Peter Weiss - 2

A recently-published dissertation by the Swedish filmographer Jan Christer Bengtsson gives a fascinating inside view of the creative personality of Peter Weiss. Focused on Weiss's work for the cinema, the dissertation examines Weiss's career in chronological sequence, but is not limited solely to the films: Weiss's literary work and painting are also considered in detail in the course of this extensive treatment, and numerous interviews are cited and quoted.

Bengtsson places Weiss within the context of postwar European - specifically Swedish and German - cinema, He proceeds from an analysis of Weiss's early short films of the 1950s (many of them utilizing surrealist techniques), through the documentaries and officially commissioned work all the way to the less well-known full-length film projects of Weiss's later years, including Hölderlin and the collaboration with Francisco Javier Uriz involving the latter's screen version of the Spanish Civil War section of the first volume of The Aesthetics of Resistance.

Of particular interest are the links to a 1961 German television interview (Berlin stellt vor, in which Weiss is interviewed by the literary critic Walter Höllerer (the links are here and here), and Bengtsson's own consideration of The Studio of Doctor Faust (1956), which as Weiss's English-language Wikipedia entry states, "shows a persisting link of the emigrant Weiss to a German cultural background."

Thought's winged horse

By Pia Tafdrup

Thoughts find their way 
forward in steady flow 
   in leap, in zigzag. 
Not exhaustion, 
just more fermenting,
          crystalline 
while the mind circulates around them. 
Thoughts provoke 
new thoughts 
   ordered, chaotic. 
No grille obstructs, 
   no halo. 
Thought’s winged horse rises, 
   flies up 
from the brain’s infinity,
   throws light 
in the cerebral gray 
   abandons 
the physical body in a steep glide.


TANKENS VINGEDE HEST



Tanker finder vej
fremad i lige strøm,
  i spring, i zigzag.
Ikke rovdrift,
blot fortsat ynglen,
       krystallinsk,
mens sindet kredser om dem.
Tanker provokerer
nye tanker,
  ordnede,kaotiske.
Intet gitter spaerrer,
  ingen glorie.
Tankens vingede hest letter,
  flyver op
fra hjernens uendelighed,
  kaster lys -
i det cerebrale grå,
  forlader
den fysiske krop i et stejlt svæv.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

The Best

By Karin Boye


The best that we possess,
we cannot give away.
we cannot write it either.
and neither can we say.

The best that is in your mind
no one can make unclean.
It shines there deep inside
for you and God alone.

It is the glory of our wealth
that no one else can gain it.
It is the torment of our poverty
that no one else can attain it.


Det bästa


Det bästa som vi äga,
det kan man inte giva,
det kan man inte säga
och inte heller skriva.


Det bästa i ditt sinne
kan intet förorena.
Det lyser djupt där inne
för dig och Gud allena.


Det är vår rikdoms råga
att ingen ann kan nå det.
Det är vårt armods plåga
att ingen ann kan få det.


translation from Swedish by David McDuff

Johansson: Israel “contemptible country”

The Jerusalem Post reports that the head of Finland’s branch of Amnesty International stands by his comment that Israel is a “contemptible country” (nilkkimaa).
In a post now deleted from his Iltalehti blog, but still available in Google’s cache, Frank Johansson writes:

Ystäväni, joka työskentelee Israelissa, oli käymässä ja puita vajaan kasatessa päästiin hänen lempiaiheeseensa. Usean vuoden pyhässä maassa oleskelun jälkeen, hän on tullut siihen tulokseen, että ”Israel on nilkkimaa”. Omien vierailujeni perusteella, jotka ajoittuvat 1970-luvulle ja 1990-luvun loppuvuosille olen aika samaa mieltä.

“A friend of mine, who works in Israel, was visiting and while we were stacking firewood in the woodshed we got onto his favourite subject. After a few years of living in the Holy Land, he had come to the conclusion that “Israel is a contemptible country”.  On the basis of my own visits, which took place during the 1970s and late 1990s,  I am quite of the same opinion.”

The word nilkkimaa, which I’ve translated here as “contemptible country”, as it derives from the Finnish word nilkki, is actually more derogatory than that – the Jerusalem Post translates it as “scum state”, and that is not too far off, as the expression is stronger than "rogue state".

One wonders why a regional head of Amnesty would make such a statement about an entire country and its people, yet apparently feel no shame about it. He claims to be “breaking the silence”, but is surely breaking a lot of other things as well.

Update: in the Jerusalem Post interview, Johansson appears to acquiesce in the "scum state" translation of the word he used.

However: 

In an e-mail to the Post on Wednesday, Johansson wrote, “I decided to take down my blog because I appreciate that my comments were ill-judged and appear all the more so when taken out of context, and have obviously caused offence to many people although it was not my intention, at all, to cause such offence.”

He added “I am especially conscious, and regret that my ill-judged action may be detrimental to Amnesty International’s work on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the valiant human rights work being undertaken by my colleagues working for Amnesty International in Israel.”

Peter Weiss

I've been reading Joachim Neugroschel's translation of vol. 1 of Peter Weiss's enormous novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, and while reading Fredric Jameson's introductory essay was struck by the numerous influences of Swedish literature on Weiss's work. The second and third volumes of the novel, which I hope to read soon in the German original, actually feature the personality as well as the work of Karin Boye, whose poetry I've translated into English. In the 1940s Weiss wrote two volumes of poetry in Swedish: the prose poems of Från ö till ö, and De besegrade. Although Weiss appears not to have been too happy about writing in Swedish, and soon returned to German - in Understanding Peter Weiss Robert Cohen says that "The two texts... did not lay to rest the doubts about his new language" - this early work with its expressionism and psychoanalytic explorations provides a unique way into Weiss's oeuvre. Cohen writes that "his lack of interest in ideology and attempts at explaining fascism rationally... fit into the conservative and restorative tendencies of the time..."

Weiss's contacts with the fyrtiotalister, the literary modernists who were grouped around the magazine 40-tal, seem to have been fairly extensive. Cohen again:

There was a basic kinship to this group of artists: for the painter and emerging filmmaker Weiss had just discovered surreaiism for himself, and his interest in psychoanalysis had been stirred by the exiled physician and psychiatrist Max Hodann. Especially with Ekelöf and Dagerman, Weiss seems to have entertained close relationships.

Hodann, of course, is one of the central characters in Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, and in conjunction with Karin Boye he provides a lead into Weiss's relation to Ekelöf and other fyrtiotalister.

I'll write about my reading of Weiss from time to time - among many other things, he seems an interesting and neglected link between German and Swedish modernism and their political and existential meaning, one that deserves wider and deeper investigation.

Dreams and fears

In Books from Finland magazine, Pia Ingström introduces some of my translations of Timo Harju's poetry, most of which have not appeared in this blog. 

These are the terms – those of ordinary crime journalism –  in which our recent public discussion of long-stay care of the elderly here in Finland was conducted. The discussion was followed by the usual misery of cuts, unchanged diapers, dehydration, over-medication, poor wages for hard work… No wonder that the concept of  ‘healthcare wills’ and ‘living wills’, in which people are supposed to say how they want to be cared for in the last stage of their lives – is acquiring a disturbing undertone of ‘better jump before you’re pushed.’

Chitambo - 4

(continued)

I understand nothing of what is really going on, don’t see the connections, don’t grasp the extent of the revolution that is underway, now silent and concealed, now with shouts and banners and hallelujahs, and least of all do I perceive that labour is the kernel of this as of all other revolutions, the sacred freedom of labour. But I do grasp something, at least, there is something that I sense instinctively like a call, an exhortation, a fanfare. I recognize the spirit that speaks in Nora’s lines, recognize it as my own, the fighting spirit. This unites me with all those of whom I know nothing, my sisters, my scattered and faltering legionnaires the world over.

Ida Aalberg was honoured like a queen that evening. In those days she was such a great star that her arrival at our National Theatre was merely a guest performance, in between her triumphs in St Petersburg and on the continent. The people were packed in crowds on the square outside the theatre, formed a human chain to the hotel where she was staying, cheered, wept, lifted her in their arms. I was one of those who pushed their way to the front! The tears ran down my cheeks, I shouted and cheered with all the might of my lungs. In spite of the biting winter chill, my coat fell open, and it never occurred to me to cover my bare head as I stood before this lofty, tragic figure, this first woman I had ever seen who could hold her head high. What good fortune that I at least had a leather cap to press passionately to my chest!

As I stood there like this I presented a thoroughly odd spectacle, and it was not surprising that the great diva noticed me as she passed. Perhaps she also felt touched by such naive and obviously youthful enthusiasm. She stopped right in front of me, took a rose from her bosom, handed it to me with a radiant smile and said: Thank you for coming, dear child!

I stood rooted to the spot holding the rose, the sacred rose of the elect. The people talked and babbled around me, they pushed and shoved me in the crush, trod on my toes. I stood still and looked at my rose. I no longer shouted, cheered, wept, or swam in a sea of bliss. The great solemnity of what had happened to me filled me with a pure, lofty, stern emotion, a responsibility, a demanding certainty that required me to muster all my inner strength. In my eyes it was not the celebrated actress who had given me the rose and marked me out from everyone else. It was Nora, the Nora my passionate heart had summoned forth and experienced with the last drop of its red blood, it was she who had given me the rose and said to me: Don’t give in, Vega! Revealed to me, by a gesture of fate, in a glittering second of inner perception were the secret direction of my conflicting sensations and experiences and the jealously hidden goal of my proud, indomitable dreams.

It was then that I resolved to become the knight of the proud, free woman! With the rose in my hand I gave a holy vow that I would never betray this cause. Never in my life would I marry, never submit to a man’s enticements! Free, untouched and pure I would lead women on to victory. Again with glorious flames within me burned activity long subdued and repressed, and the fighting spirit in my being, the dissension in my name claimed their due. Within my inner self, Atahualpa’s avenger rose up from his humiliation, swords clattered, armies prepared for battle. What music to my ears! What beatitude to my breast! I would show them all, show Mr Dreary and Fridolf and all who called me woman and tried to exclude me from a life of freedom and danger what a woman could achieve in this world. To think that no one had perceived this before! That was something I could not grasp. I was convinced that I was going to create a worldwide movement. For surely women could not voluntarily allow themselves to be shut in like this, like Nora, for example, become dependent and be dandled like children all their lives? A woman only needed to be brave and get to the top, and then all the others would follow. And the brave woman was I, Vega Maria Dreary!

(end)

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Letter from US Senator on Norway

On August 3, United States Senator Sam Brownback wrote a letter to the Ambassador of Norway in Washington DC. The text of the letter, and the attachment, are reproduced below (click the images to magnify the text).

Chitambo - 3

(continued)

One evening I went to the theatre, to all appearances the same old spinster Dreary, confused by a thousand contradictory impulses that bubbled up from the restlessness of my blood and spirit, and I emerged from there like one who knew her mission in life, a hero, a liberator, a young Napoleon.

I had made a great decision.

I had gone like everyone else to see the great Ida Aalberg in the role of Ibsen’s Nora – I tried as best I could to keep up with the more noteworthy events in cultural life. But what I saw was a revelation! My own rebellious longing embodied in a dazzling female revelation. I was hardly able to sit still, so dreadfully did I suffer as I watched them tighten the noose around her neck. My eyes were glued to her as though my life were at stake. All the way up to the gallery where I sat one could feel how horrible that home was, detestable, narrow, poisoned. I shook with indignation, I could not understand her indecision. Was she really unable to see through that man, how selfish and foolish he was, utterly unworthy of a woman such as she? And the children were the same, of course! I clenched my fists in impotent rage, I dug my fingernails into the velvet of the barrier in front of me and in a state of passion and overexcitement whispered proud words to my heroine.

And look, a miracle has happened! There she comes in her simple attire – serious, reserved and firm as a fortress. That is what a woman ought to look like!

“I must stand quite alone, if I am to understand myself and everything about me. It is for that reason that I cannot remain with you any longer.”

My heart beats with violent joy, my eyes flash with lightning. The infamous scoundrel of a man speaks of course of her most sacred duties, of husband and child and what people will say.

“I have other duties just as sacred... Duties to myself.”

My heart laughs with delight. How wonderful it is that she can say this! Myself! She just says it, calmly, majestically, as such things ought to be said. Who can harm her when she is able to talk like that? But does anyone believe that this parrot will fall silent as a result? One might think he would have had about as much as he could take, but no! He just starts going on about her being a wife and mother. Before all else, a wife and mother, has one ever heard the like? I half get up from my seat, mutter my protests, hear hisses behind me, but in uncontrollable ecstasy lean far over the balcony as if I could catch from the air the passionately longed-for words:

“I don't believe that any longer. I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being...”

Did you all hear that? Before all else a human being! I must reflect on all these things and find out what they mean. Do you realise their significance? If no one else does, Vega Dreary does. At that very moment I hear the sound of the door shutting after Nora, the door through which she breaks out of her home, I sense the curtain going up on a mighty drama in which I myself have been chosen to take part.

I am ignorant and conceited, I know nothing of real life, but even so I am seized by the same inspiration which in those years passes through the entire female world, which drives the suffragettes to battle, induces high-born women to hurl stones through shop windows and pour acid through letter-boxes, climb into ministerial cars in order to shout their “Women’s suffrage, Mr. Asquith!” in the face of the terrified statesman. I have no idea that such things take place, perhaps I don’t even know that, in advance of the women of every other country, the women of my own been granted that right to vote. I have never even heard of the existence of a venerable institution like the Finnish Women’s Union, and have given even less thought to its mission of elevating women in the intellectual sphere and improving their economic and civil status. The little sewing circles in Limingo, Suojärvi, Kangasala, Finby, Pargas, in the most remote parishes and in the largest cities across the land, perform their work entirely without my knowledge, sewing and darning and organizing on a small scale in order to help impoverished mothers and children, provide work for indigent women, support orphanages, workhouses, weaving schools, libraries. If I knew anything about them I would despise them from the bottom of my heart, the sewing circles. I know nothing of the women in my own country who work in quarries, copper mines, brickworks, in match factories, sawmills, pulp mills, paper mills, in cotton mills, bakeries, flour mills, tobacco factories, who earn their living by cooking, lace-making, needlework, washing, ironing, copying, book binding, stevedoring. Even if I knew of them and had seen their bended backs, their tired and worn hands, I would have no idea that it is these women, the most disempowered and despised of all, who with their hard, underpaid labour, their double service in community and home, have laid the foundations of women’s freedom and have made it possible for every Nora to open the door of her home and say: Before all else I am a human being!

(to be continued)

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Chitambo - 2

(continued)

Mr Dreary could probably have thought of many other names to replace the unfortunate Fram, had he been given a little more time and not been ambushed by the priest during the ceremony itself. There were several wonderful names to choose from among ships that had steered out upon uncharted seas. Think of the proud squadron with which Fernando de Magallanes embarked on his perilous voyage. Trinidad! Concepcion! Victoria! What radiance surrounded these names! I would willingly have possessed one of them. How easily they have evaporated, those names my schoolteachers tried to imprint on my memory – but the names which Mr Dreary taught me in the happy truancy of the imagination will never be effaced. Their symbolic splendour has only grown more beautiful with the years, like the splendour of old gold.

I can still distinctly feel the thrill of delight that crept down my spine as I sat on my stool at Mr Dreary’s feet, endlessly listening to his stories from seafaring history. Only the loftiest heroism was capable of satisfying me, and stories that lacked elements of defiance in the face of death left me quite unmoved. Mr Dreary himself derived indescribable enjoyment from moments of this kind. When the critical situation was upon the desperate, starving crew and they were threatening to mutiny, he would fall suddenly silent and give me a meaningful look. I would quiver with excitement and my little heart beat violently, but I did not move and uttered not a word, just fixed my gaze on his lips. Then he would get up and strike a cocky pose, as one does on deck in an extreme situation, with death before one’s eyes, and hurl out some incredibly heroic words by the leader of the expedition:

‘Though I am forced to eat the leather on the ships’ mast yards, I shall not perish until I have completed my work.’

We both had a passionate love for lines of this kind. They formed the longed-for climax of every story, and when it was finally reached we fell into each other’s arms, gripped by an inexplicable emotion which neither of us was able to control. We heard the wind singing in the ships’ rigging and saw that it was still the same wind singing the same intoxicating song: glory calls us, calls us... Such was the wind that filled your sails, my childhood’s Trinidad, Concepcion, Victoria!

If anyone had seen me only at home or at school they might well have thought that I was the virtuous daughter my mother wanted, a veritable Virgin Mary. In this world I lived asleep. A heaviness rested on my soul and my body, I felt tormented by my clothes, my pigtails, my duties. This profound discomfort made me apathetic, something I suppose to be the precondition for virtuous conduct in childhood. My mother did all she could to foster the domestic virtues in me, the only virtues a girl in our circles was thought to need. She placed special emphasis on dusting.

That repugnant ceremony was performed each morning with minute exactitude, under my mother’s implacable gaze, with the result that I came to hate every piece of furniture and every room in our home. I loathed all those objects so profoundly that I would probably have kicked them and broken them apart, had not fear held me back and compelled me to assume an air of submission and go around dusting and polishing in a manner that was idiotic and absurd. Lord knows, if only there had been an interval of a few days since the last dusting, some dust might have actually gathered, making one feel some purpose in what one was doing. But no, the whole point of womanly labour is that it must be so refined that it cannot be seen! This total absurdity is typical of all such work that is considered to belong to woman by nature.

It was the same with the work which is so tellingly called “handwork” – as though women would ever be allowed to do anything with their brains! Patching and darning was all right. Not because it was enjoyable, not that either, slow and tricky and petty like everything else in our home, but at least it was a task worthy of a human being compared to all those silly tablecloths and monograms and embroideries on which one was supposed to spend one’s time. Cross stitch and stem stitch, fore stitch and back stitch and pothooks of every conceivable kind, devilishly devised in order to give the absurdity a semblance of meaning. When the hole was darned and the torn cloth patched one did at least have the satisfaction of having done something sensible. But all those unneeded tablecloths, piles of which lay in the chest-of-drawers and were taken out once a year to be aired – they were the real handwork. Into their strange patterns Mrs Dreary and her friends poured all their womanly ambition. These patterns they showed off to one another every time they met, and woe to anyone who had “forgotten her handwork” and without this covering mantle simply sat down at the coffee table to hear gossip and drink coffee. The others would purse their lips and say that it could happen to anyone and not everyone always had a suitable piece of handwork ready, but their tone and looks said all too clearly that this woman was a sloven. They knew the sort of thing that women like her got up to. In fact, the handwork was much more than it professed to be, it was one of the great symbols of decorum, a sign of its possessor’s social status, a testimonial of respectability, conscientiousness and virtue.

In this company I had to sit, decently bowed over a piece of handwork, in an unbearably cramped position and also under close surveillance. My hair was drawn back so fiercely that it hurt my scalp, my nose shone from continual washing with soap and water, my undergarments were so thick that I could hardly move, my dress was so tight and my neckband so high that a straitjacket would truly have come as a relief. The old ladies beamed with contentment and said: Your daughter is a great credit to you, dear Agda. In this company I learned to loathe my own sex. From the dull apathy in my inner being this incipient gleam of fighting spirit rose slowly but surely to the surface of my consciousness.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff



(to be continued)

Chitambo

Some excerpts from the novel Chitambo (1933), by Hagar Olsson.


I, Vega Maria Eleonora Dreary

I was born in 1893, of course. That, as everyone knows, is the proudest year in the history of Nordic polar research. It was the year in which Fridtjof Nansen began his world-famous voyage to the North Pole aboard the Fram. Mr Dreary viewed this as a personal distinction and a sign that fate had fixed its gaze on him. He at once took it for granted that I was destined for great things, and he also showed much skill in fostering the same foolish idea in me...

My father had decided that in order to commemorate the notable year of my birth and place the seal upon my unique position in life I should receive at my baptism the strange-sounding but all the more meaning-laden name of Fram (forward). My mother was naturally in despair. At first she said nothing and dedicated herself instead to gathering allies for the expected confrontation. In the usual irrational way of women, she ran to the neighbours and complained. They listened, slightly amused and slightly scandalized. The most benevolent of them tried to persuade her that it was merely one of Mr Dreary’s jokes, but the malicious did all they could to egg her on. Mr Dreary smiled contentedly into his beard and thought: let the old women chatter – the girl shall be called Fram! Being able to vex my mother and her pious friends with this was a source of indescribable enjoyment for him. The more scandalized they felt, the more clearly did he feel his superiority in their milieu.

On the same day that the holy rite was due to take place, the storm broke. My mother wept and pleaded and wrung her hands, but to no avail. Mr Dreary was immovable, and remained so.

Weeping, my mother took me to be baptised. She quietly informed the godparents that the girl was to be called Maria Eleonora – a Christian and perfectly respectable name. There was a sense of relief, a conviction that Mr Dreary had backed down. He went about beaming, extending cordial greetings to everyone. But when the priest arrived, Mr Dreary raised his voice and curtly informed him that the girl’s name was to be Fram. In a longer statement, delivered with suitable gravitas, he set out the considerations that had led him, as the girl’s earthly guardian, to make this choice. This speech produced general despondency.

People in difficult situations often have brilliant ideas, and so it was with the priest. Like a flash of lightning out of a clear sky the name Vega suddenly presented itself to his inner vision. As an Arctic exploration vessel, the Vega was as illustrious as the Fram, was it not, and even more so! After all, there was still uncertainty as to how the Fram would fare.

One fine day it might perhaps be learned that the ship had gone down and all its crew perished. That was something Mr Dreary had not thought of. He grew pensive and rather long in the face. No, the Fram was not yet something to raise a cheer for, but Nordenskiöld’s Vega, now – there was a name that would surely fit. With such a name one could calmly sail into life’s storms. And then, too, Nordenskiöld was one of us, a meritorious son of Finland.

The priest did not need to say more. He had touched the most sensitive strings in Mr Dreary’s heart. Moved, Mr Dreary thanked the eloquent priest for drawing his attention to these symbolic circumstances. Then he said:

‘Let the girl be called Vega.’


translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

(to be continued)

Darkness at noon

In the Observer, Andrew Anthony discusses the case of a retired Swedish police chief, Göran Lindberg, who last week was jailed for rape and assault.

In the course of the article he also interviews some Swedish writers and commentators who have some harsh things to say about their native country. Their views on the apparent agenda of left-wing Swedish crime authors are particularly noteworthy:

"I have always been suspicious and critical about people like Mankell and Larsson," says Lars Linder, "because I'm not a fan of this conspiracy theory. I'm an old leftist too, but I don't like when they pick out the old social democratic Sweden as paradise, and now the bad guys have taken over with all their hidden connections. It's simplistic and nostalgic. The kind of power abuse you see with Lindberg is much more interesting."

Skæbne-anekdoter

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings. “The silent, all-embracing genius of consent” that is also the genius of true faith — the Hebrew Kadish, the death prayer said said by the closest relative, says nothing but “Holy is His Name”— rises out of the story because in the repetition of imagination the happenings have become what [Dinesen] would call a “destiny”. All her stories are actually “Anecdotes of Destiny”, they tell again and again how at the end we shall be privileged to judge.

-Hannah Arendt, ”Isak Dinesen”, Men in Dark Times

The house of forgetting - 7

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

by Timo Harju

[76]

Granny in a cardigan that's fading
slowly evanescing
hands before her on the table
lost in warm grey reflection,
rocking snowflakes in hair’s cradle
eye-sockets full of snow.



translated from Finnish by David McDuff

Two poems

by Laus Strandby Nielsen

Idyll

Let it be now. Good old now. While the cat is asleep, and the mice are gnawing at the electric cables. Before the wide-awake deep water turns into a sleepless puddle. While the background still keeps in the background and there is peace and quiet in the freezer.


Melancholy

Just after dinner time the phone rings while I am cooking. It’s a faithless old friend who wants to sell me a garden sofa. I get rid of him by promising to call him back later. But when I actually do – having made certain that the garden is still there and still does not have time to talk to me – I get a consultant on the line:
- You only need one battery, so it should all work fine, and now allow me to let you in on a secret, young man: If you keep what you promise, you will have your hands full!
- Young man! I think, hang up and give my dinner to the house pet, my little bear, who eats it with relish. He is cute and strong, my bear, and he will never be quite tame.

translated from Danish by David McDuff

from: Hvis der ikke er sandstorme, så er der nok noget andet, Gyldendal, 2010

Discussion

There's an interesting discussion on World Literature Forum of the strategies and tactics adopted by non-English-language publishers when endeavouring to enter the English-language publishing market. Stewart writes:

I found an article on Three Percent to be very interesting. It revolves around a Serbian publisher, Geopoetika, taking on the task of translating a number of Serbian novels into English and making them available to interested publishers. 

The discussion has some relevance to publishing export strategies in Finland, which is mentioned in the course of the debate.

Review

In the current issue of Poetry Review (Volume 100, No 2, Summer 2010), Aviva Dautch writes ('Existential Otherness and Constant Readjustment'):

In PR (100:1) Pia Tafdrup recounts a childhood memory. A bleeding knee impelled her to ask her father, "Why do we have to die?". Tarkovsky's Horses explores her father's illness and death. This is foreshadowed in The Whales in Paris (the Other Poems of the title, a very different collection full of existential questions. "What is death, when it doesn't come as punishment?" reverberates through a sequence of 'Three Replies to Derrida', but while Tafdrup's questions may be philosophical, her responses are aesthetic:

The thought, the dreamed, the not-yet-born,
the far, the near, the much-desired
                            − the whole of it
I let go of, 
allow the images to be what they are.

('Journey Without End')

This is an ars poetica she returns to again and again; it echoes her essay Walking Over Water (1991), in which she explored Tafdrup "the weight and force of images[...], the momentary clarity a poem can produce." Tafdrup frequently writes without formal stanza breaks, but with fractures: lines split or indented, cantilevered across the page. The poem is a kaleidoscope of fragments, question piled upon question, image upon image, until a scale of perspective emerges that is both resonant and hermetic:

You are beyond yourself,
while perhaps you recapitulate days and nights,
and in a gleam
gather them into a single figure,
                          one only graspable by you.

('Fossil Sleep')

Tarkovsky's Horses "recapitulates" the days and nights of her father's battle with dementia, when "calendar leaves / imperceptibly send out / shortcuts to the dark, / if they're not turned by the nurses" ('Of A Life's Dignity'). 'Mirroring' asks "Is time a star / ground to dust / or dust / gathered to a star?" but in the "mortal chasm" she explores in 'The Sky's Gravity', "I hold on to his hand, / time doesn't pass at all." It is here that the ontological meditations of Tafdrup's earlier poems are realised in tender description:

In no time my father's hair becomes
thin and white
         the month of May 
can be glimpsed through it,
the way the skin swiftly changes colour. 

('On the Opposite Coast')

Tafdrup's writing is at its strongest when her deconstruction of identity is located in in a precise image, but what I enjoyed most about her work was the clear sense of a thinking mind: a sensuous intelligence finding its lyricism in the creative tension between content and aesthetics.

It is to David McDuff's credit that Pia Tafdrup's poetry retains a gratifying multi-facetedness in English. Tadrup has spoken about the difficulty of reproducing a writer's "signature" in translation...

The house of forgetting - 6

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

by Timo Harju

[16]

From the sofa a voice was heard: "Suffer the old to come unto me, and forbid them not."
And on the second day: "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as an old person shall in no wise enter therein. "
The old people’s home is the strange hand of God with which he strokes his thinning hair,
a sudden shower of cackling in the dry linen closet, a bit sad and lonely
God looks out, stirring his cup of tea as though it were on fire.
Had Jesus lived to grow old and gone into an old people’s home
He would have been like these.



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
The house of forgetting - 4
The house of forgetting - 5

Journeys - 2

By Mirjam Tuominen

II

Here again the people seemed neither happy nor cheerful - if one judged by their outer appearance. They looked dreadfully tormented, pale and sickly, and indeed the children - viewed with the inexperienced gaze of a stranger - were pure cripples. Instead, it could be said that here the cause was radiant, and there really was no reason to doubt people when they claimed to be happy in the service of the common cause.

Here prejudice was exalted into a religion. It had been said that the old religion had lost its grip on people's minds precisely because it was not prejudiced, but on the other hand it was clear that in the long run people could not live without belief; the belief that there must be something that was exalted above temporal existence was actually just as necessary to them as their daily bread; to proceed from any other hypothesis was to undervalue man - or to overvalue him, whichever way one wishes, but in any case absolutely wrong. Now it was desired to unite the social or the useful with the religious and it had been discovered that it was to society's detriment that man had been created so: with a left eye and a right eye, one hand that spread to the left and another that spread to the right. His inner being tried to conform to the physical, but could only do so in a dilatory, useless and therefore harmful way: what succeeded for the body, so that for example the two eyes saw a single image instead of two, was impossible for the soul and the consequence was dualism, disunion, splitting. Now what was desired here, in contrast to what had always been the case everywhere else, was to proceed not from the outer but from the inner. The physical must be adjusted, and as the basic tenet of the common religion a single saying from the annals of the old, inapplicable religion was borrowed: 'If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.' More dogma than that was not really needed, for this one tenet gave rise to a countless number of variants and above all it fostered unity in a way that had hitherto been unknown.

Like people who had acquired an absolute formula for mutual happiness, they gave themselves up to selfless labour for the education of the growing race. To this end they set to work in the way that adults in every country usually do when children and the disciplining of children are involved: the adults pretended to do what the children had to do in earnest.

I visited one of their schools and I shall never forget that visit, such a powerful impression did the whole experience make on me. The teacher was a young man, pale, earnest, with the same tormented expression that seemed to be a part of people's physiognomy here. He wore a thick white bandage round his head, his right hand was in a splint and was held still in a broad, black-gleaming silken sling. After him followed the his little disciples, similarly bound up, in exactly the same manner, the only difference being that their bandages concealed real wounds and bodily injuries. They had that same morning had their right arms broken and their right optic nerves sprayed with a poison that had made them blind forever in that eye. But none of them complained, none even moaned, they walked silently and earnestly all the way to their work, which consisted of carrying heavy loads of bricks, and on the left side of their backs one could see the hint of a hump-like protuberance which in time would inevitably grow much bigger.

The young teacher fixed his burning dark gaze on me. Quite certainly he saw through me, for agnostic and foreigner unfamiliar with their customs as I was, I could not help watching the small children with growing anxiety. - You see, said the teacher, how happy they are, no adult can serve more selflessly than a child and make sacrifice for the sake of a great goal. When this race has grown up it will be invincible.
Thus did the teacher speak, but as I looked into his eyes, which could in their fanatical misery be called beautiful, there came over me an oppression so immense that never since have I been able to breathe naturally as I could before. I saw that the teacher was right, that these children might perhaps just as well be called happy as unhappy, and I saw for the first time full confirmation of the fact that man is prepared to make any sacrifice at all, just as long as he is assured of the existence of a clearly-defined good and is trained in the years of his youth to serve that good.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Anti-Semitism in Sweden

In an extensive article published in Haaretz, Donald Snyder of the Forward looks at how growing levels of anti-Semitism in Sweden are forcing Jews - who have long looked on the country as a haven of tolerance and decency - to leave.

The problem, Snyder says, is not confined to conflicts between Sweden's Muslim and Jewish communities:

“[There is] quite a high level of anti-Semitism that is hidden beneath critics of Israel’s policies,” said Beate Kupper, one of the study’s principal researchers, in a telephone interview with the Forward, citing this data and a tendency to “blame Jews in general for Israel’s policies.”

Kupper said that in places where there is a strong taboo against expressions of anti-Semitism, such as Germany, “Criticism of Israel is a great way to express your anti-Semitism in an indirect way.”

Journeys

By Mirjam Tuominen

I


I came to a land where freedom had been realized or was at least believed to be very close to its full realization. For the people here the word freedom could consequently not be applicable to themselves but only to other peoples who had not yet discovered the happiness-making formula that means the realization of freedom. In this land, therefore, the people talked much and with a strong sympathy for all the people beyond the frontiers of their own land who were not free. It was said that one ought to exert oneself to the uttermost in order to liberate all the lands and peoples of the earth. On the other hand, it would hardly have been the right thing if it had occurred to some compatriot to longingly invoke, for example, the concept of freedom in an internal context, to himself or any of his fellow-countrymen. To be sure, it was not forbidden by law to use the word freedom in that last-mentioned way, but a universally sanctioned convention in reality liquidated the word freedom for any contexts other external ones.

Since everything in this land was so new, so thrillingly and inspiringly new, I became like a child, reborn, receptive and avid for knowledge, and also became involved in teaching in a school. By day and by hour I received proof which confirmed that freedom really was being realized in this land as in no other. On the way to work, in buses, trams and underground trains the workers sat studying books which promised them the chance of experiencing freedom completely realized even in their own lifetimes; a mother married to a simple sailor told me with eyes moist from emotion that there was every reason to expect that her son would attain the rank of admiral one day, and everywhere there was testimony to the fact that here women were acknowledged as beings equal to men with all their human rights acknowledged: among other things the fact that within the military profession they possessed the rank of captain, major and even colonel.

In the light of such experiences, the old world I had left behind receded ever further into my consciousness like some primeval night, half-real. Here I had been born anew, here everyone was happy - there was no talk of anything else - and everyone was firmly resolved to save the whole world, against the whole world's will, if necessary. Everyone lived for the mutual welfare of everyone else.

But of course, I could not forget the old world completely, and as is often the case when one tries to repress painful memories, the past returned in my dreams at night.

And I dreamed that I was trying to invoke the word freedom. That merely to suceed in uttering and adducing freedom on my own inner - melancholy, for example - personal behalf would offer me the most nameless solace and happiness. But I could not utter the word, so strong on the other hand, also in the dream, was my conventional awareness: countless inhibitions made the syllables stick in my throat, until, sobbing with anguish, I reached the point where the four letters: f, r, e, e -- crossed the threshold of my consciousness. I knew they were there, but I did not utter them, I did not even think them.

When I woke up I was soaked through as after the most terrible nightmare.

And I said to myself that this was not suffering but imagined or pretended suffering. But in this dark night my repressed primeval consciousness refuted this assertion and said that it is precisely when we tell ourselves that we are only pretending to suffer that we really do suffer, for why should we acknowledge a suffering about which we can do nothing? The soul is mortally sick - but the soul's suffering is always imagination.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

The house of forgetting - 5

from Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (ntamo 2009)

by Timo Harju

[71]

I want to write ofyouforyou, a portrait.
Can I write about you if I don’t dare read this to you?
I’ll try. Now it’s May 25, Ascension Day. I haven’t been
to the nursing home for six months. I don’t know if you're alive or if you’d remember me. I remember you mostly as a little stone: a warm skimming-stone in children’s hands,
the earthworms loosened your heart for good cheer,
but it doesn’t help, we don’t know why
you convulse around me absently, at one corner of your mouth there’s foam.
you dissolve in the blows of your stick, start to cry and howl blindly in all directions.
Wisdom is affection is gone, is a rocking chair
that flies, and you are no more.

[72]

shoes, bedspread, reading lamp, window, snake-plant, pile of house picture magazines. three postcards from grandchildren. canary islands, china, pargas. water jug. water mug. juice jug, juice mug. back braces. spectacles. smell. diarrhea. buttoned shirt. trousers. socks. come through. Thank you. empty ceiling. empty floor. plastic mat. sticky stain. next to table leg. battery clock. walls. entrance to WC. door. window. afternoon.

[74]

Your shoulders and back are stiff
a cry left alone, which cannot find a mouth.
Yes, you can walk when you’re taken for walks.
You can open your mouth when the porridge spoon is moved towards it.
You can lie in bed and cling to the sides of the bed.
You can sit in a chair for many hours
staring at the magazine in front of you
leaning slowly forward.
You just vaporize me absently into you with your eyes.
What’s it like in there, inside you?
Every day your husband comes to smooth your cheek.


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
The house of forgetting - 4

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.