You are sitting anxiously at a café table, trying to get a leaky ballpoint or a slippery felt-tip to write on the glossy surface of a postcard.
     Sunny/rainy/cold, food good/bad, /hotel charming/awful… lots of love.
     The tenth or fifteenth postcard to friends and relatives. The same trivial words. The factual content is: I was here. Nevertheless, for the recipient of the postcard, its message, independent of content, is: She was there and remembered me.
     I belong to the genre of travellers who write postcards, letters.      When the translator and poet Kyllikki Villa, in the pages of her travel diary, remarks, 'the most important thing is communication' (page 210), she does not mean conversation with her travelling companions, or even her own writing, but contact with those who stayed at home, numerous postcards, letters, faxes and calls from telephone kiosks (before the rise of the mobile phone) from various harbour towns to her daughter, her friends. Without espousing any particular philosophy, Villa puts into words something essential about absence and presence - about writing as work. Translation, the writing of poetry and stories are, for the author, a balancing act between modes of presence. As the Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko has written, 'books are letters without addresses'.

World literature is itself a grand tour for readers. This tradition of travel, which began in the 16th century, was at first a study tour of continental Europe for boys of the English upper classes, taken in the company of a cultured tutor. During the Enlightenment, the aim was to civilise the young through visits to ancient cultural destinations. With Romanticism, emotionality also became important, and wild nature was represented by, for example, the Alps.
     'Travelling is, for the young, part of education; for the old, it is part of experience,' wrote Francis Bacon in 1601.
     If literature is thought of as a journey, perhaps Bacon's phrase should be turned back to front. For the young, literature is part of experience; for the old, it is part of education. For myself, at least, it feels as if this is true, for with age non-fiction interests me more and more, and above all those areas of science and life which I, as a humanist, am hardly familiar with. Biology, nuclear physics. I can make at least apparent sense of the world when each new day's stream of news causes more erosion of intellect, knowledge and understanding.
     I do not mean that literature has lost its importance, but that my circle of interest is expanding. Dichtung und Wahrheit. Is it even possible to grow tired of literature, if one is not a complete cynic. And are there really any cynics - are they any more than a crooked smile and a man with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth; someone who sits down at the table and extinguishes an enthusiastic emotional and philosophical conversation as easily as his cigarette. The absurd, satire and irony stretch and challenge reality (see the writings, for example, of Leena Krohn and Arto Salminen on pages 188 and 196), but do not put out the flame.
     We are on a journey as we read, as we write. As the Russian author Elena Guro wrote in 1910 'Only what we can no longer fill with love is boring.'

     Kristina Carlson
     Editor-in-Chief
  

 

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