Introduction
'Poetry after all in itself is a translation.'
(Joseph Brodsky, 1977)
No poet specifically belongs to a country; yet, as most
Finnish poets, both men and women, would admit, a
poet has to explore a particular angle, a particular location of
experience that belongs to a place. A poet stands, as Mirkka
Rekola has said, 'like a narrow gate in a landscape'. Through
that gate, through that articulated perception, the whole
landscape may come into existence.
Finland's poetic tradition is full of silences, lacunae, and
sheer struggle for survival - instead of schematic continuity,
as tradition is generally seen by literary historians, there is
a singularly unified, but intermittent, poetic inspiration
that extends from the centuries-old oral tradition to con-
temporary modernism. This evolution is not parallelled by
any other present-day literature.
Finnish poetry has developed on the periphery of European
civilization, and its off-centre characteristics are
emphasized by the fact that its language is non-Indo-
European, and that its mythology is shamanistic; but some
of its themes and motives resemble those that could be
found in the poetry of the centrally European psyche. Thus
even in the folk poetry, there are narrative poems that are
mixtures of different sources, as for instance in the
medieval cycle about the birth of Christ, where a Finnish
maiden Marjatta, a variant of the Virgin Mary, becomes
pregnant by eating cranberries (a berry in Finnish is marja).
In modern Finnish poetry, too, the new forms are constantly
sought after and created by the meshing together of
different sources, different orders of experience.
To read Finnish literature has been a notoriously
problematic task for foreigners. Translations from Finnish are
few, much fewer than for instance from Hungarian, a related
language of the Ugrian family. But there is a certain
inaccessibility that goes beyond the literal level. To perceive this
distinctive style would necessitate entering into the universe
of metaphors, metonyms, and symbols that have sprung
from roots other than those familiar to a European reader.
Finnish language has no European history; its vocabulary
as well as its deep structure flow elsewhere. It was this
common history of language on which poets like Eliot or
Pound could capitalize for their effects, and which truly
creates intertextuality, poetic allusion, and in the final
analysis, poetic tradition.
Oral literature has survived in Finland until this century.
Folk poetry, of which thousands of variants survive, was
sung both by men and women. Oral culture depends on
memory and must be passed on through the telling of its
stories, through sacred narratives and foundation myths, as
well as other tales relating to the more practical level of
existence. The collapse of the oral mode of maintaining
cultural processes is a trauma, a source of terrible anguish
and deep guilt for a culture. In Finland, the disintegration of
a homogeneous symbolic universe that characterizes oral
poetry has happened relatively late, in fact coinciding with
the arrival of modernism, and paralleling the transition
from an agricultural society to an urban, industrialized one.
Modernism arrived in Finland first in the work of Swedish-
Finnish modernists, particularly of Edith Södergran (1892-
1923), shortly after World War I. It is interesting to note that
women poets were among the first representatives of writing
that sacralized art and liberated the forms of expression
such as metre, diction and syntax, as well as held poetry to be
an individual expression, wanting to oppose both realism
and philosophical positivism which dominated Finnish
literature in the nineteenth century. Perhaps this is because
lyrical poetry is by nature both private and
anti-traditionalist; and both these modes are fully in the range of
experience of a woman writer.
Edith Södergran has remained one of the greatest poets of
twentieth-century Finnish literature, widely translated and
read across the boundaries of class, gender and generation,
although her work was ignored at first by the literary
establishment. Her poetry depicts individual experience in
raw, direct terms, yet capturing the collective imagination.
It tells of a withdrawal from the world of culture and
people and from discursive language, from the truth that
has been defined by men. It is through such withdrawal
and deliberate forgetting that she can reach her own truth,
the absoluteness and purity of inward passion.
This tradition is still strong in contemporary poetry
written by women. Yet, despite the undeniable female
presence in Finland's literature, both oral and written, both
sung and silently remembered, every poet has had to start
from the beginning. Women poets are curiously much more
outlawed and destitute with regard to poetic tradition and
cultural crib than male writers, even now; the tradition is
thinner, and the territory of unexplored subjects far wider.
Each imaginative claim has expanded the availability of
topics for other poets, and it is through such acts, daring or
rebellious by necessity, that women poets have been able to
render a complex, polymorphous reality in poetic terms,
which is equally useful for male poets - for poetry does not
know sex, or then, it knows them all.
Each poet in this book has added something new to the
range of topics that poetry can practise; some have selected
a single, special point of view, like perhaps Arja Tiainen or
Anne Hänninen; some, like Eeva-Liisa Manner or Sirkka
Turkka, for instance, have explored several planes of
projected existence. Philosophy, history, cultural mythology,
visual art, world politics, have all become subjects for poetry
alongside the traditional, universal topics that relate to
private experience, love, the loss of loved ones, the brevity
of life, and the consolation of nature.
This anthology aims to give a multi-faceted picture of the
poetry written in Finland in the 1980s. Admittedly this
picture cannot be complete, for only eleven women's voices
are represented. However, it is through these select visions,
these individual explorations of being in the modern world,
that I hope a fuller view will emerge. Reading through the
poetic work of a great number of modern women poets has
convinced me - as I hope it will the reader - of the vitality of
Finnish poetry, even at the moment when the greatest fears
of its being submerged into a multilateral, international
whole are being expressed in Finland.
But a new sense of exploration and adventure can also be
felt at a time when the maps of Europe are being redrawn in
many places, and when history is being given back the
polygenetic meaning that it has always had in the European
past. These ideas can be felt in poetry even when it deals
with private and intimate areas of human experience. As
T.S. Eliot has said, 'the poetry of a people . . . represents its
highest point of consciousness, its greatest power and its
most delicate sensibility'. It is these crystallizations of
thought and feeling that I hope a poetry anthology could
give to a reader who may be unfamiliar with the larger
context of the poems presented.
All the poets in this anthology, with the exception of
Marja-Liisa Vartio who died at the age of 41 in 1966, are
writing at the present day. Eeva-Liisa Manner and Mirkka
Rekola made their names in the 1950s, and are generally
regarded as all but classics in Finland. Sirkka Turkka, Satu
Koskimies [form. Satu Marttila], Eira Stenberg,
and Arja Tiainen started publishing
in the 1970s. Tua Forsström, Kirsti Simonsuuri, and Anne
Hänninen began in the 1980s; and Annukka Peura published
her first collection only last year [1989].
Among the diversity of voices there are also certain
similarities, and maybe a congeniality of spirit. In a certain
sense, one can see resemblances between Vartio and
Hänninen, both of the mythical darkness; between Manner
and Peura, both explorers of invisible dimensions; between
Rekola and Koskimies, both of whom are poets of language.
Forsström writes in Swedish, and her poetic language may
have a slightly different timbre at times; her poetic psyche,
however, as was the case with the Swedish-Finnish
modernists of the 1920s, seems to me to be Finnish, its lyrical,
imagistic space filled with forests, water, winds, and the
eternal movement within. But the differences are also
evident. All the poets in this book have a sense of identity
that is fully their own, fully unique.
It is for this reason that I asked each poet in this anthology
to write a short preface of their own, instead of a biographico-
literary introduction written by the editor. These prefaces
reached me in the summer of 1990, and add to the personal
and topical presences that the poems themselves
demonstrate.
Kirsti Simonsuuri
Helsinki, August 1990
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