Koiratta
on kuonoa ja
kahta luppakorvaa yksinäisempi.
Yö
on toista hengitystä vajaa.
En pelkää. Ikävöin.
Dogless
is lonelier than
a snout and two floppy ears.
Night
is short one breath.
I do not fear. I miss.
Source: Eeva Kilpi, Terveisin (WSOY, 1976), p. 8. Photos and translation by Thomas H. Campbell. Here is a different translation of the same poem
Olen rauhallinen aina kun minulla on kaksi:
kaksi kampaa, kahdet sukat, kaksi samanlaista kynää.
Rakastaessakin yksinäisyys aina toisena.
Vai niin, hän sanoi ankarasti,
käskyn sinä tiedät:
jos sinulla on kaksi, luovuta toinen pois.
Tiedän, minä vastasin,
vaan jospa minuun pätee se suomalainen sananlasku:
Joka kahta kaihoaa, kumpaisenkin kadottaa.
I am always calm when I have two:
Two combs, two pairs of socks, two identical pens.
When I love, solitude is always the other one.
Indeed, he said harshly,
You know the commandment:
If you have two things, give one away.
I know, I replied,
But maybe the Finnish proverb applies to me:
He who longs for two things loses both.
—Eeva Kilpi, Laulu rakkaudesta ja muita runoja (WSOY, 1972)
Translation and photos by Living in FIN
The past two days, I was in Jyväskylä, where I spotted this excellent example of funkis covered with ivy in the downtown.
It reminded me, for some reason, about the old song in which “little lambs” are said, unaccountably, to “eat ivy.”
You know the song.
Maybe jvyäskyläisiä don’t know the song, but they probably don’t need to, seeing as how they live in a town so rich in manmade and natural beauty, and can keep themselves busy with that.
I will be posting more about what I saw there in the coming days.
I was just reading in yesterday’s edition of Etelä-Saimaa newspaper about a show of cows (lehmiä) and hiehoja at the Kouvola Regional Vocational College’s Natural Resources Center in the town of Anjala. Since I didn’t know what the word hieho meant, I googled it. This was the first entry that came up.
Wöyh! “Hieho” (2012)
Hieho on kultaa
hieho on hopeaa
hieho on pronssia
hieho on nopea
Nivelet maistuu voissa ne paistuu
nivelet maistuu voissa ne paistuu
Hieho!
Hieho!
Jne.
The heifer is gold
the heifer is silver
the heifer is bronze
the heifer is fast
Joints taste like they are fried in butter
Joints taste like they are fried in butter
Heifer!
Heifer
Etc.
South Karelians should have no trouble identifying where Wöyh! filmed this fabulous video.
And I will never forget what hieho means ever again.
Translation by Living in FIN. Photo courtesy of Whippet & Siperiankissa
Kuolevat syöttävät lintuja.
Siksi sanotaan että linnut tietävät kuolemaa.
Eläimet ymmärretään aina väärin.
Ajat ovat sellaiset että olisi sanottava joka hetki
jotain lopullista.
Olla niin lähellä maata
että kuulee mitä se sanoo,
tulla osaksi sen ääntä,
olla sen tahtoa ja tajuntaa,
palata siihen mitä on aina tiennyt.
Se on itsestään selvää
mutta ei yksinkertaista.
Moninaisuuden voi tajuta vain
koko olemuksellaan
eikä sen tajuamisesta enää halua pois.
The dying feed the birds.
So it is said birds presage death.
Animals are always misunderstood.
The times are such one should say something final
every instant.
Be so close to the earth
one hears what it says,
become a part of its voice,
be its will and consciousness,
go back to what has always been known.
That is self-evident
but not simple.
The manifold can be grasped only
by its entire essence
not by wanting to avoid grasping it anymore.
—Eeva Kilpi, Animalia (WSOY, 1987)
Translation and photos by Living in FIN
Onko säälittävämpää näkyä
kuin kahdella sormella koneella kirjoittava aikuinen mies.
On kuin näkisi itsensä kadulla kävelemässä
takaapäin toisen kerroksen ikkunasta,
paljaan päälakensa, kyyryt hartiansa,
nöyryytyksensä taakan.
Is there a sight more pathetic
than a grown man writing with two fingers on a typewriter.
It’s like seeing oneself walking down the street
from behind out a second-floor window,
the pate of one’s bare head, one’s stooped shoulders,
the burden of one’s humiliation.
—Hannu Salakka, Yöllä näin kaiken vapaan maan (Otava, 1990)
Translation and photos by Living in FIN
Our dead speak to us through our senses
as the marsh respires
reeks and squelches
bubbles and blooms
proffers its berries
and carries the bear.
Like the wind passing over the marsh
Lulling the cottonsedge as far as the eye can see
So our dead are present
underwater
in our soul’s
depths
drowned plants are swaying.
Our dead are rooted in us
they rest in us
our soul is heavy with drowned snags
and perhaps fruitful
perhaps in its cavities something forms a chain
and something invisible to us
surreptitiously proffers its purpose
which
(what relief)
is none of our business.
—Eeva Kilpi, Recent Poems, 1996–2000
Translation and photos by Living in FIN
During the Stone Age, Finnish contemporary art looked something like this.
And it was exhibited in site-specific installations such as this.
Since the Stone Age, Finnish contemporary art has gone downhill. Like everything else in Finland. And like everywhere else.
The Kolmiköytisienvuori rock painting is located in Ruokolahti commune in the eastern part of the southern Lake Saimaa region. The painting consists of a single densely painted area on a rock outcropping that is visible far out into the lake. The painting has been dated to the early New Stone Age. The site is signposted before the turn on the road from Savilahti to Sapola on Äitsaari Island.
The painting was discovered in 1977 by Timo Miettinen, who is also listed as the painting’s inventory curator. Miettinen inventoried the painting in 1994, and Minna Kähtävä-Marttinen, in 1996. About two kilometers to the west of Kolmiköytyisienvuori, a typical Comb Ware period dwelling site has been found on Korosniemi Cape. Based on its location and height, the rock painting has been dated to around 3,000 BCE.
Source: fi.wikipedia.org
The merciless of human beings towards the natural environment, the built environment, and each other is going to catch up with them soon, I’m afraid.
The latest victim is a handsome apartment block in Imatrankoski, Imatra, built before the war (if I’m not mistaken) by Jalmari Lankinen, the then-head architect of Finland’s thriving second city, Viipuri (Vyborg).
I still haven’t figured out why this building had to go, even though I’ve read several incoherent explanations by city planners and developers in the local daily rag over the past year.
Most everywhere in the world, city planning and the construction business are rackets and mafias, and the real reason they knock things down is just to build something else in their place, almost always uglier, taller, needlessly expensive, and much less functional.
Lankinen is one of the most victimized architects from the glorious heyday of funkis (Finnish functionalism). Out in a gorgeous spot on the Lake Saimaa shore called Tiuruniemi, which is technically part of Greater Lappeenranta but is geographically part of Greater Imatra, Lankinen built an absolutely lovely tuberculosis hospital right before the Winter War, which then served as field hospital once the war started.
Not so long ago, Tiuru Hospital served as the asylum seeker and refugee reception center for this part of Finland, but when developers decided to turn the nearby Rauha psychiatric asylum (another place with lots of good architecture, including some fine exemplars of funkis) into Holiday Club Saimaa, a retreat for bourgeois Russians flush with cash from the “prosperity” of the era of Putin 2.0, the asylum seekers were moved to a recently closed prison south of Joutseno, out of sight and mostly out of mind.
Holiday Club Saimaa and the Lappeenranta authorities had some vague plans to do something with Tiuru Hospital, but when the Russian and Finnish economies tanked, those plans came to naught, and the hospital has been sitting unoccupied in the woods for many years now. Recently, the Lappeenranta authorities made the Solomonic decision to stop heating the building, allegedly, because it was costing them too much. So now its degradation will proceed apace, although it is a listed building, supposedly protected by the Museovirasto or some such government agency.
When the refugee crisis struck, it occurred to me it would be a perfect opportunity to fix up Tiuru Hospital and fill it with life again, but inexplicably the Finnish Red Cross and the immigration authorities chose a hotel in Imatra that had fallen on hard times to accommodate its tiny quota of refugees.
Actually, there are so many empty spaces in Imatra and other parts of South Karelia, you could probably easily house all the inhabitants of a small Syrian city here without anyone noticing.
But instead we get absolutely meaningless “renovation” and “urban renewal,” as pictured above, instead of an exciting experiment in learning to live together with perfect strangers and redefining Finnishness (and Europeanness).
Who needs it?
I went to school with Finnish kids, meaning the grandchildren of people who had emigrated to Minnesota eighty or ninety or a hundred years earlier “seeking a better life,” which in Finnish President Sauli Niinistö’s new and bold reading of “western values” is a pejorative phrase. Back then, it meant escaping bone-crushing poverty, unemployment and sometimes even famine in Finland itself.
It was a really a good thing Finns immigrated to Minnesota in such large numbers because, especially up on the Iron Range (the northeastern part of the state where the great Bob Dylan hails from), the Finns were the most militant and well-organized trade unionists among the newcomers (and the old-timers), who also included other Scandinavians and lots of folk from Yugoslavia.
I won’t bore you with the details (you can read whole books on the subject), but many of these newly arrived Finns were (or became, under the pressure of the working conditions they faced in their new country) kick-ass left-wing radicals, and their values definitely changed the state’s collective values for the better. I imagined that things have slipped in this respect since I was a kid (or, rather, since when my parents were kids), but Minnesota once had the reputation of being the most “social democratic” state in the Union, and it had got that way due in no small part to the militant Finns and the injection of funny “alien” values they gave our fair state.
Why do you think Bob Dylan (a middle-class Jew from Hibbing) idolized Woody Guthrie? Because Guthrie preached and lived the values that were professed and lived by hundreds of thousand people in Dylan’s own native land, the mighty Iron Range of northern Minnesota.
As an amateur friend of Finland, it’s maybe not my place to say this, but I think the best thing that could happen to Finland right now would be for the definition of Finnishness to become a lot more inclusive as quickly as possible, just as the definition of being Minnesotan has had to expand, successively and rapidly, to include the rabble-rousing Finns, the hardworking Hmong, the elegant Somalis, and the absolutely essential in all ways Mexicans, just to mention a few groups of immigrants and refugees who have enriched our state in many and different ways.
Because the alternative, you might have guessed, is pandering to the neo-Nazis, racists, and hatemongers who have suddenly felt emboldened, after their forebears were thoroughly defeated in WWII, to come out of their holes and caves and strut their stuff again. And President Niinistö strangely feels more sympathy for the “hurt feelings” of these thugs than for people who in their vast majority are not (“quaintly,” I want to say) just “seeking a better life,” but actually escaping from all-out war, bloody mayhem, and total societal breakdown.
I really regret that Pekka Haavisto of the Greens was not elected president of Finland in 2012. He would not have sunk to this new low in the history of Finland.
Living in FIN 