I saw a tree (Edith Södergran)

I saw a tree ...

I saw a tree that was bigger than all others
and thickly hung with unreachable cones;

I saw a big church with open doors

and all that came out were pale and strong

and ready to die;

I saw a woman who smiling and in makeup

threw dice for her happiness

and saw that she had lost.

A circle was drawn round these things,

that none infringes.

(Edith Södergran (1892 - 1923). The first poem in her first collection, Dikter (Poems), published in 1916.)

Jag såg ett träd ...

Jag såg ett träd som var större än alla andra

och hängde fullt of oåtkomliga kottar;

jag såg en stor kyrka med öppna dörrar

och alla som kommo ut voro bleka och starka

och färdiga att dö;

jag såg en kvinna som leende och sminkad

kastade tärning om sin lycka

och såg att hon förlorade.

En krets var dragen kring dessa ting

den ingen överträder.

Lines 1-2: Nordic readers would instantly visualize a Norway Spruce (Picea abies -- the prickly old-style Christmas tree we all used to buy before Nordmann Firs came along). It's an impressive tree in its native regions, though often an unhappy-looking one in the UK.  Its hanging cones are usually produced in the highest part of the tree. (Pictures below.)

Line 6: sminkad.  Smink means make-up, rouge, or (in the theatre) grease-paint. 

Line 7: lycka means happiness as well as luck. 

Line 9: krets (an ancient Germanic word) is often neutrally synonymous with cirkel ("circle"), but can be suggestive of a religious or magic circle, the boundary of a camp, etc.  

Line 10: den is normally an article ("the") or demonstrative adjective ("this", "that"), but here it's being used as a relative pronoun, instead of the usual som (cf. lines 1,4 and 6). (In the SAOB, this is den C.IX.1 -- to save you the 100 pages that I just scrolled through.)  Den, det, dem... agrees with the antecedent in gender and number. Södergran also uses this construction in the third poem; again with ingen ("no-one"). I'm guessing it would have struck readers as poetic or archaic, so I tried to represent that in my translation.

Line 10: överträder, literally over-tread, generally means "transgress", "infringe" or "trespass". 

*

Whether you call it a ring or a circle, it's at any rate not a wall. So could it be crossed, even though no-one does? And is the infringement to be imagined as getting in, or as getting out? 

The three scenes: at least two of them (1 and 3) contain the idea of out of reach, of  not attaining. Two (1 and 2) contain the idea of bigness. 

The ending suggests we outsiders can't, or at any rate don't, share in these scenes. There's a privacy, a sacred quality. 

The scenes don't feel quite naturalistic. The tree "bigger than all others" sounds like a mythic world-tree. The church scene suggests soldiers being prepared for a war. (Likely enough, in a poem of this date.) But the bigness of the church, coming after the bigness of the tree, also suggests a symbolic scene, a dream about the fabric of life. Likewise the gay woman's gamble seems not so much a literal dice-throw or a stereotypical "falling" as an existential catastrophe, maybe an image of permanent and inevitable loss. 

For David McDuff (in his Introduction to Edith Södergran's Complete Poems, p. 21) this image of a woman is Södergran herself, returning bruised from Davos to Finland; the uncrossed circle represents her ineluctable fate (she was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1908).  A thought that provokes another, that the big church where one is prepared for death could also image one of the sanatoria where Södergran spent so much of her short life.

Norway Spruce (Picea Abies)

[Image source: https://treesplanet.blogspot.com/2016/05/picea-abies-norway-spruce.html . A remarkable thing about the shape of these trees is that scrolling up or down creates the impression of zooming out or in. Try it!]

Cones of Norway Spruce (Picea abies)

[Image source: https://treesplanet.blogspot.com/2016/05/picea-abies-norway-spruce.html .]

You can read the whole of Dikter (1916) in David McDuff's excellent translation: http://englishings.com/nvinprint/sodergran-poems-1916.html .

But translating afresh is good for my Swedish and it makes me read the poems with attention, so let's carry on for a few more poems:

The day cools ...

I

The day cools towards evening ...

Drink the warmth in my hand,

my hand has the same blood as the spring.

Take my hand, take my white arm,

take my thin shoulders' longing ...

It would be wonderful to feel,

for just one night, a night such as this one,

your heavy head against my breast.

II

You threw your love's red rose

into my white lap --

I hold it fast in my hot hands,

your love's red rose that soon withers ...

Oh you sovereign with chilly eyes,

I receive the crown you reach to me,

it bends my head down to my heart ...

III

I saw my master for the first time today,

trembling, I knew him at once.

Now I already feel his heavy hand on my light arm ...

Where is my girl's ringing laughter,

my woman's freedom with head borne high? 

Now I already feel his fast grip on my shaking body,

Now I hear reality's hard clang

against my fragile fragile dreams.

IV

You sought a flower

and found a fruit.

You sought a spring

and found a sea.

You sought a woman

and found a soul --

you are disappointed.

Dagen svalnar . . .

I

Dagen svalnar mot kvällen ...

Drick värmen us min hand,

min hand har amma blod som våren.

Tag min hand, tag min vita arm,

tag min smala axlars längtan ...

Det vore underligt att känna,

en enda natt, en natt som denna,

ditt tunga huvud mot mitt bröst.

II

Du kastade din kärleks röda ros

i mitt vita sköte --

jag håller fast i mina heta händer

din kärleks röda ros som vissnar snart ...

O du härskare med kalla ögon,

jag tar emot den krona du räcker mig,

som böjer ned mitt huvud mot mitt hjärta ...

III

Jag såg min herre för första gången i dag,

darrande kände jag genast igen honom.

Nu känner jag ren hans tunga hand på min lätta arm ...

Var är mitt klingande jungfruskratt,

min kvinnofrihet med högburet huvud?

Nu känner jag ren hans fasta grepp om min skälvande kropp,

nu hör jag verklighetens hårda klang

mot mina sköra sköra drömmar.

IV

Du sökte en blomma

och fann en frukt.

Du sökte en källa

och fann ett hav.

Do sökte en kvinna

och fann en själ --

du är besviken.

Though such an early composition, "Dagen svalnar ...." has become one of Södergran's best-known poems.

Line 10, sköte. The imagery is more openly sexual than in English. Sköte means lap but also means pudenda. 

Lines 18, 21, ren. A form of redan ("already"), common in Finland-Swedish. 

The old house

The way new eyes look upon old times,

like strangers who have no heart ...

I long to go to my old graves,

my mournful bulk weeps bitter tears

that no-one sees. 

I go on living in the old days' softness

among strangers building new towns

on blue hills up to the sky's rim,

I gently talk with the captive trees

and sometimes comfort them.

How slowly time the essence wastes,

how noiseless the tread of Fate's hard heel.

I must await the mild death

that brings its freedom to my soul!

Det gamla huset

Hur nya ögon se på gamla tider

likt främlingar som intet hjärta ha ...

Jag längtar bort till min gamla gravar,

min sorgsna storhet gråter bittra tårar

dem ingen ser.

Jag lever kvar i gamla dagars ljuvhet

bland främlingar som bygga nya städer

på blåa kullar upp till himlens rand,

jag talar sakta med de fångna träden

och tröstar dem ibland.

Hur långsamt tiden tingens väsen tär,

och ljudlöst trampar ödets hårda häl.

Jag måste vänta på den milda döden

som bringar frihet åt min själ!

Line 5, see note on poem 1 ("I saw a tree ..."),  line 10.

Södergran's free verse divided readers, but there are a number of popular poems in Dikter that, like this one and "Nocturne" and "Autumn Days", edge towards a more traditional rhymed and strophic form. 

Nocturne

Airy silver moonlight eve,

the night's blue billowing,

numberless the glittering waves

on each other following.

Shadows falling across the path,

Shoreline bushes weeping softly,

blackish giants guarding shoreline silver.

Silence deep in summer's midst,

sleep and dream, --

the moon glides over the sea,

white and warm.

Nocturne

Silverskira månskenskväll,

nattens blåa bölja,

glittervågor utan tal

på varandra följa.

Skuggor falla över vägen,

strandens buskar gråta sakta,

svarta jättar strandens silver vakta.

Tystnad djup i sommarens mitt,

sömn och dröm, --

månen glider över havet

vit och öm. 

All the verbs apart from glider (glides) are infinitives. I've translated them as present participles.

A wish

Of all our sun-filled world

I only wish a garden sofa

where a cat suns itself ...

There I would sit

with a letter at my bosom,

just one little letter.

That's how my dream looks ...

En önskan

Av hela vår soliga värld

önskar jag blott en trädgårdssoffa

där en katt solar sig ...

Där skulle jag sitta

med ett brev i barmen,

ett enda litet brev.

Så ser min dröm ut ...

Above, "En önskan" read by Kerstin Andersson.

Edith Södergran was a cat lover. Many of the surviving photos from Raivola show her cat Totti in her arms. Raivola, though only 60km from St Petersburg, was then (just) in Finland. In 1900 only about 10% of the population were Finns (Wikipedia). It became part of Russia after the Winter War (1940) and is now called Roshchino, a name referring to the nearby roshcha, the extraordinary stand of Siberian Larch sown in 1738 (known as Lintula to Russians and Raivola to Finns). There's an Edith Södergran monument in Roshchino, and a few metres away a statue of Totti the cat who, it's said, pined away at his mistress' grave. 

Statue of Totti at Roshchino (Raivola), by Nina Terno

[Image source: https://vsuete.com/stories-behind-cats-monuments/ .]

Autumn days

Autumn days are transparent

and painted onto the wood's golden ground ...

Autumn days smile at the whole world.

It's so lovely to fall asleep without a wish,

sated with flowers and tired of greenery,

with the vine's red crown at the bed-head ...

The day of autumn yearns no more,

its fingers are relentlessly chill,

in its dreams it sees everywhere,

how white flakes incessantly fall ...

Höstens dagar

Höstens dagar äro genomskinliga

och målade på skogens gyllne grund ...

Höstens dagar le åt hela världen.

Det är så skönt att somna utan önskan,

mätt på blommorna och trött på grönskan,

med vinets röda krans vid huvudgärden ...

Höstens dag har ingen längtan mer,

dess fingrar äro obevekligt kalla,

i sina drömmar överallt den ser,

hur vita flingor oupphörligt falla ...

My translation doesn't even hint at some of the rhymes, notably lines 4-5.

Line 5, mätt. A much more commonplace word in Swedish than "sated" in English. You would ask a small child, "Är du mätt?" -- "Have you had enough to eat?" It's perfectly polite, when declining a second or third helping, to exclaim "Jag är så mätt!"  -- it implies contented satisfaction, without the suggestion of disgust that lurks in the English word "sated".

Monument to Edith Södergran at Roshchino (Raivola), designed by Wäinö and Matti Aaltonen

[Image source: http://willimiehenjaljilla.blogspot.com/2017/08/raivola-edith-sodergranin-muistomerkki.html .]

The monument quotes the first verse of "Arrival in Hades" ("Ankomst till Hades"), one of Södergran's last poems:

Se här är evighetens strand,

här brusar strömmen förbi,

och döden spelar i buskarna

sin samma entoniga melodi.

See, here is eternity's shore,

here the stream runs by,

and death plays in the bushes

his same monotone melody. 

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 ]

Ice

Ulla-Lena Lundberg is a Finland-Swedish author. Is was published in 2012. The English translation, by Thomas Teal, came out in 2016.

The novel is set on the Örlands (a made-up name, I think), one of the many groups of tiny islands to the east of the main Åland mass. (The Åland islands are part of Finland, but are almost exclusively Swedish-speaking.) It begins in May 1946, with a young priest and his family arriving to take up the vacancy. That's really all I want to say, it's a book to be shared but not written about. Here's a typically low-key, almost inert, registering:

*

Every day it changes a bit -- more hay, less grass -- but what hay! The sea level is still low, the sun shines, there is a light breeze. A dry spell so perfect that Mona ventures out after only two days to start turning the windrows, in the afternoon when the hay on top is completely dry. The windrows are so light and fine that it's a joy to let the breeze help as she turns them with her rake. At times the windrows seem to turn themselves. She walks beside the verger's Signe, who works the neighbouring row. It's not heavy work and they talk as they go, about the animals and their hope that the weather will hold and folks will finish their haymaking well before they start getting ready for the herring fishery. Signe tells her how it used to be, when they all went off to the fishing camps and stayed until well into September. She talks more than she could have in the verger's company, and before the day is over, the hay is turned and the smell has changed -- more barn, less heaven. Both of them are pleased and sweaty. "Almost makes you want to jump in the sea, if it weren't for all those sailboats," says the pastor's wife. But Signe says that you jump in the sea if you want to kill yourself. Otherwise you wash in the sauna!

For the next few days, Mona is deeply nervous. She runs around doing her chores and suddenly stops to look at the sky. This strangely beautiful weather can't last, it's only natural for the sea level to rise a bit at the shore, it's starting to get cooler and there are banks of clouds above the outer skerries. Everyone who came to church on Sunday was astonished that the pastor's hay was already mown. If it rains on the hay now, everyone will say that they were in too great a hurry. She passionately wants to show them that this is the time to cut grass, not when the hay is overgrown, and with all her might she tries to keep the clouds away. "Stay out there!" she commands them silently. "Don't you dare come in over these islands!"

The verger, who is her friend and admirer, states with all his authority that the granite is now so warm that the rain will go around it. "Even if it rains at sea, that doesn't mean it will rain on land." He is wise and experienced, no nonsense about God's will. Why would he want it to rain on her hay! She walks down to the meadow one more time to check. If it doesn't rain, it needs only one more day. At least one, because the humidity is higher now and the hay is drying more slowly. She noticed that with the laundry she hung out.

*

Petter and Mona are incomers, and their attempts to connect with the Örlanders, both their success and the inevitability of failure, is the bread-and-butter of the book. This provisionality gradually develops a more cosmic dimsension.

They live on the small "church isle", in the centre of the group. A rivalry exists between the east villages and the west villages. In summer you get about by boat; in the winter, the Örlanders are connected by sea-ice.


[As usual, I label Finland-Swedish literature under both national traditions, since Finland-Swedish literature (being in Swedish) is so widely read in Sweden.]

the lemon-yellow tints

Topeliusesplanaden, Nykarleby, Finland

[Image source: https://leifsfoton.blogspot.com/2015/10/esplanaden-i-nykarleby.html. Photograph by Leif Sjöholm.]


Nykarleby's main street. Here, as in many other northern towns where the buildings were principally of wood, a double row of birches down the middle of the main street was designed to prevent house-fires spreading right across the town. A fire on 25th  June 1888 burnt down much of the city of Umeå, now famed as  the "city of birches". I remember noticing these double lines of birches when I stayed in Jokkmokk.










*


----------
the ones that do not separate
the guffaws the derision  the invective
the tricks
'us lot' the proof of those fit for existence
that they are within their rights


they have made it up and are plucking
withered flowers out of the rubbish bins
and I see before me a funeral procession
as I saw it more than twenty years ago
when I was reading Bellman
I see again the lemon-yellow tints
in the black and the white
and perceive again
the eternal recurrence
with fresh recognition as though it were for the first time
I realize
that it is that yellow colour
that constitutes the streak of the macabre
forms tone and foundation in this whole
even though it is the black and the white
that dominate
while the yellow exists as dwindling
distant flecks
but


'Moses, you that killed our Jesus'
scream further back in time
the flax-fringed boys to the Jewish boy
in front of the staircase in the inward-turned crescent
a primordial cavern
that the sun found
and the most prickly cactus
they beat him
and his eyes accept more and more the suffering
slightly contemptuous and very reticent expression
I thought was Christ's




----------






Watteau's L'Indifferent in shimmering yellow
Bellman's funeral cortège
Mozart's C and D
Villon's 'The Ballad of the Hanged'
which without the least waste of time
with the cool delight of the spring
serves up truth
self-evident birdsong
even though pecked and eaten by birds
with the rope dangling around his neck
jester in green and yellow
the unique the solitary
which a few seconds centuries earlier
was the spring's oblation
sometimes ready for mutual death
a few seconds centuries later
the child's dismayed smile
when it died of wounds this morning in Korea
its sudden indifference
as its face turned pale
yellow against the black hair
so indifferent was the encounter
with the knowledge of the powerful
in a land where the many cultures have met together
in order to liberate enrich teach cure
penetrate     with violence    cause    illness    and     splitting


but then also cure
civilise help
but with knowledge for death
lemon-yellow skin against black wisps
'they say what does not need to be said
they make visible what does not need to be made visible'
eyes so turned-away that only the whites are prepared to meet


experience of mutilation of the irreconcilable
and yet capacity for reconciliation
if not with .....


-----------


Extracts from "Retrospect", published in I tunga hängen mognar bären  (In Heavy Clusters The Berries Ripen, 1959). English translation by David McDuff.


The complete poem "Retrospect", along with various other Tuominen pieces, is available online on David's own website:  http://www.halldor.demon.co.uk/tuompage.htm














*

Mirjam Irene Tuominen 1913 - 1967






Mirjam Tuominen in Nykarleby, memoir by her daughter Tuva Korsström (in Swedish):




http://www.nykarlebyvyer.nu/sidor/texter/prosa/tuominen/div/tkommt.htm




She lived there, especially in the 1940s (the time of her marriage, the birth of her two daughters, and the publication of her well-received short stories); thereafter more sporadically, leaving the town finally in the mid-1950s.  The small town didn't make her happy. She was remembered as causing outrage by smoking cigarettes while walking down the middle of the main street -- I suppose the birch trees were not there then.




Tuva Korsström: "Dark gods: on the prose and poetry of Mirjam Tuominen" (in English):


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1991/12/dark-gods-on-the-prose-and-poetry-of-mirjam-tuominen/




David McDuff on Mirjam Tuominen:


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1995/12/facing-catastrophe/


Mirjam Tuominen's Selected Writings, translated by David McDuff, was published by Bloodaxe in 1994. The jacket uses one of her own pastel drawings, from 1958.












*


Nykarleby is a town in Finland  more or less directly opposite Umeå in Sweden. The gulf of Bothnia (Sw: Bottenviken) lies between, and is quite narrow at this point. Nearly 90% of Nykarleby's inhabitants still speak Swedish rather than Finnish.




The poet Gösta Ågren also has Nykarleby connections, as did the nineteenth-century author Zachris Topelius, after whom its main street is named.

two poems in space

Arto Melleri in 1994 (still from TV interview)

[Image source: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2014/02/20/dave-melleri-royhka-mauri-kunnas-ja-markku-sensuroimattomina]


About once a year someone gets in touch to ask me about some poetry query. This poetry consultancy of mine is free, extremely unpopular, and rarely leads to helpful results, as my knowledge of poetry is patchy to say the least. However, I always enjoy it.




This was a case in point. A brief IM exchange with Yaşarcan Özdemir, a student at Anadolu University, last week led me to this personal anthology web page put together by Lee Bajuniemi: http://saamileb.tripod.com/PoetryByLee/Translations.html


The contents, Lee tells us, are Finnish poems translated into English. They seem generally popular and accessible pieces, by fairly well-known poets. Yaşarcan and I were debating the final two poems.




The penultimate poem is attributed to "Arto Mellar" (= Arto Melleri, presumably).





PROPORTIONS

A person's life: width of a hand
I have heard it said
I look at the early morning sky:
from star to star
even less
The happiness that you wait for,
something that
cannot be measured, only possible
if not measured.
At sunrise small birds, without bursting,
sing out loud the morning dew,
the bright sound of countless droplets. 















The final poem is attributed to Anselm Hollo:









 HEAVY JARS #6

Given the heavy jar full of all relevant
information, he dropped it on the sidewalk
and burst out laughing as the container and
its contents shattered and scattered in the
raging blizzard; he had been on his way to
present it to her, for her to dispose of as
she wished, but with the surreptitious expec-
tation that they might "go through it" together.

Now, the absurdity of the understanding had
become blatantly apparent, and he vowed to
tell the next full moon that he abjured such
subterfuge for ever: silence and starkness,
these were the perennial conditions of birth,
& love & death, the so-called great subjects,
the ones no one could ever say anything but
the dramatically obvious about.



"Proportions" isn't a poem I've seen before, but I feel I recognize it as Melleri's kind of thing;  popular nature-mysticism, a sort of precipitous visionary insight, indifference to modern poetic schools.




More on Arto Melleri (1956 - 2005):




http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/arto-melleri-on-zola.html





It's possible that Anselm Hollo was also the translator of the poems by Arto Melleri and the others, but Lee doesn't say so, not explicitly anyway.


"Heavy  Jars #6" is, I'm guessing, an original poem in English, not a translation: casual and conversational, deploying standard-issue beat-poet ampersands. combining the well-wrought urn, the golden bowl and the empty vessel in its floaty transparent medium.






Anselm Hollo (1934 - 2013) was Finnish by birth but nearly all his forty books of poetry were written in English: he moved to the UK in c. 1959, then to the USA in 1967. The above poem presumably came from the chapbook Heavy Jars (1977).




Camille Martin wrote about the chapbook here:




https://rogueembryo.com/2009/07/08/hard-to-say-whether-the-jarsve-gotten-any-lighter/




The two poems converge on a similar claim:  that the most important things are beyond expression. In Melleri's poem  happiness cannot be measured, in Hollo's poem no-one can say anything about birth and love and death, apart from the "dramatically obvious".




*


The only other text of either poem that I could track down is here:


https://tiffanycreek7.com/2015/07/10/proportions/


(where "Proportions", the Melleri poem above, is attributed to Hollo.)




On the other hand, Yaşarcan had been told that both poems were Melleri originals, translated by Hollo.


My attempts to locate a presumed Finnish original of "Proportions" have been an abject failure.


*


Poems that circulate on the internet often remind me of medieval poems in manuscripts. In both cases the transmission method of multiple copying is very likely to wear away everything that isn't embedded in the text itself.  Metadata, such as title, author, translator, original publication, date, etc are all highly vulnerable to being lost or discarded. And when a poem does appear with a title or author's name, these are not to be accepted without question.








Anselm Hollo in 1965

[Image source: https://hoppyx.com/anselm-hollo/. Photo by John "Hoppy" Hopkins (1937 - 2015), the London counterculture dynamo, photographer and political activist.]

history is not true

Pentti Saarikoski

[Image source: http://www.ostrasmaland.se/feature/pentti-saarikoski-1937-1983-finsk-forfattare/]




Pentti Saarikoski's chaotic personal life and alcohol dependency was nothing to emulate, so why is it that when I read his poems -- I mean, especially, the poems in his trilogy of late collections -- I feel at once that I'm listening to someone enormously wise, someone who tells me things?


Anselm Hollo speaks of Saarikoski's "idiosyncratic sanity". That's right, isn't it?




                   X




I sit on the liars' bench
the cow in heat smelled of pine
today the sheep came to the meadow
to eat the grass
that is their work, their task
So many flowers summer so soon


appletrees in bloom, and the cherry
the blackthorn too is in bloom
Power over fellow humans
is costly
history is not true
only propaganda is I repeat
this, praise


him whose face already is stone


his eyes are such
one doesn't listen to him
The price is loneliness
payable in cash
Pull your boat up on the rock, turn it over
sit out the afternoon


on the steps of the boathouse, how the islands
move at right angles, how
all
moves
I praise him


who had himself tied to the mast
plugged up the ears of his oarsmen with wax
a man of many turns
who came home, killed the suitors
buried buried
His face already stone
the sheep are bounding about
on the first day
He saved his country
but from what
and for what
do means sanctify the end?
I must go see him, ask him
he has killed the suitors, he's lonely
I repeat and praise
his face already stone
Birds appear in the air
this fine evening




Pentti Saarikoski, from The Dance Floor on the Mountain  (1977), translation by Anselm Hollo from Pentti Saarikoski: Trilogy (1988).


By the end of the poem we can put it together: the man with power over people isn't, as we might have expected, Lenin, but Odysseus, admired for his lies. One of Saarikoski's constant conversations is with power. Outside the establishment by dint of wild bohemianism, yet somehow a neighbour to power by dint of his herculean grasp of literatures and cultures, he's unremittingly occupied with the big questions. He accepts nearly everything without complaint, but not those.


Pentti, sitting on his liars' bench, falls to musing how history isn't true and propaganda is true. Propaganda and praise are the same thing in this poem. Praise has given us the Odysseus we read about, the one that matters. Useless to ask if Odysseus was really a good guy, or whether he brought healing or harm. History isn't true because (in the decade of John Berger's Ways of Seeing) there can never be a single history. But praise eventually becomes a fact. Odysseus is a presence in our civilisation; a stone one, but a presence all the same.


This dubious but deep meditation is only a part of the poem.  The gleam of water from the steps of the boathouse; looking up at the end of the thought and seeing birds in the sky...  these are just as important to it.


And the face already stone isn't just Lenin and Odysseus. The whole trilogy is haunted -- perhaps we might say, fuelled -- by awareness of the author's own approaching death. It's a fine evening, and the poet isn't lonely, not like those dead men of power and blood.  Not yet.




*


The translator elsewhere tells us that in the lines


him whose face already is stone


his eyes are such
one doesn't listen to him


a more literal translation would be "his way of looking is such ...  ".




*






My earlier (and much longer) post on Pentti Saarikoski:







http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/pentti-saarikoski-edge-of-europe.html

Iron Age graveyard at Pilane on the island of Tjörn

[Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pilane_gravf%C3%A4lt_med_sina_70-100_gravar_fr%C3%A5n_j%C3%A4rn%C3%A5ldern_p%C3%A5_Tj%C3%B6rn,_den_2_sept_2005._Sedd_fr%C3%A5n_berget,_mot_havsviken_till_h%C3%B6ger..JPG. Photo by "Västgöten", 2nd September 2005.]




For the last eight years of his life Pentti and his wife Mia Berner lived in a cottage on the large island of Tjörn, off the coast of Bohuslän in western Sweden (it's joined to the mainland by bridges). I couldn't find any images of the actual cottage.

Claes Andersson

Claes Andersson in 2007

[Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Claes_Andersson#/media/File:Claes_Andersson_(vanst)_Finland.jpg . Photo by Johannes Jansson.






How could I forget about Claes Andersson? But so it is. I haven't read his poems for ten or fifteen years, and yesterday the forgotten book (translations by Lennart and Sonia Bruce) comes off my bookshelf, falls open, and I begin reading, and I remember how strongly and passionately I love this poetry that I had nevertheless forgotten all about. Wasn't there, though, a perceptible if undiagnosed emptiness in the years between? Or am I misremembering it all, and the truth is I love Andersson's poems much more today than I ever did before? Has love opened up in me that I express it so, or is there something histrionic about all this, has love in fact narrowed -- whereas, back then, I inhabited a whole world of love, I didn't need to make such a noise about it?




A couple of poems translated by Rika Lesser


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1983/03/poems-11/


Here's part of one of them:


(summary)


Have sat at meetings, ticked off items on the agenda, recommended,
turned down
Approved the minutes (change "should" in §123 to "ought")
Gone to movies, museums, bars, libraries, homes, deserts, caves
Shoveled snow, played with the children, screamed at the children
been bitten by dogs
Traveled in Europe, the States, Africa, met people
Bought and sold junk and cars, waited for buses, trains, have biked
Given speeches, lectures, been dumbstruck, signed petitions, demonstrated
Read (tons of) books, papers, brochures, hares' and crows' tracks
in the snow
Stared at TV, drunk beer, wine, schnapps, kefir, tasted sperm
Awakened in my own bed, in another's, up to now have always awakened
Dozed off over books, steering wheels, bottles, women, in buses,
closets, on guard duty
Put on pounds, lost them, exercised, lifted weights, brides over
thresholds, odds and ends
Been disappointed, happy, angry, indifferent, enraged, in love,
indifferent, empty
Been to funerals, weddings, soccer games, visiting, to crayfish
dinners, outhouses
Witnessed deliveries, death throes, christenings, autopsies, orgies
Written plays, traced hearts in the snow, poems, demand notes,
prescriptions, crib sheets
Shot rifles, pistols, water guns, mortars, slingshots, blowpipes
Had the mumps, the shakes, anxiety, depression, paranoia, inflamed urethra
Fought with conservatives, radicals, myself, Finns, windmills, my wife
Rented rooms, laundry rooms, apartments, tuxedos, cars, bought
houses, potted plants
Been plagued by guilt, small children, nightmares, red-headed lovers
Have asked the meaning of it all
Brooded, deliberated, pondered, constructed, conceived, stopped
thinking
Found the questions irrelevant and answered with the answer of
the senses








More poems translated by Rika Lesser:


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1997/03/i-am-a-happy-person/




(positive thinking)


Brussels is famous for its sunny weather and
its waste disposal.
My potency and my teeth have never
been better.
Every moment I have free I listen to Wagner and
read Proust without stopping.
It is not tragic to be smothered and consumed
by small animals.
As far as I'm concerned, the panic attacks are
a stage that has passed.
Politics is about respect for those who think
differently and about being honorable.
I never feel like smacking my wife.
Autumn is my time of year, a time of clarification, of self-control.
What I enjoy most is the solitude of an early morning
in the churchyard.
I am a happy person.
*
The problem with our war was that they could
not defend themselves.
Nonetheless, we carried out the war entirely
according to plan.
We did it for our credibility and so that
we could restock the depots.
Man is not a commodity in short supply.
Land mines were not a problem for us who
conducted operations from the air.
War is always a tragedy but even a tragedy
can be beautiful.
The pictures you saw were slightly out of focus.
Any sharp boundary between the military and civilians
is hard to draw.

*
I was inside when the department store collapsed.
I was aboard the passenger ferry when it vanished
in the deep.
I lay on the operating table when rockets hit the hospital
in the city under siege.
I was riding the subway when nerve gas seeped into
the cars.
I had hidden myself in the cellar when soldiers set fire
to our house.
I saw the tidal wave that would drown us as it approached.
I was one of the children put to death because a friend
needed my heart.
I remained in the sand after the desert storm.
What you are I was, what I am you will become.

*
Our childhood photographs lie where we left them,
in an attic in a cellar.
With their features half dissolved, those closest to us,
our demons, oxidized to silver nitrite.
In the attic in the cellar, in the dark ice-cold goddamn
cellar in the attic.
Brothers, cousins, sisters, moms, dads... oxidized,
disarmed, destroyed.
Of mother's wondelful shining kitchen only the hearth remains.
The cat drowned in the well along with the rag doll,
the kids' bicycles, the rats.
Maybe someone ought to remain, withstand the oxidization when
the others flee, drown, dissolve.
Why do cars and houses with people in them explode every day
everywhere.
One fine summer day the children found a dead soldier
in the cellar in the attic.




More poems, translated by Rika Lesser:


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2002/09/selling-to-the-lowest-bidder/




More poems, translated by David Hackston:


http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2009/05/the-personal-and-the-political/




Claes Andersson on reading and writing poetry:
http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2002/09/on-the-uselessness-of-poetry/
http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2007/03/subterranean-pre-verbal/


Claes Andersson on Pentti Saarikoski's alcoholism:
http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2001/06/a-drinking-life/


Andersson is a Finland-Swedish author (i.e. a Finn who speaks and writes in Swedish).


Förtvivlan är ett alltför stort
ord, men jag vet inte.... Ty sorgen är
obotlig, den går aldrig över
Därav dess styrka, dess bördighet för det
som ännu inte förstörts inne i oss
Den som inte har sorgen har intet
Den som inte har sorgen kan ta sig till
med vad som helst! Med vem som helst!
Den som inte har sorgen har aldrig förlorat
någonting, aldrig ägt någonting
Smärtan och försoningen finns inte hos den
som aldrig haft sorgen Och dikten
växer bara ur sorgen, ur den sorg
som beretts ett rum i glädjens hjuls nav
och där klarnat till blick och förståelse. (Ur "Under"- 1984)




Swedish text sourced from:


http://ingridsboktankar.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/ett-par-dikter-av-claes-andersson.html














The Claes Andersson Trio:

the brothers seven

Leevi Lehto's self-Englished collection Lake Onega and other poems has been unavailable for a few years, following the demise of Salt as a poetry publisher. I'm pleased to say that it's now back in print, what's more with two new atttractions:  my 2009 ramble through the contents of the original edition, and more substantially, a new and thrilling Englishing of the poem "Rounds From A Racheting Rocket". 

This is an extract of "Rounds from a Racheting Rocket", amounting to about half the poem:

                                               Brandishing

sprung up a beautiful green-refreshing tree

but t' others push'd on to Turkkila

on our ardurous trek. We come to the bloody carcass

like a wat 's though the Feller's

legs was only three

& fled the snowy track beneath

& rac'd that murderous stone... the black stocks, which

he back up from underneath the many-headed pack,

         and flows

seeks to cham us up in its teeth the rounds

from a racheting rocket

an antrickal wall.

                                Once the battle was broach'd the snow

pierc'd the beautiful beast's brow, and so fell

to inspect the baited pit. E'en from

who but minutes afore expected to die, singing

asleep deep neath the snowy spruce & would lash out

the outside wall, lower'd it carefully into the pit, and then,

builded a fire on one bank, lapp'd the eggs,

however, and Timo still tarry'd a rungate

but Tuomas skirred in like a granite cliff, and where

the caribou set a screaming pace cross the hard-cut snow, but

drowning... in death-throes...

Lehto's original Finnish poem was a collage from Aleksis Kivi's remarkable Seitsemän veljestä  (Seven Brothers), the first Finnish novel (maybe not quite the first, but it's the one everyone knows). When it was published in 1870, Kivi was already well on the way to drinking himself to death. Leevi's English version of the poem makes use of Douglas Robinson's new translation of Kivi's masterpiece into quasi-Shakespearian English (The Brothers Seven, 2017).

Wikipedia is quite helpful on the storyline and on the different personalities of the seven brothers. Of the two mentioned here, Timo is "simple and earnest"; his elder brother Tuomas is "strong as a bull". You'll meet the others in the extract below. Juhani is the bossy eldest brother; Simeoni has a distinct penchant for alcohol.

Robinson's translation was preceded by his book on translation theory, Aleksis Kivi And/As World Literature.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of major and minor literature, Robinson argues that translators have mainly “majoritized” Kivi—translated him respectfully—and so created images of literary tourism that ill suit recognition as world literature. Far better, he insists, is the impulse to minoritize—to find and celebrate the minor writer in Kivi, who “sends the major language racing.”

(Source: http://www.brill.com/products/book/aleksis-kivi-andas-world-literature)

Jacket of an early edition of Seitsemän veljestä 

Source: http://palvelut.lohja.fi/kirjasto/default.asp?kieli=246&id_sivu=107&alasivu=107

Unfortunately I can't find any extracts of Robinson's translation on-line, but I did find the following extract from Richard Impola's 2005 translation:

Evening fell, a melancholy September evening; Eero brought the beer from Routio and Timo sent word that the bath was ready; and the men's sullen temper revived a little.They set out to their bath, and Timo threw water on the heated stove until the blackened stones heaped over it cracked with a noise like rifle-fire and a cloud of hot steam was wafted round the bath-house. Each plied now with all his strength the supple bunches of leafy birch-twigs, so grateful to the skin; they bathed and washed their wounds, and the furious beating of the twigs was heard afar outside the building.

Juhani: Our wounds are getting a real Turkish polka. Hot steam in the sauna, that's the best medicine for soul and body. But my eye stings like Satan. Well, itch away and sting, all the hotter will I make it for thee. How is thy muzzle, Aapo?

Aapo: It's beginning to melt.

Juhani: Wipe away at it and beat it like a Russian hammers his nag, and it'll soon be softer. But more steam, Timo, seeing it is thy job tonight to wait on us. That's it, my boy! Let it come. Oh, but it's hot there, it's hot there! That's the way, my broth of a brother!

Lauri: It fair bites at my finger-nails.

Juhani: Let our nails get a basting, too.

Aapo: Stop throwing water now, boy; or we'll soon have to climb down from here, every man of us.

Eero: Go on praising him and we shall soon be roasted to cinders.

Juhani: That's enough, Timo. Don't throw any more. For Hell's sake stop throwing water on that stove! Art ye coming down from the platform, Simeoni?

Simeoni: I'm coming, wretch that I am. And ah, if ye only knew why!

Juhani: Tell us.

Simeoni: Man, remember the furnace of the lost and pray night and day.

Juhani: Stuff! Let the body have it if it wants; for the hotter the sauna the greater its healing-power. That ye knowest.

Simeoni: Whose hot water is this in the bucket near the stove?

Juhani: It's mine, as the smith said of his house. Don't touch it.

Simeoni: I'm going to take a drop of it, anyway.

Juhani: Don't do it, brother mine, or there'll be trouble. Why didst thou not warm some for thyself?

Tuomas: Why be so snappy without cause? Take a little from my tub, Simeoni.

Timo: Or from mine, under the platform steps there.

Juhani: Have some of mine then, too, but see thou leavest me at least half.

Lauri: Eero! thou imp, take care I don't throw thee off the platform.

Aapo: What trick are you two up to in the corner?

Juhani: What's the sqabbling about? Eh?

Lauri: Blowing on a fellow's back.

Aapo: Softly, Eero!

Juhani: Hey, troublemonger.

Simeoni: Eero, Eero, can't even the stewing heat of the bath remind thee of the fires of Hell? Remember Juho Hemmola, remember him!

Juhani: He saw when he was stretched on a sickbed the fiery lake, from which he was saved that time, and all because, as it was then said to him, he had always thought of Hell when he was on the sauna platform. But can that be daylight shining through your corner?

Lauri: Bright daylight.

Juhani: Oh the beast! The sauna sings its last note. So let the first aim of my mastership be a new sauna.

Aapo: A new one's needed, it's true.

Juhani: Ay, no gainsaying that. A farm without a sauna is no good either from the standpoint of baths or the babies a wife or the farm-hands' women might have. Ay, a smoking sauna, a barking hound, a crowing cock and a mewing kitty, these are the signs of a good farm. Ay, there's plenty to do for the one who takes over our home. A little more steam, Timo.

Timo: It shall be given thee.

Simeoni: Don't let us forget that it is Saturday night.

Juhani: And let us take care our skins aren't soon hanging from the rafters, like the former maidservant's.

Simeoni: That was the maid who never had time to take her bath with the others, but dillied and dallied in the sauna long after all the others had gone to bed. Then one Saturday night she stayed longer than usual. And what did they find when they went to look for her? Only a skin hanging from the rafters. But it was a master-hand had done the flaying, for the hair, eyes, ears and even the nails had been left in the skin.

Juhani: Let this be a warning...He-he, how skittishly this back of mine takes its steam! As though thou hadst not tasted a birchtwig since New Year's Day.

Lauri: But who had skinned her?

Timo: Who, thou askest. Who else but the...

Juhani: Old 'Un himself.

Timo: Ay, he who goes around like a roaring lion. A horrible story!

Juhani: Timo-lad, stick that shirt of mine from the rafters there into this fist.

Timo: What, this one?

Juhani: Ho! 'Tis Eero's little rag he offers to a full-grown man. Ah thee! That middle one there.

Timo: What, this one?

Juhani: That's a man's shirt. Ta, brother. A horrible story, say I too, to go back to what we were speaking of. Let it be a reminder to us that "the eve is the height of a feast-day." Now let's wash ourselves as clean as though we had just come from the midwife's nimble paws; and then shirt under arm to the house, so that our over-heated bodies can get a skinful of cool air on the way. But I do believe this beloved eye of mine is getting better. 

Naked and hot, they went from the sauna to the livingroom, their bodies glowing like the sunlit stem of a birch-tree. Arrived within, they sat down to rest a while, sweating copiously. Then little by little they dressed themselves. And now Juhani began concocting an ointment for the whole wounded brotherhood.


(Source: http://uralica.com/kivi.htm from which I also took the image)

The brothers seven, from an open-air production at Savonlinna in 2013

[Image source: http://www.ita-savo.fi/uutiset/kulttuuri-ja-viihde/seitsem%C3%A4n-veljest%C3%A4-valloittaa-putkinotkon-61918]


The whole of Kivi's novel can be read online:


in Finnish:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11940


and in this 1929 English translation by Alex Matson:
http://www.unz.org/Pub/KiviAlexis-1929


I've read the first chapter and it's a lot of fun.