The Dark One’s Dances

‘The twenty-fourth of August 2003 is the twentieth anniversary of Pentti Saarikoski’s departure from this planet’, writes Anselm Hollo, in the introduction to his new book of translations of Saarikoski’s poetry. This book, Trilogy, collects Saarikoski’s final three verse collections: The Dance Floor on the Mountain (1977), Invitation to the Dance (1980) and The Dark One’s Dances (1983).

No postman knocks at the houses of the dead
I sink a hole deep in the soil
put my invitation at the bottom
and top it with juniper twigs
I soak them with aqua vitae
and when the whole thing’s flaming
there’s such a smoke and stink
the dead rise, they have to

they rise behind me on the mountainside
they see my shadow
and they ask me what it is

the world and the world’s phenomena
are soon forgotten

Hollo goes on to note that, besides publishing twenty-two volumes of poetry, Saarikoski also turned out six volumes of prose, three radio-plays, and many book-length translations, including, significantly, Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses: Hellenic classicism and modernism being two of the primary colours of Saarikoski’s work.

The Girl
dandy as a dandelion
took me by the hand and said
I’m the light that leads you into darkness
No crop to brag about when I dig the potatoes
summer was dry I was lazy
dandy as a dandelion
Our bodies overlap as we sleep
legs bent
these beds weren’t made for people as tall
as those of our time
I natter with the magpies about how all
the world’s people
are my children and you’re the light
dandy as a dandelion who leads
me into darkness
I’ve eaten of the knowledge of good and evil
the heavens are clouded
the philosophies and policies crack like dry twigs

I’d been hoping for years that a book like this might be published, ever since I acquired a copy of Herbert Lomas’ anthology Contemporary Finnish Poetry, published by Bloodaxe Books back in ’91. Saarikoski was one of several outstanding poets whose work I discovered in this eye-opening volume, and it was specifically the selection translated from the ‘trilogy’ of his late works that left me hungry for more. It was a poetry that struck me as casual yet profound, conversational yet fervently inspired.

I was poking about in the junipers and the drystone wall
for a schnapps bottle I’d hidden somewhere
The Girl appeared, licked her ice-cream
turned up her nose and said
you’re daft
you’re forever seeking the way
down the mountain and out of the wood
and our of your darkness
you call
for your dead friends
that you long for
as a bald man longs for his hair don’t you understand this
The Girl licked her ice-cream superciliously
you don’t understand
in the darkness
even the reddest of reds
the red of a red frostbitten lingonberry looks black
that’s what’s happened to your friends
I’m the light
that will lead you into darkness

I wept and wailed as soon as I opened my eyes
to have been born into this
who has looked closely
has stopped to look at the interior surface
of a freshly-cut piece of meat
understands
what I’m talking about
That a gust of wind flattens the leaves of grass
is, for me
an event, a thought
that penetrates and governs everything

The translations I’ve excerpted here are variously Lomas’s (the first), Hollo’s (the last couple) or confusions of the two. I’ve not attempted to reproduce the irregular line-placement of all but the first of these extracts…

The Dark One dances
there is no other world
than the one he inscribed on a cow’s skull
spiderwebs hang from his fingers he dances
dances through the sentence he wrote
You know nothing of this world if you haven’t looked
into a lizard’s eyes, he dances
ants climb his legs, piss
into his short hairs, crawl
into his urethra, devour
his strength, the serpent
intrudes its tongue deep into his ear and whispers
Not me
I know but won’t tell

*

Posted by misteraitch at August 24, 2003 10:43 AM | TrackBack