Birthplace

Paavo Haavikko spent boyhood summers at Kirkkonummi, west of Helsinki, and later bought this holiday home there.

[Image source: https://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/a/200810078385520 ]


And yet, we must have a word with happiness,
Build the house to catch the sun's light...

Before the lake freezes over you hear the horsemen
On their way to the forest, before the mountains grow
             dark in Bohemia,
The Bohemian mountains, the Bohemian forests,
Deep down to the forests of the Balkan,
Deep down into Balkan dust
Where pine, fir and willow rise out of the sand, a white
             bird perches
On the far side of the Danube, utters a pitiful cry. ...

How can we endure without falling silent when poems
        are shown to mean nothing...

listen, it's a time of drums,

       it's a time of drums,
drumming is a sound as if there were a hollow dumbness
       in front of the drums,
pure darkness that carries no sound

twice, no
seven times, the Black Regiment paraded here
        under their black flags,
and it's not the same, they paraded here but this is now
And only now the drum-sound has this to say:

Now is the time, now is the time before death,
Before the trees burst into flower,
The time of the drums,
And thus, even this golden decade has begun and is
            drawn to a close ....

The wood of the pine-tree, used with great care,
All the way from the Balkan forests to these woodlands,
            here
With care, the dampers are closed before dusk, to keep
            the heat in the stove,
How immutable this world is, terrifying, it is here, always
             here,
Only we move,
And I have to make up my mind what to do, what to begin ...

Oh I long for an end to changing, to stand where I am,
The soul is an empty space,
A field become too barren from too much tilling and reaping;

There are twelve of us here, of whom one is only half a
              man
And one of us only a pair of hands with a rifle ...

Now see us standing among the sunflowers, within the dusk,
Among the black, broken stems,
See us, twelve empty spaces where we stand
In the field of flowers.


*


Some lines (a bit less than half) from Paavo Haavikko's poem "Synnyinmaa", in the 1955 collection of the same name -- I've seen the title variously translated as Birthplace, Homeland, Fatherland, Native Soil. The forest in this poem is partly the Finland forest of childhood summers but the poem insists on tracing it down to Bohemia and the Balkans: just a decade earlier, this vast eastern European forest had been full of war-zones.

Most of the lines come from Anselm Hollo's translation in the Penguin Modern European Poets Haavikko/Tranströmer selection (1974), but I also took some lines from an extract I found in Herbert Lomas' Bloodaxe anthology Contemporary Finnish Poetry (1991) -- they are the uncapitalized ones, if you're curious.

I find Haavikko's poetry both exciting and worrying; sometimes more one than the other, but the two responses can't be separated from each other. Though a seminal Finnish modernist, Haavikko didn't have the usual kind of literary background; he never went to university but straight into real estate and forest management, and afterwards publishing. Trees, existence, love, death, history, power, economics, politics were some of his preoccupations. He was a sceptical humanist, critical alike of authoritarianism and liberalism. We live in a condition of permanent change, the world is real but too big to understand and attempts to control it are generally disastrous.

Marja-Liisa Vartio and Paavo Haavikko

[Image source: http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1984/06/the-writers-dilemma/ .  Haavikko with his first wife, the writer Marja-Liisa Vartio. They were married from 1955 until Vartio's death in 1966.]


Paavo Haavikko (1931 - 2008)

"Ei ole hienompaa ääntä kuin kirjoituskoneen ääni. Kun tekstiä korjaa, näkee aikaisemman version. Tietokoneessa ensimmäinen, paras, lause katoaa. Se on vaikuttanut kirjoihin aika paljon. Tietokoneella on helppo kirjoittaa runoja tai mitä tahansa, mutta ne eivät ole välttämättä syntyneet ihmismielen luontaisen prosessin kautta.”

"There's no finer sound than the sound of a typewriter. When you correct the text, you see the previous version. On the computer, the first, best, phrase disappears. It has affected books a lot. It's easy for a computer to write poems or anything else, but they are not necessarily born through the natural process of the human mind."

(From an interview in the final year of Haavikko's life, when he had almost stopped reading or writing, but still checked the share prices on TV: https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/jutut/kulttuuri/han-muotokuvassa-paavo-haavikko/ .)

He was apt to consider himself an entrepreneur first and a writer second. Yet in the end he wrote almost 100 books. This National Biography of Finland article on Haavikko (in English) gives some idea of his many-sided production:

https://kansallisbiografia.fi/english/person/4828

And here's another biography, with additional details and a pretty complete list of the books.

http://authorscalendar.info/haavikko.htm

Most of Haavikko's many sides are rather inaccessible to readers of English. Translations have tended to focus on his poetry, especially the earlier poetry. So I don't have any knowledge of his plays or histories or memoirs, more's the pity. As time went by his poetry, initially lyrical (or metalyrical) graded into aphorisms. Haavikko's serial aphorisms aren't individually clinching or ingenious; indeed, they are often ambiguous, sarcastic, simplistic, or contrarian.


What I long for most is a circle and a square
   and a caterpillar track, and the day's rates too,
but not education.
   No one educates you for this,
neither first nor last.
   Because it can't be learned, one's got to
             know bang off.
All the tritenesses, like the way of all flesh,
   come true.
I hate goodbyes because
   world-without-end goodbye means
      meeting soon, over again.
The great system of conceptions, bankrupt
   and a booby, like the rest.
And above all maybe what one can't even be
             bothered to say.
      What's the use of haggling?

(from May, Perpetual / Toukokuu, Ikuinen (1988). Translation by Herbert Lomas.)

This is Herbert Lomas's translation, from Contemporary Finnish Poetry (Bloodaxe, 1991). In the Introduction to this anthology Lomas has a little argument with Haavikko. The argument has many facets, but maybe, at bottom, there's a feeling of: What right has this successful Helsinki businessman to be so radically pessimistic about human existence and society? And yet, there's still that nagging conviction that Haavikko's work mines into something deep and real and important; at least there is with me.  

*

Some Haavikko poems online, in English translation:

http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1984/06/poems-10/

Aphorisms, from No. That's to say, Yes (2006):

http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2006/06/on-becoming-a-forest/

Paavo Haavikko

[Image source: https://prabook.com/web/mobile/#!profile/727644 ]