Six Finnish Poets

By Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummel, Matilda Sodergran and Ruth Urbom

Six Finnish Poets continues Arc's profiling of some of the 'smaller' languages of Europe and beyond, showcasing their beautiful and unusual literary stylings to audiences closer to home. Here six poets from Finland offer up a refreshing mix of narrative, cinematic and experimental devices, ranging from whimsy to sci-fi to punk.
The poets featured are: Vesa Haapala, Janne Nummela, Matilda Södergran, Henriikka Tavi, Juhana Vähänen and Katariina Vuorinen.

This is a bilingual edition, with the Finnish original and the English translation on facing pages. Translated by Lola Rogers, Emily Jeremiah and Helen R. Boultrum .
Teemu Manninen is a poet and literary critic based in Tampere, Finland. His books include five poetry collections. He works as a producer for the Helsinki Poetics Conference, an editor for the poetry publisher Osuuskunta Poesia, and a poetry reviewer for the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: Oct 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781908376534

Book preview

SIX FINNISH POETS

Published by Arc Publications

Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road

Todmorden, OL14 6DA, UK

www.arcpublications.co.uk

Copyright in the poems © individual poets as named, 2013

Copyright in the translations © translators as named, 2013

Copyright in the Introduction © Teemu Manninen, 2013

Copyright in the present edition © Arc Publications, 2013

Design by Tony Ward

ISBN (pbk): 978 1906570 88 0

ISBN (ebk): 978 1908376 53 4

Cover image:

From an original painting by Janne Nummela, by kind permission of the artist.

Acknowledgements

The publishers are grateful to the authors and, in the case of previously published works, to their publishers for allowing their poems to be included in this anthology.

Arc Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange.

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This book is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Arc Publications Ltd.

The ‘New Voices from Europe and Beyond’ anthology series is published in co-operation with Literature Across Frontiers, a platform established with support from the Culture Programme of the EU.

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Arc Publications ‘New Voices from Europe and Beyond’

Series Editor: Alexandra Büchler

SIX

FINNISH

POETS

Translated by

Lola Rogers, Emily & Fleur Jeremiah, Helen R. Boultrum

Edited and with an introduction by

Teemu Manninen

Arc.TIF

2013

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Introduction

VESA HAAPALA

Translated by Helen R. Boultrum

Biography

JANNE NUMMELA

Translated by Lola Rogers

Biography

MATILDA SÖDERGRAN

Translated by Helen R. Boultrum

Biography

HENRIIKKA TAVI

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

Biography

KATARIINA VUORINEN

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

Biography

JUHANA VÄHÄNEN

Translated by Lola Rogers

Biography

About the Editor & Translators

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

Six Finnish Poets is the tenth volume in a series of bilingual anthologies which brings contemporary poetry from around Europe to English-language readers. It is not by accident that the tired old phrase about poetry being ‘lost in translation’ came out of an English-speaking environment, out of a tradition that has always felt remarkably uneasy about translation – of contemporary works, if not the classics. Yet poetry can be, and is, ‘found’ in translation; in fact, any good translation reinvents the poetry of the original, and we should always be aware that any translation is the outcome of a dialogue between two cultures, languages and different poetic sensibilities, between collective as well as individual imaginations, conducted by two voices, that of the poet and of the translator, and joined by a third interlocutor in the process of reading.

And it is this dialogue that is so important to writers in countries and regions where translation has always been an integral part of the literary environment and has played a role in the development of local literary tradition and poetics. Writing without reading poetry from many different traditions would be unthinkable for the poets in the anthologies of this series, many of whom are accomplished translators who consider poetry in translation to be part of their own literary background and an important source of inspiration.

While the series ‘New Voices from Europe and Beyond’ aims to keep a finger on the pulse of the here-and-now of international poetry by presenting the work of a small number of contemporary poets, each collection, edited by a guest editor, has its own focus and rationale for the selection of the poets and poems.

In Six Finnish Poets, we glimpse a nation making full use of the tools of the contemporary moment to develop a fresh poetic voice in the context of a literary activism movement engaging writers and readers alike. Teemu Manninen, in his introduction to this book, refers to the artificiality of speaking ‘like poets are supposed to speak’, reminding us of an artifice that is hard to find in the poems that follow. The language, concepts, even the basic grammar of the work of these poets can be bewildering and at times challenging, but they never leave you cold – there are moments of startling beauty, and the translations crackle with the energy of the new. It becomes clear that these writers are as comfortable with a keyboard and touchscreen as they are with the dusty tomes of the poetic tradition – or rather traditions, as this is a nation writing in two languages, Finnish and Swedish – and the resulting poetry has all the diversity and complexity that you might expect from such an amalgam of approaches.

As always, I would like to thank all those who have made this edition possible.

Alexandra Büchler

INTRODUCTION

POETRY AS A FAMILY AFFAIR:

FINNISH CONTEMPORARY POETRY OF THE 2000s

In a paper delivered in the Helsinki Poetics Conference in 2004, the poets Eino Santanen and Aki Salmela wondered why so much of our thinking about poetry is so often preoccupied with the poet’s mouth, a set of stylistic, syntactic, figurative and expressive restrictions, which culminates in the artificiality of speaking like poets are supposed to speak. In order to write something different, they proposed, we should rid ourself of the poet’s mouth and find other ways of communicating with each other.

Santanen and Salmela voiced a common concern that has been, and still is, shared by many of the Finnish poets who have made their debut in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It is a feeling of having been delivered from the necessity of speaking as poets are expected to speak, of having gained a freedom to try on all kinds of costumes, voices and faces, to explore boundaries, to play, frolic, wander and dream of possibilities for literature which are not tied down by definitions of what poetry, or even prose, should be like.

By emphasizing such feelings of deliverance, I am not suggesting that Finnish poets were previously under pressure to conform to an artificial aesthetic, but rather that a certain set of conditions now exists in Finland for the production and reception of poetry that did not exist before, or was at least not understood to be available.

There are three main areas of change. First, there is a growth in new channels of publishing such as publishing co-operatives, self-publishing and the use of the internet. Second, there are new ways of communicating poetry, through the establishment of new literary organizations, through live events (including multimedia events) and through collaborations between poets and practitioners in other creative fields. Finally, there is the realisation that the audience for poetry is divided by age, class, gender, lifestyle and so on into a number of different audiences, and that it is possible to reach these audiences in new and specifically targeted ways.

These three areas of change have given rise to a new discussion culture, a new publicity for poetry and, stemming from this, a new way of writing. To show how these changes have come about, I shall briefly and very schematically describe recent Finnish poetic history.

* * *

Publishing books used to be expensive and difficult. In a small country like Finland – with a population the size of Singapore or Sicily – a marginal literary genre such as poetry never had much of a readership. In the 1980s, when I was growing up, only four (maybe five) major literary publishers dominated the field and this meant that in any given year very few books of poetry appeared. Furthermore, with no tradition of poetry events, very few literary magazines (none of them devoted to poetry), and