Tracks from My Album

Anni Sumari 

Tracks from my Album 

Translated by David McDuff and Sarka Hantula

Anni Sumari was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1965, and studied literature and media/communication studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, including Selected Poems (2006), The Years Above the Waters (2003), Train Play (2001), Sinerian (2000), and Measure and Quantity (1998), for which she won the Finnish National Broadcasting Company's Dancing Bear Prize for best poetry book of the year. She also received an artist's grant from the Finnish Ministry of Culture for 2004-2006. She is active in translation and editing, and her works have been translated into 24 languages including English, German, French, Swedish, Danish, Belorussian, Serbian, Macedonian and Italian,  Slovene and Hebrew. She was shortlisted for the Runeberg Prize, and in 2016 was elected Best International Poet of the Year by World Poets Quarterly Magazine (Multilingual) and the editorial department of Chinese Poetry Abroad). She was the first Finn to receive this meritorious award. She is a member of the Board of the Finnish PEN Center. She recently received an artist's grant from the Finnish Ministry of Culture for 2007-2011, and has edited and translated a book called Odin's Steed: The Scandinavian Myths, which has just come out in Finnish. She is the co-editor of The Other Side of Landscape, published by Slope. 

Anni Sumari's poems have been translated into English by David McDuff.

The sky, Swiss air space, December

  

We slide on the tray of noon,

we ski, we slalom on the expanse of the clouds.

On the plane’s wing it says: Do not step

outside this area,

I would never dream of it, I promise you,

anyway it’s cold out there, -65°C.

The snot runs, what joy

to be able to pick an anthrax sample

from one’s nose, I long for you! even

in the deep frost I can’t

concentrate on what is,

be where I am.

We are 

unquestionably at an altitude

of at least 11,880 metres.

That cloud is tall

for its age, the hairs on its crown

touch the angels of heaven. So

at night it’s the starry sky,

one must be thankful for that,

if on top of everything else one wasn’t

thankful, what would happen then?

Europe lies under an eiderdown

weary of those things that come

from the sky, from the blue, the bolts

the ribs of the clouds slamming down

into the divine comedy. 

Be quiet, be quiet, encyclopaedia.

The concepts burn your ears

as you don’t know what is behind them,

gratitude, freedom, love. Innocence

is a white house and an empty bottle,

are you wiser now. From above the rural landscape

is a threadbare suede coat

a moth-eaten stuffed reindeer, what else is

missing from this picture. The shadows of

the trails of jet planes ticking

over it. 

The earth’s face has always been hidden by plants

and encrusted with bivalves. Is it any wonder

that some of them were preserved, perpetuated

in stone or resin, marble, softness.

But is it possible

that even one portion of spaghetti Bolognese

will be preserved in any circumstances?

The mountains grow bearskin,

then turn to cinders,

the romantic beaches grow fossilized,

the messages vanish from the answering machine,

but the most haphazard one of the most tender things

preserves its form, remains, moves minds,

is put on display, receives its value by chance,

a nucleus of meaning. 

The granite flickers.

A human being wants to know

his exact location, approximately

by rule of thumb

the bedrock, and how long

a finger can be held in the candle flame

before it burns –

and if there is stone underneath

is there also stone on top? and what

meteor would fall

on my head, if I lived long enough? and

have I already lived beyond the moment when

I ought to have died?

and will I push my head

through the grey granite

even in the graveyard. 

But here is a surface 

which will not be breached: the horizon.

You can freely choose

an arbitrary point

anywhere on the globe,

and you will notice that all

gazes finally turn there.

Before that, however, they perform

an inconceivably complex

figure-dance at the fourth dimension

of the system of coordinates. 

Through the oval window

I watch us reach our goal.

I am not touched at all.

In the sunlight, seen from above,

the cities are broken mirrors

in which your memories

are distorted in reflection.

You clench your fist

you caress the emptiness.

The dead would do well

to weep for the living

and not the other way round

 translated from Finnish by David McDuff