Susanne Ringell - So Long, Marianne

I borrowed a typewriter from Susanne Ringell and her then boyfriend thirty years ago. So I thought I'd pay her back by saying a little about her and reproducing here the first scene of a radio play of hers, broadcast on Radio Vega last November-December and printed in the latest edition of Kontur, the literary insert in Ny Tid.

Ringell has also published poetry, including the recent book of prose-poetry Ryggens måne, Söderströms, 2009.

The play is gently absurdist, something that David touched on in his mention of her in the Swedish Book Review.

So, without further ado, here is my draft translation of Scene 1:

SO LONG, MARIANNE


by Susanne Ringell


A radio play


CAST


MARIANNE I - 17-year-old girl
MARIANNE II - in her 50s, played by a man

Anne - an older woman, over 70

Harold - in his forties, dad, played in English
Kim - Marianne’s American sister, played in English

A waitress
A girl’s choir
A chorus, in English


Set in the 1970s and the present day.
There is music.


SCENE 1

Rain. Music. (Zarah Leander: I’m standing here in the rain and waiting for you, only for you...) Rain. Music. (From the same song: I heard a clock strike, all too many strokes...) Footsteps pacing, another cigarette is lit, an umbrella that is put up by someone else. Two pairs of footsteps that walk round one another, the women’s footsteps impatient, nervous, the man’s calmer. Rain.


MARIANNE II
Are you...

MARIANNE I
No.

MARIANNE II
I think you are, you know.

MARIANNE I
Absolutely not, no, absolutely not.
(pause)How could I be?

MARIANNE II
I knew all the time it was you.

MARIANNE I
But I was meant to meet myself grown older.

MARIANNE II
Yes.

MARIANNE I
But... you’re a man!

MARIANNE II
Yes, That too. I’m also a man.

(pause)

MARIANNE I
Have you...?

MARIANNE II
No, absolutely no way! I’d never think of doing so.
(pause)
It was more something inside me, a broadening out, a new orientation. Perhaps it’s only an optical illusion. Don’t worry about it.
(pause)
You freezing?
I knew it was you all the time.
(pause)
That it was me.

MARIANNE I
Yes, you’ve got the better of me.

MARIANNE II
Not really.

MARIANNE I
You’re holding all the cards! I’m just an unshuffled pack, an almost unshuffled pack.

MARIANNE II
No, you aren’t.

MARIANNE I
No, I suppose I’m not.

MARIANNE II
Haven’t you in fact been shuffled away? Pretty well shuffled away?

MARIANNE I
When I arrived there, I was almost new. I was almost a new pack, I had played mostly with low cards.
(pause)
She broke my seal.
(pause)
It started out as a game. I thought it was a game, I thought I was in control.

MARIANNE II
I know.

MARIANNE I
But she ran away, everything ran away, everything became chaotic. She was no game. She was deadly serious. She was my first seriousness, and it crushed me, I became frightened. I became cruel.

MARIANNE II
You became unhappy. You were 17.

MARIANNE I
I am 17.
(pause)
Do you like me?

MARIANNE II
Hard to tell.
MARIANNE I
Tell me, honestly. I can put up with it.

MARIANNE II
No, you can’t. That’s just it. You think you can put up with anything, that you ought to put up with things and manage, that that’s what life and adulthood are all about.

MARIANNE I
But you do like me?

GIRLS’ CHOIR
Do you like me? Do you like me?
(pause)

MARIANNE II
You have my sympathy.
(pause)
Shall we share an umbrella? We can’t stay out here in the rain.

MARIANNE I
Why not?

MARIANNE II
Because you get wet.

The play centres around a young girl who visits a family in America. The play continues in a multi-voiced way, with several versions of Marianne, at various ages and during various decades, overlapping in their commentary of events.

I shall post the remaining scenes, one by one, assuming I get copyright permission from the author to do so.

Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

Nordic poetry blogs and info-sites

Young Ny Tid cultural journalist Emma Strömberg has written a lively article about poetry blogs in the Nordic languages, though mainly in her mother-tongue, Swedish. The first thing Strömberg confronts the reader with in this article published last month is her own prejudices:

"... I do feel ashamed at having a snobbish [fisförnäm] attitude to poetry. Because I want to keep poetry at a high standard, a rare dish, something of a luxury."

She therefore looks at poetry blogs with what I would regard a healthy scepticism. She continues:

"So I am approaching all of this with a firm view: I am as decided and immoveable as a rock, ready to accept proof of what I already know. That general poetry forums are, yes, simply full of shit."

No beating about the bush, though she somewhat softens her attitude later in the article. At first she pours out all her prejudices about poetry chatsites and blogs which are filled with naïve adolescent poetry, with clichés and catharsis. She does admit, however, that the internet does afford "the masses" a chance to participate in what risks becoming a dying art.

Emma Strömberg briefly reviews five poetry blogs:

poeter.se

This is an open forum with a relatively sober outlook. This open approach can, nevertheless, attract cyber-graffiti.

sockerdricka.nu

This open forum seems to concentrate more on layout than content. The name itself is ominous.

dikt360.se

This is an edited forum, which Strömberg says sometimes publishes interesting interviews. I (Eric) feel that this is perhaps the best and most comprehensive of these first three blogsites here, as it has a lot of reviews of poetry collections plus interviews.

litlive.se litlive.no litlive.dk

These three interlinked websites constitute a literary calendar about poetry events in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, respectively.

bloggskrift.blogspot.com

This one is where you can read and comment on texts from the first ever Finland-Swedish creative writing course carried out in the form of a blog. This website also gives further links to four Swedish-speaking literary associations in Finland: ones in Nyland, Åboland, Ostrobothnia and the umbrella organisation Finlands svenska littteraturföreningar.

*

These websites are, despite their various weaknesses, a good way of seeing what is being produced by way of poetry on the internet.

Elo Viiding

One of the most interesting contemporary Estonian poets is Elo Viiding (born 1974). Viiding comes from a literary dynasty. Her grandfather Paul Viiding (1904-1962) was a short-story writer. Her grandmother Linda Viiding (1906-2003) was a translator of Finnish literature. Her father was the major Estonian poet Juhan Viiding (1948-1995).

But despite all this, Elo Viiding stands out as an important poet in her own right.

Elo Viiding's poetry is often zany with strange jumps of associations, as you can even see from the titles of her collections below. Nevertheless, the subject matter of her poetry is commitment to society and its changes. She is often tongue-in-cheek, introducing a healthy dose of humour into her poetry. And, indeed, into her stories. She is not living in the ivory tower of æstheticism. She is pro-women's rights, but has a complex relationship with feminism. Indeed one of the articles on her blog from October 2008 is entitled "Conservative Feminism", where she discusses her attitudes to that phenomenon. One of her most amusing poems, which I myself have translated into English, is entitled "Mothers' Day". In it, Viiding mocks the rather patronising attitude of the Prime Minister who comes to open some Mothers' Day event. She also mocks the expectations of people who expect mothers to fit into a number of neat, rather twee, categories, plus being biologically programmed for the charms of motherhood.

Elo Viiding published her first collections under the pseudonym "Elo Vee". On her father's death, she took back the family name. Her first publication was the chapbook "Telg" (Axis; 1990) which formed part of what are known as "cassettes", i.e. groups of four or five chapbooks by different poets in a cardboard wrapper. After that, she published "Laeka lähedus (roughly: Proximity to Treasure; 1993), "Võlavalgel" (roughly: "In the Light of Debt"; 1995); "V" (idem; 1998, now as Elo Viiding); "Esimene tahe" (roughly: First Volition; 2002); "Teatud erandid" (Certain Exceptions; 2003) and "Selge jälg" (A Clear Trace; 2005). She has also published two collections of short-stories.

Those of you who read Estonian can consult her blog.

Elo Viiding has been translated into several languages, perhaps most of all by the exile Estonian Peeter Puide who, for instance, published translations of Elo Viiding's poetry in two recent issues of the Finland-Swedish cultural weekly "Ny Tid", a periodical which is examined in two other threads of this blog. Puide also translated a selection of her poems into Swedish. This is entitled "För en stämma" and appeared with the Ariel publishing house in 2004, a press that also produces the literary periodical "Ariel".

I myself published the English translation of the poem "Mothers' Day" in an English-language issue of the Swedish literary magazine 00TAL, and a few more of her poems in the Canadian Nordic and Baltic poetry anthology "The Baltic Quintet". I have also sent a short-story of hers to the Dalkey Archive Press in Illinois, for one of their occasional publications. This story mocks how patronising, well-off women used to come over from Sweden and used to lecture their Estonian "sisters" during Soviet times on how to be liberated from their husbands, while not understanding a thing about the material circumstances that governed the role of women in Soviet society - especially those married to poets. Elo Viiding saw this all at first hand as a teenager, when women translators and others visited her poet father, no doubt to name-drop back in Sweden, in the same way that exile Estonians from Sweden used to boast about having met poet Jaan Kaplinski.

Suffice it to say that for all their complexity, and occasional obscurity, most of Elo Viiding's works, with their zany commitment, are eminently translatable.

Ny Tid & Kontur revisited

Issue 12-13 of the Finland-Swedish cultural weekly "Ny Tid" is a double one, plus 1/09 of the occasional insert or supplement "Kontur". There is an exceptional amount of literary material this time round.

Ny Tid

- Two items about the Swedish Nordic Council nominee Johan Jönson and his mammoth 800-page mixed genre work entitled Efter arbetsschema. Article by Lorna Bertram; review by poet Heidi von Wright.

- A review by Otso Harju of the first volume of Hjalmar Bergman's letters.

- An excerpt from Finland-Swede Kira Nalin's first novel Bultar som ett bläckfiskhjärta.

- An article by Claes Andersson entitled 'Navelskådning à la Norén', in effect a review of Lars Norén's En dramatikers dagbok.

- A review, entitled ' "Zur Judenfrage" - Randanmärkningar till ett filosemitiskt livsprojekt', of a book of essays by Mikael Enckell called Om konsten att älska skriften.

- A review by Kristina Rotkirch [pronounced: ROOT-cheerk] of Russian author Olga Slavnikova's prizewinning novel 2017.

- Irmelin Sandman Lilius writes an essay about King Arthur, Merlin and Guinevere.

- Emma Strömberg discusses a poetry forum on the internet.

- A review by Emelie Enckell of the poetry collection Muntliga dikter by Swedish author Andreas Björsten.

- Poems by Finland-Swede Torsten Pettersson.

- Two theatre reviews by Isabella Rothberg of the plays Blaue Frau by Mia Hafrén and Villans hemlighet by several women author-actors: Freja Appelgren, Kontur editor Malin Kivelä, Åsa Nybo and novelist Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo. The latter play is described as a "tvärkonstnärlig föreställning", and as Rothberg says, is full of absurd humour, mysterious women, with the smell of coffee all around. There is Gothic, Sylvia Plath and Jane Eyre among the associations raised.

- A debate article by regular contributor Trygve Söderling (who doubles up as editor of the Finland-Swedish literary periodical 'Nya Argus') about repressive legitimacy in the Finland-Swedish press and Merete Mazzarella's blog.

- A review by former editor, Peter Lodenius, of Czech author Jáchym Topol's new novel in Swedish translation Den gyllene huvudet.

Kontur

- Malin Kivelä discusses a new Swedish translation of Proust.

- An essay-article by Sven-Erik Klinkmann about death and Johnny Cash.

- Poetry by the Estonian author Elo Viiding in Peeter Puide's Swedish translation.

***

Ny Tid

If you want to keep abreast of cultural events in what is termed "Svenskfinland", i.e. the areas of Finland where Swedish is still spoken as a first language, the magazine Ny Tid still exists. I say "still" because it first appeared back in 1944, when it was a mouthpiece for left-wing politics.

Nowadays, it is much more focused on the arts. The latest issue that I have received through the post is 10/2009. This contains articles on, for instance, the sculptor Angela Oker-Blom, the bilingual Viirus theatre group, a review of the Swedish translation of Irène Némirovsky's Châleur du sang, a review of Charlotte Svensson's book Pli på pojkar, which discusses the role of men and masculine role models in children's literature, and other items from Sweden.

Every now and again, Ny Tid publishes a supplement entitled Kontur which is wholly devoted to literature as such. The Finland-Swedish publishing houses such as Schildts and Söderströms advertise new Finland-Swedish books there, and articles vary from ones about Finland-Swedish literature to ones about, for instance, Doris Lessing or a review of Le Clézio. In the latest issue, there are a number of poems by the Estonian poet Elo Viiding in Peeter Puide's Swedish translation.

Another interesting occasional supplement is Ikaros, which contains academic articles by people attached to the university Åbo Akademi. These supplements tend to have a wide range of themes from psychology to philosophy, art to science.

Specifically literary articles in the main Ny Tid paper over the past few months have included a large double one about Victoria Benedictsson; a review of Merete Mazzarella's "essäroman"about Zacharias Topelius Ingen saknad, ingen sorg; poems by Claes Andersson; a review of Robert Åsbacka's latest novel Orgelbyggaren.

Their website is at: http://www.nytid.fi/start/