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.

Gösta Ågren. Photo: Studio Paschinsky

Back in the day, in one of our periodic excursions into merchandising – the main criteria were that our goods should be flat (to fit into an envelope) and, of course, literary – we printed Books from Finland t-shirts. They were wildly popular – we must have sold, oh, dozens of them – and top of the list was a shirt with a laconic couplet by Gösta Ågren: ‘Don’t worry / it will never work out.’

Writing in Swedish and hailing from a small village in Ostrobothnia, in the far north-west of Finland, Ågren (born 1936) is the author of poems, essays and biographies. He may often choose to adopt the persona of a country curmudgeon, but the laconic tone of his poems belies a tenderness, a universalism, and an underlying political commitment, that speaks of a love of the world, a desire to make it into a better place.

The volume from which these poems are taken, Jär (‘Here’, 1989), won the Finlandia Prize for Literature in 1989.

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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.

Jarkko Laine. Photo: Kai Nordberg

Our archive find this week is ‘The 101 year anniversary celebration’, a short story by Jarkko Laine.

‘Child of Marx and Coca-Cola’, ‘Nordic beatnik’, Jarkko Laine (1947-2006) published his first work, a volume of poetry entitled Muovinen Buddha (‘Plastic Buddha’) in the 1960s and was immediately hailed as the mouthpiece of his generation. He went on to make his career as a literary all-rounder – poet, writer, playwright, translator, long-time editor of the literary magazine Parnasso and chair of the Finnish Writers’ Union. His wryly ironic story, ‘The 101 year anniversary celebration’ tells the story of what every writer must dread: a guest appearance in a local library where literature from the local town, let alone further afield, is regarded with suspicion.

We’ve also unearthed a 1989 interview, by our late, genial editor-in-chief Erkka Lehtola with a grey-suited Laine who looks more like a civil servant than a 1960s radical – but still doesn’t let a day go by without writing.

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues apace, with a total of 360 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Tua Forsström. Photo: Mao Lindholm

Some weeks the digitisation project turns up material we’ve all but forgotten about; other times it’s like greeting an old friend. The poet Tua Forsström’s voice belongs in the second category: quintessentially feminine, wise, simultaneously vulnerable and strong, she is a quiet, watchful observer of everyday life, fixing the chimerical, the evanescent not with, it seems, but between, the words of her poems. This extensive selection of poems is introduced by her friend and fellow poet, Claes Andersson.

Born in Porvoo in 1947, Forsström publishes rarely. She won the Nordic Council Literary Prize in 1998 with Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland häster (‘After having spent a night with horses’, 1997). Her breakthrough into the English-speaking world came in 1987 with her sixth collection, Snow Leopard (Snöleopard), which was translated into the English by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe Books. We’ve featured her work regularly, including her most recent collection, En kväll i oktober rodde jag ut på sjön (‘One evening in October I rode out on the lake’, Söderströms, 2012), with an introduction by Michel Ekström.

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The digitisation of Books from Finland continues apace, with a total of 358 articles and book extracts made available online so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Down by the sea: Herbert Lomas in Aldeburgh. – Photo: Soila Lehtonen

‘People do not read translations to encourage minor literatures but to rediscover themselves in new imaginative adventures‚’ says the poet and translator Herbert Lomas in this essay on translation (first published in Books from Finland 1/1982). ‘Translation is a thankless activity,’ he concludes – and yet ‘you have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.’ And how do Finnish and English differ from each other, actually?

Any writer’s likely to feel – unless he’s a star, a celebrity, a very popular and different beast – that the writer is a necessary evil in the publisher’s world, but not very necessary. How much more, then, the translator from a ‘small’ country’s language.

Why do it? The pay’s absurd, you need the time for your own writing, it’s very hard to please people, and translation is, after all, the complacent argument goes, impossible. I’m convinced by all these arguments, and really I can’t afford to go on; but I don’t regret what I’ve done and, looking back, I can find two reasons for translating Finnish writing, one personal, the other cultural.

The personal first. Poetry is also what is found in translation, or perhaps I should say in translating. I never truly feel I’ve understood a Finnish poem till I’ve made a version of it. Then I’ve discovered the poem. Moreover, in inventing a language – what I think the poet might have said if he’d been working in English himself – I’m extending my own range: I’m being led not only to think and feel things I shouldn’t otherwise think and feel, I’m articulating thoughts and feelings for myself in words I shouldn’t otherwise command. I’d like to think that a reader, in the creative act of reading, taking the words off the page into his imaginative life, experiences something of this too.

Yeats thought people should put on masks. They should dramatise themselves in roles that are not ‘natural’ to them. If a man is a dreamer, say, he should try to impersonate a man of action (a publisher, for instance).

That is why Yeats became an Irish Senator for a painful while. Far from being ‘untrue to himself’ – whatever his ‘self’ may be (the self becomes more and more elusive the more you look for it) – he will be discovering potential selves that might otherwise simply lie asleep, never able to wake up into human existence.

This is surely one of the main pleasures of reading – as well as of writing.

To translate is to put on a mask and to find a self you did not know you might have. It’s generally a pleasurable experience. You have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.

I first began to translate in a purely amateur way, for pleasure. I was intuitively reaching for the experiences I’ve just been describing – wanting to find my own Finnish personality, wanting to see what the Finnish author would be like if he were an Englishman or woman. Well – up to a point: what kind of a personality emerges in this exercise? Actually something quite new something that would otherwise not exist. In these solitary theatricals one actually does become creative: it’s not merely a job of transposition. It’s a job of invention: in each poem you have to invent a new personality.

Crucial decisions are being made with every word. English has a much larger vocabulary than Finnish (the Oxford English Dictionary has 500,000 words, the Nykysuomen Sanakirja 180,000) though I suspect Finns use a larger vocabulary in ordinary speech. If you look up a word in a Finnish-English dictionary, there are several choices given, but probably none of these will do. Translations made out of a dictionary would be sheer banality. Moreover, your Finnish poet, confronted with the larger English word-hoard, would have made a very individual choice of nuances. You have to develop a strong feel for his creative tendency to be able to intuit which particular flavours and tints would tickle his fancy, above all which particular combinations and juxtapositions of words he would relish.

There are many differences between Finnish and English. Leaving aside for the moment the extraordinary disparity between Teutonic syntax and Finno-Ugrian syntax, the vocabulary alone puts you into a different climate and weather. Vowels are musical notes and Finnish is full of vowels.

Consonants are noises – and English is full of consonants. Finnish words are all stressed on the first syllable. English words simply alternate stressed and unstressed syllables – and the word may begin with unstress or stress. Finnish lends itself to dactyls. Dactyls have never been much at home in English. Most English poetry is written in iambs, with trochees coming second, a few anapaestic poems, usually not very good; and not even Hiawatha, imitating the Kalevala, resorted to the dactyl. But Finnish words are all Finnish – either invented from existing roots or naturalised beyond recognition.

Most languages have a word like gramofon or telefon: Finnish has levysoitin (‘plate-sounder’) and puhelin (from puhua meaning to speak and an ending that implies an implement). Even words like kaupunki (which comes from a Scandinavian word for ‘market town’, köping) have become so Fennicised that their origin seems amazing. There are exceptions: the word pankki bears an obvious relation to ‘bank’; but ‘pankki’ sounds like something you might play with; ‘bank’ sounds like something that might stop you dead or run you over like a tank. English is a hybrid language that revels in its hybridness: blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables rub shoulders with 
polysyllabic Greek conglomerates, reeking of ancient Athens, Frenchified loan-words from over the Channel, and senatorial or ecclesiastical Roman naturalised citizens.

All this is embedded in a syntax where the subject comes first, or you don’t know it’s the subject, and the object comes after the verb, or you don’t know it’s the object. Whereas Finnish loathes to put things in such a stereotyped order and employs fifteen cases in order to confuse not only foreigners but the tongues of its own native speakers. I think Finns speak slowly, not only because their words are long and mellifluous, and because they have been taught never to speak without thinking, but because getting their teeth round their Ciceronian sentence-structure is no joke.

So the problem is: if you’re going to translate faithfully, you must get as far away as possible from the original syntax. Take a deep breath and produce a new poem. What you actually produce always has an element of luck in it. At another time and in another place you would almost certainly produce something different. All this sounds very unprofessional because unsystematic. Nevertheless it’s an awareness that’s essential to professionalism. Like any writer, you’re always in a new context and never satisfied with what you do.

I’d like to illustrate some of the interesting questions by comparing two versions I did of a poem by Eeva-Liisa Manner. Let me say I’m not satisfied with either. It’s a poem about an unusual state of consciousness, tragic in feeling, but not without humour, even a touch of quaintness. Tone then – and tone and atmosphere are enormously important components sometimes not sufficiently considered in translation, or even in original writing – is a very delicate and essential ingredient in the poem: something, of course, you can’t get out of a dictionary or a grammar book. This poem is about an out-of-the-body experience, and anticipation and preparation for death; the lightness of touch seems to me remarkable: the wit is metaphysical.

One day I passed out of my body
              and went into the other room to look at the clock.
It was going like a mechanical heart.

Back there my body was still
 breathing and the heart was still
 pulsing
like a clock that would tick for a
 certain time.

I went back into my body and gave my mind to the experience.
This heart too's getting tired, all
 clocks get tired,
now it's throbbing still in my wrist
knocking on my ribs, that ark-shaped
 coffin.

I want to be away, on another journey, into other boats

whose curved ribs I haven't carved myself
in life's bowl of blood.

I must have thought this was all right, as I did put it forward for publication in Books from Finland in 1978; but when I wanted to include it in my book Territorial Song I wasn’t satisfied. So I produced this.

One day I passed out of my body 
              and went into the next room to check the clock.
It was going like a pacemaker.
Back there my body was breathing still, the heart still pulsing

like a clock wound to tick for a fixed time.

I re-entered my body and studied the experience.
This heart too's tiring, all clocks tire,

it's throbbing now, still, in my wrist,

knocking on my rib-cage, that
 ship-shaped coffin.

I want to be off, on another trip, aboard other boats

whose curved rib-cages I haven't carved myself

in life's bumper of blood.

This is much more matter-of-fact. Both versions are possible developments from the original: the problems are no longer in the original but in the possibilities of choice in English. In the first I got a slight jingle of sound with ‘look’ and ‘clock’; in the second I replaced this with ‘next’, ‘check’ and ‘clock’ – an intensification of sound, therefore slightly more ‘poetic’ but not losing, I hoped, that touch of prosiness that authenticated the experience. In the next line ‘mechanical heart’ becomes ‘pacemaker’ – a more technical term; again, I hoped, authenticating; but losing, too, some of the emphasis on the paradox of the flesh and machinery, both like and unlike. In the next line I cut out the words ‘and’ and ‘was’, two small changes that completely alter the rhythm of the line – and thus of the whole poem: each tiny change alters the whole structure. Later a repetition of ‘gets’ is cut out, altering the rhythm, and the complete absence of the word ‘get’ makes the poem less colloquial: ‘getting tired, all clocks get tired’ becomes ‘tiring, all clocks tire’. Later on I introduced more colloquialism to compensate: ‘I want to be away on another journey’ became ‘I want to be off, on another trip’.

The rib-cage, in the first version, is described as an ‘ark-shaped coffin’; the second version has ‘ship-shaped coffin’. Neither will quite do: it probably should be the duller ‘boat-shaped coffin’, after all. I suspect Eeva-Liisa Manner was thinking of a ferry-boat like Charon’s. I was probably being a bit self-indulgent with ‘ark-shaped’ – I did think Miss Manner might have been similarly tempted. The Finnish word arkku, meaning a coffin, was sufficiently like, for me, the word arkki, meaning an ark like Noah’s and I didn’t want to lose the imaginative association.

‘Ship-shaped’ has overtones of something too neat for the needs of the soul: when I was doing my second version, that seemed relevant – I liked the idea; now I don’t. Another indulgence: ‘bumper’ does mean something you drink out of – it also can suggest the bumping of the heart. It’s touch of wit not in the original – but one in line, I feel, with Manner’s art. I think it’s fair. Weil, this is a translation I’m still not satisfied with – though I don’t wish to disown either version.

All this is very interesting for the translator. What a marvellous hobby! But what has this got to do with the reading public? Not much, one is inclined to think. The reader tends to be innocent. This is what the original is – and either he likes it or he doesn’t. What he thinks he likes or doesn’t like is the original author – although in fact it may be the translator. People in England believe they like or dislike Dostoyevsky, not Constance Garnett. Of course, when we compare translations from different ages – Chapman’s Homer, Pope’s Homer and the Penguin Homer – we realise how much of what we are responding to may be E.V. Rieu, or Pope, rather than Homer.

Without translation there wouldn’t be any English literature. The Elizabethans consciously began by translating – or ‘imitating’, as they called it then – meaning rather free translation, often a new and original poem paradoxically taken almost word-for-word from another language. The Tudor poets Wyatt and Surrey and the Elizabethans Sidney and Spenser wanted to have a poetry as good as that of the Italians.They wanted Ovid and Horace to speak like Englishmen and thus give us a longer tradition of gentility and civilisation. North’s translation of Plutarch was put onto the stage by Shakespeare, with surprisingly few changes, often, as in Antony and Cleopatra, in the very words of North.

Indeed, Shakespeare could conceivably be considered a translator himself, certainly an adapter – taking works in Latin or Italian and Englishing them into something new,
 but not all that new. Marlow’s Ovid helped to create Donne. This is how the language was not so much enriched as brought into being – and continued, as by Pope’s ‘Imitations’ of Horace in the eighteenth century. Don Quixote is not only a great figure in English literature, he practically begot the eighteenth century picaresque novel.

Translation, often so free as to be something new, has been an important, even central element in our literature right up to the twentieth century. It’s no longer so. Asked what is the place or opportunity for translation of minor languages into English at the present time, I’m tempted to say: almost none. There’ll always be people who want to translate because they find it an extension or an excitement to do so. There’ll always be minorities who want to explore, are keen and curious for new experiences – anxious to read what some translator of an exotic tongue can turn up for them.

But after a translator has performed a great labour of love and time, for a financial return that is ludicrous, considering the time and effort, what is the reward? Hardly a review or comment. A great silence proceeds, not only from the great British public, but from the small literary world. It’s very discouraging and makes the writer anxious to hurry back to his own work, which he has been perilously abandoning for so long.

Why this lack of interest? I think it’s because we’re late on in our culture, not at the beginning, like Wyatt and Shakespeare. There’s a surfeit of good work in English for people to read. What they want to read about – and what Shakespeare provided them with, even when he was translating – is themselves. The great adapters from foreign languages have always managed to make the works seem to be about Englishmen and their current problems. Horace seemed to be on the whole like a very intelligent and cultivated English gentleman, in spite of a few local pagan peculiarities. Julius Caesar and Hamlet on the stage were great English aristocrats, like Queen Elizabeth and Essex, give or take an occasional change of sex. Even the characters in Dostoyevsky were not too remote, in their conflicts, from the English people of Constance Garnett’s day. Dostoyevsky learned a great deal from Dickens – and there is still something very Dickensian about Dostoyevsky. (You might compare Marmeladov with Micawber.) The atmosphere’s Victorian, at least in Constance Garnett, and the religious anxieties are not too remote from those of a Ruskin or a George Eliot.

What I’m suggesting is that people read to experience themselves imaginatively: they want a new perspective on their own lives. People do not read translations to encourage minor literatures but to rediscover themselves in new imaginative adventures and revealing extensions of experience. If books from other cultures are to succeed in translation, it will not so much be because of their local colour, but because the problems and anxieties that the readers are experiencing in their own lives are illuminatingly developed in these translations too.

This article is based on a presentation given at the Finnish and Dutch Symposium in Holland in November 1981.

Illustration: Hannu Konttinen

For 41 years, from 1967 to 2008, Books from Finland was a printed journal. In 1976, after a decade of existence as not much more than a pamphlet, it began to expand: with more editorial staff and more pages, hundreds of Finnish books and authors were featured in the following decades.

Those texts remain archive treasures.

In 1998 Books from Finland went online, partially: we set up a website of our own, offering a few samples of text from each printed issue. In January 2009 Books from Finland became an online journal in its entirety, now accessible to everyone.

We then decided that we would digitise material from the printed volumes of 1976 to 2008: samples of fiction and related interviews, reviews, and articles should become part of the new website.

The process took a couple of years – thank you, diligent Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) interns (and Johanna Sillanpää) : Claire Saint-Germain, Bruna di Pastena, Merethe Kristiansen, Franziska Fiebig, Saara Wille and Claire Dickenson! – and now it’s time to start publishing the results. We’re going to do so volume by volume, going backwards.

The first to go online was the fiction published in 2008: among the authors are the poets Tomi Kontio and Rakel Liehu and prose writers Helvi Hämäläinen (1907–1998), Sirpa Kähkönen, Maritta Lintunen, Arne Nevanlinna, Hagar Olsson (1893–1979), Juhani Peltonen (1941–1998) and Mika Waltari (1908–1979).

To introduce these new texts, we will feature a box on our website, entitled New from the archives, where links will take you to the new material. The digitised texts work in the same way as the rest of the posts, using the website’s search engine (although for technical reasons we have been unable to include all the original pictures).

By the time we reach the year 1976, there will be texts by more than 400 fiction authors on our website. We are proud and delighted that the printed treasures of past decades – the best of the Finnish literature published over the period – will be available to all readers of Books from Finland.

The small world of Finnish fiction will be even more accessible to the great English-speaking universe. Read on!

Susanne Ringell. Photo: Anders Larsson

Dreams about and in the Eternal City. Leonard Cohen who plays a shanty by the Swedish poet Dan Andersson on the lute. The narrator of these prose poems gives birth to a daughter who is as small as a fountain pen, but perfect and just the right size – and she brings up a litter of puppies too.

This and much more is included in the wonderful new collection of prose poetry, Tärnornas station – en drömbok (‘The Lucia Maids’ station – a book of dreams’, Ellips, 2014) by Susanne Ringell (born 1955), one of the most personal voices in Finland-Swedish literature today. After an early career as an actress, she made her debut with a short story collection in 1993, and since then she has written short prose of different varieties, poetry, and plays. In Ringell’s work there is nothing amiss in the style and language, in the audacious combinations, in the chronicled sadness and the unwaveringly discrete humour. With fantastic clarity she approaches the most elusive of motifs, the deepest content of the soul, making it vivid and recognisable.

In one of the opening poems, the narrator experiences how alienation in one’s home town is interrupted by a streak of inclusion before the common obligation of sleep and dreaming: ‘In our most defenceless state we sleep ourselves nearer to one another, open and at rest we are not as entrenched as in the day when our limited will prevails, selects and deselects.’ Yes, when we are awake everything is more difficult, as the little girl with her burning candle at a school celebration on St Lucy’s Day, 13 December, experiences:

‘Once, when I was a little girl, I walked proud and glowing in the aisle for the school’s Lucia procession at the front of the grand hall. Once, when I was one of the little girls, I set fire to the actual Lucia’s blonde hair. I walked too close. I was too keen. / It was a mistake. /How do you walk closely but not too closely? How do you walk closely without making a mistake?’

The most important themes in Tärnornas station are perhaps just that, closeness and belonging. It grows from childlessness, a motif which has been strong throughout Ringell’s works, leading to the idea that a woman who is mother to no one can be mother to everyone. She who speaks sees her daughter everywhere, in all the Lucia maids she, with fond identification, observes around her. They also become a road to introspection, and to the reliving of relationships with her mother and other important older relatives. For those who have not reproduced, Ringells poems say, belonging is not self-evident. It has to be built up through the attentive reflection process that writing involves.

If this sounds abstract it is completely misleading. Ringell has an extraordinary eye for the concrete details, whether dreamed or real. This is her starting point when she creates a fictional world which feels completely familiar whilst at the same time being subject to its own laws. The boundaries between dream and reality, between internal and external, are fluid.

A large proportion of the poems occur during a trip to Rome and the stay in the city, at one time unknown and part of every normally educated westerner’s mental landscape, becomes a symbol of the narrator’s journey between dreams and memories, well known and unknown.

Translated by Claire Dickenson

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

Juha Kulmala. Photo: Kajaanin runoviikko, 2014

The Dancing Bear Poetry Prize (Tanssiva karhu -palkinto), founded by Yleisradio, the Finnish Broadcasting Company and worth €3,500, is awarded annually to a book of poetry published the previous year. In July, at a poetry festival – Kajaanin runoviikko – in the north-eastern town of Kajaani, it was given for the 20th time.

The winner was Juha Kulmala: his collection, entitled Pompeijin iloiset päivät (‘The merry days of Pompeii’, Savukeidas, 2013), is written in the vein of the ‘beat’ tradition of the poet’s home town of Turku; the landscape of the poems includes Finland and regions in Southern Europe.

The other finalists were Ville Hytönen, Harry Salmenniemi, Pauliina Haasjoki, Sinikka Vuola and Ralf Andtbacka. The prize jury, chaired by the poet Harri Nordell, chose the winner from almost 200 collections.

Yleisradio also awards a prize for the best poetry translation (Kääntäjäkarhu-palkinto) of the year, worth €1,100; this time it went, for the first time, to an anthology. Entitled 8+8. Suomalaista ja virolaista runoutta / Eesti ja Soome luulet (‘8+8. Finnish and Estonian poetry’, NyNorden, 2014) and edited by the Estonian poet and writer Eeva Park, the book contains poems by eight Estonian and eight Finnish poets, all published in Estonian and in Finnish, translated by twelve translators.

Aulikki Oksanen. Photo: Laura Malmivaara

On my wall at home are paintings given to me by the artist and poet Aulikki Oksanen. A watercolour from 1966 is a stylised depiction, a little in the manner of Modigliani, of a room with a girl by the window. In the background are a harbour and ships.

The work reminds me of the time when I got to know Aulilkki when we both moved in University Theatre circles and I visited her in the room shown in the painting. The flat was later the scene for Lapualaismorsian (‘Lapua bride’), a film which Aulikki (born 1944) took part in.

To me, with her blond, straight hair, she was like a beautiful, slender young filly, so I was not in the least surprised when her debut work included some enchanting horse symbolism. Her first book, an original, fresh collection of poems entitled Hevosen kuolema (‘Death of a horse’, 1966) gained immediate attention.

The musical, corn-blonde young woman was a multitalent who gained her spurs as a writer and poet, an artist, a singer and songmaker, even as a film star. But writing and literature seemed to be at the heart of her world. As a writer she found herself addressing feminism; after all, this was a time when the role of women was being discussed passionately and in a new way.

In one of Aulikki’s works which is in my possession, Madonna and child, the ‘child’ nestling against the mother’s middle is in fact, when you look closer, an adult, tiny, big-nosed man. The painting appears to show a disproportioned loving couple. Some time later Aulikki published her successful novel Tykkimiehen syli (‘The gunner’s embrace’,1968), a story of extremely difficult love. The book made her famous. The work was, in the opinion of a Swedish critic, as fresh in the context of the predominant Finnish realism as a lone cornflower in a field of rye.

Just such a field, with a grey barn and a couple of birch trees, appear in one of Aulikki’s small watercolours, in which the eye can just make out a pair of lovers hidden in the meadow. The watercolour is like an illustration to the songs which Aulikki was writing at the time. Among the finest of these are Puhu minulle rakkaudesta (‘Speak to me of love’), Hyvästi (‘Farewell’) and Sinua, sinua rakastan (‘You, you do I love’), that poem expressing simultaneously extreme suffering and extreme tenderness – has been voted the most touching Finnish love song.

Niin liikkuu pehmeä kätesi / kuin vene varhain aamuisella joella.
Like a boat on an early morning river / moves your soft hand.

The individual seeks his or her place in the world at a time that falls between the twentieth and thirtieth years of life. For us it marked an impassioned period, the cultural radicalism of the 1960s, when earlier values and ways of life were questioned. Life was extremely concentrated and pulsating. A huge amount of happenings and actions were contained in a single year. We knew no fear – there was no time even to consider such a thing. We provoked irritation and sometimes bloodthirsty spleen, but also admiration and gratitude when our contemporaries in Finland felt themselves to have been liberated from something heavy, outdated and stifling. Widely listened to, Aulikki’s songs were inspirational. At that time we began to be conscious of the world beyond the borders of Finland and even of Europe. The Vietnam War and the Third World fluttered before our eyes like a quickly opened fan.

Aulikki Oksanen’s poetry has become widely known as song lyrics. Her poems have been set to music above all by Kaj Chydenius, Henrik Otto Donner and Eero Ojanen, as well as Kerkko Koskinen and Tuure Kilpeläinen, composers of a younger generation. Aulikki herself has also written music for some of her poems.

The collection Helise taivas! Valitut runot 1964–2014 (‘Ring out, heavens! Selected poems 1964–2014’) demonstrates the breadth of the themes and techniques that have welled up in her work over the decades. The stylistic features range from one extreme to the other, from light songs to dark, fateful ballads and symbolic poetry. Sometimes the poems follow the rhythms and imagery of folk songs or pop songs (although they also wilfully vary them), sometimes the moving, unbroken rhythm, moving from one verse to the next, seems to well up directly from the innermost being of the author. The tone varies from shout to whisper, from battle-song to intimate lyrics, from world and universal catastrophe to homely warmth and intimacy.

As time goes by fiery, possessive love can become a fragile, tender image of two old apple trees, leaning against each other, and direct accusation of the wrongdoers of the world can become an exhortation to the heavens to throw the crystal chandeliers of its starry head towards the darkness so that even time might be ashamed of itself.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

 Extracts from the preface to Helise, taivas! Valitut runot 1964–2014 (Siltala, 2014), entitled ‘Aulikki Oksanen, lintunainen’ (‘Aulikki Oksanen, birdwoman’)

Illustration: Aulikki Oksanen

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

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

Johanna Venho (above) and Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen. Photo:

Jano (‘Thirst’) is the name for a new online magazine: according to the writers and poets Johanna Venho and Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen, its editors, it is a ‘poetry journal for all’ – for poets, the general public, for anybody.

Two issues have been published since November 2013. The theme of the first one is Time, of the second, Place.There are interviews, autobiographical texts, texts by critics and poets.

Jano features new thoughts about poetry and writing, texts by and about poets old or young, Finnish and foreign. The languages, so far at least, are Finnish and Swedish, depending on the language the writer writes in, but for our readers we pick a few samples here:

The poet Ilpo Tiihonen analyses reading poetry in an interview: ‘You can let prose take you on, just float along, whereas poems must be read as if standing up, constantly prepared to take a step to some direction. Either ready for coming or going. The posture while reading a poem differs completely from the reading of a long text. A poem requires activity, transience, ability to let oneself loose.’

For the poet Heli Laaksonen (who writes in her native dialect of the south-western Finland) reading her poetry in public is also what she does for living. In a text she calls her ‘monologue’ she notes that ‘this year of those who have come to interview me two had read any of my books.

‘The flimsiness of journalistic work may be just a selfish worry of an author, but can the quality of what’s currently published really satisfy the reader? A recent example: a journalist from an evening paper comes backstage ten minutes before a gig. He wants to write a personal profile. My mind is already occupied by the occasion at hand, in an even drearier space than usually. “Take a look at my homepage at least so you won’t have to pinch your information off Wikipedia.” “Haha, no Wikipedia needed, I’ve got this interview from this women’s magazine, I have three little questions here. How’s the renovation going on? I hear you don’t like cooking? Are you planning to have kids?” “I’m sorry but I have to go on stage now.” ’

The Icelandic writer and poet Kári Tulinius once chose to write a manifesto in which she condemned the material nature of art and literature. Text is difficult to destroy. ‘The human body decays and returns its molecules to the cycle of nature. The same cannot be said of the work authors leave behind. Their art and their writing were of great importance to their contemporaries, but nowadays they mostly occupy space in thoughts and in the real world. Everyone who has visited museum or library stores cannot but marvel at the incredible amount of cultural junk left behind by our foremothers and -fathers.

‘Write poems with water, let them decay, returning their molecules to the nature of the mind.’

Lars Huldén. Photo: Charlotta Boucht

The state of poetry in Finland has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. The focus of much of this attention has been so-called ‘experimental poetry’. Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that, in its ability to reshape and reinvent itself, contemporary poetry serves as a model for other forms of literature.

In such a literary climate, a writer like Lars Huldén might easily be overlooked, a writer whose poems give honest expression to thoughts and moods. This Huldén achieves in a manner that is at once recognisable and inventive. His poems are, perhaps, close to what many assume poems should be: concise speech expressing the wisdom of experience and often revealing a clear sense of resignation – which is hardly surprising when you have reached the age of 88.

Huldén has composed many different kinds of texts. Alongside poetry he has written songs, revue scripts and, in collaboration with his son, translated into Swedish the national epic Kalevala and many other works besides. He has lectured in Nordic literature and has worked extensively in the theatre and various organisations.

Those who know Huldén will expect humour, irony and sardonic asides. His new volume Inga stjärnor i natt, sir* (‘No stars tonight, sir!’) presents life as a sea journey, a cruise. ‘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.’

Transposing the traditional sea-journey metaphor on to a cruise ship is an effective and gently satirical trick: cruises have become trivial and mundane. At the very outset of the journey we meet ‘an old, old man’, who is never seen at the ship’s cabaret evenings or in the ballroom. All he wants to do is see the stars.

‘Before long, we’ll forget that there are stars in the sky,’ the eminent poet Paavo Haavikko once commented in an interview. This is precisely what has happened on the cruise, concentrating as it does merely on entertainment. Huldén’s critique is at its sharpest when he presents it subtly, almost by stealth. We have run away from fundamental elements, from nature. Without underlining matters, Huldén succeeds in pointing out that though the cruise ship offers lots of diversion, it is ultimately only a another way of running away from death, something none of us will escape.

At the end of the collection, Huldén convincingly links images of death to nature. He comments that from the window of a train running through fields of crops ‘you can see peculiar little islands, / sparsely covered with ash or aspen.’ The poem ends with the image of bails of burning straw, traditionally lit in the autumn ‘to the memory of our fathers’.

Huldén has written a great deal of dramatic lyrics for the theatre, so it is understandable that he wishes to give a clear warning of the destructive nature of our throw-away lifestyles. However, he is at his most impressive in apparently calm poems that seem to open up across an expansive landscape or time span.

Behind the mask of a resigned elderly man is the familiar old trickster who comes to warn us of confusing views from a train with those at sea, and who challenges us to write about things as they truly are – ‘if you dare’. That being said: ‘Poetry, by definition, has fled, / fled from things that / happen all the time.’

Huldén reminisces, dreams, ponders (ever)lasting love. We are left with the firm impression that he himself would flee no subject at all.

Translated by David Hackston

*) Inga stjärnor i natt, sir in Finnish: Ei tähtiä tänä yönä, sir (translated by Pentti Saaritsa, Siltala, 2013)