Six writers contemplate their country as it celebrates a big birthday
Jyrki Kiiskinen
We too
I awoke as if from a dream, queuing in a cafe, cup in hand My native tongue, buzzing around me, was distorted, or was it me The same words, the same way of combining words But there was too much of something; the pauses were missing, those microseconds in which the other gets a chance to rest and become an interlocutor Those pauses that make you impatient, where meanings are deposited like eggs and where they grew to utopian proportions Or had I imagined it all The space between people where things as yet unfulfilled await Unfulfilled like the girl at the register In her clearly delineated role and yet with unplumbed depths A pause in speech A ditch digger who falls silent A traffic cop who stops the traffic and makes the world hesitate As pauses in speech Not a bit of it Finnish self-esteem is fine; no need to clear one’s throat at the reception in the health centre The machine doesn’t hesitate Everyone takes up space, two parking spaces, their right in a world that no longer flickers or gutters The girl at the register is a display window along with the rest These objects of the wallet, speech and gaze are sprinkled around the city Just for you, or me A city as objects, moving targets, moving values Me as an object Surrounded by my rights, duties, and claims, my values, I open the newspaper ’The theme of this year’s competition was creativity and small to medium-sized business — intellectual property and innovation as promoters of social welfare’ The national prize was taken by a stunning virtual game that steals money from children all over the world More than 3.2 million visitors a month, I mutter to my coffee cup just as unconditionally as The wide prow of an automobile approaches my rear bumper on the motorway, pushing me out of the way of the free flow of traffic, goods, and capital The flow hesitates The author takes upon his shoulders the mantle of the social critic and searches for great topics of national concern with confident phrases Even though the stone buildings around him be washed away and the readers be embroiled in the waves and dissolve in the froth of the computer screen I can always write a novel about the Winter War, if I begin to feel lonely The money sticks to the author’s fingers at the register, the car hesitates on the motorway, and somewhere a screen flickers for a microsecond Words get caught in the throat Meanings are laid like eggs in that pause I myself as a pause in my own individual fate pass a bench where drunks sit sipping hard liquor Silent as the heroes of the Winter War They teach us that you don’t leave your mates, even though they have already been left Like us too We continue on We too
Translated by Owen Witesman
Kristina Carlson
Far away
Finland is not a small country. Finland is larger than Italy and Portugal and Bulgaria and Estonia. And Denmark.
Even so, when one travels abroad, there isn’t any weather in Finland. Low pressure and high pressure systems sweep across Europe, but Finland is nowhere to be seen. Finland is in the upper-right corner of the weather map; the weather girl is standing in front of it. It’s irritating. A Finn can get on TV after the weather if he wins a Formula 1 race. Kimi Raikkonen was on French TV. But he never gets his umlauts.
In Finland and in France, the new moon is right way round. It is a sliver or sickle. In Hawaii, the new moon first looks like an emoticon smile and then like half a grapefruit. When you’re born in Finland, you get used to looking at things a certain way. There’s no way around it, even if you travel to China (as the factories do). China is bigger than Finland.
When travelling abroad, it makes you happy if someone rolls down a car window and a man or woman asks directions. The Finn thinks that he or she looks like a genuine foreigner. Then he or she realises that no one else walks in the industrial district of Los Angeles in the evening or in a French village on Sunday. I would certainly ask a Finn for directions wherever I might be.
In the square, an old man said that La Finlande must be a neighboring village. That’s a very kind way of saying it in Europe.
A New Zealander said that Finns are fat. That made me cross. In some countries, poor people are too fat, and in others they are too thin. My father was as thin as a straw when he was sent off to the war when he was 18. It irritates me when other people come from the other side of the gulf or from a neighboring country or from the other side of the planet to tell us what we should eat or do.
It’s funny to see how detergents have different names and packaging outside of Finland, but the same commercials. In the dark of the evening in the village, I gaze at the full moon, whose face looks down on Finland too. The dry chestnut leaves rustle, but my mind is filled with blue shadows in the snow. I begin to think of the weather report and that map again. I hope that in Finland and in the world there will still be weather for a long while yet. How are things there? My aunt’s birthday is the 7th of December, 1917. She is one day younger than Finland.
Vouvray, November 2007
Translated by Owen Witesman
Jani Saxell
A belief in life
A champagne cork called Kimi Räikkönen shoots through the stratosphere and the blogosphere. In an instant he’s the most quoted Finn there is. Then a pizza advertisement and The Day After Tomorrow. Climate change could lead to a new ice age. The next morning a free-range poet standing at the tram stop longs for a pair of long johns; beep goes the travel card. The tracks lead to a former pharmaceutical plant whose workforce has been outsourced to the Far East. Pills patter on the northern coniferous forest belt.
The tram doesn’t screech round the corner by the old people’s home; the new green track liners neither make a noise nor play funeral marches. Moving Grandma’s stuff in was easier than deciding what to give away. The earth shuddered in Jammu and Kashmir; the suburbs of Jalalabad held a snake dance; Grandma’s linen (1914 Uuras, 1936 Viipuri, 1957 Helsinki) were used as the bandages of autumn 2005. Living is needing.
The old people’s home: Karelian pies, Church Slavonic, samovars and rambling papas. A Zimmer-frame procession. That way, too, people return to their childhood. And the last room is always the quickest to empty. Fluorescent light strips flicker in B wing on the third floor of the former pharmaceutical plant, a hastily keyed code stops the alarm going off. On the great Sunday of life rooms and corridors await their final resting place. After all, they might be replaced with glass walls, pan-federal style transilluminations and barcodes. After all, everything might scrape by just as before.
But there are other kinds of images too. We colour in our colouring books, join the dots to one another. Across a whole page. Where the bottling factory and the chemical tanks once were there are now offices, garages for bands. Faded leather jackets convene around cups of tea and microwaved ready-meals. Then they withdraw again to continue being scribes of the mind and painters of consciousness.
And what do people give one another? Sometimes continuity and a belief in life. Or a copy of Wuthering Heights, print edition Porvoo 1947. Grandma’s line was longer than that of several superpowers, history books and political theologies, teleologies. And still is.
A memory from last summer: a two-and-a-half-year-old sitting in the workroom barber’s chair (recycling-centre romanticism, creaking and lyrical). Manic Street Preachers on the headphones, the corner of a crispbread disappears down the hatch.
‘Mitja, what is Finland?’
‘It’s… far away.’
‘What will it be like in another 90 years?’
‘Dad’ll go into town and there’ll be robots. They’ll be… fighting!’
Repairs to a Lego block with a plastic screwdriver continue — to people, too.
Translated by David Hackston
Sirpa Kähkönen
Silence and heritage
For me, Finland is a land of extreme silence. And I’m not referring to the silence of nature.
As Bertolt Brecht wrote in his poem ‘Das Finnische Landschaft’ (1940), in Finland there lives ‘ein Volk, das in zwei Sprachen schweigt’ — a people that stays silent in two languages — referring to the bilingual land of Finnish and Swedish.
The silence described by Brecht is often treated like an expression of some mythical national temperament. But this is too black-and-white an interpretation.
Brecht was in exile in southern Finland, on the Marlebäck estate in Iitti, which was located in the area of the historical province of Häme, on the western side of the tribal boundary that splits Finland lengthwise. Reticence has always been admired in western Finland, unlike in the East. The only Finns with any real ability at small talk live in the area of the eastern tribes, where conversation and socialising has been appreciated from time immemorial. That sort of linguistic virtuosity has been the object of scorn and ridicule elsewhere in Finland.
Brecht’s stay in Finland was during a time of truce [1940—41]. At the time, the silence was downright palpable: it was best for the nation to keep silent not only in both official languages, but also in all of the dialects as well. The gruelling Winter War was behind us and our relationship with Germany was just taking shape. The elite knew what was best for Finland — the job of the common folk was to wait silently for the dance it was being led towards.
Silence is a heritage of the war years and centuries of Lutheran folk education.
In my Finland, the silence of the woodland pond reigns supreme. Sometimes a fish hidden in the dark water splashes the surface of the water, and rings spread out wide. The bulrushes sway, and then the waves calm. A reserved, enigmatic silence reigns once again.
Translated by Owen Witesman
Teemu Manninen
Something to remember
Recently, a Finnish film was reviewed in the newspaper. The most laudable thing about it was that the film didn’t seem Finnish, but like a ‘real’ Hollywood movie.
It wasn’t that long ago that Finnish films, avant-garde poetry, hip hop, urban culture, style or any Finnish this or that piece of art or product or way of life that attempted to imitate western pop or high culture still seemed like an impossible equation. What has happened?
Finnish history has often seemed to me to be a history of memory loss. The task of each generation is to be ashamed of the political and artistic tastes of the previous one.
According to ‘Jameson’s law’, as enunciated by the Italian literary sociologist Franco Moretti, in peripheral cultures the contemporary novel is always created as a compromise between formal outside influences and local material, never independently and autonomously. Development is often preceded by a wave of translation (the comical wave of rap music in Finland in the 1980s), which is followed by that ‘impossible imitation’ equation filled with uncertainty (for ten years Finnish hip hop always seemed like a joke).
The local way of life simply can’t be molded into a form that can be represented in the ‘right’ way required by the style. When and if the impossible equation can be solved, the result is a style revolution: South American magical realism, the Indian postcolonial novel, Finnish jazzhop.
In Finland, where a consensus-oriented mentality has always required that there is only one right way to do things, that fact has been a source of shame down through the ages. Truly domestic things are never ‘good enough’. For this reason, in Finland this shame appears as a paradoxical adoration: we get so tangled up in innovative generations that we don’t remember what we have already forgotten.
But the tradition of renewal never runs from radical father to conservative son, but rather from ne’er-do-well uncle to frustrated cousin. Inventions aren’t found by hoeing one’s own land, but from foreign seeds planted in domestic soil.
Translated by Owen Witesman
Katarina Gäddnäs
Finlandia II
— a polyphonic work for symphony orchestra, metal band and large choir
Through the darkness you must go, through the forests and the tarns’ black waters.
Through the sauna you must go, through the beer, the sausages, the birch twig whisks.
Through the drinking you must go, through the vomit and the knife-fights.
Through wood pulp, steelworks and telephones you must go.
Through November cities and the extinguished windows of the village shop.
Through Moomin Valley you must go, through symphony orchestras, opera and monster rock.
Through glass birds and bentwood furniture you must go,
through large-patterned fabrics and traditional knitwear.
Through vodka, reindeer hides and cloudberry liqueur you must make your way
Through tar-smelling jetties and glittering summer bays boulder fields, swamps and fells in their autumn tints you must go.
Through ski-jump slopes, hockey fields, running circuits you must go
Through jazz and tango festivals, light summer nights, bird migration times
Through elk-hunts and bear fever you must go.
Through all the languages we are silent in, you must go
Through the refugee camps, and the wars,
through the wars you must go.
Through hunger, famine and rationing
you must go as the ice-breakers go.
Through all the ages you must go ages that rest like earth’s primordial creases
in the faces of the old.
Through the children’s laughter and the games of playgrounds you must go.
Through the moss in the swamp you must go
Through the darkness, the forests and the tarns’ black waters.
Translated by David McDuff
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