A POMEGRANATE
A SMALL TORTOISESHELL
A POMEGRANATE
*
Most wonderfully lovely pomegranate tree.
Most wonderfully beautiful pomegranate.
Love’s pomegranate-red fruit.
Nothing more.
*
It is said
that pomegranates
cleanse the body
of hatred and jealousy.
If it is said
that poetry
is the breath of the soul
then pomegranates must
be love poems
all of them
*
Granada is the place
where many pomegranate trees grow.
Granada is the place
where the Alhambra palace is.
I got lost in the Alhambra.
And
suddenly stood
in the Alhambra’s secret chamber.
In one corner of the chamber I could sense
a man’s presence in the thick darkness.
I sat down in the opposite corner of the chamber
and whispered my secret to him.
Only then
could I
continue along
that fate-determined road.
*
SIESTA
CIRCULAR SAW
SIESTA
*
In endless, deep minutes
of penetrable transparency
I’m united with my poems in koans
while
two ink-black daytime-owl-eyes
just
stare and stare and stare
mysteriously
straight through me
(from Andalusiske øjebliksbilleder i november, 2010)
translated from Danish by David McDuff
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Monday, 24 January 2011
Mirjam Tuominen
Friday, 21 January 2011
Russian land sales ban upsets Finland
On January 9, Russia’s President Medvedev signed a new decree which specifies border areas where foreign citizens are not allowed to purchase land. The areas include nearly all the regions of the Russian Federation bordering on Finland and Norway, all the way from Pechenga in northern Russia to the Gulf of Finland in the south (near Helsinki).
Finland has asked for an explanation of the new law, according to the Barents Observer, with foreign minister Alexander Stubb making an official representation to the Russian authorities, as quite a few Finns have already bought land in the areas that are now banned:
Finland has asked for an explanation of the new law, according to the Barents Observer, with foreign minister Alexander Stubb making an official representation to the Russian authorities, as quite a few Finns have already bought land in the areas that are now banned:
What will happen to those foreigners that already own land in this areas is highly uncertain. The Finnish Embassy in Moscow is examining the significance of the decree, reports Helsingin Sanomat.
- We stick to the principle of reciprocity as long as it is realistic and possible, says Alexander Stubb, interviewed by YLE.
- We’ll talk with Russian authorities about how this can be realised. If one can buy land here, then of course one should be able to buy land on the other side of the border as well, says Stubb.
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Dark October
by Pia Tafdrup
translated from Danish by David McDuff
To cross a strait
in a boat at night
like my mother.
To cross a strait
at night in another cutter
like my father.
To flee like growing crowds
of displaced persons.
The black water
is open.
My mother without luggage, but wearing
layer upon layer of clothes,
crammed into the hold among many others,
down to her mother and sister
with a hat to throw up in.
The order is for dead
silence
until the boat is out of the harbour.
On the deck in the pitch darkness
follow my mother's father at sea
the voyage to Swedish territory
lashed to the mast
so as not to fall overboard.
No German patrols, only tugboats.
The black water
is open.
Relatives are left behind —
friends houses belongings a beloved country.
To cross a strait
on a dark October night
with a fisherman and crew
who don’t know the exact route.
To try to find port
by sounding the depths,
try to find port with signals
from searchlights’ glare.
At last to dock at the right berth in Höganäs
shouted in by Swedish soldiers.
A way across the water homecoming
with no home
to what future?
Not to flee from oneself,
but be allowed to be oneself.translated from Danish by David McDuff
Hunger
Issue 14 of Absinthe is out, with among other things an essay by Thomas E. Kennedy recalling his first acquaintance with Knut Hamsun's Hunger, after seeing Henning Carlsen's 1966 film of the novel:
The film led me to read an SAS Airline bilingual publication (Scandinavian Words 15) of the first chapter, written by Hamsun in the late 1880s and later expanded to the novel.Kennedy compares Hamsun to Conrad, perceiving a journey to darkness at the heart of each author's work.
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Solveig von Schoultz
Two Poems
By Pia Tafdrup
from Trækfuglens kompas, 2010
translated from Danish by David McDuff
MYSTERIOUS BRIDGE
With my lipstick
a poet from Cyprus is reading
her poems in Turkish.
A woman asking
to borrow my lipstick
is one second
more overarching of borders
than driving from one country
to another.
My lipstick now speaks
on her lips.
Suddenly I'm one kiss closer to
her language.
With my lipstick
she is reading
a poem about a man
who is like a pendulum.
He sways incessantly
between two women.
That could have been
my life
my lipstick was reading poems about.
An arrow
would have kissed
the back of his neck.
THE ROAD ANYONE CAN GO
I go led by sleepless nerve paths
in front of my shadow,
traverse dense traffic, find
a passable path
go right, left,
cross bridges over streams
and fords,
reach a track I want to follow.
The straight path is not
the shortest one.
The air is chilly and raw, the landscape
is lit by the earliest morning sun,
cold and heat proliferate
at once.
Now is the time, I go
lured by dreams
where birds migrate.
Notice a sharp odour of plants
that grew once,
hear sounds purring
of before.
What does the road want of me?
Look out across the vast terrain
with its network of tracks and scents.
Fear
is always there,
like this a pupil opens.
The road changes pace, keeps me awake -
I branch, collect myself
mark
on the map of the future
a route
bound for uncertainty.
from Trækfuglens kompas, 2010
translated from Danish by David McDuff
Friday, 14 January 2011
Purge
I've just finished reading Lola Rogers' translation of Puhdistus (Purge), by Sofi Oksanen. It's a remarkable work - restless, vivid, articulate, emotional, violent, political - and I don't think there is anything quite like it in the rest of world literature. The only book remotely akin to it that I've come across before is a strange Estonian novel from 2004, which has a similar graphic reconstruction of Soviet reality. I think Sofi Oksanen's work does require a knowledge of Estonian and Soviet history if the reader is to understand the thinking, motivation and actions of the characters. One solitary niggling doubt I have is that while the book amounts to an extraordinary tribute to the Estonian people and their survival of decades of Soviet occupation, the characters themselves don't come across as very likeable human beings - but I believe that may be deliberate on the author's part. It's good to see Paul-Eerik Rummo's poetry quoted in the opening of each section.
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Mistral and Sweden’s security
Ever since the announcement of the controversial Mistral arms deal between France and Russia on Christmas Eve 2010, the Swedish press has been publishing articles about the implications of the deal for Baltic security, and Sweden's security in particular. On January 7 Dagens Nyheter noted that concern about the sale of the Mistral assault ships to Russia was high because these helicopter carriers can be used for landing operations - presumably in the course of a military invasion. Bo Pellnäs, a Swedish defence analyst, commented that although the carriers will be based in Murmansk, they can be moved anywhere. This, against the background of reports that Russia is to increase its military expenditure by 60 percent, and last fall held its largest military exercise in the Baltic Sea since the 1980s, is giving rise to fears in Sweden that the country's security may be compromised.
On January 5 a member of the Swedish parliament, Mikael Oscarsson, requested a statement from Foreign Minister Carl Bildt on what the deal means for the security of the Baltic Sea as a whole. Oscarsson also said that it was necessary to ask Russia about the purpose of the invasion capability, and that a tightening of Sweden's defence with Poland might be needed.
Now, in an interview published in the Swedish current affairs journal Världen idag (The World Today), Oscarsson says that his concerns are heightened by the internal political situation in Russia in the aftermath of the recent unsolved murders of journalists and the sentencing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.
"We need greater cooperation between Sweden, Poland and the Baltics, but we should also invite Russia to talks. I'm not one of those who say that the Russians are coming, but we cannot assume that anyone else will defend us. Therefore, we need to respond and ensure that we have a fleet that works."
In Poland, Polskie Radio has taken up Mikael Oscarsson's question, and there are reports that the military ties between Sweden and Poland may strengthen in response to Russia's investment in the new warships.
he U.S. think tank and news agency Stratfor's East Europe analyst Marko Papic says that just five days into the new year Mikael Oscarsson's question to Carl Bildt shows that the geopolitical map may be redrawn.
"The area of Sweden, Poland and Russia will be crucial for European security and political issues in 2011," he said in a statement.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Rabbe Enckell
My versions of a selection of Rabbe Enckell's poetry are now posted at Nordic Voices In Print.
Sunday, 9 January 2011
The Human Lot
Owen Witesman's translation of Kari Hotakainen's novel Ihmisen osa / The Human Lot is to be published by Christopher MacLehose/Quercus this year. From the book's blurb:
A writer buys a life from Salme Malmikunnas, an 80-year-old former yarn seller. You can get a lot for 7000 euros. Salme opens up and tells him everything the way she wants to remember it – the silence of her husband, Paavo, the accident that befell her daughter Helena, Maija’s marriage, and Pekka’s success in business. But will the author tell the story like they’d agreed? Can he resist the urge to write about subjects that are off limits? And is Salme telling the truth?
Saturday, 8 January 2011
A review and a story
There's a review of Tarkovsky's Horses and Other Poems in Evergreen Review, and Ólafur Gunnarsson has a new short story in Mayday Magazine.
Thursday, 6 January 2011
Keeping translations alive
The following is mainly related to translations of poetry, though some of it may also be applicable to certain kinds of translated fiction. For some time now – at least during the past decade – I’ve become aware that trying to sell poetry in the form of printed books is increasingly an uphill struggle, and some alternative means of reaching a readership may need to be found.
The struggle has always has been there – for example, when I worked at the UK’s Anvil Press Poetry during the 1980s the firm produced no more than 12-14 titles a year,approcimately half of which were translations, and the notion of making a profit was out of the question. Like Bloodaxe, Carcanet and several other specialist publishers, Anvil survived mainly because of the Arts Council grant it received each year, which accounted for most of its income. In the second part of the 1980s and into the 90s, Bloodaxe Books, under its committed director Neil Astley, took a more aggressive approach to poetry publishing, endeavouring to embrace a wider audience and reach out to readers who didn’t normally read poetry at all. This project had some success – although still heavily AC-funded, Bloodaxe did manage to operate as a normal business, comparable to mainstream London publishers of fiction. Bloodaxe’s poetry translation list was (and still is) impressive, including a wide range of titles and poets. But the new vigour didn’t last – by the 2000s, one was again uneasily aware that the Bloodaxe operation was under something of a strain, and in the early part of the decade many Bloodaxe authors and translators were informed that the unsold copies of their back titles would either be sold to them at a discount, or pulped.
The situation with other poetry publishers was not much better, or even worse. Carcanet, which in addition to original poetry and translations also published fiction, seems to have got by on the strength of its fiction list. The smaller houses like Arc and Dedalus were also in trouble, and in 2008 Dedalus had its Arts Council funding cut drastically. After a long campaign, that funding was restored in July last year, but in the present economic climate the future still remains uncertain. Book publishing is currently undergoing a crisis, and because of their minority appeal published poetry and poetry translation are the the first to be seriously affected.
So what’s to be done? My own feeling is that with the increasing power and presence of the Internet, poetry translators, poetry editors and poets should start to take matters into their own hands. Online and ebook publishing may not be to everyone’s taste – I know that my colleague Eric Dickens heartily dislikes it – but at least it’s a way of sending the work out into the world, and can even be a commercially viable method of sale and distribution. I’ve already started to scan and put online the contents of some of my older Bloodaxe titles – the copyright in those translations rests with me, and the volumes in which they appeared are now of out of print.
Nordic Voices in Print is my first attempt in this direction – it’s only a basic blog, and is devoted exclusively to the reprinting of my translations of Nordic literature and poetry, but in time I hope to develop the project further and extend it into the area of ebook publishing. Above all I think it’s important to avoid the ghettoization of translated literature that’s evident in certain US-based publishing concerns (they shall be nameless) which enjoy a high profile in the translation world at present. While they may once have been inspired by selfless motives, I believe that those publishers are really taking advantage of the ever-growing marginalization of translated work. Poets and translators beware.
The struggle has always has been there – for example, when I worked at the UK’s Anvil Press Poetry during the 1980s the firm produced no more than 12-14 titles a year,approcimately half of which were translations, and the notion of making a profit was out of the question. Like Bloodaxe, Carcanet and several other specialist publishers, Anvil survived mainly because of the Arts Council grant it received each year, which accounted for most of its income. In the second part of the 1980s and into the 90s, Bloodaxe Books, under its committed director Neil Astley, took a more aggressive approach to poetry publishing, endeavouring to embrace a wider audience and reach out to readers who didn’t normally read poetry at all. This project had some success – although still heavily AC-funded, Bloodaxe did manage to operate as a normal business, comparable to mainstream London publishers of fiction. Bloodaxe’s poetry translation list was (and still is) impressive, including a wide range of titles and poets. But the new vigour didn’t last – by the 2000s, one was again uneasily aware that the Bloodaxe operation was under something of a strain, and in the early part of the decade many Bloodaxe authors and translators were informed that the unsold copies of their back titles would either be sold to them at a discount, or pulped.
The situation with other poetry publishers was not much better, or even worse. Carcanet, which in addition to original poetry and translations also published fiction, seems to have got by on the strength of its fiction list. The smaller houses like Arc and Dedalus were also in trouble, and in 2008 Dedalus had its Arts Council funding cut drastically. After a long campaign, that funding was restored in July last year, but in the present economic climate the future still remains uncertain. Book publishing is currently undergoing a crisis, and because of their minority appeal published poetry and poetry translation are the the first to be seriously affected.
So what’s to be done? My own feeling is that with the increasing power and presence of the Internet, poetry translators, poetry editors and poets should start to take matters into their own hands. Online and ebook publishing may not be to everyone’s taste – I know that my colleague Eric Dickens heartily dislikes it – but at least it’s a way of sending the work out into the world, and can even be a commercially viable method of sale and distribution. I’ve already started to scan and put online the contents of some of my older Bloodaxe titles – the copyright in those translations rests with me, and the volumes in which they appeared are now of out of print.
Nordic Voices in Print is my first attempt in this direction – it’s only a basic blog, and is devoted exclusively to the reprinting of my translations of Nordic literature and poetry, but in time I hope to develop the project further and extend it into the area of ebook publishing. Above all I think it’s important to avoid the ghettoization of translated literature that’s evident in certain US-based publishing concerns (they shall be nameless) which enjoy a high profile in the translation world at present. While they may once have been inspired by selfless motives, I believe that those publishers are really taking advantage of the ever-growing marginalization of translated work. Poets and translators beware.
Sunday, 2 January 2011
Gunnar Björling
A selection of my translations of the poems of Gunnar Björling is now available on Nordic Voices in Print. These are essentially the same as the translations that appeared in the Bloodaxe Ice Around Our Lips anthology, with one or two minor edits.
Thursday, 30 December 2010
The background to the language situation
In the latest issue of the Finland-Swedish journal Nya Argus (nr. 11-12, 2010) linguistics professor Fred Karlsson considers the present uneasy situation surrounding the status of the Swedish language in Finland above all through the prism of the past. In doing so he raises some interesting points that are sometimes forgotten: the men who in the 19th century worked to establish Finnish as Finland’s national language were, after all, Finnish Swedes. Snellman, Forsman and other representatives of the country’s Swedish-speaking intelligentsia helped to bring about a peaceful linguistic revolution, but were soon regarded as traitors by their own Swedish-speaking compatriots. Karlsson also examines the nowadays neglected role of the Finnish linguist and politician Emil Nestor Setälä (1864-1936) who single-handedly drafted Finland’s declaration of independence in 1917 and also wrote an important work on the language law of 1922, in which he emphasized that although Finland had two languages, this did not mean that Finland had two nationalities: “Finland’s people are one.”
The essay also traces the history of pakkoruotsi (tvångsvenskan or “compulsory Swedish” – the preferred translation “mandatory Swedish” seems like a bit of a euphemism) – in Finland’s schools, pointing out, somewhat drily by reference to online discussions, that compulsion is not usually the way to make friends. There are, however, difficult decisions to be made. An education minister of the Kekkonen era is quoted as saying that if compulsory Swedish is abolished, it will be replaced by another language, “and that language is not Spanish”. Karlsson believes that it’s incumbent on Finland-Swedes to keep a low profile in the current language debate, and to leave it up to the Finnish-speaking majority and their political leaders to draw up guidelines as to their situation in Finland, Europe and the constantly changing modern world.
The essay also traces the history of pakkoruotsi (tvångsvenskan or “compulsory Swedish” – the preferred translation “mandatory Swedish” seems like a bit of a euphemism) – in Finland’s schools, pointing out, somewhat drily by reference to online discussions, that compulsion is not usually the way to make friends. There are, however, difficult decisions to be made. An education minister of the Kekkonen era is quoted as saying that if compulsory Swedish is abolished, it will be replaced by another language, “and that language is not Spanish”. Karlsson believes that it’s incumbent on Finland-Swedes to keep a low profile in the current language debate, and to leave it up to the Finnish-speaking majority and their political leaders to draw up guidelines as to their situation in Finland, Europe and the constantly changing modern world.
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
WikiLeaks and extremism - 2
At Harry's Place, Joseph W draws attention to some further aspects of Russian WikiLeaks, and the shadow it casts on the whole of the WikiLeaks operation.
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Nordic Voices in Print - latest additions
Nordic Voices in Print now has complete texts of my translations of collections by Karin Boye and Gösta Ågren, as well as selections of poetry by Bertel Gripenberg, Arvid Mörne and Elmer Diktonius.
The blog can also be accessed at
http://nordicvoices.xtreemhost.com/
The blog can also be accessed at
http://nordicvoices.xtreemhost.com/
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
WikiLeaks and extremism
This article in Reason magazine looks at some aspects of the WikiLeaks operation that seem to have been largely ignored by its supporters.
Monday, 6 December 2010
Nordic Council Literature Prize 2011
The complete run-down of candidates for the 2011 Nordic Council Literature Award is as follows (NB Norway's Beate Grimsrud wrote her novel in both Norwegian and in Swedish versions):
Denmark
Josefine Klougart
Stigninger og fald
Novel, Rosinante, 2010
Harald Voetmann
Vågen
Novel, Gyldendal, 2010
Finland
Erik Wahlström
Flugtämjaren
Novel, Schildts, 2010
Kristina Carlson
Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (Herr Darwins trädgårdsmästare)
Novel, Otava, 2009 (Swedish translation, Janina Orlov)
Iceland
Gyrðir Elíasson
Milli trjánna (Bland träden)
Short stories, Uppheimar, 2009, (Swedish translation, John Swedenmark)
Ísak Harðarson
Rennur upp um nótt (Stiger upp om natten)
Poems, Uppheimar, 2009, (Swedish translation, John Swedenmark)
Norway
Beate Grimsrud
En dåre fri
Novel, Cappelen Damm, 2010
Carl Frode Tiller
Innsirkling 2
Novel, Aschehoug, 2010
Sweden
Beate Grimsrud
En dåre fri
Novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2010
Anna Hallberg
Colosseum, Kolosseum
Poetry Collection, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2010
Faroe Islands
Tóroddur Poulsen
Útsýni (Utsikt)
Poetry collection, Mentunargrunnur Studentafelagsins, 2009, (Swedish translation, Anna Mattsson)
Greenland
Kristian Olsen Aaju
Kakiorneqaqatigiit (Det tatoverede budskab)
Novel, Forlaget Atuagkat, 2010
Åland Islands
Sonja Nordenswan
Blues från ett krossat världshus
Novel, PQR-kultur, 2009
The Sami Language Area
Kerttu Vuolab
Bárbmoáirras (Paradisets stjerne)
Novel, Davvi Girji OS, 2008
(Via the Nordic Council)
Denmark
Josefine Klougart
Stigninger og fald
Novel, Rosinante, 2010
Harald Voetmann
Vågen
Novel, Gyldendal, 2010
Finland
Erik Wahlström
Flugtämjaren
Novel, Schildts, 2010
Kristina Carlson
Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (Herr Darwins trädgårdsmästare)
Novel, Otava, 2009 (Swedish translation, Janina Orlov)
Iceland
Gyrðir Elíasson
Milli trjánna (Bland träden)
Short stories, Uppheimar, 2009, (Swedish translation, John Swedenmark)
Ísak Harðarson
Rennur upp um nótt (Stiger upp om natten)
Poems, Uppheimar, 2009, (Swedish translation, John Swedenmark)
Norway
Beate Grimsrud
En dåre fri
Novel, Cappelen Damm, 2010
Carl Frode Tiller
Innsirkling 2
Novel, Aschehoug, 2010
Sweden
Beate Grimsrud
En dåre fri
Novel, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2010
Anna Hallberg
Colosseum, Kolosseum
Poetry Collection, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2010
Faroe Islands
Tóroddur Poulsen
Útsýni (Utsikt)
Poetry collection, Mentunargrunnur Studentafelagsins, 2009, (Swedish translation, Anna Mattsson)
Greenland
Kristian Olsen Aaju
Kakiorneqaqatigiit (Det tatoverede budskab)
Novel, Forlaget Atuagkat, 2010
Åland Islands
Sonja Nordenswan
Blues från ett krossat världshus
Novel, PQR-kultur, 2009
The Sami Language Area
Kerttu Vuolab
Bárbmoáirras (Paradisets stjerne)
Novel, Davvi Girji OS, 2008
(Via the Nordic Council)
Friday, 3 December 2010
Mr Darwin's Gardener
Otava's Hanna Kjellberg reports that Kristina Carlson's novel Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (Mr Darwin's Gardener) [2009], my translated excerpts from which were published in Books from Finland magazine earlier this year, has been shortlisted as one of the Finnish candidates for the 2011 Nordic Council Literature Award.
Friday, 26 November 2010
The global book
In Hbl, Philip Teir reflects on the increasing internationalization and globalization of contemporary fiction, and wonders whether we are heading for a new literary world where national identity doesn't count for much:
Perhaps part of the explanation for Sofi Oksanen's success is that she is one of the first to try their hand at taking stock of the new Europe?
Slovak-born Alexandra Salmela's shortlisting for the Finlandia Prize could perhaps be seen as a sign of a coming trend... her new novel 27 - Eli Kuolema Tekee Taitelijan (27 - Or Death Makes an Artist) is not particularly rooted in one spot, but is a sort of cacophonous young person's novel that could have been published in almost any language at all...
...It's an interesting thought: are we heading towards a future in which the national literature project dissolves and we get literature that is trans-European? That may be too optimistic...
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Continuing
The new blog is up and running in both versions: the wordpress.org one and the wordpress.com one. There are two new posts, representing two collections of poetry: Karin Boye's Moln (Clouds)[1922] and Jär (Standing Here)[1988] by Gösta Ågren, both in my own translation. Soon I hope to be adding some work that hasn't previously had much exposure, including my versions of poetry by Arvid Mörne and Bertel Gripenberg.
I still haven't decided how to proceed with the question of the two versions of the blog. I feel that the Xtreemhost server-hosted one gives me more personal control over the content and management, while the wordpress.com one, though off my computer, is quite a lot easier to administer and maintain, and most of the relevant plugins are ready-supplied. Anyway, time will tell. Perhaps one of the blog versions can serve as a backup for the other, and vice versa...
I still haven't decided how to proceed with the question of the two versions of the blog. I feel that the Xtreemhost server-hosted one gives me more personal control over the content and management, while the wordpress.com one, though off my computer, is quite a lot easier to administer and maintain, and most of the relevant plugins are ready-supplied. Anyway, time will tell. Perhaps one of the blog versions can serve as a backup for the other, and vice versa...
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
Nordic Voices in Print - New URL
The URL of the new blog has changed: it's now
http://nordicvoicesinprint.wordpress.com/
And, after some wrestling with my wp.config file, it's also once again
http://nordicvoices.xtreemhost.com/
So you can take your pick. :-)
I think that for the time being I'll maintain both versions - the wordpress.com one and the wordpress.org/Xtreemhost server-based one - and eventually one of them will be the "winner".
From the WP About page:
http://nordicvoicesinprint.wordpress.com/
And, after some wrestling with my wp.config file, it's also once again
http://nordicvoices.xtreemhost.com/
So you can take your pick. :-)
I think that for the time being I'll maintain both versions - the wordpress.com one and the wordpress.org/Xtreemhost server-based one - and eventually one of them will be the "winner".
From the WP About page:
The general idea is to provide a space for Nordic texts (Finland-Swedish, Swedish, Icelandic, etc.) that I’ve translated over a number of years. Some have appeared in published book form, others haven’t. I had thought of reviving the old Demon site, as many of its pages are still up on the Web, isolated and unadvertised – but WordPress seemed like a more up-to-date and user-friendly way of dealing with the issue. In particular, there are some older Bloodaxe titles that are now out of print, and WP might be one channel that could be useful for making these available again, in part or in whole. Another alternative might be to reissue the texts as e-books – but I think I prefer the less formal method of the blog, which also gives more control, potential interactivity and editing flexibility...The first main posting is my translation of Moln (Clouds), the 1922 collection by Karin Boye.
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
Sunday, 14 November 2010
Vanishing Point
Joel Haahtela’s novel Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) – excerpts from which I posted in my own translation in some earlier posts to this blog – has been selected as a nomination for this year’s Finlandia Prize, FILI reports.
Sunday, 7 November 2010
Ice Floe
The first issue of the new series of Ice Floe is now available from University of Alaska Press - the inaugural issue presents new poems as well as a selection of work from the first seven years of the publication's existence, and the poets represented hail from Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
Elmer Diktonius - 2 Poems
The child's dream
An angel came from heaven
with a sausage in her hand
and gave it to me –
oh how good it was!
And the angel said, come to heaven!
and we flew. And there was God.
With a lollipop in his mouth.
And he gave it to me.
And it was good too!
And God said: there is always meat
for poor children,
and pastries on top
and ice cream!
And we ate.
And all our tummies rumbled full.
And God said:
who ‘s that singing so nicely?
My name is Diktonius
My name is Diktonius –
a liar like everyone else.
not songs do I sing
but concrete,
have no ideas –
an iron skeleton is my inner being.
My lines are the explosion’s,
my heat the crater’s -
if you seek coolness
I give you blocks of ice,
I understand much,
know very little –
but what do you care!
translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff
An angel came from heaven
with a sausage in her hand
and gave it to me –
oh how good it was!
And the angel said, come to heaven!
and we flew. And there was God.
With a lollipop in his mouth.
And he gave it to me.
And it was good too!
And God said: there is always meat
for poor children,
and pastries on top
and ice cream!
And we ate.
And all our tummies rumbled full.
And God said:
who ‘s that singing so nicely?
My name is Diktonius
My name is Diktonius –
a liar like everyone else.
not songs do I sing
but concrete,
have no ideas –
an iron skeleton is my inner being.
My lines are the explosion’s,
my heat the crater’s -
if you seek coolness
I give you blocks of ice,
I understand much,
know very little –
but what do you care!
translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Summer Poems
by Lars Huldén
Even the Ice Age had its summers,
short it is true
as the Nordic summers are,
but light, light.
One saw the expanses of ice.
But one didn't despair.
That is my consolation.
***
Hay belongs to the summer,
fragrant hay.
How lovely
a well-kept meadow smells!
And a barn full of hay,
the kind there were still in the country
until a short time ago,
could make people drunk.
The days of free hay are gone.
People don’t make love among bales.
***
The mist cups its hand
over the meadow’s bosom.
The sun throws down its gaze.
A curious moon rises
to see what is happening,
is going to happen, or has happened already.
The meadow says that she is unfortunately
already married. The mist’s hand
stays where it is.
***
We flesh-eating plants
are not so numerous here in the north.
I am the only one on this moss,
says the drosera.
It gets quite lonely sometimes.
My surroundings think I’m mysterious,
but I don’t care about that.
There are plenty of little flies here,
and creepy-crawlies.
One doesn’t have to go hungry.
But occasionally I
envy the grasses and the semi-grasses
that stand so close together.
I have no I
on whom I can rely.
But it’s all right.
And soon the summer
will be over.
translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff
Even the Ice Age had its summers,
short it is true
as the Nordic summers are,
but light, light.
One saw the expanses of ice.
But one didn't despair.
That is my consolation.
***
Hay belongs to the summer,
fragrant hay.
How lovely
a well-kept meadow smells!
And a barn full of hay,
the kind there were still in the country
until a short time ago,
could make people drunk.
The days of free hay are gone.
People don’t make love among bales.
***
The mist cups its hand
over the meadow’s bosom.
The sun throws down its gaze.
A curious moon rises
to see what is happening,
is going to happen, or has happened already.
The meadow says that she is unfortunately
already married. The mist’s hand
stays where it is.
***
We flesh-eating plants
are not so numerous here in the north.
I am the only one on this moss,
says the drosera.
It gets quite lonely sometimes.
My surroundings think I’m mysterious,
but I don’t care about that.
There are plenty of little flies here,
and creepy-crawlies.
One doesn’t have to go hungry.
But occasionally I
envy the grasses and the semi-grasses
that stand so close together.
I have no I
on whom I can rely.
But it’s all right.
And soon the summer
will be over.
translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff
Friday, 22 October 2010
Sontag Award
From the Scandinavia House website:
The 2010 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation was awarded to Benjamin Mier-Cruz, a Ph.D. candidate in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, for his proposed translation of selected letters and poems by the Finland-Swedish author Elmer Diktonius (1896 -1961). In celebration of the translation prize, programs will include the panel discussions The Challenges of Literary Translation Today and Elmer Diktonius, Finland-Swedish Literature, and Modernism in Scandinavia. Programs will also include a screening of the rare Sontag film Duet for Cannibals/Duett för kannibaler (Sweden, 1969).
Thursday, 21 October 2010
18 Gothenburg Poets
Lev Hrytsyuk's large anthology of contemporary Swedish poetry in Ukrainian translation, 18 поетів із Гетеборга, is now available on Issuu.
I personally find the Issuu interface a little tricky, but it's nice to be able to turn the pages!
I personally find the Issuu interface a little tricky, but it's nice to be able to turn the pages!
Monday, 18 October 2010
Identities
Swedish author and translator Ulf Peter Hallberg recently visited Helsinki and wrote about what he perceived to be a "slightly alarming" social and cultural uniformity (entydighet) in the place and its citizens. When the piece was reviewed in Hbl (with an accent on Hallberg's pessimistic take on the future of Finland-Swedishness), some commenters took the opportunity of pointing out that because of its unique history, Finland and the Finns play a special role in today's Europe, preserving the concept and practice of national identity in an era when it has been less than fashionable to do so. Hallberg's reactions to Finland are particularly interesting in the light of German chancellor Angela Merkel's recent remarks about the failure of multiculturalism in her country.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
Islandia
Qué dicha para todos los hombres,
Islandia de los mares, que existas.
Islandia de la nieve silenciosa y del agua ferviente.
Islandia de la noche que se aboveda
Sobre la vigilancia y el sueño.
Isla del día blanco que regresa,
Joven y mortal como Baldr.
Fría rosa, isla secreta
Que fuiste la memoria de Germania
Y salvaste para nosotros
Su apagada, enterrada mitología,
El anillo que engendra nueve anillos,
Los altos lobos de la selva de hierro
Que devorarán la luna y el sol,
La nave que Algo o Alguien construye
Con uñas de los muertos.
Islandia de los cráteres que esperan,
Y de las tranquilas majadas.
Islandia de las tardes inmóviles
Y de los hombres fuertes
Que son ahora marineros y banqueros y párrocos
Y que ayer descubrieron un continente.
Isla de caballos de larga crin
Que engendran sobre el paso y la lava,
Isla del agua llena de monedas
Y de no saciada esperanza.
Islandia de la espada y de la runa,
Islandia de la gran Memoria cóncava
Que no es una nostalgia.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Islandia de los mares, que existas.
Islandia de la nieve silenciosa y del agua ferviente.
Islandia de la noche que se aboveda
Sobre la vigilancia y el sueño.
Isla del día blanco que regresa,
Joven y mortal como Baldr.
Fría rosa, isla secreta
Que fuiste la memoria de Germania
Y salvaste para nosotros
Su apagada, enterrada mitología,
El anillo que engendra nueve anillos,
Los altos lobos de la selva de hierro
Que devorarán la luna y el sol,
La nave que Algo o Alguien construye
Con uñas de los muertos.
Islandia de los cráteres que esperan,
Y de las tranquilas majadas.
Islandia de las tardes inmóviles
Y de los hombres fuertes
Que son ahora marineros y banqueros y párrocos
Y que ayer descubrieron un continente.
Isla de caballos de larga crin
Que engendran sobre el paso y la lava,
Isla del agua llena de monedas
Y de no saciada esperanza.
Islandia de la espada y de la runa,
Islandia de la gran Memoria cóncava
Que no es una nostalgia.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Sunday, 26 September 2010
Bending the knee
At Absinthe Minded blog, Rita Dahl considers the Finnish case involving the Mohammed cartoons [excerpt]:
Read it all.
The cultural magazine Kaltio, based in Oulu, was the first magazine to republish the Mohammed cartoons in Finland. The 6-page-long comic appeared on the internet in September 2006 and was drawn by the Finnish comic artist, Ville Ranta. The prophet Mohammed was presented in the comic as a very furious, fundamentalist figure, who was wearing a mask and criticizing the Western world for the bad deeds it had done in the past to Arab countries and at the same time imposing the demand for freedom of speech in Arab countries. At the end of the comic the Finnish prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, and president, Tarja Halonen, burn the Danish flag in the hope that the Islamists would not get angry with them. (This burning of a flag refers to the apologies already made by Vanhanen and Halonen in February 2006, after the Finnish magazine, Suomen Sisu, had published the Mohammed cartoons for the first time in Finland.)
We call this heritage of bending the knee to other countries Finlandization. I will shortly explain what this way of reacting (still common among Finnish politicians) means. Finland has a long history of being suppressed, first by Sweden, then by the Soviet Union, until our independence in 1917. Even after that our political leaders continued to bend the knee to Russia whenever it was considered to be politically wise. Our country became famous for its unique foreign policy-- Kekkonen´s and Paasikivi´s line. That meant precisely that--bending the knee. Finlandization became another term for that foreign policy.
In my opinion, Ranta criticizes in his comic both Western and Islamist countries for their own kind of fundamentalisms. His starting point is that it is never good in the long term for anything--be it religion or politics—to be presented and heard only by its most fundamentalist representatives. His argument is that it is especially not good for anything--be it a religion like Islam, or western politics—to be represented by its most fundamental figures, be they fundamentalist Islamists, or Finnish politicians, who in their fear of losing good relations with other neighbouring countries, bend in every possible direction.
Read it all.
Skogslund
News that Gösta and Anna-Lisa have moved from the country environment of Skogslund to Vasa City. The following is my translation of Gösta's poem Orfeus' återkomst (The Return of Orpheus):
No poet can endure
being dead, a sojourn without
rhyme or reason. He needs
order and rhythm. His poems
are really laws. He
always turns back
from the underworld, which resembles
the everyday.
The darkness hides the screams
around him, when
the walking begins. The sun is
only black heraldry, only
a cavern in the sky
of stone, and he sees
it, without being blinded.
Then he goes, through the walking's
immobile, invisible lattice
from horizon to horizon.
An occasional tornado
of consciousness moves
through the journey, which is
what will remain.
The figures he meets
are shadows remembering
all that could have been.
Broken illusions are the name of
the only space in which we
are always free, can
always breathe, but those who
do not give up for lost what they have lost
will never attain it. He passes
a gateway, and continues in its
long, invisible arm. A gateway
never ends; it waits.
The darkness expands until it is
obscurity, no longer threat but
depth for all. Orpheus is like
a lonely child in a poem.
He is afraid. Perhaps there are
no dangers. But then there is
no protection against them
either.
But then there is only
this.
That is why he is not afraid
when the smiles begin to gleam
in the darkness, a swarm of knives,
slowly approaching. He knows
that he must go towards them
in order to escape from them. In that
way we flee from all
that we cannot flee from:
by seeking it out.
In vain do we ask for names.
Only the myth can answer.
The particular is too
general. Orpheus runs
through the crowd of indistinct
demons, created by that
reality whose innermost,
subatomic particle's name
a scientist's trembling hand
will one day write: Emptiness.
Now he is threatened by the total
consciousness which exists
in the darkness in his body.
They strike him as
hatefully as though they
were striking themselves, his image
within them. He flees
by enduring. For
he must write his
poems. Only thus can he
silence them. When he
at last lies alone
by the roadside in the underworld
he rises up once and for all,
as though he were abandoning
the figure lying there,
and continues, continues
the journey.
The wordless autumn wind
puts people's grief
into words. They themselves cannot
do it, for it is existence
that grieves, a nothingness
inside us all that compels us
to torment, and be tormented,
and thus exist so
intensely that being
drowns out the grief. Orpheus
sees the enemy, one
who is helpless, and strikes him
in order to be freed from the blows
he himself has had to accept.
It was thus he became
their prisoner.
To walk through the north wind is
like pushing one's way forward
between the icecold atoms
in a knife blade. What is it called,
the helpless voice that shouts
in the cold without doing so?
Love? No, love is never
helpless. It is an immense
bathsponge that sucks into itself
everything, and thus, imperceptibly, becomes
everything. The one who holds fast
to his name cannot
accept life in any
other way than by
hating it. Orpheus is
helpless, but he is
Orpheus, and while
the sun thunders against the rockface
he meets Christ, here
and now a beggar
whose task is to
save people from
their insight that nothing
can save them. The kindness
his misery compels them to
shows that something else is
possible, if only
as the void in which it
does not exist. Thus may a haze
of mercy be wrapped
over facts. The ragged
figure walks slowly
onwards, total as a blind
judge. But Orpheus knows
that kindness is only part
of suffering, and they pass
each other without a word
while the sun burns
above the centuries.
His footsteps echo in the silence,
a monotonous leitmotif that
has got stuck. To
continue demands weakness.
His heart beats without resistance,
but Orpheus himself is strong.
He stops, he
turns round.
Who is she who is dimly seen
and vanishes inside
his gloom?
Now he knows: She is
a legend which no
narrator will tame. The
form he loves
he has himself sculpted.
Only if she becomes
real can he become
free. When one has waited long
the meeting
is a farewell.
The night closes society
and opens the stars.
Even in the underworld,
whose starless night
surrounds Orpheus' brain,
fatigue can grow
into grace. That is why the
sparse crowd of people
he meets is peaceful
as a landscape,
but stubbornly, mechanically
as a series of copies
of himself, Orpheus
walks in the opposite
direction.
The gateway's vault of clouds
and pillars of pines are
invisible. One sees only clouds
and pines. He walks out
into the unproven theory
that is called reality,
into the village where the faces
turn towards him like
lanterns in the gloom. He
thinks of a poem about what
he is thinking of: these
people who move
through the village, dragging long,
impassive shadows. Now
once again they know the result
of today's work: tomorrow's
work awaits. To endure
is a way to get strength
to endure. So
he thinks, and that is why
he does not shout that the one
who has walked long through
the underworld can only reject
everything, even this
meaningless gesture of
rejecting everything.
Instead the poem ends
like this: He comes home.
The air is motionless in the cottage.
Slowly, with movement after
movement, mother peels potatoes.
Is it poverty and illness
that stand still in here?
No, but she is choked
by an unsung song
of sorrow, our chance
to live.
That song aches like a child
without words. It is so hard
because sorrow demands love,
that immense hand
in our breast which no one
can reduce to fate.
The evening's black, swaying
trees are the horns of slowly moving
herds. Inexorably
everything journeys.
Orpheus sings
of sorrow.
translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff
No poet can endure
being dead, a sojourn without
rhyme or reason. He needs
order and rhythm. His poems
are really laws. He
always turns back
from the underworld, which resembles
the everyday.
The darkness hides the screams
around him, when
the walking begins. The sun is
only black heraldry, only
a cavern in the sky
of stone, and he sees
it, without being blinded.
Then he goes, through the walking's
immobile, invisible lattice
from horizon to horizon.
An occasional tornado
of consciousness moves
through the journey, which is
what will remain.
The figures he meets
are shadows remembering
all that could have been.
Broken illusions are the name of
the only space in which we
are always free, can
always breathe, but those who
do not give up for lost what they have lost
will never attain it. He passes
a gateway, and continues in its
long, invisible arm. A gateway
never ends; it waits.
The darkness expands until it is
obscurity, no longer threat but
depth for all. Orpheus is like
a lonely child in a poem.
He is afraid. Perhaps there are
no dangers. But then there is
no protection against them
either.
But then there is only
this.
That is why he is not afraid
when the smiles begin to gleam
in the darkness, a swarm of knives,
slowly approaching. He knows
that he must go towards them
in order to escape from them. In that
way we flee from all
that we cannot flee from:
by seeking it out.
In vain do we ask for names.
Only the myth can answer.
The particular is too
general. Orpheus runs
through the crowd of indistinct
demons, created by that
reality whose innermost,
subatomic particle's name
a scientist's trembling hand
will one day write: Emptiness.
Now he is threatened by the total
consciousness which exists
in the darkness in his body.
They strike him as
hatefully as though they
were striking themselves, his image
within them. He flees
by enduring. For
he must write his
poems. Only thus can he
silence them. When he
at last lies alone
by the roadside in the underworld
he rises up once and for all,
as though he were abandoning
the figure lying there,
and continues, continues
the journey.
The wordless autumn wind
puts people's grief
into words. They themselves cannot
do it, for it is existence
that grieves, a nothingness
inside us all that compels us
to torment, and be tormented,
and thus exist so
intensely that being
drowns out the grief. Orpheus
sees the enemy, one
who is helpless, and strikes him
in order to be freed from the blows
he himself has had to accept.
It was thus he became
their prisoner.
To walk through the north wind is
like pushing one's way forward
between the icecold atoms
in a knife blade. What is it called,
the helpless voice that shouts
in the cold without doing so?
Love? No, love is never
helpless. It is an immense
bathsponge that sucks into itself
everything, and thus, imperceptibly, becomes
everything. The one who holds fast
to his name cannot
accept life in any
other way than by
hating it. Orpheus is
helpless, but he is
Orpheus, and while
the sun thunders against the rockface
he meets Christ, here
and now a beggar
whose task is to
save people from
their insight that nothing
can save them. The kindness
his misery compels them to
shows that something else is
possible, if only
as the void in which it
does not exist. Thus may a haze
of mercy be wrapped
over facts. The ragged
figure walks slowly
onwards, total as a blind
judge. But Orpheus knows
that kindness is only part
of suffering, and they pass
each other without a word
while the sun burns
above the centuries.
His footsteps echo in the silence,
a monotonous leitmotif that
has got stuck. To
continue demands weakness.
His heart beats without resistance,
but Orpheus himself is strong.
He stops, he
turns round.
Who is she who is dimly seen
and vanishes inside
his gloom?
Now he knows: She is
a legend which no
narrator will tame. The
form he loves
he has himself sculpted.
Only if she becomes
real can he become
free. When one has waited long
the meeting
is a farewell.
The night closes society
and opens the stars.
Even in the underworld,
whose starless night
surrounds Orpheus' brain,
fatigue can grow
into grace. That is why the
sparse crowd of people
he meets is peaceful
as a landscape,
but stubbornly, mechanically
as a series of copies
of himself, Orpheus
walks in the opposite
direction.
The gateway's vault of clouds
and pillars of pines are
invisible. One sees only clouds
and pines. He walks out
into the unproven theory
that is called reality,
into the village where the faces
turn towards him like
lanterns in the gloom. He
thinks of a poem about what
he is thinking of: these
people who move
through the village, dragging long,
impassive shadows. Now
once again they know the result
of today's work: tomorrow's
work awaits. To endure
is a way to get strength
to endure. So
he thinks, and that is why
he does not shout that the one
who has walked long through
the underworld can only reject
everything, even this
meaningless gesture of
rejecting everything.
Instead the poem ends
like this: He comes home.
The air is motionless in the cottage.
Slowly, with movement after
movement, mother peels potatoes.
Is it poverty and illness
that stand still in here?
No, but she is choked
by an unsung song
of sorrow, our chance
to live.
That song aches like a child
without words. It is so hard
because sorrow demands love,
that immense hand
in our breast which no one
can reduce to fate.
The evening's black, swaying
trees are the horns of slowly moving
herds. Inexorably
everything journeys.
Orpheus sings
of sorrow.
translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff
Monday, 20 September 2010
The art of aphorism
Over the past 25 years Finnish poet and scholar Markku Envall (b. 1944) has pubished seven collections of aphorisms, a literary genre particularly favoured in Finland, where it has a long tradition stretching back to the nineteenth century. Envall's seventh collection has just been published by WSOY, but these are a few examples I've translated, drawn from earlier collections, courtesy of Aforistiblogi:
in the world at large.
He loved Bach as the music of the future. Bach was the only sure thing he knew about it.
Break out of prison, at every moment.Life a dream? If a nightmare, it has a happy ending. Awakening.
You think you are using the machine. The machine is using you.It is frowned upon to eat so much at the table that the other goes without. Not so
in the world at large.
The trees will be there when you are gone. When the trees are gone you will not be there.
Wednesday, 15 September 2010
Reading matters
The interesting blog of Swedish military historian and defence analyst Lars Gyllenhaal continues to provide thought-provoking insights into aspects of Nordic and European security, past and present. with references to little-known and little-publicized historical, literary and other documentary sources. Among recent posts to the blog are:
- a review of a book called If Germany Had Won -- 53 Alternative Scenarios, with a chapter containing speculations on questions such as what might have happened if Sweden had been drawn into the Winter War of 1939-40, or had said no to Hitler in 1941.
- a dissection and general Fisking of the 9/11 “Truth Movement”, with some unexpected words from Noam Chomsky.
- an examination of Russia’s new defence policy in the light of a recent BBC report, and a look at one puzzling recent development.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Work poems
Lev Hrytsyuk and Linn Hansén have drawn my attention to another poetry collection that deals, among other things, with the experience of work in a care home. According to the publisher's blurb, Swedish poet Johan Jönson's 800-page Efter arbetschema (2008), his twelfth volume of verse, focuses on the reality of work: "dels försörjningsarbetet i vården eller i den tunga industrin, dels ett arbete med att förstå och besvärja 'världsfabriken'."
Although work in a care home is one of its subjects, Jönson's massive book appears to cover a much wider field of concerns than the remarkable first collection by Timo Harju, recently published in Finland, and partly available in English translation on this blog and elsewhere. But it's interesting to see that the subject of work is one that engages the attention of some Nordic poets - it's certainly a topic that's encountered less frequently in contemporary English and American poetry.
Although work in a care home is one of its subjects, Jönson's massive book appears to cover a much wider field of concerns than the remarkable first collection by Timo Harju, recently published in Finland, and partly available in English translation on this blog and elsewhere. But it's interesting to see that the subject of work is one that engages the attention of some Nordic poets - it's certainly a topic that's encountered less frequently in contemporary English and American poetry.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
A private story
I've now finished the third volume of the German-Swedish author Peter Weiss's long novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, and so have now read all 1787 pages of the 2005 Suhrkamp edition. It's a varied reading experience - something akin to a blend of fiction, documentary report, ideological tract, historical treatise and autobiographical reminiscence - and it's possible to see why if it were to be translated in its entirety, the book would probably have a limited readership, placing its author firmly in the category of a 1000 copy guy. Although the voice of the narrative is not directly Weiss's own, but that of the novel's youthful narrator, it's hard to swallow the illusion that the teenage chronicler and historian would in real life be capable of disgorging this stupendous volume of earnest, didactic oration.
On the other hand, the book does offer some unique insights into the history and psychology of the Germany of the immediate post World War 2 era. The sections in volume 3 that deal with the problem of why a country that was able during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce one of the most highly-evolved aesthetic cultures of Europe, and indeed of the world as a whole, proved at the same time to be an almost total failure in the art of state building and political endeavour, and ended by nearly destroying not only itself but much of the rest of the world as a well. Weiss appears to pin the blame on what he perceives to be an innate Germanic (not only German, for Sweden also comes in for a large dose of criticism) yearning for an ideal realm, a longing unaccompanied by any substantial practical ability that might have brought about its realization. The link between aesthetics and politics which forms the novel's principal thesis is only an abstract one - in practice, the link did not exist, and most of the writers, artists, filmmakers and composers who began by espousing the cause of a New Jerusalem built from Marxist revolutionism ultimately found themselves cast adrift in a murky sea of violence, war, totalitarianism and genocide.
Weiss extends his judgment to condemn not only Germany, but also most of Europe and America. The Soviet Union is seen as a deceptive friend and foe, which during the 1920s and 30s encouraged the aspirations and actions of radical idealists only to betray them, delivering them into the hands of their tormentors and destroyers. The parts of the novel which deal with this - such as the long passages of analysis and recrimination that precede the gory accounts of executions in the Nazi jails - are probably unlike anything else in postwar German literature, possessing the kind of clarity and frankness sought by W.G. Sebald in his book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction, but not found by him there.
The third volume stands apart from the other two by containing elements of a more conventional narrative kind. The long account of Charlotte Bischoff's voyage from Stockholm to Nazi-occupied Holland aboard a Swedish merchant vessel could be taken from a 1930s spy thriller, while the section describing the executions of German communists (including two of the novel's principal characters) in Plötzensee Prison have a lurid quality that is possibly at odds with the elevated style of much of the rest of the book. In the end, I found that the unyielding nature of the narrative technique, the unbroken yet breathless hammering of the syntax and diction, made it hard to be swept along by the flow of language and rhetoric as the author undoubtedly intended. By the last 100 pages or so there is a definite sense of exhaustion, with the clauses of the long sentences coming in shorter and shorter bursts - one literally feels that the narrator is almost at his last gasp.
Sebald called this a "genuinely catastrophic novel in which, with a shattering sense of system, Peter Weiss wrecked what he knew was the little life remaining to him", and it is hard not to concur with that judgment. For a work which aims to embrace the aspirations and sufferings of an entire generation, with only a few exceptions this is all too clearly a book of individual self-analysis and self-destruction. Perhaps, given the continued silence about the inner, intellectual reasons for the rise of Nazism in pre-war Germany (a silence that persists not only in Germany itself but also in the rest of Europe), there was no other way in which Peter Weiss could write his fascinating, cataclysmic but ultimately private book.
On the other hand, the book does offer some unique insights into the history and psychology of the Germany of the immediate post World War 2 era. The sections in volume 3 that deal with the problem of why a country that was able during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce one of the most highly-evolved aesthetic cultures of Europe, and indeed of the world as a whole, proved at the same time to be an almost total failure in the art of state building and political endeavour, and ended by nearly destroying not only itself but much of the rest of the world as a well. Weiss appears to pin the blame on what he perceives to be an innate Germanic (not only German, for Sweden also comes in for a large dose of criticism) yearning for an ideal realm, a longing unaccompanied by any substantial practical ability that might have brought about its realization. The link between aesthetics and politics which forms the novel's principal thesis is only an abstract one - in practice, the link did not exist, and most of the writers, artists, filmmakers and composers who began by espousing the cause of a New Jerusalem built from Marxist revolutionism ultimately found themselves cast adrift in a murky sea of violence, war, totalitarianism and genocide.
Weiss extends his judgment to condemn not only Germany, but also most of Europe and America. The Soviet Union is seen as a deceptive friend and foe, which during the 1920s and 30s encouraged the aspirations and actions of radical idealists only to betray them, delivering them into the hands of their tormentors and destroyers. The parts of the novel which deal with this - such as the long passages of analysis and recrimination that precede the gory accounts of executions in the Nazi jails - are probably unlike anything else in postwar German literature, possessing the kind of clarity and frankness sought by W.G. Sebald in his book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction, but not found by him there.
The third volume stands apart from the other two by containing elements of a more conventional narrative kind. The long account of Charlotte Bischoff's voyage from Stockholm to Nazi-occupied Holland aboard a Swedish merchant vessel could be taken from a 1930s spy thriller, while the section describing the executions of German communists (including two of the novel's principal characters) in Plötzensee Prison have a lurid quality that is possibly at odds with the elevated style of much of the rest of the book. In the end, I found that the unyielding nature of the narrative technique, the unbroken yet breathless hammering of the syntax and diction, made it hard to be swept along by the flow of language and rhetoric as the author undoubtedly intended. By the last 100 pages or so there is a definite sense of exhaustion, with the clauses of the long sentences coming in shorter and shorter bursts - one literally feels that the narrator is almost at his last gasp.
Sebald called this a "genuinely catastrophic novel in which, with a shattering sense of system, Peter Weiss wrecked what he knew was the little life remaining to him", and it is hard not to concur with that judgment. For a work which aims to embrace the aspirations and sufferings of an entire generation, with only a few exceptions this is all too clearly a book of individual self-analysis and self-destruction. Perhaps, given the continued silence about the inner, intellectual reasons for the rise of Nazism in pre-war Germany (a silence that persists not only in Germany itself but also in the rest of Europe), there was no other way in which Peter Weiss could write his fascinating, cataclysmic but ultimately private book.
Friday, 10 September 2010
Finnish State Prize for translation
This year's Finnish State Prize for translation has been awarded to Hebrew translator Rami Saari.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
A view of The Magic Mountain
Karin Boye, talking to the narrator in volume 3 of Die Ästhetik des Widerstands:
Neunzehnhundert Achtundzwanzig, Neunundzwanzig, sagte sie, habe sie den Zauberberg übersetzt, zuerst sei sie von diesem Buch mit der denkwürdigen Liebesgeschichte ergriffen, dann aber, beim eingehenden Studium der Sätze auf ihren letzten Gehalt, von Abscheu erfüllt vvorden. Wieder werden die Funktionen der Liebe einzig vom Gesichtspunkt des Mannes aus dargestellt, und dazu noch in einem plötzlichen Umschlagen der Zärtlichkeit und des Begehrens zur Herabwürdigung, zur Verächtlichmachung der Frau. Gegen Ende des Romans finden sich der junge und der alte Liebhaber zusammen, in der Verurteilung des Objekts ihrer Liebe, im eignen Versagen ihre mannliche Dominanz dennoch aufrechterhaltend, schreiben sie der Frau zu, was sie gemeinsam ausgebrütet haben, daß sie sich als reaktives Geschöpf, ohne Initiative, eben nur als Objekt empfinde und sich, durch weibliche Bestechlichkeit, der primären Wahl des Mannes überlasse.
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Boye
The third volume of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance opens with a tribute to the narrator's parents, who have succeeded in fleeing to Sweden. The tribute is also one of mourning for his mother - though still alive, she is ill and has withdrawn into a silence from which she cannot be recalled.
Imperceptibly, the image of the mother merges with the image and memory of another female character, that of her friend and colleague, the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye, who like other women in the novel is referred to solely by her last name. Boye's suicide, and her own rationale and explanation for it, form the subject of the early part of volume 3.
The novel's sharp focus on the life and work of Boye and the acute attention the narrator devotes to her indicate that for Weiss this author and poet had a more personal significance for Weiss than was the case with Brecht, for example. One wonders if Weiss had met Boye in Sweden - after all, in 1938 his family took up residence in Alingsås, West Gotland, where Boye herself moved in the following year in order to be close to Anita Nathorst. A meeting does not seem improbable.
Some of Weiss's account of Boye's life and of her final months appears to be drawn at least in part from the biography by Margit Abenius (Drabbad av renhet, 1950)- yet there are also some details that may derive from actual contacts with the poet. In particular, Weiss is at pains to analyse Karin Boye's existential, political, artistic, sexual and personal situation in 1941, describing it through the words of the psychoanalytically-trained doctor Max Hodann. Hodann says that in her moment of surrender to Goering at a mass rally in 1932, Boye had made it impossible for her to forgive herself or receive forgiveness, and had consciously and unconsciously abandoned hope. Her novel Kallocain (1940), which depicts the merciless and inhuman conflict in a world that is divided into two opposing blocks, is the testament not only to her own despair but to the despair of a generation. Hodann sees a continuation of Boye's fatal inner and outer dilemma in the inability of the radical German youth of the 1930s and 40s to avoid either a collapse into Nazism or an embrace of Stalinist Communism:
Imperceptibly, the image of the mother merges with the image and memory of another female character, that of her friend and colleague, the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye, who like other women in the novel is referred to solely by her last name. Boye's suicide, and her own rationale and explanation for it, form the subject of the early part of volume 3.
The novel's sharp focus on the life and work of Boye and the acute attention the narrator devotes to her indicate that for Weiss this author and poet had a more personal significance for Weiss than was the case with Brecht, for example. One wonders if Weiss had met Boye in Sweden - after all, in 1938 his family took up residence in Alingsås, West Gotland, where Boye herself moved in the following year in order to be close to Anita Nathorst. A meeting does not seem improbable.
Some of Weiss's account of Boye's life and of her final months appears to be drawn at least in part from the biography by Margit Abenius (Drabbad av renhet, 1950)- yet there are also some details that may derive from actual contacts with the poet. In particular, Weiss is at pains to analyse Karin Boye's existential, political, artistic, sexual and personal situation in 1941, describing it through the words of the psychoanalytically-trained doctor Max Hodann. Hodann says that in her moment of surrender to Goering at a mass rally in 1932, Boye had made it impossible for her to forgive herself or receive forgiveness, and had consciously and unconsciously abandoned hope. Her novel Kallocain (1940), which depicts the merciless and inhuman conflict in a world that is divided into two opposing blocks, is the testament not only to her own despair but to the despair of a generation. Hodann sees a continuation of Boye's fatal inner and outer dilemma in the inability of the radical German youth of the 1930s and 40s to avoid either a collapse into Nazism or an embrace of Stalinist Communism:
Ich gab Boyes Schilderung wieder, wie sie sich hatte betören lassen dem Mann mit dem bleichen Hysterikergesicht auf der Tribüne in der überfüllten Sporthalle, und wie sie zu spät erst das Ruchlose seiner Reden begriffen habe. Viele von uns, sagte Hodann, immer noch, und oft grade, wenn es um Entscheidendes gehe, wie Kinder, wir ließen uns beherrschen von Hoffnungen, deren Ursprung eingebettet sei in der Erinnrung an das Ertasten der Mutterbrust, im Aufgehn in einer Harmonie, die es für uns nicht mehr gebe. Auch Boye müsse, wie wir alle, nach der Mutter, dem Vater in sich gesucht, und diese, in wachsendem Maß, und durch andre Gestalten ersetzt haben... Ich möchte behaupten, sagte er, daß unsre Generation mehr gezeichnet ist von dem Unheil, das die Sowjetunion ergriff, als von den Verheerungen durch den Faschismus, denn an dem Arbeiterstaat hingen wir mit unserm ganzen kindlichen Glauben, während uns von Anfang an bekannt war, was in Deutschland aufkam.I'll return to this subject in another post.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
The Pact and the Poet
I've found the remaining part of volume 2 of Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance something of a mixed bag, as it deliberately avoids settling down into one main stream of narrative. The sections on Engelbrekt seem a little contrived, as though the author were spinning material to fill out space, especially when one learns that Brecht himself has lost track of the project and the narrator is left alone with his research on the subject. Of more interest are the extensive deliberations on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is now providing all sorts of headaches for the various radicals, including Rosner, who continues to try to find some justification for the nefarious agreement, engaging in a Kafkaesque series of arguments in which the Pact becomes the basis for an "understanding" between the working classes of Germany and Russia. Weiss makes it perfectly clear that he regards the situation as patently absurd, and the characters of the novel appear trapped and helpless in the face of a historical conundrum that goes against all they have worked and fought for.
Brecht's preparations to leave for Finland, and the dismantling, disposal and transporting of his vast private library of world literature (the authors and titles are listed over several pages, take up most of the narrative. There is a nice concluding scene in which Brecht leans out as the Swedish secret police depart after searching the contents of the library for "subversive" literature. "You've forgotten the thrillers!" he shouts to them, and then throws his copies of books by Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, etc. out of the window down to the garden below.
Brecht's preparations to leave for Finland, and the dismantling, disposal and transporting of his vast private library of world literature (the authors and titles are listed over several pages, take up most of the narrative. There is a nice concluding scene in which Brecht leans out as the Swedish secret police depart after searching the contents of the library for "subversive" literature. "You've forgotten the thrillers!" he shouts to them, and then throws his copies of books by Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, etc. out of the window down to the garden below.
Monday, 6 September 2010
Soul support
In another recent Hbl feature the paper notes that it's becoming more and more common for Finland's authors to derive all or most of their income from state arts subsidies of various kinds, with such support increasingly being perceived as the measure of a writer's success and the quality of his/her work. According to researcher Elina Jokinen, who is quoted in the article, the subsidies are far from regular or reliable, with grants being made on a one-off basis, and there's a need for a more stable and long-term solution to the problem.
Language talk
The debate about whether Swedish should continue to be a mandatory subject of instruction in Finland's schools, and about the general status of the Swedish language in Finland, continues to occupy the columns of the Finnish press. Ten days ago the magazine Suomen Kuvalehti devoted a readers' discussion to "10 common statements" about the subject, including "Finland is a bilingual country", "Everyone must know Swedish", "Swedish-speakers have too much power", "Civil servants must be able to speak Swedish", and so on. Judging from the majority of the large number of readers' comments, the consensus appeared to be a thumbs-down for Swedish as an obligatory part of Finnish education and society, though few seemed to be eager to ban it from the curriculum altogether. Not to be outdone, Finland's main Swedish-language daily Hufvudstadsbladet has hosted a discussion of its own featuring the same 10 statements. Oddly enough, the consensus among Hufvudstadsbladet's readers is largely the same -- no one has much objection against Swedish as a language, but they don't want it to be forced on them if they don't grow up in a Swedish-speaking household. An interesting feature of Hufvudstadsbladet readers' discussions in general: it appears that comments written in Finnish are not accepted by the editors, and are routinely deleted from the discussion board...
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Resisters - 2
The narrator becomes involved in one of these projects, working as a lowly researcher for a new play Brecht wants to write about Engelbrekt, the leader of a 15th century peasant revolt in Sweden. Weiss devotes a large number of pages to giving an exhaustive account of this. In fact, it becomes another of the novel's "set pieces", like Heracles and the Pergamon frieze, or the paintings by Delacroix, Goya, Brueghel, Gericault and others. There is also a long discussion about Swedish politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weakness of Sweden's parliamentary democracy, and the significance of mineral ore for the country's industry, with particular reference to the period of the Second World War.
Interestingly, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is discussed in some detail, with the characters, including Brecht, giving their various interpretations of it. Although it's sometimes difficult to extrapolate the author's point of view from that of the narrator and other figures in the book, Weiss appears to take a highly critical view of the Pact, seeing it as a major enigma and obstacle for the European left. At all events, the issue is hardly swept under the carpet, as might have been expected in a work by a less complex radical author. One of the characters, the Comintern official, political journalist and editor Jakob Rosner tries to compose a justification for the agreement, which he plans to circulate in his newspaper Ny Dag to likely subscribers in Stockholm:
He asked me to search the phonebook for Jewish names, and enter them in the register of people who were to be sent sample issues of the paper. He refused to believe that the Jacobssons, Danielssons and Rosengrens were of old-Swedish origin. Jakobsohn, Danielsohn and Rosenzweig, he said, shaking his head with its rumpled hair, and so the Lewins and Blumenbergs are also Christians in this country... (p. 664)In a bitter conversation with Rosalinde Ossietzky, the narrator questions her "Marxist" argument that the cause of the impending world war is the conflict between the capitalist nations of the world. At the end of November 1939 the signs that an armed confrontation is about to break out between Finland and the Soviet Union leads the Sweden-based radicals (most of whom are in Sweden illegally) to speculate on the outcome.
Göteborg poets in Ukraine
The final part of Lev Hrytsyuk's major anthology of contemporary Swedish poetry, 18 Poets from Gothenburg, is now online. This volume-by-volume sequence has been published in stages, with the last section, containing Ukrainian translations of poems by Mauritz Tistelö, available on Scribd.
This seems like an enterprising way to go about publicizing a poetry translation title, and one hopes that mainstream poetry publishers - Bloodaxe? - may take note.
This seems like an enterprising way to go about publicizing a poetry translation title, and one hopes that mainstream poetry publishers - Bloodaxe? - may take note.
Friday, 3 September 2010
1,000 copy guys
Over at Three Percent, E.J. Van Lanen is writing about the FILI editors' trip:
We do different kinds of books here (My favorite story so far is when a publisher was going to tell us about two books: one, a more commercial author, they thought would sell 10,000 copies in the US, and the other, a more literary author, who was wonderful but who they thought would sell 1,000. Chad and I both said at the same time, “Tell us about the 1000 copy guy.”), and because we do a special kind of book, I feel like we have different kinds of meetings with publishers.
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
Resisters
The analogy with Tolstoy also comes to mind in the fact that the characters now being developed and described are historical figures. This is a historical novel, after all. Just as in War and Peace Tolstoy introduces military figures and political leaders into the narrative, Weiss now brings in not only Max Hodann, but a number of other real-life people who worked as political activists in the exiled German Communist anti-Nazi resistance movement. We meet Charlotte Bischoff, who having fled the Third Reich is now in Sweden preparing to return to Germany in order to carry out undergound resistance work there. "Lindner" appears to be the German-Czech resistance worker Hertha Lindner, though from a historical point of view it isn't clear that she was in Sweden during 1939. Weiss now also introduces Rosalinde Ossietzky, daughter of the radical German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky (1889-1938), who in Stockholm tells the narrator and Max Hodann about the torture and murder of her father by the Nazi authorities. She also recalls the actions of some pro-Nazi Norwegian cultural figures, including the novelist Knut Hamsun, who took part in an active campaign to discredit her father and to deny him the award of the Nobel Prize which he received in 1935.
It has to be said that Weiss succeeds in leading these new characters onto the stage quite naturally, without much ideological ballast - they act and talk like real people, and above all one can believe in them. It is only a pity that the author forgot (or perhaps decided not) to include explanatory notes on these figures, who will probably be unfamiliar to many of his readers, even - or especially - in Germany. There the affinity to Tolstoy breaks down, for Tolstoy's historical characters were all well-known to his readership. However, with the advent of Wikipedia, it's not too hard to keep abreast of the historical and biographical background as one reads - this was hardly the situation of readers of this challenging novel three decades ago.
Although Sweden in 1939 is now a temporary home for many of the political activists being brought to life, most of them are there illegally. Weiss is scathing about the country's Aliens Act of 1938, which in a response to antisemitic protests (among others, by students at Lund and Upsala universities) virtually closed the door to Jewish refugees altogether. As is consistently the case throughout the whole of the Aesthetics, Weiss groups Jewish and Communist refugees together - for him the Holocaust has two elements, a racial one and a political one. Sometimes they overlap, but they are distinct, separate and of equal validity. The reader is left unaided to deal with this debatable historical construct.
Another problem is the account of the international political events of 1939 which led up to the outbreak of war. The account is heavily influenced by Stalinist versions of history, with the Baltic States, for example, being stigmatized as "semi-fascist" and standing in the way of a successful Soviet defence - part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy being cooked up by Great Britain, France and the United States. One feels that, although this Tolstoyan historical digression is put, somewhat unconvincingly, into the mouth of the youthful narrator, who is only in his teens, one can't help feeling that it would have been better if Weiss had left it out, for it leaves an unpleasant taste, even as fiction. The bewilderment of the narrator and his friends as the German-Soviet Credit Agreement of 1939 is signed is well-described, but again there need to be some notes or other signposts for the reader.
I'm now moving on into the closing section of the first part of volume two, in which the narrator visits the island of Lidingö near Stockholm where the Swedish sculptress Ninnan Santesson has put her home at the disposal of the German writer and dramatist Bertolt Brecht and his family.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Shipwrecked
So far in Volume Two I've crossed three of these blocks: the first was the long introductory sequence devoted to an analysis of Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), in which the narrator seems to be draw an analogy between the situation of the people on the raft and the oppressed working class of 19th century Europe, but then begins to analyse the scene in terms of a personal shipwreck, a disillusionment and abandonment of hope. This shift is discussed by W.G. Sebald in his essay on Weiss as a "transfer" - I would even go so far as to use the psychoanalytical term "transference", as it does not seem out of place here. The reflections and musings on Géricault’s aesthetic intentions melt almost imperceptibly into a second block of narration centered on the narrator's political exile with Max Hodann in Paris. There are Walter Benjamin-like street scenes of the city during the years immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, and then gradually we enter a third block, which gives a vivid account of the narrator's mother's political exile in Sweden and her efforts to evade the clutches of the German secret police.
The writing is at times inspired, with a particularly memorable description of Stockholm during a blizzard:
Durch die schwebenden Flocken gingen sie die enge Straße entlang. Ab und zu erschallten Rufe von den Dächern, ein Posten hielt die Fußgänger auf, heruntergeschaufelter Schnee fiel in die Haufen am Gassenrand. Zwischen Schneewällen gingen sie hindurch, auf den Hafenkai zu, im milchigen Gestöber waren Kräne und die Rümpfe einiger großer Schiffe zu erkennen. Weit wird die Aussicht nicht reichen, sagte die Schwester, sie fuhren aber trotzdem im Fahrstuhl hinauf, das Verkehrsrondell an der Schleuse sank zurück, die Querbalken des Eisenturms glitten vorbei, zuerst waren unten noch Straßenbahnen, Automobile, Omnibusse, auf hohem Sockel ein Reiter mit vorgestreckter Hand zu sehn, dan verschoben such im Flimmern nur noch formlose Schatten. (p. 550)Yet one has the sense that the narrative is constantly being eaten away by Weiss's need to engage in didactic pedagogy, with homilies drawn from contemporary Communist Party texts (mostly Swedish, one gathers) which follow the Soviet line of the time, casting Nazism as a result and product of Western capitalist greed and intrigue, and the Soviet Union as the only hope for the future not only of the working class but of the whole of mankind.
Somehow these political sections, with often stretch for pages, have a curiously desperate ring, and suggest that Weiss himself is not convinced by their content and message. This tension, which was already noticeable in the first volume of the novel, is becoming harder and harder to ignore as I continue to read.
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