Maaria - 6

from Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela (Otava 2010)

Maaria handed me a letter she had found, it bore a date in January 1998. Raija wrote that she had prepared five large bundles of firewood and carried them indoors to dry; now she felt safe for the winter. The novel she was writing was still unfinished, it did not interest her at all. Instead she was thinking of starting a career as an inventor and making her fortune from it, that would be more fun, and easier. She wondered why the iron had no switch; another typical male invention, a strange oversight. In the last paragraph she outlined plans for another journey, to Spain by car, Marbella and the mountains, Portugal and finally Africa, would Maaria come with her? For a week, at least?

It was late afternoon and I put the letter on the table. Maaria said she felt a little guilty, that she ought to be able to remember more. Now she realized there were many things they had never talked about, and that saddened her. I got to my feet and asked if she would call me later if she remembered anything. Maaria nodded and wrote her husband’s name on a piece of paper. Perhaps he may know something, Maaria said, folding the slip of paper into my hand, pressing it into my fist.

Outside it was dark and I walked down the hill, across the bridge to the other side. Later I stopped in front of the church, saw the brilliant lighthouse beacon shining up in the tower. It was cold and I walked briskly to the shore, but had to wait for a ferry. As I shivered under the shelter the dark water gleamed in front of me, and further away was the ferry, its lights swaying on the waves in their gradual approach.

I thought about Ingeborg Bachmann, and the book that had rested on Raija’s table. She read a sentence now and then, wrote another few words, watched through the window an icicle beginning to slide along the telephone wire. What was that doom which had swept over everything? I felt the same sorrow in myself, was that why I was here? I saw Yves Navarre sinking slowly into sleep, heard the rattling in the stair passage as Raija tried to open the door. The lock was stuck, until suddenly it gave way and opened. October 17, 1973, and later: February 7, 2004. Between the two fires lay thirty-one years. I was certain that Paul Roux had come back to try to find the woman he once met. I was certain that he was still there, behind the slowly undulating water, behind the lights.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

Maaria - 1
Maaria - 2
Maaria - 3
Maaria - 4
Maaria - 5

Maaria - 5

from Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela (Otava 2010)

(continued)

When Maaria returned to the room and asked what I had found, I was startled and felt that I had been caught doing something I was not supposed to. I apologized for trespassing on her books, but my eye had been struck by the name of Ingeborg Bachmann. I explained that Raija had written that name on the sheet of paper I had found in the Finnish Literature Society's archives.

Maaria smiled and said that Ingeborg Bachmann had been important to Raija, and especially this particular book, Word for Word. When Raija was writing she did not usually read books by other people, Maaria explained, but Bachmann was an exception. Ingeborg Bachmann’s work stirred her to action. Raija had even called her cat “Max” after Max Frisch, Bachmann’s husband. That had always made Maaria laugh.

But it certainly was strange, Maaria said, that Raija had died in a fire like Ingeborg. In fact, she remembered that Raija had always kept her stove lit, even in summer. Maaria told me that Raija also smoked in bed, even though she was afraid of fire. In one of her books Raija had written about bush fires that raged for days and weeks, driven by the wind; she wrote about a woman who stared at the television pictures of the sea of flames, then went back into her house, where something had happened from which she could not get away. The woman soaked a cloth in linseed oil, put it on the window ledge in the sun, waited, and when eventually the fire broke out she opened a bottle of wine, her best, sat by the window and watched the flames slowly begin to rise.

Yes, I said, it was a strange coincidence, but what was Maaria’s opinion of the fire? Had there been something deliberate about it, did she know what had happened? Maaria shook her head and said she had never thought the fire was deliberate, it had been a pure accident. Though it was true that Raija was in a bad state that autumn, thin, not eating anything. And perhaps it was true what Raija had once said, that a person’s attitude to food summed up their relation to life.

Maaria told me, still with a slightly absent air, about Raija’s last years and about the island, which Raija no longer visited. She had also begun to get rid of her books, and that had seemed strange to Maaria; as though all Raija’s ties with the world were being broken, one after the other, and suddenly she was free of all the things she once had loved.

When I was sure that Maaria had no more to add to this, I asked if she had heard the name Paul Roux. Had Raija ever talked about him? And what about Mariankatu 24, did Raija have any connection with that address? Maaria thought for a moment and then said she had never heard that name, but knew Mariankatu well enough, Raija had lived there. After giving up the beloved Ahlqvist House, Raija had moved to an apartment block on Mariankatu, but was not very happy there, and before her death she had moved again, to the Custom House on Korkeavuorenkatu. Maaria remembered that to Raija this had seemed a kind of new beginning.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

(to be continued)

Maaria - 1
Maaria - 2
Maaria - 3
Maaria - 4

Maaria - 4

from Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela (Otava 2010)

(continued)

I listened to Maaria and through the window saw a twinkling, slowly moving light. Perhaps it was a ship, further out at sea. That journey must have been a real escape for her, Maaria thought, pouring a drop of mate into the bottom of a glass. Because if she had understood correctly, Raija's second marriage was in trouble, and she had embarked on the journey to get away from it, she herself hardly knew for how long. Maaria remembered that Raija’s husband, Tarmo, had two sons by his previous marriage who were likely to come and stay with them for a while, and perhaps that had scared Raija, though she had not talked about it.

Maaria related that she had gone back to Helsinki, but Raija stayed on, and when she later returned to Finland, Tarmo was taken ill, and died soon after. It had all happened so quickly, Maaria said, within the space of a few months, and at around the same time Raija's father also died, and now she felt that the two consecutive losses must have been too much for Raija; as though some cold and foreign object had been inserted under her skin.

Yes, Raija travelled again even after that, Maaria said, and even though those journeys were often disappointing and she came back earlier than planned, for one reason or another. In recent years they had not been in contact very often because Raija drank and did not always answer the phone, and there were fewer and fewer letters from her, too.

Then Maaria was silent for a long time, and I did not say anything either, feeling that the words had suddenly exhausted her, and that there were many things she did not really want to remember, and soon she began to talk about something completely different: how an apple tree grew in the yard, in a place where it should not be possible, yet it kept on growing and every spring it bore new white blossoms.

Maaria got up and said that she might still be able to find some of Raija’s letters, though she had not the faintest idea where they might be, because she was not very tidy, even less so this late in life. One day she had even lost her spectacles, and searching for one’s glasses without glasses was rather hard.

Maaria flitted away into the other room and in her absence I studied the bookcase, trying to make out the titles of the books. At the end of one shelf I found a volume by Ingeborg Bachmann, a collection of short stories called Word for Word (Simultan). I took the book in my hands and read the note on the back cover: "Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt in 1926 and died in Rome on 17 October 1973, as a result of serious burns sustained in a fire. She studied the philosophy of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and after receiving a doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1950 she worked in radio and also in a mental hospital, and lectured at the University of Frankfurt. From poetry which received wide recognition she soon moved to imaginative prose. Malina, Bachmann’s only surviving novel (1971) was translated into Finnish and received the Finnish State Prize in 1984.” The translation was published by Weilin + Göös in 1988, and the front cover showed a painting of a woman's face. One of the woman’s eyes was black; the other seemed to be empty, a gaping hole.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

(to be continued)

Maaria - 1
Maaria - 2
Maaria - 3

Maaria - 3

from Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela (Otava 2010)

(continued)

Maaria’s apartment was located in the second storey of a large stone house. She led me up a spiral staircase to a small two-roomed flat, where she asked me to take off my coat in the hallway. One of the windows looked out on the sea, but it was a grey afternoon and I couldn’t make out the landscape very well. Next to a bookcase was the guest bed with a colourful Turkish bedspread. Maaria asked me to sit down and asked if I would like something to drink, she had some yerba mate drink in the refrigerator. There had been a wonderful Chilean film last week on TV in which everyone drank mate from morning till night, and it had given her a truly obsessive craving to try it. Though the film had probably been financed by some mate-manufacturing multinational company, for that was the way of the world nowadays.

Maaria returned from the kitchen and said that after I called her she had considered matters and reached the conclusion that perhaps she had not known Raija as well as she had imagined. She had also tried to remember when she had first met Raija, but was not sure. It was probably back in the 1980s, although at that time they were not yet close friends, only later on. After that she had paid occasional visits to Kotka, where Raija lived in the beautiful hundred-year-old Ahlqvist House, opposite the cathedral. Maaria recalled that Raija had been involved in setting up a cooperative which had acquired that dilapidated house and gradually begun to renovate it. The house had been important, and Raija had often written about it, so it was particularly sad that later on money worries had forced her to abandon the house and move to another location.

Maaria said that although the house had been Raija’s base she had often wanted to go away, made long trips abroad. Maaria said she had accompanied Raija on one of those trips some time in the early 1990s, 1993 it would have been. Raija set off on the journey alone, but one day when she had been gone for several weeks, the phone rang and Raija asked Maaria to come to her immediately. Something was amiss, Raija was frantic, and because Maaria had nothing particularly important to do at the time and happened to have some money, she had flown to Nice and met her friend in Antibes.

It was autumn, and a couple of months earlier Raija had arrived in the nearby town of Grasse, where she rented a house. But this time everything seemed have to have gone wrong. The house was small and gloomy. It rained incessantly. Mildew and greenish flowers grew on the walls, the pots and pans were rusty, she had not really eaten anything. The shower did not work properly or did not work at all, each new day brought more small setbacks. When they met, Raija was lonely, almost in a state of panic, and had for a long time been suffering from writer’s block.

Maaria said that that not even then had Raija explained in much detail what the real trouble was, except of course for the wretched living conditions and the dispiriting rain. Instead, they had talked about everything else, and if it was not raining they had sat on the beach and drunk wine. One day they had taken the train across to the Italian side of the border, to Ventimiglia. They had bought shoes, Raija loved shoes, they put her in a good mood. And though Maaria herself was often timid on the journey, Raija coped with the practical things for her, too, whatever the situation; and that was really how she wanted to remember her friend: she had the sudden, surprising bravery that others lacked. As if Raija were sometimes a little above the world, as if the world’s rules did not apply to her in the same way.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

(to be continued)

Maaria - 1
Maaria - 2

Maaria - 2

from Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela (Otava 2010)

(continued)

At around noon I went to see my colleague in the next room and said I would be out for the rest of the day. I had arranged the meeting for two o’clock on Suomenlinna Island, where the woman lived. Her name was Maaria, and when I called her to arrange the meeting, her silence was so prolonged that I thought she had put the phone down. At last I heard her voice, and she had said that mornings were no good, nor were evenings, because that was when she usually did her writing. But at two in the afternoon nothing much happened.

I did not know much about Maaria at all. She was in her sixties and had been acquainted with Raija  for about ten years. They had met for the first time in connection with some journey, and had then exchanged correspondence. Maaria wrote several novels, but I had not read a single one of them, though the titles of the books seemed vaguely familiar. I hoped that she would know something about Paul Roux; perhaps Raija had sometimes happened to mention the man’s name.

I walked to Kauppatori marketplace, which at that time of year was empty. By the seafront stood the ticket booth, and further away gleamed the red-roofed tower of Klippan Island. The sky was overcast and the wind blew off the sea. Perhaps the first falls of snow would be coming soon. The Suomenlinna ferry waited at its berth, rocking gently, and I entered the chilly cabin, choosing a seat near a window. There were only a few passengers, a solitary woman and a couple of parka-clad Asian tourists, heaven knew why they had strayed to Helsinki in October. Soon the sound of the engines grew louder and we moved away from the quay. I gazed out at the open sea beyond, which was like a large waiting room, a dim, undulating hall. I saw the quays gliding past, the other boats in the harbour, and I thought about the fear, the fear of all waiting rooms, the doctor’s office just before the results of the tests were announced; the paper tape that slowly ticked from the printer, the numbers on the screen which from now on would determine the direction of a life. I thought about what lay ahead and could not be imagined before it happened.

The trip took around fifteen minutes and Maaria was waiting for me on the quay, we had arranged it that way. Even from afar I knew it was her. The boat bumped softly against the quay and I walked to her side. We greeted each other and Maaria said it was unlikely I would have been able to find her apartment on my own, because most people who came got lost on the way and had to be searched for in the labyrinths of the walls or along the shores. We set off up the hill and past the church. I explained that, as I had mentioned on the phone, I was looking for information about Raija, I planned to write something about her, though it was all still very vague. I had heard that she, Maaria, had known Raija and might perhaps be able to throw light on certain points in her life.

We walked across a bridge to another island, past a dry dock and up a hill. Maaria said she had moved here at the turn of the millennium and now felt as though she had always lived here; at any rate she no longer wanted to leave. Many people had wondered how Maaria could live in such a windy place, but it did not bother her, quite the opposite, the windier it was the better. Except that her neighbours had nearly lost their roof last winter. She said she also liked the capricious nature of the wind here – quite different from the cold, harsh mistral of the Rhône, which was said to drive people mad. At least she had not heard of anyone being driven mad by this wind; by other causes, yes.

(to be continued)

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

Maaria - 1

The house of forgetting - 4

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

By Timo Harju

You stumble you tumble, you don’t find your way home,
the vaults of your tongue collapse. The hut of speech falls from the tree,
the shed of words ignites and burns in spring’s forest fire,
the forge of sentences is cold and still, you crouch, don’t rise,
scratching your nose with your absent mind. A nose that’s quite some size.
Goodbye nose.

All round let's sing, make papillotes, we’ve
time for lots of bedtimes, many plates of stew,
much talking.
while, carefully you
bent double
for hours and hours,
pick the crumbs from your pants
goodbye your pants that hold you in
goodbye your veins that keep you full of blood
goodbye your insides wriggling in a sack of skin.

Now, heap of wrinkles and furrows, I want to say
goodbye by having an early night,
by making my hands go every which way.
I start to wave in the empty room, goodbye goodbye...
How to say it, tomorrow you may not be here.
Your toenails, your dry soles, the fallen arches of your feet,,
your swollen ankles will be gone, your listless painful calves, their skin,
your knees, your knee joints, resting place of hands on thigh,
the thinning hair, the yelping tremors of your legs,
your worn out willies, dented hips
and all the body’s other scrips and strips.

When I asked you to get your stick from your room
you came back leaning on a toilet brush.
Hallelujah you cried when you couldn’t remember hi-de-hi.
You don’t cry hallelujah any more. Apart from that I don’t know much.
I've seen a photo album, which is hidden well,
so you won’t shred more photos in your zeal
yes and I’ve seen the harmonica you could sometimes play,
I’m here in my overalls, and so are you.
Which is why I’m saying goodbye to you.
I’m trying not to sit on top of you.

Goodbye your memory which I don’t know.
Goodbye your memory which you don’t know.
Goodbye chairs, carpets, ceilings, cabinets,
goodbye path of rooms, shadows of objects
whose flowering the others didn’t see.
Why the hell have you gone and broken now?

The care home’s in a mess old women burst from heads,
the stuffing rolls down the corridors hairy and sprattling
shy and smarting and kicking and sparkling and
softly eyeglass-like screaming prattling
and why has the stuffing in your head run out?
Why hasn’t your life stopped, is some soul alive in you instead?
What is really going on here?
goodbye your stooped and crazy mornings
goodbye your squelching
goodbye your vulnerable tenacity
goodbye your name
goodbye your nameless you
Look
a closet bright with clouds
you can flap your hands
Bye bye airy reeds, and sea and sky,
suspenders stuck in a wc. goodbye.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

See also in this blog:

The house of forgetting
The house of forgetting - 2
The house of forgetting - 3

Maaria - 1

from Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela (Otava 2010)

During those days I felt as though I were preparing to commit a crime and therefore had to move with soundless steps, feel my way in the dark, beware of a switch, of a light that could scare it all away. I was entering a place that was no one else’s business, another person’s life, and the most frightening thing was the certainty: that no one could stop me, forbid me, not even she could say anything now. And while the mornings were windy, while the windows rattled and the roar of the city increased, overwhelming other sounds, I had to stop, listen, open the doors of rooms quietly; in case she was really standing there and seeing it all.

Perhaps I was also aware of the crime’s self-regarding aspect, the desire to take possession of something that belonged to another person, to make it a part of myself before anyone else could; like all the robbers of lives before me. Or perhaps calling it a crime was going a bit too far: I was really stealing a life that had already been lived, something that no longer existed.

After my visit to the archives of the Finnish Literature Society I made a few phone calls and found out a couple of names: people who had known Raija [Siekkinen]. And as I sat in my third storey consulting room on Albertinkatu that morning, I noticed that my thoughts kept wandering to the forthcoming meeting, returning to that moment, then straying again, and so everything I heard – and at the same time remembered – mingled in a strange texture; as though I were looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, through multiple mirrors; slipping backwards and forwards in time, yet still remaining in the same place.

The man who sat before me was middle-aged, about ten years older than me, he had come to my consulting room for the first time at the beginning of summer. But unlike my other patients, there seemed to be nothing at all particularly wrong with the man, and I wondered why he had come. His problems appeared to be very vague, until one day he said that yes, there was something that preyed on his mind; that was really why he was here. And then he began to talk about a memory that had come back to him, unexpectedly, in early spring, when the first warmer days had arrived.

The memory was connected with his mother, and with water, and week by week he appeared to remember more and more, though each time he also seemed to doubt his memory, seeking confirmation from me, calling me as a witness. By September the memory was out in the open, and only a small part of it remained obscure. Now he remembered the sun-splashed water, the beach, his mother's eyes, their colour, bright blue, the pattern of her skirt, orange and green, the water coming up to her waist, the cloth slowly getting wet, its heaviness. The man remembered how he had pressed his mother's neck, fastening his hands tighter and tighter, and how the two of them had suddenly stood still in the water for a long time, and the cool water had splashed her ankles, and how they had then returned to the sandy beach as after a very long journey.
Now the man was considering all the decisions of his life in that light; as if every action had had ever taken in his life were somehow linked to that moment on the beach; as if at every moment, from then on, he had had to try to persuade his mother to turn back, not to go on moving deeper into the water, not to take her son with her. And now, in this room, the man still felt he was there, as if to this day a part of him had remained in the water and he had to go back to look for it over and over again.

As I listened to the man I forgot about everything else. The things he had confided to me shocked and moved me. We continued to talk for a while and then the man fell silent, rose and took his coat. At the door he paused in front of the Vermeer reproduction and stared at it for a long time. This is new, he said, touching its surface with his finger; in case the woman in the picture was actually alive. I said that the picture had been there for a week, and that many others had also wanted to touch it. The man laughed and closed the door behind him. I thought of the chain that the second-hand bookseller had reeled off; how the original painting had moved from one owner to another, changed continents, and perhaps that unbroken chain had fascinated me more than the painting itself; the mere thought of how it was all in motion, continuing, secretly becoming part of another person’s life.

(to be continued)
translated from Finnish by David McDuff


See also in this blog: Vanishing Point

Words in Nature

I've put an electronic version of my early poetry collection Words in Nature (1971) for sale in Amazon's Kindle e-bookstore. For a change, these are nearly all original poems, not translations. The Kindle Store looks as though it may be a useful way to bring back titles that once sold reasonably well but are now out of print, and I may eventually broaden the experiment to include some Nordic titles for which I have the publishing rights.

Incidentally, you don't need to own a Kindle e-reader in order to read Kindle e-books - the free-of-charge Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for iPhone/iPod touch and Kindle for iPad all make it possible on the respective devices.

Kindle 2.5

I'm pleased with the Kindle 2.5 upgrade, which finally arrived on my DX Global this morning via Whispernet. Not only are "collections" (folders) now available, but the web browser also works for all sites, not just Amazon and Wikipedia. So although the browser is still quite slow it can be used for things like checking mail and news, anywhere that there's a 3G connection. The E-ink typeface is also clearer and sharper than before,in all the font sizes. All of this is a major improvement.

Mirjam Tuominen - 10

by Tuva Korsström

(continued)

A biography of love

Mirjam Tuominen's last secular 'signposts' were Rilke and Hölderlin. She published a large volume of her translations of Rilke's letters in 1957 and in the same year the first complete Swedish translation of Die Sonette an Orpheus.

'Whoever has begun to read Hölderlin will return to him and will gradually become a willing captive of his poetry,' she writes in her introduction to Hölderlin. En inre biografi (Hölderlin. An Inner Biography, 1960).

She had herself been for many years been a willing captive both of Hölderlin's poetry and of his life, which bore many resemblances to her own. Hölderlin's loss of his father, his hesitation between his need for contact and his unwillingness to lead a social life, his brilliant career as a poet, his illness and labelling as an unfortunate and madman - all these drew Mirjam Tuominen to an identification and idealising admiration.

As a biographer of Hölderlin, Mirjam Tuominen reveals equal amounts of understanding and intellectual blindness. There is none of the slightly ironical distance from which she considered Kafka and Proust. Her study of Hölderlin has the intensity and the subjectivity with which one looks at one's child or beloved. The biography is in fact just as much about herself as it is about Hölderlin. She defends all the phases in Hölderlin's life, and the same time in her own. She even exalts the long, silent period in the poet's life into something inevitable and sacred.

Hölderlin, with his incommunicable but resigned duty to live for a long time, silent and silenced, without illusions, alone with the wandering clouds, the birds flying outside his window and the minute insights of quietism in his inner being is an inviolable phenomenon. The silence that emanates from the latter half of his life has self-mastery and piety.

God is present

In Under jorden sjönk Tuominen makes Spinoza deduce God's existence:

SPINOZA

Out of the simple
into the manifold
composed of the simple
through the simple
deduced from the simple
leading to the manifold
simple
again leading onward
to new manifoldness
simple deductions
conclusions
all the way to the most
simple of all
the simplest simple
arch-simple:
(god!)
the whole.

When in the mid-1950s Tuominen began to take an interest in the Roman Catholic church, she entered a more varied spiritual context than the Lutheran church had been able to offer her. The Virgin Mary added motherliness and femininity to the image of the divine. There was ample choice of spiritual company to be found among the saints. Mirjam Tuominen chose Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross and St Thérèse of Lisieux.

She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1963 and religion entirely dominated the rest of her life. Her poetry took the form of prophecies and rrevelations, while her prose became a dynamic, often questioning dialogue with the Bible and the writings of the saints.

The meditation Gud är närvarande (God Is Present, 1961) is the last book she published. Her publisher rejected two subsequent and very large manuscripts of religious poetry: Jesu Kristi lyra (The Lyre of Jesus Christ) and Ave Maria. Her own sketches for covers for her last published books were also rejected. Her crayon drawings, including the covers, have been recognized as outstanding and exceptional works of art more than twenty years after her death.

Mirjam Tuominen interpreted these rejections as a last unforgivable insult from the outside world. She considered herself condemned to a silence which she had not chosen herself and which was not, like that of Hölderlin, dictated by God.

Her last, silent years, until she died, from a cerebral haemorrhage, in the summer of 1967, were possibly the most unhappy period of her life. Writing had been her life, the life she had chosen. Writing had given her human dignity and the strength to 'look ahead, always ahead', like Irina in her very first short story:

I lived my life observing. What I met with, I observed. I was a zero and pure observation.

In the days after I died, however, I became very articulate. People wondered why. With good reason. For it was not I, but my observations, that became articulate in a strangely profound, though swiftly transient manner. They flew away and came back again. They fly away and come back again. They named them with my name, honoured them unpretentiously, and it was the unknown in themselves that they so honoured.

(Epitaph for a zero. Gud är närvarande ).

(end)

Pro-Israel rally in Helsinki

Via Ynet:

The Finnish capital's streets were filled with Israeli and Finnish flags as participants marched towards the port while chanting slogans in support of the Israel Defense Forces and waving banners protesting what they claimed was the biased media coverage of the flotilla raid.

The protestors also sang “Hevenu Shalom Aleichem (We Brought Peace Upon You)".

Helsingin Sanomet's coverage of the rally is here.

Mirjam Tuominen - 9

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

The collection Monokord (Monochord) appeared in the same year as Under jorden sjönk. It was followed by Dikter III (Poems III, 1956), Vid gaitans (By the Gaeta, 1957), and I tunga hängen mognar bären (The berries ripen in heavy clusters, 1959. For a short period in the mid-fifties Mirjam Tuominen was unable to write and started to draw instead. Some of her pencil drawings were published in Dikter III.

The period without words was provoked by two short spells of internment in a mental hospital. This happened against Mirjam Tuominen's will and she interpreted it as an act of deceit on the part of her relatives. She forbade her mother, sister, ex-husband and most of her friends to have any contact at all with her or her daughters.

Tuominen's attitude to society during the later period of her life could be described with the words she herself used about Strindberg's paranoia: it implied a division into two halves, one consisting of enemies and the other of future enemies. She gradually isolated herself from the rest of the world. Her life became the 'work illness poverty' she had anticipated in Under jorden sjönk.

She allowed herself only the company of those spiritual companions she loved and trusted: angels, saints, her dead father and a varying number of dead writers, artists and philosophers:

FREUD

You who do not want to believe
you have never looked into your brains
I have looked into my brain
I have looked into a shaft
I have burrowed in a mine.
Forty years I burrowed
Moses in the desert in a mine
half a human lifetime
until I got there
A trauma lifted
a pressure vanished
I was inside the vein
brilliant gold flowed out.
Half a human lifetime
in order to get there.
I am in the subconscious.
Another half
in order to will the pure.
My patience is long
as the prophet's in the desert.
A cry comes from mountain peaks:
'I am a stranger
in a land that is not mine.'
I am making it mine.
I will only be content
with the best
the best in man.
Sediment is not water.
I will only be content with water
clear fresh from the primordial source.

But she could not ban the demons, the devils and the tormentors from her inner world. She chose solitude, silence and light, but she also received a chorus of evil voices from Hell. She was never able to free herself from her inner visions of the war and the concentration camps. It was precisely those visions that may have caused her illness. She developed a frightening and self-destructive ability to react directly and actively to political news from outside. The atomic bomb, the Korean war, the execution of the Rosenbergs disturbed her particularly. But even those visions of horror were turned into poetry:

but the child followed the ball's fate
was carried on women's backs in gypsy bundles mass migrations
was gassed beaten to death kicked
hurled into sewers
thrown from burning houses
by desperate homeless mothers
German Polish Jewish Russian
now without distinction
doomed for racial impurity
never found any refuge
other than the nether world of cloaca
where mothers were glad
if sometimes a washroom was opened for them
dirty as in the bistros of southern seaports
with a toilet hole in the floor
and a device with a grating
for the washing of the inner sexual parts
here they could relieve their bowels or bear the child
which an unknown father of unknown nationality had given them
while they slept unconscious of anything
but dreams of home and gentle stars
and tranquillity's narrow sickle-moon on deep blue late autumn nights...

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 8

By Tuva Korsström

(continued)

The poems

DOWN

Down in straight lines the birds
silent O silent
down down
into an earth that opens like a sea
into a sea you plunge.
Up up.

It closes.


In her first collection of poems Under jorden sjönk (Under the Earth Sank, 1954) Mirjam Tuominen abandons the attempt to surround her investigation of the inner world with fictive descriptions of the outer. The characters and milieus of her short stories give way to expressions of the pure self, the idea, silence and a now clearly-enunciated awareness of God:


MAKE ME TEACH ME


Make me pure
teach me silence
make me whole
teach me new words
words that are not words
words that are as silence
whole pure
not self-abandonment
not accusation
not defence
not thesis
not antithesis
but synthesis.
May life and death
hold each other in balance.

At the same time she crosses the border between illness and health, abnormality and normality which she has described many times in her books. She is no longer a sensitive but objective witness who can give reports from both sides. She gradually retreats into a clear-sighted privacy of her own, an isolation that is sometimes very frightening:

THE CRY

There is a cry in the forest:
I want to go home
the keys have fallen
the paths have disappeared
I cannot get there
I am badly frightened
I have frightened myself very very badly
they have frightened
I have frightened
I want to go home to the dolls there at home
home to the stove the fire the hearth.

(to be continued)

Mankell may bar Hebrew translations of his books

Via Ynetnews:

Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell may prohibit the translation of his popular books into Hebrew after the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, he said in an interview published on Thursday.
"I am a best-selling author in Israel and I must consider seriously whether I should block my books from being translated to Hebrew," the author of the popular Wallander series of detective novels told daily Dagens Nyheter

To me there's something wrong about this,but I can't put my finger to it...

Mirjam Tuominen - 7

By Tuva Korsström (continued)

Mirjam Tuominen left Nykarleby, at first for short spells of time, and then finally for good.

'The decisive thing had now happened,' she writes in a short prose piece called Skilsmässa (Divorce) in the book Tema med variationer (Theme with Variations, 1952). 'They were separated, spiritually and physically irreconcilable – and what divided them was stronger than reason and will, stronger than instincts and desires.'

What caused the divorce was not only male jealousy at the woman's 'fornication with spirits, demons and non-personified men' which Tuominen describes in Skilsmässa. It was perhaps above all the jealous, all-consuming attention she herself paid to her own spirits and demons. She demanded solitude and wholeness. At the same time she was torn apart by her own demons.

For a while she lived with her mother and sisters in her former home in Helsingfors – an old, dark apartment, similar to the one in which her little heroine Irina has nightmares. A few years later, as a single mother, she was allocated municipal apartment in Kottby (Käpylä), a suburb of Helsingfors. She moved there with her two daughters and lived there until she died.

The book of prose sketches Tema med variationer reflects this new phase in Tuominen's life. Stories like 'The New Houses' or 'Ahti laughs' derive their origin from the new environment: a row of recently and poorly constructed tenement houses, filled with large working-class families, gypsies, alcoholics, social casualties and rootless people from all over post-war Finland.

This apartment was the first that Tuominen felt to be entirely her own. It was with a sense of triumph that she sat down at her typewriter in the early morning hours. Outside her window construction workers climbed on scaffolds. All around new houses were going up. There was a kind of pioneering spirit in the air.

Kaveri - kamrat - toveri:‘ (comrade) they shouted in the pouring autumn rain, in thirty degrees of frost, Then one had a sense that it was not they, these fellows well wrapped up and yet lightly clad: young and old - who were carrying out the work, But angels, While the men - old and young - stayed at home in order to drink hot milk - Kaveri - kamrat - toveri: in a long line at 7 in the morning they came. They laughed. They whistled. And did the work: Together. In broken Swedish, in broken Finnish, natural Finnish, natural Swedish, natural Yiddish - homeless people from Karelia, homeless people from Hangö, homeless people from some concentration camp in Central Europe...

With Tema med variationer Mirjam Tuominen embarked on a stylistic experiment on the borders between prose and prose poetry. While hitherto she had employed a timeless and classical literary language, now she strove for the inner leaps of the stream of consciousness.

She was moving from prose to poetry.

<(to be continued)

Mankell found

Apparently he’s back.

Mankell missing

The present status and whereabouts of Henning Mankell, the 62-year-old Swedish author of detective thrillers, are "unknown", according to The Local. Mankell earlier set off from Cyprus with the Gaza "peace flotilla": 

"I think that when one talks about solidarity, one must always know that actions are what proves destiny," he told Sveriges Radio last Thursday.

Rotterdam Poetry International

The 41st Rotterdam Poetry International Festival takes place from June 11-18. This year's event is devoted to the theme of prose and its relation to poetry. Nordic poets taking part include Jon Fosse, Hasso Krull and Ursula Andkjær Olsen, and there's a special festival blog which may be worth checking out from time to time.

Poem

by Eeva-Liisa Manner

Like Odysseus, the Inquisitive, I have felt this journey
to be dangerous, and have rejoiced in it.
I am empty now,
my empty boat is tired of the adventure.

Take these cocooned words and put them away
In them are tree and butterfly and lizard and dragonfly
and snail and gastropod and spiral staircase
and snake because it too is necessary.

In them are plesiosaur and the swan's stretched neck and song
and rain forest and the scales and the cry of the cross bill.
In them are the fleeing hoof and the memory of the injured horse,
and the memory of how human beings, snares must be avoided.
In them are slow snowy death and swift hieroglyphs
and the slender writing of toes in sedimented salt.
and the plates of the mussel shell and the spirals that ring
and the secret of the counterpoint invented by the nummulites,
- oh, how they ring -

In them are brain-coral and coral and the brain
in which all the mysterious numbers do their patient work,
practise mathematics and change
and ceremonial magic;
the numbers which are beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful thing there is,
but bring misfortune, seldom fortune
even to those who know the formulae of alchemy.

Take them and sow them in the wind
Take them and sow them in the current
Take them and sow them under the snow to overwinter

Take and deliver me from evil.

(from Tämä matka [This Journey], 1956)

translated from Finnish by David McDuff and Hildi Hawkins

Mirjam Tuominen - 6

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

Two of the most enjoyable essays in Stadier concern the letters of Proust and Strindberg. Proust was one of Mirjam Tuominen's constant companions and she read the volumes containing his letters over and over again. Her description of Proust is characterized by the tender irony she used when writing or talking about her literary favourites. Proust was just another of those unpractical victims who make themselves hopelessly absurd whenever they undertake something.

His letters are as a rule very considerate, so considerate that they may seem to consist of nothing but politeness, flattery, almost. He is so polite that his politeness sometimes kills itself and becomes an impoliteness, because his equally great need for sincerity gets in the way. The result is an intricate arabesque with a succession of constantly new explanations, each of which annihilates the last.

Strindberg was one of the authors whom Mirjam Tuominen read intensely for a while but later rejected. She describes in her essay, not without irony this time, too, the restless Strindberg who included the whole world in his private life and then suffered from having it there, who could not live without women and then suffered from being at their mercy.
She writes with perspicacity about Strindberg's paranoia:

He could renounce neither woman nor the world... Subsequently mankind appeared to him as divided into two halves, one containing enemies, and the other containing people who were not yet his enemies...
For Strindberg Sweden was Little Puddleton, and anything else one would not have expected, it gave him paranoia, and that is very understandable, even if one might have wished that his brain had retained the upper hand.

It is worth noting that a large number of Tuominen's prototypes were men: mostly unusual, 'unmasculine' men like Kafka, Proust, Rilke or Hölderlin. What preoccupied her, just as it would preoccupy the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva decades later, was not the problem of masculine and feminine but that of marginality and dissidence.
Female artists who fascinated Tuominen included, for example, the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran, the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the Finland-Swedish painter Helene Schjerfbeck. These women, like her male favourites, are characterized by the vulnerability of marginal beings. They are all in pursuit of the same self-consuming search for the the absolute.
Of Cora Sandel, Tuominen writes:

This writing is in the highest degree feminine, as feminine as Strindberg's is masculine, it constitutes an index of features that are normally feminine, raised to an intensified and therefore abnormal level of emotion in the same way as Strindberg in his writing becomes an index of the `normally masculine at an extremely heightened level of emotion. I have never seen a portrait of Cora Sandel and I have no idea what she looked like, but something of the same terrifying, at once defenceless and strong, expression that is reflected in Helene Schjerfbeck's self-portraits emanates from her writings; a white face with dark, wide-open eyes, the expression of a being mercilessly incorporated into the nerve of life's essence and with the same mercilessness exposed to the conditions of reality; extreme sensitivity and extreme, overpowering temperament are here united, the fruit is extreme shyness, a scream of existential agony.

(to be continued)

IV

by Ursula Andkjær Olsen

One could form the
suspicion that I
was simply looking for an

excuse to get
away.

One could form the
idea that I had
chosen you to
play this
role.

But it was
probably a
trap. That idea was a
part of

the plan. I am
still not alone.

Nothing suggests
it. This is unforgivable naivety.

I can
clearly hear you talking about
the unacceptable behavior
of the care staff.

Your incompetence in
the field of thinking has shown itself

to be your
strength. In situations where it
cannot possibly be predicted.

I ought really to
remove your headaches
surely and

quickly. I ought
probably to cut out

my tongue.

*

Now that I
am sitting
still.

The windows are totally

opaque. I don’t
know whether I should view this as a
sign of your
mercy.

As an attempt to
spare me the sight of the world’s
oh so familiar

sufferings.

For a sofa it was
actually something almost
perfect.

One could have hoped that
it was an expression of
the situation’s

stability. But I am
not certain

any longer.

A sofa cannot
really be

that much of a
basis.There are
remnants of food underneath
the cushions once you
start to
look around. And the coffee is
obviously

corrupt. I
clearly hear the words
food control.

I can hear the word
guarantee but it is a

glass clear
lie. You can
howl and scream.

You can shut me
up and blow into me. It will
not help.

Now I sit
here with the sofa pricking
under me. The fact
is that I am not lying
right.

The fact is that I
thought it was a
sofa.

Right until I
saw it.

And what can one learn from
that. The only thing that saves me

is my almost scary
adaptability. My great
talent for

avoiding any kind of
hardness any
pricking basis with a
flexibility that almost recalls

that of capitalism. A
quite intolerable
flexibility.

A feminine side

of my personality that ought to be
eradicated immediately if
wasn’t because it soothed

the bedsore.

*

Now that I
am sitting
still.

It is nearly as
bad as my earlier

mobility. It is
unbearable but it is
the image I am
created in.

It’s absurd this eternal notion
of putting down
roots. Here on
the sofa wherever it is
it is

not a
pretty sight. It is the
flesh I am
made of running
after me.

While I suddenly
cannot move

hanging out of my
neck.

It is an
age-old tragedy.

An age-old tragedy

between the peasant and
I want to cut my roots.

*

But this is
not the sea
either.

What am I doing
here.

I thought it was
the sea. Right until I
saw it.

Had it not been for
the obvious ugliness of the
bolsters.

I might possibly have
sat on a
chair.

But now this is
out of the question.

It is nevertheless
how I
am.

I will get no
further.

If I reached
all the way to
the windows.

Then I would probably
discover
how dirty they
were.

And I would
still not be able
to get a

view of the
branches.

If you had
seen me leave
something. You would

be in no
doubt. It is
not good
enough.

And if you had
heard me arrive.

I must
try to look it in
the eyes. It

does not remotely
concern you All I am
saying here. It is a form of

one-way communication that is
not easy
to mistake.

*

If I had
hoped for a
quiet life.

Then I
have come to the
wrong place.

I am still not
alone.

This is neither

the truth nor
the sea.

It doesn’t even
smell

of fish. It wasn’t
the real sea.

I withdraw my
longings. It was
not that sea they were
to swim in.

I haul my
longings
ashore and

there they stay.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Mirjam Tuominen - 5

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)
Prototypes

Besk brygd concludes with essays on Edith Södergran, Franz Kafka and Hjalmar Bergman. 1949 saw the publication of Tuominen’s essay collection Stadier (Stages), which contains studies of Valéry, Proust, Rilke and Cora Sandel, among others. Tuominen was an assiduous reader of literature in the Nordic languages,  German, French, and to some extent also Spanish and Italian. She had extraordinary literary intuition and, while she still wrote reviews in newspapers she often introduced new names there. She was one of the first people in Finland to write about Kafka, and was drawn to Hölderlin years before he was rediscovered by literary fashion, though she seldom used literature as a source of news items. The essays in Besk brygd and Stadier indicate that she wrote only about writers whom she liked and with whom she felt a spiritual affinity.
Of Kafka, she writes:

This latterday relative of Jesus of Nazareth was born in Prague and grew up in an incurably bourgeois home.
One may wonder if there is anything so immensely liable to have a hostile effect, an effect that is deeply and inwardly incurable to the bottom of the soul, on a growing poetic force that senses its possibilities but as yet has no idea of its own existence, than the helplessly arch-bourgeois mentality.

For Tuominen, Franz Kafka became n almost ideal object of identification. Both are victims and outsiders. They feel surrounded by despotic executionerss who want to reshape and adapt them to 'normal', bourgeois life. Both bear the harshest executioner within themselves.

Franz Kafka carried an extremely harsh executioner within himself. He was harsh with himself, exacting as to the quality of what he wrote, and equally exacting of other people.

In her Kafka essay, Mirjam Tuominen consciously or unconsciously defines herself and her writings. When she describes Kafka's irony, it is her own sense of humour she portrays, that of the physically passive, non-aggressive victim.
The irony of both writers is predominant in her analysis of Kafka’s story ‘Die Verwandlung’ (Metamorphosis). The metamorphosis is the only way of escaping the strains of normality:

Gregor Samsa persists in his existence as a beetle, he cannot part from this existence even by his own will, he lives in his dark, untidy bedroom, shabby and neglected, bitter and ashamed, guilty and yet neither ashamed nor guilty, because if he looks like a beetle in the eyes of the family, then there is nothing to be done about itl, then he must be a beetle, he wants to be a beetle, he has no wish to be the respected son, the good brother any more.

Tuominen concludes: 'In order to write a story like “Die Verwandlung” Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with extreme and almost intolerable intensity.'  She could hardly have found a more accurate definition of herself and many of her own characters.

(to be continued)

The tongue-breaker

Fabulous Iceland has an interview with photographer Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson, whose book on the "Island-Mountain-Glacier" eruption is due to be published in June: :

Without warning, the tongue-breaker “Eyjafjallajökull” permeated the world news following the April eruption, causing newscasters around the world to struggle with the mouthful as the ash-plume played havoc with air traffic.

“Yes, I'm still wondering about the book's title,” Sigurjónsson continues. “The name Eyjafjallajökull really says it all. It's a book about an eruption which is still going on – nobody knows how it's all going to end. The book itself is ready. It's split into four chapters, showing the beginning of the eruption, its development, and last but not least the effects on the people living in the area.”

Vanishing point

Otava have published the short novel Katoamispiste (Vanishing Point) by Joel Haahtela, an unusual book which describes a search for a missing person and in the process enters the landscapes and cityscapes of the Finnish novelist Raija Siekkinen, who died in a house fire in 2004. The novel establishes a curious relation between Siekkinen’s fate and that of the Austrian poet and author Ingeborg Bachmann, who died in similar circumstances in October 1973.

The house of forgetting – 3

From Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla by Timo Harju

Come let’s build a home for old folk. Let’s build it from the crooks in fingers, lightly porous bellyaches, we  can take the armfuls of fir needles and bright cuckoo fluff up to the attic. Let’s make a lot of mossy rocking chairs, they can rock in them. Let’s collect gazes and make them into coffee cups, you old folk can paint the flowers of your lives on them, at the first lunch hour Martta is the first to announce that there’s too much porridge and she doesn’t eat anything. I go to reduce the portion. The porridge observes: "If you start to give in, everyone’s lives will soon be impossible here." The kitchen nods, swaying. Do the old folk need limits?
They’re not children. So are they able to set their own limits?
Far away you can see bundles of mist drifting into the watercolour.
Are the porridge rules security lights in the water?
The traffic lights are there to stop the cars from touching one another.
Will I affect her if I reduce this portion of porridge now?
You’ll get rid of her more quickly if you do what she asks.
Shall I reduce this portion of porridge or not?
Don’t ask me.
Should we educate old people?
You're right, old people can learn new things too.
Or should I just make this moment as easy as possible?
You're right, they don’t have much time left.
Huh? What do you want of me?
Don’t be afraid.

*
Collect the flour falling from old folk. Bake a skilled attendant.
The skilled attendant is direct and honest, frankly
says now I've had enough and could you please buzz off. Stretch the dough. People work is open in the middle.
Fetch hundreds and thousands from the cupboard to fill his head.
Raise, roll, rotate, twist
press your hands on his heart.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

See also in this blog: The house of forgetting
The house of forgetting – 2

Mirjam Tuominen - 4

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

Victim and executioner

'This morning I saw my book: Bitter Brew. In this dawn without light, in which whiteness glowed: melting snow, dirty white walls of houses. Rain, snow, slush, black trees with torture-twisted trunks. December dawn in this city, which can only inspire me with agony.

On this border I apprehend everything with painful clarity. But the tension in my throat gives me the evidence that it is the borderline that, overstepped, leads to the terrain of madness.'

The long essay Besk brygd (Bitter Brew, 1947) marks a watershed in Tuominen's writing, and it has been viewed by many critics as her most important book.

The mood of Besk brygd is one of departure and disintegration. Tuominen would soon abandon the short story and fiction as literary genres. She was about to leave the small town, and her marriage. Humanity had gone morally bankrupt; the holocaust of Hitler's Germany had been revealed to its full extent:

'If I were to stand on a square and howl out the horror that has seized me, they would take hold of me and cart me off to a mental hospital. They would look after me and declare me insane, but no one would look after my horror. Because I feel my horror so strongly that I must howl in order to obtain an answer, I am considered insane, but if I conceal my horror in my heart and talk about the weather, the shortage of food, clothes and tobacco, I receive a many-worded and many-voiced reply, and am considered sensible.'

Tuominen does not howl out her horror in the streets. Instead, she uses the tool she possesses, literature, to bring order to the chaos and decay. She analyses human guilt and the part played by the executioner, methodically, step by step. Her starting point is a news item about a German soldier who threw a little Jewish boy into a sewer because the boy cried as the soldier was whipping the child's mother.

This scene remained in Mirjam Tuominen's mind forever. She would return to it over and over again. When she was writing Besk brygd, she believed that she could analyse it away or, more typically of her character, that she could take the guilt upon herself.

'I want to become embodied in this German soldier, in his body and his soul. I would like to return with him into his mother's womb, be born with him, grow up with him and then, organically coalesced with him, exist until the day when he took the boy and threw him into the sewer.That is my most fervent wish and and my greatest desire. Often. But I cannot do it, and therefore I am helpless. I know nothing.'

In her autobiographical book from the years of the Second World War, La Douleur (Pain, 1985), the French author Marguerite Duras makes a similar effort to analyse a executioner. She states: 'His stupidity is impenetrable. It is completely without holes.'

In Besk brygd, Tuominen describes a more nuanced but equally impenetrable executioner:

'Yes, if the executioner could express himself - then nearly everything would be gained. Only he could fix on a pin this harmful human insect - only he see through it. But the executioner never speaks, he is the most laconic being that was ever created. He forces his victims to do the talking, the wailing, the stammering -- he himself is silent - one might think it was stupidity, but it is not stupidity, one might think that it was contempt for words, but he does not despise words, he is interested in words. It is perhaps quite simply inability. He is bound to the action, the victim is bound to the word.'

The classic example of the executioner who compels his victim to talk incessantly is, of course, 'The Sultan and Sheherezade' in The Arabian Nights. Tuominen points out that Besk brygd could equally well have been called 'Sheherezade and the Sultan' The book's cover illustration is a pen and ink drawing by Mirjam Tuominen's husband. It shows the cruel, sensual face of a man behind the slim silhouette of a young woman.

The relationship between man and woman is often based on ties that are reminiscent of those between victim and executioner. We all have a executioner inside us, we are executioners to our nearest and dearest, to our children, to our pets, to ourselves.

But, Mirjam Tuominen argues, there are people who have both a executioner and a victim inside them. These human beings have a highly developed sense of humour.

'The executioner has no sense of humour, he is always deadly earnest. How could he have a sense of humour, as he does not speak, but act. There is in fact in every action something irresistibly absurd. The victim senses the absurdity and acts very reluctantly.'

Mirjam Tuominen constructs a system of guilt and non-guilt, of executioners and victims. The least guilty beings are infants and animals. This book of meditation on humanity's greatest crime is about 'feelings of gratitude towards a fly, remorse for offence done to a cat, and the genuine joy the company of two infants has given me.'

The world of adults is false and hostile to life.

'The infant and the animal love what they see and feel in man, the adult person loves what he wishes to love.

What makes social relationships with other adults so difficult is that the other person for the most part seems to be indicating that he is associating with someone different from whom one really is, and that one is probably acting in the same way oneself...

An invisible executioner, not joy and happiness, seems to be the host at every social event.'

Mirjam Tuominen is looking for better company than that hosted by the invisible executioner. She finds her new intellectual friends among those who, according to her own interpretation, have 'pointed out' the executioner; writers and artists who seem to have known all there is to know about the problems of guilt and the anguish that 'fill my days and nights until it seems to me that I have sunk into a burning sea of fire.'

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 3

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

Mirjam Tuominen's Fiction

I have focused on two of Mirjam Tuominen's earliest short stories in order to highlight something that characterizes all her writing from the very beginning: a continuous study of life's inner essence, a deep penetration into its nerve. Perhaps this is what Hagar Olsson had in mind when she characterized Mirjam Tuominen's earliest short stories as 'not products of literature', but as objects that 'contain within their form the living word.'

During the 1940s the two early books were followed by a steady flow of short stories and essays: Visshet (Certainty, 1942), Mörka gudar (Dark Gods, 1944), Kris (Crisis, 1946), Besk brygd (Bitter Brew, 1947), Bliva ingen (Become No One, 1949), Stadier (Stages, 1949). Shortly after the outbreak of the Winter War Mirjam Tuominen had entered into an impulsive marriage, typical of those days, with Torsten Korsström, the man she had loved for several years. Since before the outbreak of war Torsten Korsström had obtained an art teaching post at the Teachers' Training College in Nykarleby, Ostrobothnia, his young wife had to spend the war years there, isolated in Finland's smallest town, far from her family, her friends and the intellectual circles of Helsingfors. Their daughter Kyra was born in 1941, their daughter Tuva in 1946. For most of that time Mirjam Tuominen's husband was fighting at the front. Contact was kept up through letters and short, intense visits.

This biographical background permeates the stories of the '40s. She depicts love between man and woman with all its eroticism, tenderness, struggle for power, and jealousy. She depicts childbirth and the mysterious closeness between child and mother. She depicts the small town and the Ostrobothnian plain. She depicts the war and the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies in the Finland of her day.

In routine literary contexts it was often pointed out that in her short stories Mirjam Tuominen specialized in describing children, animals, women and sick people. She certainly described and analysed all these beings with great psychological acuity, but it cannot be emphasized enough that at the same time she gave a picture of the whole society of that time. Through the deviant, who precisely because they stand slightly outside are particularly sensitive, Mirjam Tuominen registers the normal. Through the child she sees the adult, through the animal human beings, through the sick she describes the healthy, through the woman the man.

One of her most fascinating short stories is called 'Bara en hund' ('Only a Dog', from Walls, 1939). It is the long monologue of a dog, like many of Mirjam Tuominen's characters struggling to choose between its desire for independence and its need for love. At the same time the dog is witnessing his master's and mistress's painful divorce. The most obvious dissident and outsider in human society is the witch ('Jan and Marietta', from Certainty, 1942). Mirjam Tuominen was to return to this subject later on in her poetry, making it clear that her witches are consumed not only by the pyres that society lights, but also by an inner, ineluctable flame.

In the book that can be considered her farewell to the short story, Bliva ingen (Become No One, 1949) she summarizes and anticipates all her themes within one short tale, called 'In Absurdum'. It tells the story of a dancer who strives for absolute skill in her dancing and for absolute solitude in her life, who falls and badly injures herself, and who sees God as she is dying.

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 2

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)


The absolute

 Mirjam Tuominen's next collection of short stories, Murar (Walls), was published the following year, in 1939. The first story in this book, 'Anna Sten', is both strange and magical, and thematically enigmatic.

Anna Sten does not possess the thematic elements which, though skilfully concealed, can be traced in many of Mirjam Tuominen's stories, for example 'Irina' and  'Brevet' (The Letter) in the first collection, and later on 'Flickan som blev en växt' (The Girl who Turned Into a Plant), 'Chérie Klosters dagbok' (Chérie Kloster's Diary), or 'Resan' (The Journey). The heroines of these stories are slim, beautiful, intelligent young girls or women struggling on account of their need for intellectual independence on the one hand, and for a physical, 'normal' life on the other.

Anna Sten has none of the beauty and creativity of these protagonists. She is totally ugly, totally isolated, totally passive, totally unhappy.

But before she becomes the incarnation of absolute misery, Anna Sten is given a certain number of chances in life. She is gravely handicapped from birth, but she can use her hands and takes a delight in her work as a seamstress. Then her hands are ruined by rheumatism. Anna Sten might possibly have taken pleasure in reading. Infirmity makes her half blind. Anna Sten, who is so repulsively ugly that human beings cannot stand the sight of her, gains the affection of a kitten. The cat disappears. Gradually but inexorably, Anna Sten is stripped of everything. She becomes the sum-total of suffering:

'She looked as though she had never done anything but suffer and she looked like one who has never reconciled herself with her suffering, who is completely helpless before it. One might have taken her for suffering personified. That was why her appearance frequently had the effect of a violent insult brutally thrown the face. It was as though she deliberately wanted to force upon people the assertion, for the suffering consciousness at least an atrocious and wounding one, that suffering is completely without purpose or meaning.'

What other people find particularly shocking about Anna Sten's face is its expression of active suffering:

'It looked as though it had constantly placed its hopes on this earth. Otherwise it would not have looked so desperate. Otherwise it would not have borne this imprint of suffering, of dissatisfaction with suffering.'

To the young man Sven Kolmar, who is mortally ill, Anna Sten is as the pawnbroker is to Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment: something that ought to be eliminated. The reason for this is that Anna Sten, unlike Sven Kolmar, still paradoxically, senselessly, hopes for something. But when he comes to Anna Sten in order to kill her, it is she who discloses life's inner essence to him:

'And then Sven Kolmar understood that he had forgotten or overlooked the most important thing, he had forgotten love, human love and the one that exists outside human beings; more patient, stronger, more merciless, more compassionate than any human love, because it will not give up until it has forced to the surface that within man that will help him to help himself, life's love for all creation, which for its part will not give up until man has blessed it.'

In 'Anna Sten' Mirjam Tuominen expounds the essence of Christianity in its most naked and for many its most unacceptable form. She returns to the New Testament and its injunction to love the ugly, the poor and the suffering.

'Anna Sten' is a timeless story. Its image of suffering and existence makes it possible to understand why, for example, Grünewald's paintings of Christ are so repulsively ugly. Mirjam Tuominen also anticipates Samuel Beckett's terrifying and humorous descriptions of beings that possess nothing except life.

(to be continued)

Hiidenkivi

Hiidenkivi, the Finnish-language magazine of culture, history, language and literature now has its own website. In order to access the whole publication, readers must register and also subscribe to the paper version of the magazine. But some of the articles are is available free of charge, and the site gives a good idea of the range of material on offer, including some items that are not in the current subscriber's version - this month, for example, discussions of the ideas and writings of Väinö Linna.

Mirjam Tuominen

By Tuva Korsström

The 25 year-old Mirjam Irene Tuominen made her debut in 1938 with a collection of short stories, Tidig tvekan (Early Hesitation). Hagar Olsson, Edith Södergran's friend and the leading Finland-Swedish critic of her time, gave the book an enthusiastic review:

'With her collection of short stories Mirjam Tuominen, hitherto an unknown name, has won a place among the very elite of our literature; it is a long time since we have witnessed such an important début. What is so strange is that the author who is now making her appearance is a truly original talent. She is an artist in soul and spirit and not merely a more or less good writer... It is certain that she touches the nerve of our time very intimately and that her short stories are no products of literature, but really do contain within their form the living word.'

Over nearly twenty-five years Mirjam Tuominen developed an active career as a writer, publishing about twenty books. She wrote short stories, essays and poems. She reviewed contemporary books and translated literary texts into Swedish, including Rilke's letters and Sonnets to Orpheus. She compiled an extensive biography of Hölderlin. She left two large unpublished manuscripts, diaries, hundreds of pencil drawings and about fifty abstract paintings.

After her death in 1967 Mirjam Tuominen's work fell into neglect. During the last decade it has, however, undergone a sudden renaissance. Ghita Barck's biography, Boken om Mirjam (The Book about Mirjam) appeared in 1983. Tuominen's Finland-Swedish publisher Söderströms Co. published a selection of her work in three volumes, appearing in 1989, 1990 and 1991. In the spring of 1992 WSOY published an extensive volume containing many of her most important writings translated into Finnish by Harry Forsblom. Many of her poems have been translated into English by David McDuff. In 1990 her paintings were exhibited for the first time in the Amos Anderson Museum in Helsinki.

The return of Mirjam Tuominen has been hailed by critics in Finland and Sweden. In both countries a large number of articles about it have appeared in the press and in literary and arts magazines. She is also a focus of interest for literary research. It is obvious that this new interest is more than merely the due attention paid to an unjustly neglected author.

By her own Finland-Swedish minority Mirjam Tuominen was until recently considered to be a minor classic, mainly as a skilled short story writer. The Mirjam Tuominen who is now being discovered by new readers and art-lovers, and by a new generation of critics and researchers, is an unfamiliar and surprisingly topical writer. Her development proceeds from traditional prose forms, through avantgardist poetry and painting to Roman-Catholic mysticism.

The first choice

Hagar Olsson points out that there is an element of choice built into each story in the collection Tidig tvekan:

'Each one of these stories illuminates in its own way a certain psychological situation, in which the protagonist, under the pressure of dangerous and contradictory elements in his or her life, has to make a choice.'

The most difficult and important choice in Tidig tvekan is that faced by Irina in the very first story.

The girl Irina, one of Mirjam Tuominen's many alter egos, is a shy, contemplative, sickly child who has lost her father in early years. Irina has been taken to hospital and hovers between life and death. She sees her struggle as a matter of choice - between life and death, between darkness and life. Paradoxically, it is death that is light, while life is darkness and anguish:

If one looked towards death, one looked towards the light, but if one looked towards life, one looked into the tangled darkness of a primeval forest. Irina did not want to look into life, it hurt her physically inside; when now and then she made the attempt, the compress began to tighten around her chest, she lost her breath, there was a sudden and unpleasant stabbing in her back. The mere attempt to look into life made one lose one's breath. When one looked into the light for a long time one lost one's breath, too, but in a different way, for another reason: it was because the light spread within and around oneself, because the clarity grew inside oneself, because one was close to bursting. In life one lost one's breath because the darkness was narrow and full of insoluble contradictions and mysteries, it was narrow and at the same time bewildering large.

Irina told herself that she wanted to die.

Irina is the first and fundamental dissident in Mirjam Tuominen's writings. She is different, because she experiences anguish in the face of life even in its most prosaic, everyday manifestations. Life is night and fear, but it is also the daily inability to be like everyone else. In the hospital her Lebensangst takes concrete form in self-ironic, nightmarish memories of gym lessons at school and of her inability to 'keep in step with the others'.

Irina chooses life and the anguish of life. She chooses the awareness that her dead father was possibly the only person she ever kept in step with. She comes to the conclusion that 'one should always look forward, only forward.'

(to be continued)

I write

By Mirjam Tuominen

I write it shows in the eyes of the dog
it creeps in the paw of the cat
it shimmers in the solitary fly's pair of wings
it leaps in foaling withers
it flies in the flight of birds
it flies
it sinks
into the earth down under roots
it smiles in the infant's eyes
it grows in the eyes of children
it wonders in young eyes
it yearns in human eyes.


translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Sandstorms

Gyldendal have published Laus Strandby Nielsen's latest collection of poetry, which bears the title Hvis der ikke er sandstorme, så er der nok noget andet (If there aren't sandstorms, there's probably something else). Translations of some of these prose poems have already appeared in this blog:

Here
Here
Here
Here
and
Here

The house of forgetting - 2

Reviewing Timo Harju's We watered them abundantly with coffee in Hbl, Pia Ingström makes the central point about the poems in this collection:

Det är inget vanvårdsinferno Harju beskriver, utan en vanlig, hyggligt välskött åldringsavdelning. Han är inte ute efter den socioekonomiska problematiken, utan den existentiella.

What Harju describes is not some inferno of neglect, but an ordinary, decently well-kept care home for the elderly. The problems he uncovers are not socio-economic but existential.

See also: The house of forgetting

The words travel

by Pia Tafdrup

I live in another country, but still
don’t leave my home.
The alphabet I take with me
and the structures of the grammar
the meanings of the words and their emphases.
  No matter where on the globe
I settle down
I live in the language
I was born into.
No storm of other languages
capsizes mine.
I am I
        in my own language –
dreaming in what chance
made my mother tongue.
I write at home,
              write abroad,
everywhere the same:
The words have hearts of migrating birds,
dissection shows
  they want to reach someone,
  and I live with these
bird-words, their singing and hoarse cries.


from Trækfuglens kompas (Birds of Passage), Gyldendal 2010

translated from Danish by David McDuff

The house of forgetting

Finnish poet Timo Harju did his obligatory civil service working as an attendant in a nursing home for elderly people. Now he has written a collection of poems - his first - about the experience. The book's title is We Watered Them Abundantly with Coffee (Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla, ntamo, 2009), and there follow some excerpts from its early pages.


1.

Moisture seeps through the seams of the TV,
the grandfather clock that no longer chimes,
through the neatly made bed, the photographs.
The tears go flowing under the door,
turn down the corridor, roll into the lift,
then another corridor, not far to the front door now,
they’ll get out of the front door! they’ll get out!
the nurses dash after the tears grab hold of them
and coax them back inside by force. I write
a spanner in the waterworks. a wrench.


2.

Leaving means hugging one another
like crushed blueberries.
A year ago behind that door
the nursing home director warned
that the people here were not exactly
sweet old grannies and granddads.
Perhaps it was a joke.

3.

I’d like the nursing home to open wide,
for all the doors to fold and hide
and the grannies and granddads go fluttering out
with their wrinkles their wheelchairs
rushing bright as a cow field in spring.
But they don’t run, so come and see
the clouds in the nursing home corridors.


***

Ward A5, Wednesday

make breakfast sandwiches
(thin layer of margarine and one slice of ham)
wash kitchen floor
take porridge to table next to bed
pull blanket away neatly
give medication
carry to WC
put on trousers
(rub legs down first)
put on braces
take porridge
serve porridge
get new asthma inhaler from medicine cabinet
clean and make bed
change towels in rooms
turn off TV
put on pleasant music
have coffee
carry chest of drawers to basement
make lunch sandwiches
take residents’ laundered clothes to closets
read newspaper aloud
put spoon in open mouth
(if the upper denture falls out, it may need
more adhesive powder and pushing
firmly)
wipe purée off table and from under table
do washing-up
sneak couple of biscuits from kitchen cupboard
find dead granny on floor of room
(plastic bag on head and telephone cord)
serve afternoon coffee
(two black and fifteen white
though now only fourteen white)

***

Ward A5, Thursday


The clouds in the nursing home corridors, sky-open springlike after a bathe
and forgotten, in a frayed blue dressing-gown beside an osiery.
The grannies in the nursing home corridors, the last beautiful pride
you keep in a small wooden box behind your forehead:
if the lid opens by accident all the things may drop to the floor
topsy-turvy you won’t be able to find them, your back won’t let you
you won’t recognise them any more even if you do.
the springtime your insides to pieces.
Here they come, the grannies.
Better to stay here indoors, the journey to the dining room is a rough one
exposed like this
a long way and all by sleigh.
You stare at the keyhole: the clouds are coming.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

Pia Tafdrup: Over the Water I Walk (VIII) - 4

In poetry, the body acquires articulation. I cannot write outside my gender or my history. The angle of vision in my poems wants to reveal that a female ‘I’ is perceiving and finding her voice. However, the relegation of woman-created art to an autonomous rival world is tantamount to letting it degenerate into a ghetto.

Of course, the problem lies somewhere else. In the sphere of the sexual, porosity and the ability to empathize with the other are all-important. When a poem comes into being receptivity is essential, but so are the outlets connected with male sexuality. Both are present in the process of any poem.

In the fields of sexuality and art, one state is common to both men and women: the moment when integration and personality break down. In sexuality, when one approaches the animal, in art the place where the writing ‘I’ is saturated and completely filled, where the ‘I’ lacks a face.

*

In the process of the poem’s inception I am not a gender-determined being. In the moment of writing I do not think of myself in terms of gender, I am simply absorbed. I am bi-gendered, androgynous or hermaphroditic – which does not mean demonic, but merely that in the poem it is clear that, explicitly or implicitly, the perceiving subject is female. In my poems there are traces of female perfume.

*

In poetry the genders are related like brother and sister.


translated from Danish by David McDuff

Over the Water I Walk (VIII)- 1
Over the Water I Walk (VIII) - 2
Over the Water I Walk (VIII) - 3

Still here...

Apologies for the long silence, but I have to admit that there are times - sometimes quite lengthy ones - in the year when my reading leaves the path of foreign fiction and poetry and returns to the field of British and American writing. Since I acquired a Kindle DX as a birthday gift from my daughter a couple of months ago I've been catching up on my acquaintance with the work of some major British authors, in particular Julian Barnes, whose Flaubert's Parrot I read years ago when it first appeared, and was fascinated by. Now at last with the help of Amazon and the Kindle I've managed to read several more of Barnes's novels and collections of essays, including Metroland  and his most recent book, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, both of which strike me as quite unlike anything else in contemporary British fiction.

Which leads me to conclude that, given the flexibility of Blogger and blogging, it might not be a bad idea to at some stage widen the scope of this blog to include a wider range of writing, and escape from the purely "Nordic" ambit...

I'll be thinking about this in the days and weeks ahead, and may reorganize or rename the blog accordingly (maybe even start a new one).

(THE NAMELESS)

By Ursula Andkjær Olsen

It is like a garden where everything
is robbed of its name by the great jewel thief.

Bad bad garden.

TELL ME! I am the mass so why am I so
lonely? TELL ME NOW!

You are sucking me dry DAMMIT. You are sucking me dry giant queen and
king kong of all genders you shout to me: "Give usss dessstinies! Lean out! We can’t tell you in advance. Little heart."

I am not heart. Not the heart horrible
bloodsucker that needs me to stand there and PUMP the clammy
parasite. Let me ascend into hymns and howling. I have my heart

sitting everywhere. It is eating me up from inside and you? YOU suck me dry.

Are you trying to hatch me OUT?
I am your dirty eggz? Tyrannosaurus Flex. HAHA.

Will I reflect my top in the wave’s
blah blah blah. Huh?

Death and chaos and nameless, here you come, what are you but an
unbridled consumption of
hoodies?

And order would that be better NO from here where I sit chaos looks like the only possible freedom. Stuff it, you can stuff it you GIANT. FART.

Everything that doesn’t kill me makes me more and more
nameless. Only in paradise will this nameless thing in me open up and

flourish. Paradise after closing time when they’re not watching. For DAMMIT they’re always
watching PARAFART. It's that pissy fence.

Good Breast and Bad Breast that’s you. I should have been
Enemy Of The State and the Serpent in Other People’s False Paradises. I would have to clear the Milky Way of stars:

Lean out!
I'll throw up. That is what is expected.

Giant DAMMIT you will not eat me until I am destiny. Eat me. Drink me.
Smoke me until I become destiny. Suck. Giant giant destiny. You can smoke it. Smoke me now and tell me then.

And spare me this original

idyllic and solemn
alienation. PLEASE! Turn off that horrible PUMP I am
open and have hearts everywhere.

Let me anoint your mouthpieces. I am alone. In the midst of idyll and solemn icy garden this cold blue grotto where the sigh-stones drip. Incredibly quiet. I have
the seconds sitting. Seconds all over the place.

In the midst of solitude and intimacy. It is piss-dialectical to be
a social tit- and political creature one must separate in order to meet. First one must hang together and then one must separate

in order to meet. One must

tear out one’s hair in order to meet.
MAYBE one must die in order to meet? Is that what you’re saying you big

PISS!? Is that the kind of story you have got to tell?!
With eye for an eye super-bloodshot while
I sit with sighs and

seconds all over the clothes. DAMMIT where is my sobriety?
DAMMIT I am throwing up no

YOU are throwing ME

up as stars and eating me when I fall. If I can’t
stay up in the sky. AND DAMMIT I CAN’T I fall down.

S'il vous plaît! How many times does my
face have to split? Before I get a name. Breast Buddy and
Soft Brain. My heart that fucking parasite. Until YOU slake your thirst.

Just slake your thirst I’ll give you destiny. BITTE schön. Beat beat. Look here I come
with a belly full! Here’s the fat dripping TELL ME NOW!

Do I have my heart in the right place? What are we going to do about all that beating? DAMMIT. Everywhere and all over the place. The heart in the garden in the garden in the garden in the garden in the garden in the garden in the garden in the garden I suppose it will make the nights whiter. Supersuperwhite. Will it for example tell me that loneliness comes before individuality?

Is it the name or the nameless that must be kept behind
fence under lock and key. HAHA. Is it me or is it

YOU BIG! And must it be looked after and watered or starved to death or both? OH. So that they are singing both of them

Good Breast and Bad Breast. Both Big Prick and Carrot. Them I will swing between that is destiny. That we can call a quadruple grip on my BALLS that is destiny? YES? You give all the names.

All that YOU have given me in the belly: security and both breasts and prick and carrot. DAMMIT how small I am.

YOU give both reality and dreams and I am the quiet before the name. Oh. TELL ME.

My dolls. Breast Buddy and Enemy Of The State. I gave them names
bury them with me when I die. Sweet sweet big

alarm. Let me howl and die.
The skin of my ass blossoms and becomes wings

flapping wings.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

Linton apology

The Suecophile British Labour MP Martin Linton, who hosted the opening dinner of the 2008 Nordic Translation Conference which spotlighted the work of many literary translators from Scandinavian languages, has publicly apologized for saying that “There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends.” Melanie Phillips, writing in the Spectator, has some commentary.

The Last Goodbye in Grötlingbo on Gotland

By Susanne Jorn


I

My father died on May 1, 1973
Everyone knew it - except me.
Because I lived all the way over
on the other side of the Atlantic
and my siblings did not phone.

When I was told I wore mourning white far into May
and slept like a Sleeping Beauty for 28 years.
Slept black – until a Danish man planted
a kiss on my lilywhite lips
and I woke up ...


II


First the stalkers erected a gravestone
for Asger Jorn in Grötlingbo on Gotland.

Then Asger Jorn's youngest son removed the stalkers’ stone
and put up another for his father:
A base for his father's bronze sculpture
that bears the inscription "Kontemplatione Fatigata" ...

It went black and white for me
at Grötlingbo cemetery
as I stood before my father's grave:
the bronze sculpture "Kontemplatione Fatigata".

I ran a fever and my eyes stung as I unsuccessfully spoke to my father's ashes.


III


At Grötlingbo cemetery next day
I called out again –

addressing my father's ashes
in Erik Nyholm's blue urn.

The lid sprang open.
Up came the Spirit
my father's ghost in the sky.

Only then
was I able to say
The Last Goodbye.

Reaching out for
the spectral-blue ghost --
but it was already invisible.

Since then
my mood has been neither
black nor white,
but all colours.

translated from Danish by David McDuff