Eeva-Liisa

Manner

Born 5 December, 1921, in Helsinki
Over fifteen collections of poetry,
numerous prose works, drama, and
radio plays, translations of world
literature.

'The war years shadowed my youth. I was seventeen when the Russian planes started bombarding my home town of Wiborg on 30 November, 1939, damaging it badly. At armistice, Wiborg had to be yielded, it remained behind the border- an endless source of nostalgia for one who had a catlike, persevering fondness for homestead. Even as a ten-year-old, I had spine- chilling dreams about the destruction of Wiborg, and from those times onwards I have been haunted by reflections about the nature and mystery of time. I believe that we have a false conception of time; everything has already happened some- where in an unknown dimension.
Intuitively I knew it quite early, even as a child I was a Spinozistic determinist. Now that quantum physics has revo- lutionized our world picture, such a belief - in fact it is an experience - may appear hopelessly old-fashioned, but inevitably there are fractures in determinism, just as there are ossifications in irrationalism, in its conception of time. I have explored my experience of time particularly in my most important collection Fahrenheit 121(1968). In its introductory poem I write: "I do not believe in coincidence, at most, in the sum of chances. / Do we have a totally mistaken notion of time / and what is about to come, has in fact come already? / Even a dream, a vision, an apparition will materialize / doesn't it prove that what happens/ has in fact happened already ? / That the future tense is the present tense and the present, the past tense? / That we have stuffed time into too tight a box? / Time does not flow, is not consecutive, but/ all time is around us? / We live in a falsely co-ordinated space?" '

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