00-tal - Finland-Swedish issue

The Swedish literary quarterly 00-tal has just published a Finland-Swedish issue. According to one claim on the internet, Finland-Swedish literature is often met almost with silence in Sweden. If this is indeed the case, it is a pity. Because two Finland-Swedish prose authors are publishing new novels this autumn.

This is significant because Finland-Swedish literature has always had more of a reputation as a literature where poets abound. Even short stories were part of the canon, but Finland-Swedes often used to complain that they had no real novelists. The situation has changed gradually over time, but it is nevertheless encouraging that Kjell Westö (pictured) and Monika Fagerholm will be adding Finland-Swedish novels to the pile this year. There will also be recent poetry by Tua Forsström.

Another interesting feature in this issue is a questionnaire where major Swedish authors are asked about their favourite Finland-Swedish writer. And Merete Mazzarella describes the breakthrough of radical prose.

See also in this blog: The book harvest

Mare Kandre: "Bübin's Offspring" - excerpt

Mare Kandre published Bübins unge in 1987, at the age of 25. Previously, she had published two collections of prose-poetry. This was her first novel. But even here, the book was split up into short sections, almost resembling prose-poems, although there is now a plot to follow. I have divided these sections by an asterisk here, to save space. The photo is from roughly the same time as the novel was written, and was used as the cover of the Swedish literary magazine 00-tal, published in 2006. 00-tal had already published a Mare Kandre issue back in 1993, but this 2006 one was a memorial issue.

In her overview of Kandre's work, Helena Forsås-Scott describes the novel as follows:

"Here the first-person narrator is again a young girl. She is living with a woman and a man known as Bübin and Uncle, but these characters fade away as the central character’s physical growth and development begin to command all attention. As the central character begins to menstruate, the landscape becomes increasingly surreal, the grass standing to the height of tall reeds and the stalks of the nettles growing to the thickness of the trunks of young trees. In the midst of these threatening transformations, the central character now finds herself alone but for the Kid, who suddenly appears as the embodiment of the adolescent’s sense of split and alienation, small and innocent and cosseted by the adults as long as they have remained, the Kid becomes the butt of the confusion and anger raging in the older girl. The torture and killing of the Kid, presented as prerequisites for the adult phase of the central character’s life, convey the extent of the plight of the adolescent girl in this powerful text."

Bübin’s Offspring

Mare Kandre

Summer has arrived –
 In the sun everything is kindled and hard.
 The trees are billowing sweetness, flies; the earth is silent; the wind stirs the bushes, the dense berry patches, up out of the grass, forcing the junipers up against the wall.
 The tall grass reaches up to my thighs.
 I’m standing far down, as if in deep water, and pushing aside the trees, pushing aside the bushes.
 Because every day you go deeper into the narrow tunnel.
 The colours become ever more muted. Sounds are muffled by the yellow water.
 It comes nearer. It’s not as if the world is getting smaller, no: you’re going inwards, downwards, into the belly of the great heat –
 You can hear stones splitting deep in the earth.

*

It’s Uncle, Bübin and me!
 It’s just us –
 You can’t really say what it’s like. I walk back and forth in the tall grass under the trees, moving the dry stones around distractedly with my foot.
 Bübin’s face is shiny and greasy with sweat. I’m thinking about Uncle. In my ear I can hear a dry white sound, as if something is unfolding inside my head –
 I go inside, sit with Bübin, I think the same strange hard thoughts over and over again –
 It’s here; it isn’t here –
 The stones lie wet and upturned behind me in the grass where I have walked, the dark side upwards. You can see where I have been. The evenings are falling ever later –
 Then I go up to my room and sit on the bed, exhausted by all the heat, and can hear Uncle moving about in the room next door, heavy and groaning, as if he is dragging a large dead body back and forth across the floor.

*

Before summer came the trees stood grey and separate, a long way into June, July, as if it daren’t go there, not yet in bloom and withered like me!
 The stones sat deep in the frozen earth, impossible to budge, and everything was wide open on account of the dry, yellow light, forced up and yellowed.
 I stood at the well in my black coat.
 Bübin could see me from the kitchen window. The road down to the village was blown bare and cleansed. I walked, my body hunched with cold. A few berries, frozen black still clung to the bushes. The cold grew more intense. The stones cracked –
 This was before we got a pump.
 There was water in the well –
 It was the fault of the water.
 It was when Uncle grew worse and something happened to his eyes, as there was something that would not grow pure.
 Yes, we prayed so hard and powerfully in the evening that the prayers left a deep cavity behind in our sleep, but nothing was clarified.
 I became ill and lay in bed next to Bübin.
 My head was burst open by sweat in her large hand, and I slept a hard, crazy and yet permeable sleep, right across the whole spring.
 I could hear Bübin walking in and out of the room, morn and night, but it wouldn’t loosen its grip on me. She would feel my closed face, and I calmly slept the fever out of my body, until the frost had left the ground like a thin, yellow smoke, and I emerged out of closed darkness, thin and worn –
 My skin had grown taut.
 I knew nothing about the world, no: I sat on a stool in the garden, wrapped up in Bübin’s shawls, and would grow faint and dizzy from just nothing at all!
 Everything around me was undeveloped and dead.
 But the grass stiffened, blade by blade –
 Soon sprang up out of the frozen earth.

*

In the middle of the day, when it was hardest to walk around in the hot air, I am unwillingly following Bübin down to the village to shop –
 As soon as we have started to walk between the low, silent wooden houses it grows dark, raw from the damp and the smells.
 Bübin is walking in front. I am forced to run after her breathlessly to keep up with her, as if I was afraid she would leave me, be lost.
 The houses stand a long way down into the ground, huddled together in a little hollow, and nothing can be heard, we pass no one.
 It’s the large, black timbers of the houses that make everything so quiet. The forest pushes in. The village is slowly sinking into the blackish grey ground, house by house, I am wading through dung and filth and the smells make me dizzy and woozy, I have to push hair in mouth and keep on chewing.
 The houses are leaning –
 I run after Bübin out onto the market place and exhale the sour air. There we stand. I immediately grow light, the dizziness leaves my body.
 An old woman is selling fish from large barrels, a tree with a black, sparse crown is growing here, wild and fumbling, as if it wants to leave, straight upwards and at once Bübin places two fish in my empty basket.
 We walk between the various stalls –
Everyone knows who Bübin is, she fills my basket with pale, bitter greens, no larger than unripe fruit or stones, as nothing can grow to become sweet and big in the soil around the village, it simply lies there silent and hardened in the meagre shade under roots and grass.
 Then we go off to a house on the market place and Bübin enters.
 I wait outside with the full basket. I have not yet seen Ildre and Dordi. I sit on my hunkers and draw flowers in the soil –
 Further down, a door to one of the old-fashioned houses suddenly opens.
 Two men are carrying out a small, light coffin between them. Three women come out. I squat there with my fingers in the soil, watching –
 The black tree begins to bend right away: agitated, afraid. I get a dead, harsh taste in my mouth, and the houses stand there dogged and small around the square, the trees stand and sway, it smells, and I want Bübin to come back right away!
 I can hear people sitting in the cramped houses, but can’t make out what they are saying. The men, the three women, all look down at the ground in shame –
 I turn around and see Bübin coming out of the house, slowly, and with renewed vigour in her step.
 A pale child’s face pops up in the overgrown window, but glides away again –
 I snatch my basket and run after Bübin, up out of the village.

*
Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

Elo Viiding: "Mothers' Day"

Here is the poem Mothers' Day by Elo Viiding, which takes an ironic look at the way mothers are treated politically and socially by public figures full of assumptions and expectations, and is also about the physical side of bringing up children. It was first published in this translated version in an occasional English issue of the Swedish literary magazine 00-tal.

Viiding is just old enough to have have consciously experienced both Soviet and post-Soviet life. But even in post-Soviet Estonia, things are not perfect. Viiding is very much a poet of social comment and observation, whatever the political system of the country. Maybe this poem can be regarded as a kind of anti-Whitmanic rant:

Mothers' Day

On Mothers' Day every child should sing
and give its mother flowers and prime ministers think
that every mother wants to be honoured
and all prime ministers dream
that all women who aren't mothers
will feel simply feel rotten
more rotten than ever before
so the government gives mothers
special advantages
and passes a law on parental salaries

all teachers believe that every mother can be bothered
on Sunday morning at ten o'clock
to come to the Mothers' Day Concert
and every mother regards herself as part of
the social group "mothers"
and every mother is childishly insulted if no one sings for her
or people get annoyed at brutal selfishness of her children
more than about the beautiful two-facedness of society
so that you should be nervous on stage in front of all those mothers
in front of page-boy styled mothers and mothers in hats
and mothers with metallic finish cars
and mothers with nylon handbags and mothers with carrier bags
and mothers with Saint Laurent shadowed eyes
enterprising hawk-eyed single mothers and ostrich housewives
and the few clever fathers who stand at the back of the hall
because they're not allowed to sit they are men and today the mothers are sitting

because it's so nice so nice to sing to complete strangers
do you know your mother's heart
on Sunday morning ten o'clock in the stuffy hall to the gurgle of gastric juices
because if we don't sing to the mothers
they will all die off
not from a lack of sleep or hunger for sex
but because we ruined Mothers' Day for them
and we will have a bad conscience
so bad that we can never return to society

the prime minister thinks
that every mother has a heart of gold
on a chain around her neck
that every mother has read child psychology
that every mother is well acquainted with gender release and with the child's father
that every mother lives in a centrally-heated flat with hot and cold running water
that every mother is a Hansa Bank customer and dreams of obtaining a loan
that every mother wears tracksuit bottoms at home and is slimming
that every mother is happy and every mother ready for motherhood
that postnatal depression is a mere trifle compared with the greater joy
which will come in twenty years' time when life has become six times more expensive

that every mother is healthy and strong and can manage life without moonshine
that every mother has a stable nervous system and avoids injections
that every mother knows at least in the sixth month that she is pregnant
that every mother is older than eighteen years of age
that every mother loves little children
that every mother is a good boss to her children
that every mother sticks her children on the front page of Women's Own
at the first opportunity
that every mother takes her children to some children's activity
don't let them fucking-well play with those young criminals in that sand-pit
that every mother gives her children vegetables and boiled beef for lunch
that every mother has got on damned well in life
and has not been warped by police thrillers on TV
that every mother has a retired grandfather and a grandmother who dandles the children on her knee
so that she doesn't ever have to put it in the crèche as people usually do

that every mother is in fact a human being and every mother is a woman

and that every mother dreams of nothing else but becoming a mother
that every mother takes part in the family forum on the net
that every mother has something to give her child
that every woman regards her offspring as her primary duty
that every woman lives for others and never for herself
that every woman wants to serve her country and her people
that every woman wants to get up early in the morning
that every woman can be bothered to wake up six times a night
that every woman has a bad conscience if she can't produce enough milk
so necessary for the immune system take a look at the scientific research
which divides children up into breast-fed ones and sick ones
that every woman conceives naturally and that every woman is fertile
that every woman wants to give birth in a maternity home
that every woman manages to combine a career with motherhood
that every childless woman regards her life as empty and incomplete
that every woman rushes headlong to buy a pregnancy test
when the right time comes when the biological clock rings relentlessly
she grabs the first best reasonably suitable father
that every woman only wants to talk about her pregnancy
that every woman afterwards wants to teach the non-pregnant
that birth is a special experience not especially unbearable pain
that the three months after birth need to be got used to
that pregnancy isn't an illness, just simply a natural state of affairs
that hormonal changes don't affect our psyche that much
that hormonal changes are sometimes even enjoyable

that every woman likes her primary biological function
that every woman's behaviour is governed by her primary biological function
that every woman's existence is governed by her primary biological function

that every woman thinks of this as a trifling problem
if anyone makes a big thing about motherhood
which is so natural
then every problem is, believe you me,
easy to solve by the government and the mothers themselves

that every supermarket wants
that children honour their mothers
make your mother happy and give her something cheap
something which costs less than 500 crowns
because your mother deserves it
because of you dear child don't buy wrinkle cream
but load some yoghurt, cornflakes or muesli
into your shopping basket
go and ask her for those 300 crowns gift money
and buy her a nice rejuvenation emulsion
every mother enjoys the bargain prices around Mothers' Day
and doesn't pay the January rent because of Christmas presents

and every child wants to say thank you
for its existence
a childishly guilty thank-you
and wants say
to the prime minister
thank you that I'm alive

every mother wants to be sublime and noble
and feel that a child's life depends on her
every mother wants to be selfless and not to belly-ache
every mother manages to cope
whenever she wants don't forget whenever she wants
and every mother believes that those who aren't mothers
should be obliged to feel bad about it
because they have nobody simply nobody who in their old age
will treat them as well as they do now
in a word to pay them back for their trouble
you should always live with recompense in mind
you should always expect recompense

thanks to mothers

as soon as every woman reads women's literature and dreamy prose
as a time of peace arrives dear people
as no one has claims any more
as we are many and we have plenty of serotonin and endorphine
as we all get under one another's feet and jump for joy thanking god
as no one gets irritated any longer or drive people to despair
then our dear mothers will have fulfilled their mission

and even women writers will get their just rewards
when they have children and when when they are nicely buried
when their creative endeavours are good beautiful and safe
and when they agree nicely with their readers
or when they suddenly become children's writers
when they are finally steered onto the right way
when they are translated into several languages
and invited to attend seminars
in whose breaks you can eat a sausage roll
and drink coffee from a plastic cup

even the prime-minister knows
that no woman any longer reads poetry
especially that which is inhuman and subversive to society
and for which no prizes or medals are given
and especially if it is written by quasi-women
and especially when they do it well
yet no one of us can admit it, let's be honest
better write or do something useful

what, let them think for themselves, come on, time to guess yourself

On Mothers' Day every child should sing
and give their mothers flowers and prime-ministers know
that mothers are the only ones who listen to their speeches
because they are mothers

***
Translated from Estonian by Eric Dickens