keskiviikkona, kesäkuuta 21, 2006

Electric verses

Maailman jälkeen minä luettelen sinut
maailman vastaajaan liikaa, polku
puheeni jälkeä jättää tänne ja leikit

luminen katsoa niin lyhyt iho:
sinä itse minun puheeni kuolla, piti
leikit näkyvän jäädä lehvistön nopean

niin suvereenisti muistaa punaista ja
ei näkyväisen pylväässä
ja minun muistaa välke tarvinnut viesti
kielletyt ja ohikiitävää muta, ikkunoiksi kielletyt

2 Comments:

Blogger Geofhuth said...

Runo Electrico

Mailman joking my little sinus,
mailman vastly liking polka,
please joke just tons and like it

luminescent, catatonic, unlit here:
since it means "Please, koala," pity,
like it nakedly--joust, levitate un-European,

no servant must punish you
and never pill-vase
your minimum must, vacant, tarnished, vast,
call it your occupation, mute, incognito, killed dead.

3:32 ap.  
Blogger Karri Kokko said...

That’s pretty cool, Geof. You are, probably unawares, turning a double play here. Your source text was my non-edited cut-up of two original poems written by Leevi Lehto, and Jyrki Kiiskinen. Both poets are featured in Electric Verses (http://www.electricverses.net/), a source of contemporary Finnish poetry, some of it in foreign translation (not these particular poems, however). I won’t go into a detailed commentary of your visual translation, except for one word. The Finnish word ”maailma” -- which means “world, or universe” and consists of two words “maa” (earth) and “ilma” (air) (here suffixed with an “n”) – has, of course, the perfect looks of the English “mailman,” but there’s also something else; dropping the other “a” is one of the most usual spelling mistakes in our language. That’s why I had trouble reading thru it the first time. What’s with these poorly spelled Finnish words in here, I thought. There are other borderliners: sinus (although Latin, it looks like colloquial Finnish); polka (we spell it with two k’s); koala; joust (joustava=elastic, resilient); no (Well…); must (musta=black); pill (pilleri=pill; pillu=cunt); vase (vasen=left); vast (vasta). The last word is a handful in itself. You may have heard of Finns beating themselves with birch leaves in a sauna (details found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_sauna)? The bundle of leaves bound together is called either “vihta” or “vasta,” depending on where you live, the eastern or the western part of Finland. The weekend you wrote this was the summer solstice that we celebrate here by burning great bonfires by the lake and lots of sauna, with a vasta or a vihta…

That enough for you?

2:33 ip.  

Lähetä kommentti

<< Home