Virran molemmin puolin: Runot, 1954-1996.
Schoolfield, George C.
Mirkka Rekola. Helsinki. WSOY. 1997. 630 pages. ISBN 951-0-22219-4.
Because of her well-known brevity, the twelve individual collections
of Mirkka Rekola's (b. 1931) verse could easily fit into a single
volume. Her lyrics often resemble haiku or aphorisms. (Rekola's
clearly aphoristic production, praised by Markku Envall in his standard
Sum malainen aforismi [1987], was collected ten years ago in Tuoreessa
muistissa kevat [Springtime in Fresh Memory; 1987]; perhaps, augmented,
it will appear again as a complement to the poems.) A problem with
getting some knowledge of Rekola's lyrics to the outside world lies
in their simultaneously crystalline and ambiguous vocabulary, and
syntax; the claims that she is a poet of world rank may have to remain
untested, or be taken on faith.
The lyrics do not allow a translator much room for maneuver; one
could imagine that a responsible translator might make several versions
of the same poem and publish them simultaneously - an idea not liable to
fill a publisher with enthusiasm. In an intelligent essay in the 1997
Jahrbuch fur finnisch-deutsche Literaturbeziehungen Stefan Moster
discussed the difficulties in rendering Rekola's work into a
Western language, and he bravely provided German translations of several
poems; in Books from Finland 31 (1997), Herbert Lomas turned several of
her poems into English, all taken from her most recent collection,
Taivas paivystaa (The Sky's on Duty; 1996). Earlier, Kirsti
Simonsuuri included a fair amount of Rekola in her anthology of Finnish
women poets, Enchanting Beasts (1990), and Lomas in his Contemporary.
Finnish Poetry (1991) provided a sampling of poems from 1969 to 1983.
Although Rekola has been a succes d'estime for years, there has
recently been much public interest in her verse; in 1995 she received
the Suomi Prize and in 1997 the (unfortunately named) Dancing Bear Prize
of Finnish Radio. A 1997 dissertation by Liisa Enwald - who has also
written the afterword to the present volume, "Mirkka Rekola: The
Poet of Likenesses" - has bestowed an academic seal of approval on
her, if such was needed. Long ago, Auli Viikari, now a professor of
Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki, caught the hub of
Rekola's difficult transparency in a 1995 essay for Parnasso called
"Avoin kirja" (Open Book).
One way to penetrate Rekola's world might be to take the
collected poems along to some isolated vacation spot and to browse
through them, back and forth. Or, if one is a bus commuter, one could
take them along on the diurnal rides. Rekola herself has done a great
deal of pondering beside windows - for example, in Kohtaamispaikka vuosi
(The Year of the Meeting Place; 1977): "From the bus window I saw
two blind people / when they met on a street corner, / the second one
was already waiting there. / Thus on both the same smile / before they
took each other by the hand." Sentimental or not? Or, from
1981's Kuutamourakka (Moonlighting, Lomas's apt rendering of
the title): "I saw you waiting there, I don't know, / I just
remember when / a child nodded off in your arms there on the bus, I
recognized its smile, I saw from the window the memory, of that ride, /
it was evening, turning to early spring, / I was in your in the
child's dream." How many implications does such a poem have?
A lyric from Ilo ja epasymmetria (Happiness and Dissymetry; 1965)
which has attracted translators by its simplicity and centrality for
Rekola's view of life must be given in conclusion. Both Simonsuuri
and Moster have done it; because of the lack of space for maneuver
mentioned above, the present translation will turn out to be nothing
more than an Americanization of Simonsuuri's version: "In a
train in a streetcar / in a bus in a plane / in a store in a coffee shop
/ it's quiet to read." The introduction to the volume by
Rekola herself, "On Both Sides of the Stream," is an
unpretentious personal and literary autobiography, as simple and
mystifying as the poems that follow.
George C. Schoolfield Yale University
