wall it’s not the wall that puts you into a tight spot

If you’re on your own in a car you have to sit in the driving seat in order to drive

That which you continue to love must exist

The world is worth all the pain

Still, put up with being reminded of how another world, more beautiful, would also be possible

When there’s no use running it’s better to stand still

You don’t need to do anything, not even give up

It’s always possible but confusing to continue

Everything shall pass

Remember you can live and be a part of the ocean

You’ll have time to be dead

It’s already a lot for you to have come here

Translated by Ruth Urbom

Memory

If you give me time
I don’t weigh it in my hand:
it’s so light, so transparent
and heavy as the thick
shining darkness
in the backyard gateway
to memory

Grilles

The houses climb around
but the streets have their chasms
children see with the backs of their heads.
From behind window grilles they see
the windswept trees,
black hands waving
motionless, blind.
If only they could open
all the closed and sleeping ones,
like a cut in a pumpkin
blood-red, with seeds
like stars.

Mist

Someone is coming out of the mist.
t’s the garb of a stranger he draws
like a mantle after him. Not seeing you
he walks past, softly calling.
It’s your name he called.
Didn’t he see you or did he just
want to call to someone he didn’t know.
Perhaps you should have answered.

Do you follow me

Do you follow me when I grow afraid
               of being alone?
Do you follow me when a darkness
               from outside
or from something inside me at midday
               falls over me
leaving me sight-impaired, chilled through?
I am used to your warmth, we exchanged it
               a long, long time.
Do you follow me when I or you
               are no longer visible
in our old, shabby rooms, but step out
               to a pure morning
with a gentle breeze, the lingering song of the years
               across the grass?

Joy

The joy when even the song of birds
falls silent, and in the clear evening
the light descends, through you
into the darkness and lifts it
from us.

If mountains too

If mountains too descended into me
and shadows of the trees concealed
a scent of birdcherry and linden play
around the honey of warm days, the bees’
song and June’s clarity – if all this
turned into night, yet still my eye
would seek the sky’s vault and the grass,
my heart would seek the poem’s clear star
and words that were the dawning morning
in silence hold the gleam of longing
and aim to outlive death:
a ‘Let there be light’.

Sorrow

From the southern rock
a wild view out across the sea,
hovering above the fog
the islands’ cliffs.
Far away just cloudless air.
Here, close to,
dark forest on the other
side of the bay.
As in life
the far away invisible
yet there,
the near at hand solid, intangible,
and softly in the seen,
sorrow, being forced to leave
all this.

The steppe

Like an opened door of light the steppe
rises in front of him, opens the grass
and bends over the flickering of the birds,
dizzying with spokes of grass under black clouds.
The sun, a blood-filled fruit
rolls slowly down into an invisible chasm
where the birdsong spreads like beads of rain,
thin silvery drops of yearning for his home –
the plain sways through his body,
fills him like a sunflower turning to the light,
gently, as if a calloused life
with sleep’s hands stroked his hair
and whispered in his ear: courage!
Oh, this scent of miles-wide wonder!
Time itself slumbers in the creaking of the cart
that under heaven’s starry vault
leads him in towards unknown, mysterious
life, like a dark, open space.

Translated by David McDuff

I read two of this spring’s new collections of poetry one after the other: Kivirivit (‘Stone lines’, Otava 2013) by Harry Salmenniemi and Pysty hiljaisuus (‘Vertical silence’, Teos 2013) by Miia Toivio. The experience was perplexing.

These two works are completely different from one another as regards their individual poetics, and yet the similarities between the themes that arise from them was arresting. Both works seem to inhabit an internal world of sorrow and depression, a world where the function of poetry is to forge and show its readers a path out of the anxiety. In their silence – and even emptiness – both collections have two faces: one lit up, the other darkened by grief.

What’s the matter, what’s happened to you? This is the reader’s spontaneous but rhetorical question in face of this poetry. In response, all we have is indirect talk of poetry and writing as the means of resolving human paradoxes. The themes in these works are strongly metalyrical. Though they deal with speaking subjects they also deal with poetry itself, and above all with language, perhaps our only connection to one another.

These poems speak of the possibility and impossibility of speech; this theme is developed and realised in two excellent and very different manners. Salmenniemi (born 1983) and Toivio (born 1974) are contemporary poets in the sense that both are interested in the experimental nature of renewed poetic language: in their earlier works both have actively sought out new modes of expression.

It is fascinating to note that they now address the question of the poetic subject, a heated debate in the contemporary discourse. Public work in the poetic field is also important to these poets; both have served as editor-in-chief of Tuli&Savu (‘Smoke&Fire’), the most significant poetry magazine in Finland.

Harry Salmenniemi. Photo: Irmeli Jung

Salmenniemi’s poems feature a first-person subject, an ‘I’, but who is it? The speaker’s status is confusing, as in his earlier procedural works Salmenniemi has often blurred the identity of the traditional poetic speaker, making it more polyphonic and anonymous, for instance by using material generated by search engines. Now, however, the more ponderous tone leads us towards a stronger interpretation of the role of the speaker.

Kivirivit is a series of seven extended prose poems, though its narrow layout makes the text look more like columns of verse. This too is trompe l’oeil, as the individual lines are not a fundamental structure of the poetic expression here, rather calm sentences carry the text forwards one clause at a time. And more importantly, it seems as though no narrative emerges.

Small entities a couple of sentences long seem to interact with one another: they are like neo-aphorisms, crashing words together to form new meanings. Behind this may be the ‘New Sentence Technique’, created by the American poet Ron Silliman (born 1946), here adapted for the needs of prose poetry. Sentences struggle against the narrative tendencies of prose by moving away from referentiality.

The work gains a sense of continuity through a series of repeated elements. Every poem begins with the words ‘Then, not now’. The chain of clauses and sentences progresses through the interplay of memory and observation. Language and mind digress, but no unifying story ever emerges because the text breaks down structures of narrative logic.

As the poem suggests, reading becomes writing: ‘Don’t read this, write this.’ The speaker’s mind is filled with the straining conditions of everyday life. Human relationships, separations, and the mere fact of being are like heavy burdens not alleviated by living as an artist.

The idea of the work is of speaking through all the repeating elements, rewriting them, writing on top of them, emptying them, dismissing them. Salmenniemi’s collections of poetry have always been ‘total’ works of art. Graphic designer Markus Pyörälä has designed the book to look like a passe-partout frame: through a gap we see writing that has been written over time and again. The graphic layout emphasises the poems: the objectification of the book is reduced to a minimalist aesthetic, always referencing itself, its own pure presence.

A world of states of mind, spoken away, written and wiped away, develops into an intense, reverent silence whose meaning lies in the art of meditation. The sheer emptiness of Salmenniemi’s poetry is powerful and the source of all energy.

Miia Toivio. Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

Contrastingly, Miia Toivio has openly explained the philosophical background to her work through numerous quotes and references: influences include the German 17th-century mystic poet Angelus Silesius, the French writer-philosophers Maurice Blanchot and Julia Kristeva, the latter’s texts providing a quotation that opens the first poem:

“‘I speak, but I speak at the edge of my tongue”, she said, “at the edge of my skin,” she said, “I have very small fingers, with those,” she said but cut herself short. I wanted to listen to her, but she wouldn’t speak. She never did exchange her yellow fruit for violet. For a moment she pondered the lemons, the plums. For a moment I let her ponder the lemons, the plums. She felt for her contours too, then began to sink. I didn’t like the way she expressed herself, didn’t like her small fingers, but I did like them all the same: small fingertips cupped around a fruit.’

Kristeva’s seminal work Soleil Noir (1987, in English, The Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia) speaks of melancholy and depression, at the root of which is the tragedy of humans’ being born into a world of language. Children are removed from the ‘mother’, i.e. from a symbiotic and semiotic relationship in which language and body are one, and turn towards the ‘father’ or the ‘father’s name’, i.e. to symbolic meaning (language). This is then followed by a separation, a divorce from the original state. For Kristeva, art is an endless attempt to close the gap, to heal the wound of that separation. For Toivio, poetry fulfils a similar function, but this is equally the case for Salmenniemi too: emptying, purging by writing away, a meditative silence.

On a formal level, Pysty hiljaisuus is also a process-driven work in which the reader moves from the straight columns of prose text at the beginning to the ragged, edgy verse structures of the final two sections. The work begins with a subject–object binary, at the heart of which is the disintegration of the subject; the subject seems to speak to herself, to different aspects of her own being. At the same time she is also searching for an unknown universal other, towards which she is travelling.

In Kristevan terms, depression condenses into an alienation from language, an inability to communicate. Toivio’s poems intensely strive to form connections with the other, to correct and complete one another, to repeat endlessly what has already been said, to find new meanings in language and its relationship with the surrounding world. Talk of ‘the edge of my skin’ grows to represent a corporeality of sorts; the poems seem to yearn for a synthesis of body and language, to close the gap between them, to restore the symbiosis.

Blanchot’s notion of the paradoxical nature of language is beautifully expressed in Toivio’s poems: on the one hand language is an instrument of power and violence, on the other it is the only way for humans to connect with one another. The title of this collection is like a creature representing both danger and possibilities. Eventually the poems’ duality culminates in a beautiful depiction of the forest in the manner of Baudelaire, or the great temple of Finnish symbolism; the sketchiness and the incompleteness of human life redeemed there: the spacious, simplistic silence of the forest.

Translated by David Hackston

Then, not now. White birches against the white
sky. A vase in the middle of the room.
An attempt to make contact, but with what? The room slowly
fills with whisper and touch. A woman,
turning to catch herself in the mirror,
is afraid the phone will start ringing and startle
her. A gap-closer, not an equaliser.
Beneath the bridges, faces around the fire, these, those.

A ship colliding with the quayside, wind rising,
lost among the rocks, visibility in a sea of buoys,
fog. The story of where I shall end up once
I’ve been travelling long enough. Exotic
animals make a deep impression on the child.
Eyes press half-closed. I know
this might come to nothing, neither good
nor bad. The dull clank of metal on bone,
strikes at various consciousnesses, sometimes in Iceland,
near the coast, whale bones and tanks.
I saw a black-and-white picture of the waves,
and from then on I’ve thought waves are
black-and-white. No war, no peace will
last forever. The memory stick flashes, a hand
removes it from the computer. An organism must
continue long enough that its limits are exposed.
Sometimes, when you imagine you are a machine, sometimes
when you are a machine. A bottle of mineral water, empty-full, wine
on the floor, you walk naked towards the window.
The sense of sleep, the sense of snow. I shall complete this,
become more complete. The conductor stamps
the ticket as the child examines its mother’s silken scarf.
The kimono and the obi are beautiful by themselves,
but do not remotely suit one another. I dream
of shedding flowers. Have you ever felt
like a ruler, so rigid and
exact? A click, a reminder that
the room might be tapped. At first
there was a figure on the canvas. She is looking for something
that she’d like to eat but cannot find anything
that appeals. A human happiness,
a human illusion. Her hands touch
the keyboard, and from the keyboard
this letter is selected, this combination of letters,
this word. Feathers fall to earth
and tickle the stomach of a blind man. Man, every bit as
corporeal a being as any primate,
and every bit as unhappy. The book’s name is the same as
that of the previous book, whose name was the same as the book before
it. Not a species, a variety. I see this
clearly and fall silent. Landscape is mirrored
on the screen, and a fantasy and and an image overlap,
interlock. Sick and suffering,
yet happy still. Gouache, paper, acrylic.
Dusk thickens, softening the contours.
A mirror, just as tired as the image within the mirror,
just as blurred. The journalist hates music
but writes a probing interview with the composer,
asks about his children, but the composer hates children.
Parking spaces outside the barracks, behind
the barracks, beside the barracks. Stamp, rubber,
letter, signature, ISBN number. Trees through
which you can make out the cottage roof, smoke, mist,
the jetty. I’m not concentrating, I’m trying to forget, I forget.
A dumbfounding twist as you make sure
the tank stopper is properly closed. On the carrier bag
a slogan in orange lettering,
too glaring to make it out. White
shores, transparent rocks, boneless dolphins.
I see a square with a woman walking across,
but I do not see the woman. Perhaps it is futile.
Quieting down, concentrating, forming. The sound of ice
when it doesn’t crack. The lecture begins with a lengthy introduction
on the ethics of conception and research. Everything can be imagined
differently, there exists a wholly different order.
Perhaps she is dead, perhaps asleep or
drugged. Don’t read this, write this.
In such a situation violence is not enough,
by no means, there can never be too much
violence. The image of a mother gorilla and her offspring,
closer, sharper. Perhaps it’s
a refrain that you just don’t recognise. That state
after concussion, a dim unconsciousness,
a frigid cellar. Pages are glued to one another.
When nothing happens for a long time,
life feels real. Blood flows in the darkness
within us. A quick one after work,
then home, light, restored. It was a question
of passion, the fact that I loved you so
intensely that I couldn’t sleep next to you.
Why does the child caw, not cry? In the darkening
evening I look in the mirror at a reflection that might not exist at all.

Translated by David Hackston

She said, it was I who said, alone, my feelings confused. Should I somehow have cleared my head, though all I wanted to do was write in the water? ‘Behind me I drag desire’s reflection, like the skirts of a boat sinking towards the depths,’ she once bespoke me. ‘Your skirts are heavy with algae and their smell would banish even the insects. A deer, swimming across a long lake, becomes entangled by the heel, only worsening things as it thrashes there, until it too falls straight down, never floating, to the bottom of the lake,’ I replied. She turned her back and leant against the wall. I couldn’t see her fingers as she, controlling the sound, ripped off a small, wriggling fin, closed it in her fist and turned towards me with an unnatural smile:

She who said nothing lay spoken there. She would rather tear out her tongue with her own hands than give her basket full of yellow plums, folded sheets and all that blended scent. In the blended scent she spoke, her voice through my voice: deny one thing, deny another, deny them all if you will, but no one will listen to your playing. That’s what it’s like: through a twisted tongue the body must strive forth or yield to the wishes of a little lass. Other winds will no longer blow: even sweet tumult will lead us to a wuthering wood, forever echoing with the sound of the summer earth, only the wind in the forest trees, the forest trees swing ding, ding, ding.

Would we could arrive 
of questions unburdened
somewhere 

where our toes drop off
       and our cheekbones, outlines.

Would there were a place
where warmth came quickly.

To surround silence
to stand with a net in hand catching butterflies
the butterflies pass the net’s gullet
what is it that surrounds silence
why is surrounding important
isn’t someone standing there, silence growing
like a tall birch
up from within the listener, his ribs
give way
from his crown a treetop rises
upwards, nudging the sky:
or so the birches believe, those craning trees.
The wind gets inside them and shakes them,
the wind’s caress cannot be avoided,
the wind so strong you can’t hear your
I’ve forgotten what to write
of those bearers of green
knights of the green shroud
wrapped in green shroud
monarchs of the greening days
lush, soft and deep,
those that surround

Translated by David Hackston

ON THE SHORE

The wonderful pale clouds
cross the sky like wings.
Quiet and enchanting
the open water sings.

The sand has grown weary
of the waves’ caressing play.
Now come in perfect quiet,
now come here, right away…

17.3.1930

APRIL

Tired and grey the earth is now.
Wet snow is falling all around.
And over the deserted sea
the wind sings inconsolably.
It’s April. The hardest time for earth.
Now spring cries in her agony of birth.

Oh yes, I know, struggling victoriously
again she lifts her magic sceptre high.
And through her tears comes April’s smile,
– the day advances, bright now the soil,
and over it grow grass and leaves
the breathing of a wonderful breeze.
Oh yes, I know, the spring can spurn
No one who for it learned to yearn.

And yet: that life so fearful,
that life so new and fragile,
that life that in the trees, the soil,
now throbs towards the light,
to which the sea-wind’s breath
is like a message boding death,
that gentle life, now shivering
now trembling and quivering,
– oh, will its waiting run
until the earth wakes in the sun?

Oh, does it know, coldest of all,
what will redeem, as I know well?
Oh, does it know, pale and anguished:
spring’s love can’t be extinguished.
Spring can’t leave one person yearning
on the earth, in all its turning!
Not one who longs enough, and oh,
I know it – how would I not know!

19.7.1931

ON A RAINY NIGHT

I had been to the cinema then,
and the night was a rainy one.
I walked with wet shoes
across the misty street.

On that rainy night
Christ came to meet me.
And the raindrops fell
on him sadly.

What pallor in his face,
what night in his eyes!
Past the bleary neon light
he walked into the dark.

On that rainy night
the whole city was ill.
No one knew: Christ
had come to meet me.

16.10.1930

EDITH SÖDERGRAN

The rainy evening
breathed its cold dankness
through the dark window.

Face pressed against the wet pane
I thought of you, great spirit,
burning flame in the rainy street.

In the dark you sensed the rise of a new sun,
from afar you felt the rumble of its legions.
The cold drops gave way in surprise
before your mighty blaze.

At the damp window I knew
I do not have your power.
Flare up in my soul, O God,
so I am not extinguished on the rainy road.

1930

From Huhtikuu, ‘April’)

BOUND

Often in your arms I heard the flow
into my being of the deepest peace.
But often, captive there with no release,
I’d beat my wings in you, I also know.

No, love never ever can be free.
It is the treasure of the bound alone.
But through the prison trellis love has grown
the prisoner’s eye meets with infinity,

the hidden is opened by love’s binding part,
and the narrow cell arches to a universe.
That heart that is the limit of my steps
expands and grows into the world’s own heart.

27.10.1934

A HAPPY EVENING

The sky has darkened to a fragile blue,
and shadows wander blue across the snow,
but in the snowy street still brightly glow
its dreams and lanterns, ever shining through.
Light of step, I walk on homeward now,
as the first star in the dusk thrills on and on.
From my bosom all the pain has vanished, gone,
and I am blessed, not knowing why or how.
Only the snow’s peace, sky’s limpidity,
only star upon gentle star up there so high,
only the knowledge that in my warm room
a rose is smiling singly in the gloom,
a rose is smiling with its petals’ fire.
Blue night, a rose! What more could I desire?

20.1.1934

INVULNERABLE

On wings inaudible and delicate
happiness flew to my heart like a bird,
so that the pain from which I crept away
is now nothing but a lifeless word.
For you I yearned, now breathing close,
your pulse throbs in my every vein.
For a moment shining like a morning dream
I, timid, am invulnerable again.

30.7.1935

WAITING

Quietly I walked amidst the garden’s charms.
Already flowers were slumbering in rows.
Cutting them, it seemed pain in me rose,
but I enclosed them sweetly in my arms.

When at last on the sweet peas I cast my gaze
I stopped, and saw the evening darken blue.
And moment by moment, with a wondrous hue ,
it deepened, lightened, deepened in the haze.

But still below, aflame with inward light,
amidst the forest burned the pallid lake,
as if a pane of glass stretched out to take
the final rays, preserving them in night.

And on the sky, whose spell embraced me still,
a group of clouds divine extended far
like a white veil shining in the twilight hour.
And then the first star began to twinkle, thrill.

Yet more pale stars broke out in heaven’s deep,
as if I had a dark blue road to pass,
and stepped with bare feet on cold grass.
Already in my arms the flowers were asleep,

in sweet slumber land and forest slept,
but with new stars the sky lived yet.
When the ray of light began to beat
through the cloudy veil, and dimness crept,

with all my senses by the night refined
I felt at last you must be at the door,
at the road’s turn you, with eyes so kind,

whom I had waited many summers for.

18.8.1934

(From Sateen jälkeen, ‘After the rain’, 1934)

OUTI TALVITIE*

In memoriam

It opened to the sun, dear, fragrant bush.
It burst with roses, more lovely than the others.
Rose upon rose, like the warmth and charm of summer, exuding love.

Then came the thunderbolt, down to the earth it struck.
Not an ancient tree, not a rotten stump
did that heavenly weapon touch, it did not break the sick flower’s head.

Only the summer’s fieriest roses it struck.
Fragrant even in their agony they died with smiling lips.
There remained a slender shoot, sucking strength from the ashes: a budding rose.

2.4.1936
*Saima’s sister (1911–1936) who died after giving birth to her first child, little Outi

(From Hunnutettu, ‘Veiled’, 1936)

AT WINTER’S HEART

Beside my lamp the warmth is pouring,
the gold of moments flows free.
Not yet has darkness, devouring,
taken you from me.

You open a fairytale garden.
There the two of us are.
For a moment fiery roses
around our heads now flower.

Listen: lashing the window
the snowy lines whir and dart.
From the open sea they come raging,
the winds of winter’s heart.

Into the night and darkness
the man must turn and go.
For one last moment light flashes
across the road of snow.

Beside my lamp I linger
and then I know nothing more:
in the storm I see a boy wander
near chasms that have no floor.

19.01.1936

THERE IS A LAND

There is a land to where
the traces of dreams disappear.
With each road my steps explore,
closer that land they make.
What here I lost, there I will find,
what here stammers, there is defined
in the land where illusions break.

There hope is realised, and fear in vain,
the darkest enigma bright and plain,
and deepest agony consoles the most.
See, those tears
within whose spheres
my bosom’s bitterness and sorrows move
are a mountain spring where strength I drink.
And if I bring
the crumbs of inexpensive love,
in my hands a jeweled treasure lies,
that gleams and shines.

And the dead
now radiant in shadow go.
– Oh longed-for one, I see you by my side,
I seize your hand, that has grown cold,
I see the smile I lowered to a certain grave.
There in my arms a dear child I hold
whose little face
is here denied.

There is a land to where
all paths vanish, then cease.
Those there do not see the reflection
that lights us on darkened ways.
Into the eyes of Being they gaze.

It is the land of Peace.

8-9.12.1936

THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING

The first day of spring still lingers,
rippling on the garden’s ground.
A tiny winter bird chirrups,
its tireless voice new-found.

On the silver-bright bark of the branches
the twilight deepens a shade.
The quiet air is weightless.
All the treasures my sparse life weighed,

all the grace my heart ever owned
seem to be present here,
in the light that hides its smiling,
as the sun-veiled dusk draws near.

30.3.1937

(This is the last entry in Saima Harmaja’s diary; she died on 21 April.)

Translated by David McDuff

I fell through the papers laid aside
I came to a place where I was supposed to stay

for four nights but I stayed four years
Someone said: you have caused the council considerable expense

I said: this is my situation
A brave little cat came to my rescue

I could see what I wanted in the dark
at night and no one saw me

It was like a dream but I wasn’t dreaming
I was not afraid and I could pass through chalcedony

I could pass through quartz crystals
I could pass through sad and sick

On the bottom in the mud coins from many lands lay gleaming
We wish for anything between heaven and earth

All that we see and cannot see and lost
I do not recognise myself, and no one sees me

Everything happens for the first time and we become afraid
At the forest’s edge some aggressive act has taken place

There is a lukewarm smell when people and animals are slaughtered
I fell through the tiresome retakes

I say that I have been on a course but it doesn’t help me
I simply mean that the pictures are so disparate

‘In a way we can all be swapped round’
Sticks and straws, something about lacking dimensions and limits

Someone came walking in the rain and said come with me
and I won’t let go of that hand

We hurry out when the alarm goes off,
stand in excited groups with
coats over nightgowns and chatter. ‘When
the expected course of everyday life is interrupted,
we are like shipwrecked people on a miserable plank
in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from
and not knowing whither they are drifting,’ wrote Albert Einstein
at the age of sixty. The smoke is ventilated, the firemen
leave. We can go back to our rooms.
I close the window: fresh, full moon over the snow.
The clear night. A green-shimmering light above
Stockholm, as if we were inside the ice.

The dead speak kindly to us
but we become frightened, get

things mixed up
There is a dark material

The dead don’t care about it
We offer them an apartment with

windows facing the courtyard but they come and go
Don’t sleep at night, don’t

use medications, don’t sweat
Don’t buy expensive clothes

I ask after my mom and dad
At Mjölbolsta I run into the thunderstorm, the rain

turns to hail, it’s completely white
I pull in to the side of the road at the old driveway to

the sanatorium with the heavy chain across the road
A police car slows down, and continues

We don’t want to let our childhood down
I tell my parents that they mustn’t

worry, the dandelions have finished flowering
and soon the repair work will be done

I ask about the dark material
I ask if they are homesick

They turn their faces towards me,
seem interested

Seem thin and terribly strong
It’s a density I don’t understand

Perhaps they are surprised when
we laugh and cry awkwardly

There’s a wild pattering on the pane, small
round hailstones bounce up and down,

consist of layers of ice
Perhaps the dead don’t play, they flounder

and volatilise
I ask them to help, explain

that the university is to be closed
and winter is coming, they don’t seem to understand

(To a hare at night with darkness evenly
 distributed without stars, the sky hidden by clouds.
 [a painting by artist Risto Suomi, Yömatka / Night journey])

There are pictures that make it possible to see what we
    cannot see
There are stars that are not visible and somewhere else
    blue and swans
The hunters hunt and carry guns on their shoulders in the forests
The hare travels at night. In someone's dream
There are star-couplers, multiphase systems
The hare belongs to another circle that we all belong to
Search words: forest hare, found in abundance, no restrictions
    on shooting

But the hare's heart is strong and pure
The hare knows foreign lands and peoples
The hare has counted the injured
The hare knows who are hungry and have no home
The hare visits those who have been thrown in jail
The hare is not sentimental, but the hare weeps

We grow old, confused
‘I burned unnecessarily, for unnecessary things’
It is quiet when one travels at night, the rain
    rustles against dark leaves

We feel gratitude when the wild creatures come near
    without noticing us
There are pictures that make it possible to see the other,
I do not know in whose dream you are in the evenly distributed
    darkness and it is raining roses over all creatures

The thing with sorrow is that one thought there
was a fire but it is starting to rain. The brushwood smokes
listlessly for a while, it is far too sparse or dense
and on the field remains a dark installation sprawling
to the sky. The smoke from the clear evenings in April has
stuck in the jacket in the hall. Far from the city’s lights
So many years have passed, but flakes detach at the slightest breath
and blow out across the lake and up toward the house where I lived
with my parents and my brother, in our family.

The next chapter is called: before we forget
The next chapter is called: the darkness
the rain the kindness
It is already October and blowing hard
I must drive firewood home
I must turn the key in the lock
And then I hear again that voice,
mysterious and clear
You are old now little child
don’t be afraid little hare

Translated by David McDuff

I try to write books whose reading will bring enjoyment, in other words not entertaining ones.
Suomentajan päiväkirjat (‘Translator’s diaries’, 1970)

The term ‘world literature’ was invented by Goethe to describe the importance of Goethe.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1978)

A work of art is bad if it ‘makes you think’. About something other than itself. What is wrong with ‘art for art’s sake’ – or bread for bread’s sake? Art is art and bread is bread, and people need both in their diet.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1978)

Translation is moving a fish from one waterway to another.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1981)

It is said that you can have command of a language but you can’t command languages; they command you.
Euroopan reuna (‘The edge of Europe’, 1983)

Literature is not a message, newspaper, news report, it is its own reality like trees and mountains and animals in the yard.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1983)

Yesterday I looked at young birch trees. Is there not, in their pallor and lightness, their special immateriality, much of the most beautiful and purest femininity? An ugly woman has no right to exist, because a woman is unable to live for herself.
Nuoruuden päiväkirjat (‘Youthful diaries’, 1954)

The happiest marriages are those in which the man is impotent and the woman frigid, but such good fortune seldom occurs. Generally marriages are second-hand shops in which the woman sells old stuff and the man buys it.
Prahan päiväkirjat (‘Prague diaries’, 1966)

Sex gives new energy for living, like eating, but it does cast any light on one’s world’s view. The importance of sexuality has been extraordinarily exaggerated since it became possible to speak openly about it.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1982)

Only a continuous revolution prevents the revolution from devouring its children. In a continuous revolution children devour their parents.
Ihmisen ääni (‘The human voice’, 1976)

Revolutionaries are the true conservatives: the world can only be preserved by changing it.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1977)

A sure way of becoming a statue is to start one’s career by smashing statues.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1980)

I loathe officials, that whole bloody class of ne’er-do-wells, primates with ties round their necks and rectangular cases in their hands. Milk-drinkers!
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1978)

Life has generally left a bad taste in my mouth. If I were to write my memoirs, they would be the world’s most dishonest book. It is only with children that I’ve been able to form authentic human relationships; I abandoned my own children, I didn’t ever take a single one of them to school.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1981)

Be a jester, not a poet laureate, for a poet laureate will lose his head; a jester, never.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1982)

My home would be like this: the entrance hall in Dublin, the living room in Paris, the bedroom in Rome, the study in Budapest, the kitchen in Athens and the sauna in Kerimäki.
Euroopan reuna (‘The edge of Europe’, 1983)

I have been accused
of not taking the realities into account
as if I were not myself a reality
Hämärän tanssit (‘The Obscure dances’, 1983)

I have never cared for relatives, what is the sense of that? Everyone is related, after all.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1983)

I do not consider myself to be responsible for interview comments, or even, really, for what I write; I am a living person and will say it differently tomorrow.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1978)

The number of people in the world, right now, can be supported by the world, but there is not enough room for all the opinions of these people.
Euroopan reuna (‘The edge of Europe’, 1983)

Of course one will never learn to understand the world, one just has to try pass, squeeze oneself, through it. We shall never receive an answer to the question why we are here and build houses, roads, religions, sciences and arts. Birth is the subject of death and the reason for it, this is how one must accept it, simply: because once the world (ours) has started to exist, it will also have to cease to exist.
Päiväkirjat (‘Diaries’, 1983)

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Today I’m going another way
coming to the meadow from the west
I want to see the mountain in unfamiliar marine light

the air is soft paper
on which the trees are blurred signifiers

I’m roaming the meadow
longing to be a poet whose song
would move stones and
organise city walls
make trees walk to carpenters
that build homes for people

An unsubstantial sorrow
is a heavy burden
but still, I still I want to see
everything in unfamiliar marine light

IV, from Tanssilattia vuorella, ‘The dance floor on the mountain’, 1977. Translation published in Contemporary Finnish Poetry by Herbert Lomas, Bloodaxe Books, UK, 1991

Other English translations:
Pentti Saarikoski: Poems 1958–1980. Edited and translated by Anselm Hollo. Toothpaste Press, Iowa, 1983
Dances of the Obscure. Translated by Michael Cole & Karen Kimball. Logbridge-Rhodes, Durango, 1987

Poems from Aallonmurtaja (‘Breakwater’, Otava, 2011)

Night flight

Man cannot hide in the night, his desire will betray him.
Man turns toward the lights, light sparkles as though it were close at hand
even if it is far away.

Lights, which offer themselves like jewels to the one who sits in the plane above them, are already
                                                                                                                                 in their viewers’
eyes even if they have only just begun to stream from their source. A city-jewel swaying
in the black night air.

A solitary light on the surface of an island. Seen close up it is a soft-lit lamp
which casts light only on the table and the faces around it,
but from above, at a distance of kilometres, it is an immediate spot, a straight line that
                                                                                                                                aims at the viewer
and pierces her. A fierce light-beam.

Perhaps in the house someone has set a light in both windows,
looking at each other from opposite walls.
Then a beam can come in through one window and leave through the other.
Lighthouse light, sunset light.

The immateriality of the house becomes clear, the fact that it is just
general air that someone has earmarked
and which through care she is able to keep warm.

But perhaps there are two sitters around the table. Then the house closes.

But if someone is sitting at the table alone,
we can go to her, behind her ears,
we can certainly go up close to her.
The radio is beside her on the table, and sometimes the programme is decades old,
as if the radio were so old that it can only produce its old broadcasts. But it is only a short journey
to the past, not even a short one; some awakening moment pushes a hat-pin
through the layers of the past, memory connects times with one another.

The quite special kind of sleep into which you fall as night comes in a homeward-bound
vehicle, in a fusiform shape that overtakes everything: a rising sun
that is setting.  Sleep arrives against the seat-back into which you sink, copying the force
of speed. The sense of speed has disappeared and all sense of place. It would press
you strongly into this seat, if you could feel it. Now you have to fall asleep. All reason has been
shaken out of the nocturnal world. The thing which encloses you is just an immaterial jewel
or cloud. As sleep approaches the plane begins to take quiet, wide steps in the moonlight;
no longer in the sky – now you are journeying on the forested island. The night is black but blue
at its centre. Nothing is to be heard. Somewhere in the sky however there may be clouds, and
                                                                                                                                  in them thunder,
like claws in a paw!

A catalogue of catalogues

In the alphabet you only reach the letter n,
there is so much to tell if you want to tell it all,
even if you let the thought be a generous rake,
a swipe, an electron microscope that barely distinguishes
a grain of sand. Even if you were to journey from one constellation to the next and make
arcs across the sky, named a few animals,
allowed the nameless, almost bursting thought
to represent everything, left the sentence unfinished like a declaration
of love, plants, everything scented, you do know.

All of that. A couple of children examined the beach enthusiastically, its
sandy and stony zones, at one point someone found such
a large fossil that he did not want to know anything about it.
The intention was to turn every stone. When the wave walked
to the shore, new stones licked by it. The tip of the headland and
steep slopes either side, seagulls, a white-tailed eagle,
barking jaws. When they found the mouth of the cave,
the beach and the sun were left entirely. They walked
for kilometres inside the porous rock, opened
the cave with their torch.

Do I know anything about what is really happening?
In the middle or the edges, wherever at all
on the chart, or in myself. A great cave is dug.
A poisonous stream is dammed. Furious calculations.
Immaterial value is born. The earth does not bear it,
at some points it collapses inward.
Water steams, water falls, water flows, but not eternally.
For the moment we may sit together and see
water become water.

The breakwater

I t  s o  h a p p e n e d  that they sat on the roof of the boat and arched
over the water in their delight, the sea carried them somewhere. The boat was
light to steer and understood like a horse; they were able to
lean, laugh and become drunken. There are no words for this.
The surface so steep that eyes had to be closed, the tender core
that splits almost immediately, for example humility.

Slow sounds break the water like long oars, and the long
ship slips forward. Enormous oars hit the water far away,
travel just below the surface, are lifted, drip,
are jerked backwards. Steady, narrow, powerful oars.

H o w  d o  y o u  read it? From top to bottom? Toward the centre?
A quite unnoticeable jolt. A grey heron was here, stepping, and now it is similarly reflected
in the calm water. What happened? Perhaps it was a change of phase.
After that things begin in reality, now that they can command themselves
from their own new place, act accordingly. Joy is great. Has illness vanished?
Cruelty has vanished. Has the challenge communicated by a direct gaze disappeared?
You laugh at me and laugh at everything at which I do not laugh.

B u t  f o r  e x a m p l e  there is joy in stone, and in water. And when taken by surprise,
shaking off and stepping into your new place, you have been caught again.
Both demons and animals keep pushing Man, and angels as well,
constantly some burr grabs your hair, your sleeve on a tree-stump,
your glove falls, a window opens outwards,
a hare comes in through a gap in the wall and a bird flies out through the roof.
Music reels out the thread of time behind it.
The gaze is already in the eyes and they are already tuned together, very clumsy
all attempts. The oar hits the water vertically, the water spatters.
The branch sways. But time does not leave even one of us.

How dangerous it is to travel the world and let every stranger
tell the truth, and expect far too much from song, which unites human voices;
behave as if you had just come before the sphinx.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Poems from Sanaliekki äänettömyydessä. Valitut runot 1980–2006 (‘Word-flame in silence. Selected poems 1980–2006’, WSOY, 2011)

You are beautiful
light-cupola-ecstasy of the eye

I look at you
from I-silence

daughter, bringer of the Word

involvement has been inscribed
with the name’s black reed

Girl, salt-grain of light
the mighty river of blood rinses memory,

otherness has come through us

If there were
              willow-weaving light,
likeness
              if there were
You would be a cloud in my lap,
              if the day of de-parting
were not

You’ll be bare soon,
          weeping’s clothes
will be given you

You’ll be clean soon,
          hoarfrost’s woman
will be yours

Then nuptials ice-music
then forest’s coniferous convoy

empty, black root-bed

A person is left his silent
          Autumnlight-eyed
speechless spouse

The century with its
          light handwriting
bids you farewell

April’s wagon drove into the yard.

I was born, a human head on my shoulders,
          the loon’s cry in my mouth,
wearing the bloody coat of the apostate.

The driver has my memory.
The womb’s wild dusk in his eyes.

From Huuto ja syntyvä puu (‘Scream and a tree being born’, WSOY, 1994)

The summer night is muddy-yellow
A stone in shallow water
You sleep in broken bird-shell-clothes
Word-flame in silence

  Here, on the other side of you where the silk-grebe presses its head into dazzling,
there are always two in silence.

That I didn’t have a name to call you. Light’s impala, wake her softly.

  The days are short, windy series. Drift into their chronologies. In the bay, a genus-less bird
slurs the name of an ancient lake. Anc anc, anc

  I am written into the register of the dead.

  You extended the vessel in which was root and the copper line of the horizon. You had the head of birds. You were dead.
There was nothing else. Dry boulder field, mound of sleep-rocks from which a lake had risen. A lake whose name is the mussel’s name.

  An old man walked the ash heath. I didn’t make it. He was far away. Almost on the edge.

And the black spruce copse grows into the eyes
And the dust-shoe dances, star-clasp

And the hare drives the carriage of metempsychosis
There’s a stone in the carriage, moon and metacarpal
and sleep and copper and water

From Valkoinen kirja (‘White book’, 2006)

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah