The Peculiarity of Trees

The trees are being peculiarly.
I cannot say, how.
It makes me uneasy.

Pentti Saarikoski, translated by Susanna Laaksonen.

It is comforting to know that trees 'behave' around others. Despite appearances, this blog is not dendrophilic (if a blog can be passionate about something; it's cousin to the questions about what powers are innate to guns). I sense communication in everything from rustling leaves to the pepper grilling in the kitchen ('Will you turn me all ready?' grumble sizzle grumble grizzle seethe). Saarikoski, who was born in Impilahti in 1937 and died in a monastery 46 years later, was a major figure in Finnish literature in the 1960s and 70s. Enough years for you? That Saarikoski didn't have many may have been due to his heavy drinking. Saarikoski's father was a journalist; his mother, the daughter of a baker. He spent a few years working as a satirical columnist for the conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi, writing under a pseudonym (Nenä). He married (Mia, whom he called his Molly Bloom), joined the Finnish Communist Party (That must have gone down well with his ex-employers.) and edited the Party newspaper, Aikalainen.

He put his politics in his poetry:

120 miles from Leningrad
(trans. by Anselm Hollo)

We sit here surrounded by our forests,
backs turned to the giant and stare at his image in a well’s eye.
He wears a dark suit, white shirt, silver-grey tie.
In this country everything is quite different,
there people walk on or without their heads.

So we have Saarikoski openly angry, married and Communist. Oh, yes, and famous, and living a little tiny weensy bit beyond the edge.

It's not fair to portray him as hard (as if you could, given the poem atop the page). Here's a reflective pondering of war:

What would happen to me
it there was a war and they closed the borders?
I couldn't go anywhere, disqualified as I am
from soldiering; I suppose
I'd have to sit up nights, composing
orders for the day.

Saarikoski was neither forced to satire nor married to political diatribe. He is described as a trickster, compared with James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Che Guevera, Rilke and Rimbaud, and held by some to be a philosopher. Certainly, he was prolific: fifteen collections of poetry, five prose works, three radio plays, and more than seventy translations (modern and ancient), including Alan Ginsberg, J D Salinger, Euripedes, Sappho, Philip Roth and Italo Calvino. (It was fun putting that list in order.) Do you hunger for a couple of specifics? Saarikoski translated The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, getting Greek mythology two ways.

Shades of Kit Marlowe: What if Saarikoski hadn't died so young?

A biscuit for you trivia hounds: Saarikoski liked to use Webster's Third New International Dictionary. A consolation bikky for those of you dedicated to strict form: Saarikoski wasn't. (Tell yourselves that you are wiser than he.)

The heavy drinking -- this is not a unique passage, be warned -- led to repeated stays in hospitals, which led to reevaluation of life, which led to an interest in early Christianity. This brought Saarikoski to translate Matthew's gospel. He proceeded to set Christ and his apostles as revolutionaries. Don't go all 'duh' on me. We're talking Che Guevera. It's another sort of revolution. We're also in the late 1960's and in Finland. Consider your place- and time-line.

Here's a bleakly impressive list. Saarikoski went to London, came back and returned to hospital. He weighed a whopping 126 pounds (57 kilos). This is no surprise, given what was going on with him. Here's the list, as found online: alcoholismus chronicus, epilepsia symtomatica, chirrosis hepatis, and encopresis. Hep and epilepsy alone would be enough to send me back to bed for the long haul and have me drinking nothing harder than mint tea.

In the 1970s, Saarikoski retired. He and his wife moved to Kerava, north of Helsinki, where Saarikoski developed an interest in the work of Eino Leino, a Finnish poet who straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He had a gift for gentle and evocative descriptions: The moon is the heel of a limping shoe. (translated by Doug Robinson)

Saarikoski's travels took him not only to England, but also to Ireland, Greece, France and elsewhere. He moved to Sweden. Towards the end of his life, he started talking about returning to Finland, but it never happened. In 1983, Saarikoski died of cirrhosis of the liver. He is buried in the graveyard of monastery of Valamo in Heinävesi.

Here's a taste of the translator of myths --

Aft, he sleeps,
untwitching,
he has seen all places
and been made to suffer,
they call him godlike,
the ship rides the wine-dark waves,
he is on his way home,
he sleeps.

(translated, in turn, by Anselm Hollo)

-- and of the philosopher --

Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he’d like to be dead in,

grey skies pass over,
the sky’s a hanging garden
and earth comes into the mouth like bread.

I am at a loss for the translator for that poem. It's from Runot ja Hipponaksin runot, which was published in 1959, and please don't ask me to translate the title. I'm happy enough to have found it.

There's literal truth in the poem, if you are of that mind. The earth does come into the mouth like bread -- as bread and as other things. But . . . I've been buried alive and the earth coming over you sounds like a storm, like thunder at the end of the world. Unite Saarikoski's 'earth coming into the mouth like bread' with Catullus' 'starvelings under the earth' and you have food fit for thought.