Chaconne

By Lassi Nummi


1

I would like to begin as if unnoticed – not right now or a little earlier,
also not later; neither with this particular subject, nor with something else:
I would like to begin as animals gods and children begin, as love begins, that which is told about –
not as: "do I really dare?” or "did I interpret the shine in your eyes correctly?" or "do you know that your resistance is crumbling?"
but as the waves, the trees of the forest, and the wind – the most transient, most everlasting. I would like the thoughts
to break unnoticed into words, and so that each has time to take root
in the soil of silence, where they will blossom alone. I would like the words to turn into speech as if by a whim of chance, and the speech into song, and the song into a song without words,
and the wordless song dissolve into music, and the music to flow over our heads towards silence. At its edge I would like to draw black lines, not very many,
about something that has occurred to me – or that I have supposed might occur to me -- or that might
occur to me, as we sit with our friends on a honeyed autumn evening.


2


I have written many strange songs on strange subjects.
Today I am going to write a serious song on a serious subject.
My theme is your ear. I have researched it, grown thoroughly acquainted with it,
studied it from every angle in streaming light and twilight and semi-darkness
against the grapevine; when you are speaking, laughing, or when you are silent;
when tea is brought in. In a moment of music, a moment of hubbub, or when everyone is simultaneously silent
and the distant murmur of the streets is borne on the evening air through open windows.

3

Your ear – it is white, but not marble-like; I would say that everywhere in it a warm rosy shading can be observed. A slender labyrinth of furrows and bulges
– I deliberately use emphatic diction – thus acquires a deeper, more human content
through the affinity with
organic nature, transience and the brilliance of moments. Towards it many things
gather, and its time is short; gleaming as its backdrop
it has the gold of your hair.

Towards, past it your hair
is gathered through a golden comb in a bob at the back of your neck:
the morning fresh swell glitters, through which, quite close to the shoreline, gleam
shellfish or the white labyrinth of coral.

Near it your face is gathered – this almost motionless and very lively face,
This Greek and Asian face, unconscious of its consciousness, closed in its clarity – face of the Goddess of Mercy, Mary, Diana
This face of a birch tree, a maiden, a girl reflected in a pond, this white-stemmed face,
born from the smile of Artemis, smile dissolved back into a spring, born as Artemis,
born as Diana

Towards it voices are gathered – a sea’s thundering and whispering voices:
the hubbub of the city’s sea, the hubbub of the park’s sea of leaves, which the giant seashell of the house
repeats; the house’s hubbub, the laughter and uproar and talking and whispering and music
and the cry of a ship far away; the rustling of foliage, as if some brown god
were silently watching us.
Your ear’s shell rests
on the shore of the sea of voices. But silence has grown within its heart like a pearl.


4

Now I will tell you what I have thought this honeyed evening, autumn-honeyed,
among our noisy and sincerely many-faceted friends. I have thought: if my hand were to pluck
the flowers of your skin, it might stop and with closed eyes wake up and listen
to the streams, the brooks, the veins’ pulse, the soil’s pulse and the silence and swell of your heart. Into itself it might gather you, every voice
and everything that is silent. On the seashore the seashell opens to the thunder of the surf.

5

I know that the moon is rising. The shutters are opened
in the rooms that face the moon’s rising; or perhaps it was just a door. The Asian gods of my father's house
smile at the touch of the moonlight. Often, on hearing them murmur to one another,
I have intervened in their talk. Once – I must have been twelve at the time – I said to the Healer of Eye Diseases:
"Oh, teach me to see!" And when they were silent, I said angrily:
"You turban-head you could very well
take me to the God of War and Riches and order him to run me through with his sword
and let my family die out with me – provided you take this cataract and let me
look for a few moments into the heart of existence!"— Then for the first time I saw the gods’ faces fall:
in amazement they stared at me from their pedestals; disapproving, severe, stiff, or thoughtful;
but the God of Fertility had turned away, trying in vain to hide his bronze smile.

6


The Buddha is so heavily gilded, and on the topmost shelf: I do not speak to him – let him sit on his private lotus
and let the river roll by. – But you, God of Fishing, who keep watch near the shore
with your vigilant nets – I talk to you: could you not fill our house with invisible water so that the fish would swim everywhere in our midst – turn our speech into fishes, so that my words would leave my lips
and swim towards her hair – seaweed, golden sand, amidst which the contours of shell or coral are dimly visible?


7

You stir slightly, your hair flickers. I know: the moon is rising. They said just now
that Venus has fled Taurus and entered the figure of Aquarius, which is really
far more dangerous.
The moon is rising. Wild vine covers the house. The troubled brightness of the preludes
rises up the leaves like dew. The music is turned on, and the wind that flows in
behind it wakens the gods to listen.
Oh, what I would give, if everything were to stop now!
Only the music would flow on, and we would float with it, until we awoke in a network
of wild vine
wild vine growing through us.
– Dew, the brightness of the preludes. The moon is rising
between and above the wild vine. The leaves are flickering. Wild vine covers
the houses and covers the hearts, our bold, childish and trembling hearts.

The music has stopped. The pagodas rise from the twilight. Something new has caught on its fingertips the bird of your gaze.

8

The ivory goddess from Himalaya has raised her light hands.
The two at the top hold a lotus, each their own,
in a divine balance with her head and on a level with her girlish face.
A third supports the cloak, lightly wards off, on a level with her breasts..
A fourth, lower down, points, as if approving.
When you understand the posture
its frozen movement comes to life: even if the moon were not shining on the ivory-white skin,
you would see it moving and hear the music through the movements. I, at last, would understand the music
even without seeing the sculpture, as the light that rises from within your face
and melts into the semi-twilight of the moon; as the silence that thickens around you, until
the hand’s light movement is ripe to release, the gaze to brush the distance,
to shine forth, a half-unconscious laughter, like the chiming of the ankle-ring when the dance suddenly dies.

9

I know that the way, the truth and the life open in the moonlight as the nocturnal lotus flower opens.
But I have been taught to be sceptical. When I search for the truth, I find fossils,
characters, corals, the skeletons of hieroglyphics that have passed away; to reconstruct
the spark of life
into them – and in general – requires a talent for alchemy. -- On the other hand I have been raised
to search for wisdom, which is not so much waking or sleep than a continual awakening
from sleep to consciousness, from waking to a sleep that is permeated by consciousness: a tightrope semi-sleep-
walker, whom the images of two worlds bruise and entice:
a wind that towers to the heights and the depth of the ravine. – Raised to study
the mysteries, not so much in order to solve them as to learn the right way to approach
the kernel of the riddle: to listen to the humming, to attain the pearl.
– The Asian gods
smile doubtfully. Without grain and signs, lifeless, they reminisce about the man
about whom my mother talks: years before he went to follow the Lord Jesus Christ,
he raised in place of the gods on his altar the signs of heaven and earth.
I have not learned how to write them, but I love the golden grain and the wind
and I know that something of immortal beauty, vanishing and eternal,
is between them.

My earth-dream, my heaven-dream narrate it over an abyss, and the piercing wind takes my tears.


10

Have I told you that my heart once heard your heart’s shy speech
and now cannot distinguish the thundering voices of the world’s sea through it?
For that reason everything in me gathers into you. If you gather all this
into your pearly brilliance, will you one day repeat these voices like a far, forgotten sea?


11


I have wanted to tell you all this, and also less, this honeyed autumn evening
when our friends have gathered to celebrate the moon, which blesses their marriage, and endless sonatas are played
and talk is unrestrained and tea is drunk, to conceal the true nature of the ritual
and make the evil spirits go astray; I have wanted to say
that everything in me is gathered in you, and sings.
-- This painful secret
you have known of course, and we have talked about it; or might I have caressed it
into your hair? and might you have danced it for me?
But today it is new, reborn – as all true secrets and enigmas are reborn
over and over again: not to be solved, but to be realized and approached.
So approach its essence
and touch it.

I know that these years are vanishing,
have almost already slipped out of my hands. The moon has risen. Everything is ending
almost before it has begun. Look, the wild wine withered
and burst into clusters. The foreign voices
descended on its leaves like dust.


12

Hellene or barbarian – I do not know. This sense of change and flux, and this sense of changelessness and stasis
will always survive. I am perhaps a European, and I ought to understand
the demands of the age, serious business, commercial prosperity, or compensation for oppression
in new-fangled arrangements where that
term is not used. Or I am Asian,
arrived with a wandering nomadic tribe, here grown decadent: reciting spells, stimulating oneself into ecstasy,
conjuring past and future; meat curing over the sides of the saddle; opening the door to the non-existent garden
and submitting.

Are wreaths being made
for the wine festival? Dionysus, spirit of music,
is he is in our midst? Do flutes glimmer
everywhere, from mountains and ravines, stimulating us to processions and dances, into a wild ecstasy,
until we are ripe to fall on our faces
before the mystery?
Or does Apollo gesture
from further away, from a landscape of midday and majestic light -- raising the lyre,
playing his white peace through us?

The Asian gods
are watching us. Between the leaves I think for a moment I have attained a shining gaze
full of hidden meaning.

The gods of my country gaze from the heavy memorial tree group
at the sacred innocence of the birch trees, as the mist rises, the dance of the forest nymphs,
dissolving back into the spring.

I do not know, I do not know.
I know that I have seen the smile of Aphrodite rising white-stemmed
from the gold-glittering foam, where the corals the shells the clams happily conceal
their secret.

13

I would like to end as if imperceptibly. I would like my speech to slowly dissolve into
music, the music to dissolve into the light, into the silence of the light that streams through the doors.
As if you were already gone, all of you gone, the rooms filled with a pearl-brilliant silence,
the shutters forgotten, the moon descending,
with a curtain of dewdrops covering the sleeping wild wine.

"Here the country palace is empty, empty as a dream..."

In the semi-dusk of the moonlight the gods are staring. But they are only black lacquered wood
and the images of our fears and our desires; and we are skin, blood, dreams
and bone. Everything is in flux. And yet: there is the truth, and the way. It begins in the moonlight before my front steps,
and if I go on a journey without taking anything with me, bowing to the gods and praying to the Lord Jesus Christ,
there is a fleeting hope that I shall get back before I am seventy, and when I perceive I have completed the round trip
I would understand that I know less and am closer to the truth that lives in the circle’s hidden centre.


14


You sleep in the chamber of my anxiety. I pray. Then I bow to kiss
the cowrie shell the sea has brought. The curtains flicker. The world’s pearl ceiling
bends over us and repeats the echoes. We listen, and we are listened to
we are the cowrie shell, we are the sea. We dissolve into the world and the world into us.
We are the wild vine and the dew, we are the brightness of the preludes, we rest in the world’s gastropod
which shuts everything out, but repeats the voices of an unknown distant ocean.



[from Taivaan ja maan merkit (Marks of Sky and Earth), 1956]


translated from Finnish by David McDuff

The Diary of William N.

Following on from Mr. Darwin's Gardener, which won the Finnish State Prize for Literature in 2010, Kristina Carlson has written another novel on a theme drawn from the history of 19th century science. The Diary of Wlliam N. [William N. Päiväkirja, Otava 2011] is a fictional portrait of the Finnish botanist and entomologist William Nylander (1822-1899), who specialized in lichenology and lived in Paris from 1863 until his death.

The book is really a study of what it means to be an outsider - by virtue of his "difficult" temperament and his unconventional approach to scientific and university matters (sometimes perverse in its wrong-headedness), Nylander lives as an institutionless exile from his native land, subsisting in poverty while still maintaining his often shaky links with the scientific community both in Finland and abroad. Presented in the form of diary entries, the novel takes the reader through the final years of Nylander's life in Paris, and the narrative is broken by reflections on art and science - the botanist is also fascinated by contemporary French painting and other developments in modern art, and this makes for an interesting meditation on the meaning and significance of the new century which Nylander does not quite live to see.

In some ways the book is reminiscent of other Finnish and Finland-Swedish essays in the genre, possibly the most notable being Bo Carpelan's Sibelius study, Axel. But Kristina Carlson has gone further in evoking the atmosphere and reality of a bygone era and milieu, with a vivid and intricate account of the details of Parisian social, scientific and academic life viewed through the psychological lens of a Nordic mind that is steeped in Gallic wit and black humour. The figure and presence of August Strindberg are never far away, and with his antagonism to the status quo and embittered view of bourgeois life and marriage, Nylander becomes a link to the future - alienated from the suffocating climate of the age, he joins company at least in spirit with the artists, writers, philosophers and poets who seek a way out of the 19th century's moral and aesthetic cul-de-sac.

Solstice

by Sjón

when your eyes
pause on the ball
that hangs on the third branch from a star
you remember why it got dark and why it is getting light again

the earth (like the heart) leans back in its seat
and like that it travels along an orbit
drawn in the darkness

unpolished pearl in sky-black palm of hand
flickering sun-flame

you remember
that you yourself are a light-bearer
who receives her radiance from others

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff


sólhvörf

þegar augu þín
nema staðar við kúluna
sem hangir á þriðju grein frá stjörnu
þá manstu afhverju dimmdi og athverju birtir á ný

jörðin hallast í sætinu (eins og hjartað)
og þannig ferð ast hún eftir sporbraut
teiknaðri í myrkrið

ófægð perla í himinsvörtum lófa
flöktandi sólarlogi

þá manstu
að sjálf ertu ljósberi
sem þiggur ljóma sinn af öðrum

Detour

by Pia Tafdrup

Wild geese are gathering on the field
soon the whole flock will rise,
flying up over the woods, out across the water.
An ocean rolls within me
  wide open. 
I am too slow
for quick changes,
          too quick 
for things to go so slowly that life
                                becomes futureless.
Dreams start
  even before one learns to walk.
From the other side of the Atlantic
I can see better
what Scandinavia is –
the black duckling, the white swan,
Ibsen, Strindberg, Kierkegaard,
  gravity, melancholy, irony,
the wind settling round the trees,
  no other embrace,
the grey-white light of winter days,                         
loneliness enough
           for all.
In a Chinese street
where I try
to distil meaning out
of the words’ acoustics
I understand the dependence
on my Danish language
             the aorta
that runs underground in my body
no matter how aimlessly I 
travel around, buoyed up
by the light.
I move forward,
  the same sky seen
from different angles,
  the same Earth,
the blood’s cadence sets the pace.
Every detour I make
goes by way of myself alone. 

translated from Danish by David McDuff

The Cool Day

My translation of Bo Carpelan's Den svala dagen (The Cool Day) is here. And some versions of poems from Carpelan's last collection, Gramina, together with an essay by Michel Ekman, are here.

Pia Tafdrup: Three Poems

Infection

You stiffen poisoned by sudden dread
while the day overturns and changescolour
and the blood beneath a steadily growing pulse
sends the pain out into the most finely branching net
where it flutters around like ash
at a wing-beat rising above the embers
until the heart, that coral tree
in acute flowering stands still in spasm,
near to drowning in its own blood
For who can go about immune in a city
where people live in separation
like shards of the same dream
The dark’s invasion of a stranger
– is the hatred taking hold of you?
Like stab of metal that gnaws into your flesh
far, far from that morning where newborn you
were blessed by the first light.


Mount of Olives

For all men have one entrance into life,
and the like going out.

Wisdom of Solomon, 7,6

Still is the Mount of Olives graveyard in sun
where caravans of stone travel acrossthe west-facing slopes
Still as those landscapes, which abruptly turn to desert
places that have not yet been assigned a name
where sand flies,settling in ever new formations
Still is the air, a rent in the garment
and the night on the mountain mild as under a bird's wing
Still stands the air among the graves
on which stones flower eternally for the dead
– Blessed be the Judge of Truth –
Still as in Jerusalem's depth, where the water drips
in the more than two thousand year-old cisterns
echo of souls that still watch and wake
Each drop falls with its click
one syllable, as in the word death.


Night in the Mountains


The sun that lays waste the squares at noon
sinks quickly near the 32nd parallel
but before it loses itself and each object creeps into the shadows’ depths
vast landscapes saturated in their tone appear
colours that beyond all reckonings of time cling round each other
to seep redeemed into the brain
You see a cypress bend beneath a bird’s weight
if it settles in the tree’s crest
You see mountains that may be moved by faith or crumble at a sudden command
a sky that may crackle with jet fighters
or a sudden rain of missiles
Sleep-heavy the traffic curves up the hill, but the sound of car horns fades beneath you
You will see contours wiped out by a steady hand
see sky and desert merge into one near the low mountains further away
Your eye will dwell on the Arab houses,which chameleon-like, pretty
glide together with the desert colours in the light of sunset
until a woman’s laughter bursts from the nearest house
and lights the city’s lamps

Mild evening air caresses the city afterthe sun has gone down
Let the darkness fall about you like those kisses
the young girl receives from her beloved in the tavern
The stones are still warm as his hands
Lean against these stones, stay sitting so long
that the cats, who at night wail with longing,are not afraid
but sneak out from their hiding-placesand rub up against your leg

Jerusalem's night is also yours, the light of the half moon
its gentle breeze, flowers that each individually close around their scent
the birds that are silent and the city's furthermost lights out there, where silence embraces all sounds
where no one hears your steps and no paths are beaten
No one will call you back from the grey zone
where you feel neither anger nor pain
but something will grow in you between sky and desert
where you reach no one and no one canreach you
something will shine with darkness and trump your earlier self

You will see the old new and the new old
it rests on your eyes how you look at this place
just as it depends on you what the city chooses in you
Say goodnight to the impenetrable darkness, to the star that shines so brightly
that its light is cast far into the days here.


(from Territorialsang [Territorial Song], 1994)

translated from Danish by David McDuff

The Chromatic Levels

or An Introduction to the Breaking of Captive Form


by Eeva-Liisa Manner

[N.B. words and phrases that occur in English in the original Finnish text are marked in italics]

I open the door, it is an ordinary wooden door
stone pine coloured by the sun
I open the door like a valve
I come from a cool room
into another cool room
here it is the hallway
one hallway in the universe
not a place but a space
there is no one there
it is an empty space hollowed out of absence
I forgot something
I open the door (like a valve)
I go back in
fetch the newspaper
it’s today’s paper
full of yesterday’s news
I turn the page
on the paper square
there is a public meeting
mouths frozen around a cry
In the room there are people
who do not come and do not go
but are always there
lonely with printer’s ink
They have been arrested
in the midst of a sentence
on a flat expanse
a page of La Tarde
I walk through the sentence
through the life of the room
A room as white
as if it had been carved in chalk
I enter the yard
I see the life of the yard but do not feel it
between me and the yard
there is an impression of glass
it moves slightly all the time
as if I were walking through glass
behind the glass a grasshopper grinds its wings
I register it do not feel it
behind the glass a cat is searching for its kittens
criatura estética domestica
from habit of thought but I
do not feel it
it is none of these, it is
ungraspable
The cat meows
my ear receives the message
but the message’s impressive authenticity
makes no impact on me now
My ear receives it out of habit
but in reality my ear is dead
Every definition is wrong
sound is ungraspable
my ear is not dead, it is asleep
as though it had been given a deafening blow If
a creature
criatura estética filosófica
were to whisper: touch me with its voice
what an awakening I would run
square and room in hand I would take
yard & houses in my arms
But no Only the grasshopper grinds
a grasshopper’s thigh
(in the green room its green wing)
and a cat meows and searches
its light-shunning iris yellow as cold resin.
I return to the room
which is an empty space
Absence has hollowed out the room
and me. If
emptiness is the room’s finite gain
then emptiness is my infinite
loss, which I do not even grasp
The one who is absent is ungraspable
his absence is ungraspable
his presence: this is past tense: ungraspable
But I see him
as if he were Present
That conditional is an optimistic present tense
the sense of presence in a state of absence
but an illusion: like the reeds’
Lydian melody, so past.
―͝͝͝͝ ͝   
That broken profile (like the coast of Cornwall)
which is the long-remembered dactyls of the sea,
they rise, fall, slowly, fading into my room
where I sleep like a stranger, alone
(Epi oinopa ponton)

Criatura metafísica trágica
(the immense tragedy in the daydream
of a peasant’s bent back)
But every definition is wrong
not even the essence of tragedy is tragic
when I say that it is tragic, then
I myself am tragic
only I myself. The essence of
tragedy is noble,
and that too is wrong,
the essence of tragedy is noble submission in necessity
(not to necessity but in what is necessary)
Noble submission: the proud choice of the humble:
between sorrow and emptiness it chooses sorrow
And even that is wrong
It chooses both
Only the tragic
can choose both
without engendering compromise.
The solution is ungraspable
because the essence of tragedy is ungraspable
Ungraspable firmness
ungraspable softness
the colours of water and iron.

Because pure grief and pure Nothingness
are one and the same.
Pure being is not the eye of Nothingness
From pure being (grief), I look into Nowhere.
This room is now, left alone,
Also a non-room.
Every deserted space is a part of emptiness
Every part of emptiness is all of emptiness.

I have made this lime-house
out of my own flesh and soul
out of my spirit, like a snail.
A house, first of pure flesh, and now of chalk.
How can it suddenly be so lonely and abandoned
Perhaps I myself am no longer here
There is no real reason
no any single serious reason

and no real evidence, except perhaps
a little muddle here and there
but perhaps it is just a kinetic disturbance of objects
how do I know
The active cause is removed, but the hysteria continues
in objects, in highly sensitive individuals.
It is indeed theoretically possible. But this is a joke.

I always have to explain all and everything
because when I pretend, everything is taken from me,
when I am serious, and very cold, they think, well
aha, she’s a humorist.
But from start to finish there is no humour.
Humour is flight, a refracting mirror for the one
who cannot look straight at phenomena
in a harsh light.
There is no longer any humour in me.
A few word games are not humour, but loneliness.
One plays with words as children play with bricks
the primary game as they study for themselves the possibilities of spatial things.
Devotion to them is loneliness.

Because now I have given up the illusions of the objective world.
Every world is subjective,
everything else is an error of the eye.
Everyone is the centre of reality.
In this world there are billions of
realities, like billiard balls,
stay in your own ball, be your own monad,
close your window, it was blind, too,
that door also opened inwards,
on the gardens of the moon, you are there yourself;
and that too is a mirage.
Continue the study of the eye,
put it in a Faraday cage,
the theme of emptiness is there, if not the core.

I came here full of eyes, but eyeless I shall leave,
Lorca said, and the pen wept, and he also said:
All I want is one hand,
a wounded one, if possible.
All I want is one hand,
though I spend a thousand nights with no bed, alone.

Your eyes will kill me who said that?
If your love is so strong
that you are willing to cross the Styx twice,
you need the golden bough – whose advice was that?
But as soon as that
metal tree breaks into leaf in me,
I will die. It has already begun, the death of my hands.
When I touch objects I do not feel them.
I am already half wood, like fleeing Daphne.

Every word went wrong
as if clay were put in a delicate mosaic.
Every movement was amorphous,
as if my hand were buried.
A bird flew over the house, I did not see it,
but heard the humming of the emptiness.
It has gone, but the path of going
keeps on returning like a fragment of ribbon.
Joy does not come twice,
but its heavy foot is still in me.

So sink back to the cave of shadows
to one or two others with chains around their necks
and watch the reflections on the wall.
Perhaps they will stop some time, and you will see the light of the sea,
thalatta, thalatta,
or start to hear music that does not exist.

Those who were burned by the dream of truth,
knowledge led astray.
Those who were burned by the dream of beauty,
love led astray.
Those who were burned by the dream of freedom,
saw themselves as the splinters of crooked mirrors.
Perhaps there was a ghost of truth there, perhaps even beauty,
but freedom was always something else.

Because man is a relative being: a kind of contract.
I have lost all my relations, all
my contractuality
have stepped out of myself, of my own flesh
(spirit of the snail: small houses and very delicate and sensitive,
extremely emotional flesh)
and arrived Nowhere.
Emptiness is not just a part of me,
I myself am a part of emptiness.

But this is not important. I do not
take myself seriously, I take the Void seriously
It is the subject. I am the verb:
constantly though slowly changing
I inscribe my words on the screen of the Void.
on the empty flesh of the heart of the Void,
the Heideggerian essential emptiness, whose signal is Das Schaudern.
When I examine emptiness in detail,
I see what is around me, if anything.
Perhaps the Void is so porous
that I do not see anything.
Perhaps the Void is so essential
that it does not mean anything else.
Perhaps the Void is being itself.

There is always too much night
covering me.
I do not grasp it.
Only my hand grasps it:
emptiness: feels it,
I feel it with my whole hand
My heart feels it to be infinite
the heart is not exact
yet it is right
My hand feels it
to be precisely the size of a hand
In the room there are 485, 112 hand-breadths More than
512, 148 times intimate
hand-grasped emptiness
Essential
is that emptiness which repeats itself in series
it is what makes the room
as the hollow in the pot makes the pot,
as my cavities make me,
the heart’s hallway and ventricle.

All definitions of emptiness
are inverse.
I cannot say what it is, I can only say what it is not.
I cannot describe its essence, I can describe only its effects.
Although emptiness is nothing, not even a space,
it produces spaces.
Although it has no being, it breeds,
because it fills man with his own pain.
Although emptiness is outside all activity
it acts through those whom it deprives.
Emptiness is a dropper
and if you have a poet’s will, it drops you into a poem,
until that will also ceases
and you fall forever,

like a stone that falls
to a depth of 70,000 fathoms

and goes on falling,

because in reality there is no weight and no falling stone.
Only the falling is real.

‘I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field,’ said Wittgenstein.
But the eye can extend
over the body (as in those who are blind).
As the sex
is not between the legs, so the eye is not
in the head.

When the bomb drops and the city catches fire,
you see the light with the back of your head,
and your limbs also see it.
It all depends on the strength of the light.
In total darkness
your eye is empty.
You can furnish it with any objects you like
and say: this is the world.
The world is a perception for the mind, not of the eye.
My eye is also the world.
Or ear, that winding funnel of flesh,
though its creation needed one age of the world.

The Devil poured small wheels of logic into the world’s ear
and said: now it can hear very well.
Everything is what one wants it to be.
Everything is logical within the framework of my system.
Strict solipsism coincides
with ‘pure realism'.
The whole of the West is asleep in a capsule of solipsism
and speculates in the pure language of science
and meanwhile the East will come to hollow out the flesh of the West
unless by then it has wholly been turned into a language,
a language game.

Many a solid and clear idea begins with ravings,
the determinations of logic.
Their element is fire, swift and dry.
A process of alchemy: Besessenheit, concentration, crystallization, stone,
aquamarine cold as water, hard and clear as that
heart I envy, not achieved by many.

But this is physics.
The manifest life of the soul begins in complexes
and conflicts. When they
relax, you step into a large room
so empty that you could even walk through the walls.
This is the hallway of the final emptiness.
The rate of explosion depends on whether the experience
is pleasant or not, and it is not important,
in any case you are simply here complete and intact,
as intact as you were as a child when everything was indivisible
and objects seemed to seemed to pass through one another
and flow. In this flowing is the mystery
perhaps life itself.
It stops as soon as organization begins
and with it, rigidification. This
organization makes you human,
but the more human you become, the
more of a share you acquire in the general human presence,
the more you lose your share of the common mystery,
call it what you like, some call it God,
but almighty it is certainly not.
For as soon as we organize we lose the mystery
at every moment and break our relation with God.
Therefore all doctrines are unnecessary and they should be shaken off.
All knowledge is so unnecessary that God is now
only in the trees.

Even this explanation of mine is unnecessary
and when I write it here, I simply write it
in order to shake it from myself.
Some vessels fill as life goes by, and finally break,
others grow empty.
The wind digs a well
in the abandoned yard.
My well
is starting to be very empty, the emptiness ever more echoing.
I do not listen to myself.

The father held the church in his hand and from his mouth came a painted phrase:
Noli foras ire. In te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas.
Poetry, that eidetic science, has many times said the same,
and more ambiguously.
You Yourself are the casket of truth.
Stay in your room, do not go out.
Around the corner, where the wind turns,
great misfortunes await.
-- But does not the air of this room contain the very essence of misfortune?
You can plant oriental flowers in your chamber, and they will die.
We will die of the truth, because we are all
nailed to the cross of doctrine. While that truth
may be a paradox, it does not lead anywhere.

I too was the truth of my dreams
and fragmentary.
Whence this ceramic memory?
And whence its passionate association,
Zauberbruch für die Reise ins Weite:
Only by blowing up your dreams can you blow up your fate.
Sacrifice the most precious thing you have:
the dream, and the step into freedom,
and at once you are in the centre of a much wider reality.
It is empty
but now
I am no longer falling: :the force of gravity is dead
it died at 3 am
The stars of illusion and disillusion set
The Pleiades descended in my mirror.
The burning of one’s heart may start as the burning of a book
on any page at all,
unveil itself leaf by leaf vanish
into an increasingly pure anonymity.

This is scorched-earth tactics.
When you destroy what you believed in,
and surrender it, after the destruction,
the surrender remains, the whole theme of defeat.
You stand on the brink of emptiness unable to see your own shadow any longer:
a waste land, no blade of grass, nor even one of dill
to decorate your hair.
And everything is covered by Thanatos’ cold mantle.

Man does not own
anything here except love and death
and in them he is completely alone
and outside.
From the towers of fate he surveys himself
like a soldier from the terrace of death
his unknown adversary,
a transient guest on earth.

We come here
and collect objects for ourselves
only gradually to abandon them.
In reality they reject us.
All of life is the burning of a book,
Page by page we cease to yearn for what is not,
Page by page we ourselves also cease to exist,
for the dreamer is not more real than his dreams
and reality shuns us.
All matter shuns the other
even when it apparently seeks company:
the counterpart by intertwining with which
it would destroy matter’s routine.
All matter also shuns itself
because it takes the place
that is really emptiness’s own.
Matter appropriates the motions of energy,
they are its own contents,
conjuring tricks of the fight against emptiness,
and thus the endless war of matter and emptiness goes on.
the Void swallows limitless numbers of matter’s troops
and still its hunger is insatiable.
It is never a war of man against man,
emptiness is always greater, and indivisible.
And
there is nothing but matter and empty space.


The empty house, the abandoned birds’ nests.
How they sang in the spring, the potter- birds!
Where they have gone, is not winter coming here?
The brittle formation of sky and branches is silent,
the trees full of the silence of death.
The leaves will fall, and the lime from the walls.
(Alles ist Sein zum Tode)

As there is calm in the eye of the storm,
so in the eye of the revolving wheel is the core of silence.
I heard the Void transporting clay along the rails,
I never saw the wheels, but I heard the approaching squeal
though it was really silence
so deep that it fractured everything around it.
And now it is here.
As in the first bars of sleep is the glimmer of death
so on the threshold of emptiness is all the Schaudern of defeat.
On the one side the abyss of the horrors and the spirit’s darkness,
on the other a vision of beauty, a land that is made
from carnelian gemstone and rose-cut diamond (which induces sleep)
all illusions
(des ewigen Sinnes ewige Unterhaltung)
truth is emptiness, to which all chaos, beauty and systems return,
worlds blinded by light and darkness
measurable, immeasurable, yet relative,
but emptiness is the Absolute,
the cosmic curtain: the final dimension, against which
everything is a mere reflection.
The screen ruptures when your mind is shaken
and the mystery is pressed against your face
and before you worlds are raised as from a crucible;
the screen heals when life runs away
the arteries violently opening and closing
and you no longer hear its demonic call, its
angelus bell. You open the door like a valve
and you enter the empty hallway;
the threshold brass, in the room the smell of earth,
your home is here.

I too was a reflection,
reflections of a reflection these characters: images,
I made them to pass the time, wrote for writing’s sake, for whom, then,
poem after poem, leaps of ink on the paper’s skin.
Because I do not want to be subservient to anything but language,
defeated to conquer language gradually
until a man comes along the black water and interrupts that task too,
but it is another man.
I said along the ‘black’ water, I meant: unknown,
in which time flows backwards and in whose boats we grow young again.
As I do not want to go back, then you go, songs,
obeying the command: "Always try to stay in the harsh light of Sophocles
and let his good humour wound you."

But my songs were musically stupid
and it was all just a correspondence with the night and the mist
under the Saracen olive trees.
The words go out one by one like little swaying lights
and return to the darkness
the size of fingernails illuminating the night.
The land returns to its ancient form, the words
no longer forge it into matter rising on their wings
the heart turns into bronze and flows back into the night again.
Love makes the words solitary, superfluous,
Love is not a unifier, a steed on the bridge;
not the sun refracted in the ally’s shield
raising the mist from the meadow and showing pastoral images
but not the shepherd or the sea, not the voice of the conch-shell.
Love is a spring that floods inwards
a cave’s echo, a fumbling, the silence of snow,
an ever deeper solitude.

I believed one book
the fine dust of whose verses was shaken from the constellation Lyra:
"This world does not harm those
who walked far on the paths of love."
This world, yes, how could it harm me,
made of fog and rust.

Moreover
I realized I had always walked only in the chambers of my heart
and always the same journey
from articulated light to the zone of darkness.
Those others, whom I thought were radiant
with the same light, had burnished their copper for others
or else they were just the illusions of my dreams in the forest.

There is no hope of an explanation, I only know
that the arrow of love kills again even though it has been removed.
This phenomenon is one of the body’s strangest experiences:
It includes as a part of its space also that which no longer exists.

Darken my soul heart of the night silence
this world is far too heavy, the sky
so empty now each fragrant bough offered
itself to the wind The roads were full of horrors
under the flowering cherry trees
And yet they were all delusions of the same world
Darken tear the thin mist of consciousness
through which the phenomena glitter and call
and sink back to your home to the grove of shadows
your feet, half earth, probably remember it still.

Here is the end of all the roads in all the world
I haven’t anymore music in me
I have no music
These snippets of language are phrases
not sensory qualities but motor snatches
of, jazz, that noise, so childish and gentle
with which they stimulate to movement, a storm of movement
their limbs that want to go to sleep.
I am not tired, I am indifferent: Void.
There is no more music in me.

[from the collection Fahrenheit 121 (1968)]
Note: English words that occur in the Finnish text are italicized in the translation.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

True Finns - 2

Huvfudstadsbladet reports that True Finns leader Timo Soini has accused Sweden's media - in particular the leftwing Aftonbladet newspaper - of distorting Finland's image in the wake of the recent election result which gave the party a marked increase of the national vote. Soinu considers that European media in general have demonized the True Finns, painting the picture of a racist extremist party, and comparing its campaign with the most notorious rhetoric of the 1930s.

Perhaps a more realistic appraisal of the True Finns is provided by the UK-based Open Europe website, which in its blog has gone some way towards clarifying what the True Finns really signify and stand for:

The True Finns party, or Perussuomalaiset in Finnish, has its roots in an anti-incumbency, rural protest movement from the 1950s, leading to the formation of a political party, eventually named the Finnish Rural Party. The party's dissolution in 1995 led to the creation of the True Finns (one of the party's slogans, "Crush the power hold of the old parties", is testament to its heritage). More than anything else, its euroscepticism seems to flow out of this tradition (which also explains its opposition to providing more cash to the temporary eurozone bail-out fund, the EFSF, for more bail-outs - bail-outs which we agree aren't really working).

So clearly, the party has very different roots compared to other Scandinavian populist parties, such as the Sweden Democrats and the Danish People's Party (for Swedish speakers, here's an article breaking it down). The Front National, Geert Wilder's Freedom Party etc are much farther away again from the True Finns.

In other words, the party cannot be described as "far right", as some non-Finnish media insist on so doing. However, it cannot be described as "centre-right" either, as it draws heavily from an old school, social democratic agenda (i.e. high taxes and a big welfare state). Kind of like a social democratic tea party, with a lot of emphasis on national sovereignty and independence.

Additionally, Finnish academic linguist Jaakko Häkkinen has some interesting proposals (pdf) on how the language issue in Finland could be addressed.

True Finns

The ultimate significance of the remarkable gains by the Perussuomaliset (True Finns) party in the Finnish national elections - achieving nearly one fifth of the national vote - is yet to be made clear. But looking at the new situation in general socio-cultural terms rather than purely economic ones, it seems evident that the public mood in Finland is moving in favour of the concept and practice of a national Finnish home, rather than a European state in the political, EU sense. The demise of policies like the obligatory teaching of Swedish in Finnish schools (the so-called "pakkoruotsi" or "tvångsvenskan") may have far-reaching implications for the ways in which modern Finland interacts with the modern world - yet in its reassertion of local and national identity Finland is only following a general trend that is now making itself felt throughout Europe.

The Svenskfinland in English blog has some useful facts and figures about the election results, and the Perussuomalaiset website (in Finnish) is here.

Gramina

I'm working on some translations of poems from Bo Carpelan's last collection, Gramina (2010).These will probably be published in Books from Finland.

Sabbath

by Pia Tafdrup

The first Saturday is weightless and reflected monotonous
in the insects’ meditating buzz; the beginning endless
The second Saturday the city looks like a deserted ballroom
where the invited guests have gone home early
The third Saturday I am called out
to morning-drowsy plane trees along the sidewalk
and streets where cars stand parked in long rows
The dust sticks dry to shoes whose worn heels click
against the asphalt like homeless echoes
One or two dogs wander lazily about
and under the deep-sea sky washing is taken in
from balcony railings and the city’s flat roofs
Even the cash machines observe the Sabbath
like a prophecy that has been fulfilled
Still, a tribute to the Russian Church with its verdigris onion domes
and stray cats jumping around one another on the steps
Opposite, a barrier goes up for a jeep on the way out
otherwise the police station lies ecstatically empty
From pines the birds are heard, not seldom confused
with the sound of an old man who is playing a saw
and among clusters of roses the oleander blooms like wild fever
at the traffic lights near the Jaffa Gate
where groups of bird-like men with taliths
appear on foot en route to the synagogue
Mornings where Jerusalem seems no less quiet
than when Jonah slept safely on the bottom of the storm-tossed ship
as I remember it from my childhood’s sailing.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Two Poems

from Territorial Song [Territorialsang, 1994]
by Pia Tafdrup

A CITY IN HEAVEN

My blood has many relatives.
They never visit.

Yehuda Amichai

The eye in its cave turns the horizon round
birds circling in the air
Born in Warsaw, born in Budapest, born in Kiev
Born in Moscow, born in Berlin, born in Craiova
in Sofia, in Prague – they come to the city of David

A language they leave, letters from home
go up this generation or the next in smoke and oblivion
or vanish in the glowing ether’s sphere
In the light from wax candles they drown themselves out
and the family is only visited in dreams

The eye in its cave turns the horizon round
birds circling in the air
heavenly bodies glide in their paths
They live under evening-warm clouds now with desert mist and wine
cut bread in slices, eat figs and pomegranates
know the rocket shelter as well they do the prayers
they recite, and the songs of blood, milk and honey

They have cuddled one another wearing gas masks
children they lose in the war-
that-never-stops
They celebrate holy days and will be buried here
to awaken the earth with their longing

The eye in its cave turns the horizon round
birds circling in the air
heavenly bodies glide in their paths
words intertwine and let go in winged song
Born in Warsaw, born in Budapest, born in Kiev
Born in Moscow, born in Berlin, born in Craiova
in Sofia, in Prague…



HORIZON

Like grains of salt held forth
Jerusalem sprouts
up from the mountain

Red and pink limestone
a desert all round
that obeys and flowers

Time
is momentary
and millennial

Wind harp
shifting sand
evening sun

Voices
graze the ear
that scans the pain:

In the darkness under a hatch for fishing tackle
my father and his family in a cutter
across the Sound to Sweden

On the bottom of another boat my grandfather
and on a shelf in the engine room
my mother and her mother…

Count the many
see the one
nothing must be limited, no one be forgotten

Each consciousness its tell*
a memory
that keeps the dread awake

The day is great
as a stone of burden
I lean towards the silent paper

Spin a life-thread.



*tell - from Hebrew tel, a heap of ruins, a mound that forms an archaeological site.


0translated from Danish by David McDuff

Five Books

At TheBrowser, a literary website which announces that it is creating a 21st century library of Writing Worth Reading, Rory McTurk discusses five works on Norse culture and Old Icelandic literature, including Vilhelm Grønbech's The Culture of the Teutons, Sigurður Nordal's Icelandic Culture, and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen's Saga and Society. All the books mentioned in the interview are available in English translation.

Siri Hustvedt: The Summer Without Men

Siri Hustvedt’s recently-published novel The Summer Without Men (Henry Holt, Sceptre, hardback, also Kindle) tells the story of the survival of a 30-year-old marriage through a brief and sudden experience of loss and breakdown which leads to a realization of personal integrity. This happens not only in terms of individual experience but also in a broader context that encompasses the generations, from childhood to extreme old age. It’s a moving narrative that is unpretentious in its determination to get to the truth. The style is episodic, at times impressionistic, occasionally making a transition to poetry. It has a place for humour, irony and dry observation, yet also carries a voice that is straightforward and sincere. The evocation of Norwegian-American Minnesota, with it communities, its libraries, its care homes for the elderly and its study groups for children, is delicately and skilfully done. The central theme is the interweaving of life and art, of reality and fiction. At a book club discussion, the participants don’t distinguish between them, regarding “the characters inside books exactly the way they regard the characters outside books. The facts that the former are made of the alphabet and the latter of muscle, tissue, and bone are of little relevance.”

In a sense the book can be seen as a homage by Mia, the novel’s heroine (and by implication the author herself) to “that coy but passionate genius, the Danish philosopher who has been irking and unsettling and bewildering her for years.” As one of Mia’s anonymous correspondents writes: “Who would deny us the mere pantomime of frenzy? We, the actors who pace back and forth on a stage no one watches, our guts heaving and our fists flying?”

Peter Weiss: Letters - 2

I’ve now finished reading the book* – it’s a fairly short work, and includes the text of 21 letters, with notes and bibliography. The letters themselves give a fascinating snapshot of the 24 year-old Weiss’s psychological, emotional and artistic situation in Alingsås, western Sweden, during the summer of 1941. In April of the same year, the Swedish poet Karin Boye, who also lived in Alingsås, and with whom Weiss may have had personal contact, committed suicide. It seems that this event drove him to seek psychoanalytic treatment, though it was some time before he could afford to undertake a proper analysis. In the letters there are references to an aborted analysis with a local doctor, Iwan Bratt, and a self-analysis conducted afterwards during a time when Weiss was still working as a darkroom technician in his father’s factory.

Henriette Itta Blumenthal, like several other of Weiss’s close friends during this period, was considerably older than him, and had also trained as an analyst. Unlike Weiss, she emigrated to the United States. Weiss’s letters to her bear the character of a personal confession, and reveal much about his troubled sense of personal, ethnic and national identity, his relation to his parents, his affairs with women, his attitude towards homosexuality, his increasingly political interpretation of the role of resistance in psychoanalysis, and many other themes which eventually became merged into his later literary works, especially the "Erzählung” Abschied von den Eltern (1960), and the novels Fluchtpunkt (1961) and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-1981) There is also a good deal of detail about his activity and aspirations as a painter and visual artist, and the book gives an insight into his concept of “world theatre” (Welttheater) as a meeting-place of the personal and the public, which would later become important in his work for the stage and screen. The descriptions of life in a small Swedish town during wartime, with its gossip, its hostility to foreigners and its undisguised anti-Semitism, are sharply and vividly drawn.

In their notes, the editors of the volume have tried to be as precise, inclusive and informative as possible, and this is very welcome. Their introductory essay also serves as a useful summary of the rest of the text. One has the impression, however, that the editors are not quite at home in Swedish, and this is a pity, as the letters are written in a curious linguistic style that hovers somewhere between German and Swedish, occasionally producing some strange and subtle shifts, not all of which are literary, and which require some detective work on the part of the reader.  In one case when Weiss writes that he has been out with friends picking rosehips, and uses a “Germanized” form (Nippon) of the Swedish word nypon, the notes flag this as “Unklar: Es gibt eine Pfingstrose namens »Nippon Beauty«. Möglicherweise auch ein Übertragungsfehler.“ (p. 151) Where Weiss spells the name of the journal Månadstidningen in a mixture of German and Swedish which probably reflects his state of mind in exile, as "Monatstidningen", in one instance the notes go even further, and reproduce the title as Månatsdidningen (p.71). On a more general level, many readers could probably dispense with notes that inform them that Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch painter, or that Diego Rivera was a Mexican one.

But these are minor matters, and ones which it would perhaps not be hard to set right for a second edition. Readers who are familiar with Weiss's prose work, especially the Ästhetik, will find much of interest in this book as it provides documentary background material and in some cases a confirmation of certain themes and facts that are only hinted at in the prose fiction. It is also a highly enjoyable read, and a worthy addition to the volumes of Weiss's letters that have already been published (most recently his correspondence with Hermann Hesse and Siegfried Unseld, the late head of Suhrkamp.)

* Peter Weiss: Briefe an Henriette Itta Blumenthal, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2011. 175pp.

Christer Kihlman reassessed

Hufvudstadsbladet’s Pia Ingström has been rereading the novels of Christer Kihlman (b. 1930), Finland’s doyen and former enfant terrible of “confessional literature” who was at his most productive in the 1960s and 70s, but whose literary activity subsequently became more sporadic.  Kihlman’s breakthrough novel Se upp, Salige! (1960) has  been reissued in a new edition by Söderströms, though readers of English will have to wait.  Four of his novels are, however, available in English versions, and one wonders whether the renewed interest in his work may also extend to the English-speaking world. Certainly, as Pia Ingström points out in her column, Kihlman’s work is not short on interesting, contemporary and universally human themes, whether it be marital conflict, family breakdown, homosexual prostitution, alcoholism or drug addiction – “Frågan är om inte Kihlman är bättre ju värre han är” (The question is whether Kihlman is not better the worse he is), she writes, and there may well be something in that, for he was probably at his best as a writer when exploring what Gunnar Ekelöf called the “bottom” (botten) of human nature and  experience. At all events, one looks forward to seeing the republication in Swedish of more of Kihlman’s controversial but surely not superannuated output, much of which has been out of print for a long time. After all, in the intervening years since the 1970s confessional literature has never entirely gone out of fashion in the global literary market, and may even be on the way back to prominence again.

Peter Weiss: Letters

News that Berlin publishers Matthes & Seitz will this month release a new edition of Peter Weiss's Letters to Henriette Itta Blumenthal, written mostly from Alingsås, Sweden, between 1941 and 1943, before the beginning of Weiss's first proper psychoanalysis.

Update: the book is now published, and I have a copy. I'll post a short review here in due course.

Thor Vilhjálmsson 1925-2011

It's reported from Reykjavík that the Icelandic poet, novelist, essayist and translator Thor Vilhjálmsson has died at the age of 85. Among his better known works are the essay collection Fljótt, fljótt sagði fuglinn (1968) and the novel Grámosinn glóir (1986) which won the 1988 Nordic Council Literature Prize and was translated into English by Bernard Scudder (Justice Undone, 1998).

Update: Shortly before his death, Thor Vilhjálmsson was interviewed on video by Icelandic novelist and critic Einar Kárason.

Two Poems

by Pia Tafdrup

SIGNPOST


The world was old
even before
it was born,
for no one learns
from others’ experience,
  only by making
the mistakes oneself
over and over again.
Atlas, globe, map, 
the world was discovered, 
  only not by me…
In the heart is
the signpost
    I follow.
What else can I
so exactly
navigate by?



STUMBLING STONE
  
Not a stone in the shoe 
that chafes long before 
it registers as stone, 
but a stone on the road, 
                   a stumbling stone, 
that suddenly makes the heart 
pound in the chest, as waves 
roll from foreign shores 
  in towards the coast, 
where I grew up, 
  into the poems I write. 
A stone 
between before and after 
at an insurmountable distance 
on a hot day 
without a cloud in the sky. 
A stone, 
lying as it does, 
  sun up there 
  stone down here 
substance, matter, 
in order to point out 
that I am scarcely
on the road –
but the  mind is racing. 
What does a person think of 
  while walking? 
Not necessarily of travel, 
the legs walk by themselves, 
once they've learned 
  to walk. 
Quite often the person thinks about
not having much time 
                 to live, 
thinks about events that are 
like scars in the heart 
or about changing 
for the better, at least 
  trying. 
I walk on the road 
the mind is racing 
            over a wayless terrain, 
                           far beyond this present now. 

(from Trækfuglens kompas, 2010)

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Göteborg Poets in Ukraine

The cover of Lev Hrytsyuk's new anthology of work by 18 Göteborg poets, which he has translated into Ukrainian. The book has 244 pages, and is published by Krok.

Bo Carpelan

It's sad to read of Bo Carpelan's passing - in many ways he was the last remaining representative of the classical Finland-Swedish modernist poetry tradition. If anyone feels like reading some of my translations of Carpelan's poetry, there's an excerpt from one collection here.

As far as my own role in making Carpelan's work better known outside Finland is concerned, there isn't really much to say: for several years I worked with him on getting two of his novels (Axel and Urwind) into an English format he was more or less happy with, as well as three collections of his poetry - the latter were published in a single volume by Carcanet Press in 1993. Although Carpelan came from an upper-class Finland-Swedish background, and Axel is in some ways a spiritual and intellectual history of Finland-Sweden, there was little in his essential artistic and aesthetic orientation that could be called specifically Finnish or Swedish: while he gravitated towards Anglo-American literature, his ideal was an international one, and like his contemporary Tove Jansson he reached out to a wider audience. He was a shrewd, kind and occasionally stubborn man who wanted to find the way home, both for himself and for his contemporaries everywhere:

A few words sought their way close up to me
as though they sought protection from something
that was too difficult to see. I wrote them down.
This they taught me, the words that came:
farewells are part of everything that is
and, when I have dreamt most strongly,
a homecoming.

Bo Carpelan (1926-2011)

The Literary Saloon notes that the Finland-Swedish poet and novelist Bo Carpelan has passed away at the age of 84:

quote: He was two-time winner of the Finlandia Prize (for Urwind and Berg), and also won the Nordic Council Literature Prize. See, for example, the books and writers page on him, or this interview at Books from Finland.

Quite a few of his books have been translated into English, including the interesting Axel; see the Northwestern University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Update: Pekka Tarkka has written an in memoriam.

German as a gateway language

In Publishing Perspectives, Amanda DeMarco notes that German is becoming a gateway language for literary translations from Icelandic.

Icelandic literary awards

Via Iceland Review: 

The poetry book Blódhófnir ("Bloodhoof") by Gerdur Kristný and Sveppabókin (“The Mushroom Book”) by Helgi Hallgrímsson received the 2010 Icelandic Literary Award at a special ceremony at Bessastadir, the presidential residence, on Wednesday [February 2].

Hat tip: Literary Saloon

David Vikgren

In Hbl, Ralf Andtbacka reviews Norrbotten poet David Vikgren's latest collection of verse, and also a volume of Vikgren's and others' translations of the poems of the 17th century Tornedal Finnish poet Antti Keksi. Andtbacka notes that Folkmun, the new collection, is more accessible than Vikgren's two previous books, and his opinion is that this is "en imponerande och oroande diktsamling som man inte blir klar med i första taget."

Incidentally, I recently found an online selection of Vikgren's early work, and an interview with him, at this link (pdf).

Years Like Leaves

There are some of my translations of Bo Carpelan's poetry here.

Susanne Jorn: poems

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

Mirjam Tuominen

I've posted a selection of my translations of poems from Mirjam Tuominen's 1954 collection Under jorden sjönk - here and here.

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:

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.

Dark October

by Pia Tafdrup

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.

Solveig von Schoultz

I've put a selection of my translations of the poetry of Solveig von Schoultz (1907-1996) on Nordic Voices In Print - here, and here.

Two Poems

By Pia Tafdrup

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

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.

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.

Rabbe Enckell

My versions of a selection of Rabbe Enckell's poetry are now posted at Nordic Voices In Print.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Attack on Jyllands-Posten foiled

http://jp.dk/indland/krimi/article2290657.ece

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.

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/

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.

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)

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.

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...