Kirsti
Simonsuuri
Born 26 December, 1945, in Helsinki.
Five collections of poetry, novels,
essays. Scholarly works, translations of
world literature, criticism, editorial work.
University teacher and researcher.
'The blood of an exile and a vagabond flows in me, as a poet; in
my work I seem to be looking for the restlessness and peace that
is in life itself. For many years, for most of the seventies, I was
deeply alienated from my mother tongue. I rediscovered it at the
same time as I found my lyrical space again, my own natural
way of moving within it. To be without one's mother tongue for
a while can be beneficial for a poet, because it heightens the
awareness of the specificity of one's own language among other
languages. To live in other cultures can help a writer to perceive
the eternal movement between otherness and sameness. This is
the experience of our century. People who live in exile, ideas
and images that shift and enmesh, nations that migrate, are
recharting the world that we know. I believe that poets are
everywhere messengers of the future without a permission.
Something propelled me into going even when very young. The
symbolic and metaphoric nature of the world was the theme of
my meditations and I wanted to try out the boundaries of my
understanding. Sometimes my poems are like the reflected
reportage of these experiments; sometimes I exist beyond my
poems and my language, in the region where I do not yet know
and where I could just as well be dreaming. Maybe for this
reason I have used dream material: there I am face to face with a
universal structure, similar to which I find when I study ancient
cultures or wander in the world, among different people. I
would not want to be afraid of anything. But when I notice that
I am afraid of something, I am forced to rethink everything, from
the beginning. The future is a facet of the present. And the rest is
trying to find the right words.'
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