Björling aloud

 With thanks to Ian Giles. 

New Swedish Writing in English

The theme of the new issue of Swedish Book Review (now re-conceived exclusively as an online publication) is Emerging Voices in Swedish Literature, with work by Pooneh Rohi, Kayo Mpoyi, Adrian Perera, Balsam Karam and Joel Mauricio Isabel Ortiz. There are also reviews of new titles, including poetry with Burcu Sahin's Broderier (Embroideries) - also featured in an earlier post here. 

The editors of the new site are to be congratulated on its pleasing and variegated design.

Finland-Swedish Literature Today - Series

On the occasion of Tua Forsström's election to the Swedish Academy, Opulens has a series devoted to contemporary Finland-Swedish writing. Authors profiled so far include Tuva Korsström and Merete Mazzarella, and there are apparently more articles in the pipeline. Series editor Ivo Holmqvist has some wry historical notes on the Finland-Swedish presence in the Academy:

Så är det också skamligt länge sedan någon från Finland återfanns där. Den ombytlige Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt som var född i den östra rikshalvan blev invald på stol nr 14 i maj 1786. Åtta år senare uteslöts han, för påstådda politiska stämplingar. 1805 togs han åter in, fast på stol nr 17 som han tvangs lämna 1811 när han förvisats ur Sverige. Han är den ende som suttit på två stolar i den församlingen.

On the outlook for the newest Finland-Swedish member, Holmqvist is encouraging, though he can't  help pointing to some of the commentary that has greeted the latest appointment:

Dagens Nyheters kulturchef hör till dem som hälsat Tua Forsström välkommen fast han samtidigt undrade om hon är tillräckligt stridbar, och här på sidan noterade Helena Lie nyss att det är ”en ytterligt patriarkal hegemoni Forsström träder in i (motbevisa mig gärna, jag är idel öra) så frågan är väl hur länge Forsström kommer stå ut i ett sådant sällskap om det fortsätter som hittills.” Det är nog en onödigt pessimistisk blick in i framtiden även om föregångare som Kerstin Ekman, Lotta Lotass, Sara Danius och Sara Stridsberg satt exempel genom att frivilligt lämna församlingen.

Lists

SELTA is compiling a list of 100 ‘must-reads’ - popular Swedish books in translation, though it’s unclear what the purpose of the list may be. It’s actually quite hard to imagine that there are as many as 100 books fitting this category, with so many titles out of print, and especially in view of the fact that numerous  exclusions are made: for example, no poetry or drama is considered, while for unaccountable reasons the wide panorama of Finland-Swedish literature is kept out of the picture altogether. 

It seems that by ‘books’ the compilers mean ’novels’. 

One thing that did become clear during a ‘name your favourite books’ session on the SELTA discussion forum was that several interesting Swedish-language authors remain entirely untranslated, with no English versions of modern classics like the controversial novels of Agnes von Krusenstjerna and the books of Birgitta Trotzig.

The list is modelled on a similar venture from Deutsche Welle, though it’s significant that the German list is composed not of ‘German’ but of German-language titles - i.e. Austrian fiction is included along with the rest.

Presumably the SELTA list is intended for publication in Swedish Book Review, though this has not yet been announced. 

Älvan och jordanden

In Älvan och jordanden (Schildts & Söderströms 2018) Tuva Korsström has written a double biography of her parents, the poet, short story writer, essayist and painter Mirjam Tuominen (1913-1967) and the graphic artist and lector Torsten Korsström (1909-1964). Besides being a profoundly personal document, the book is a substantial contribution to the history of Finland-Swedish literature, and also provides a remarkable degree of background on the political, social and cultural development of early to mid-twentieth century Finland.

And now I am here

»Och nu är jag här.

I ett land som i fyra decennier haft en socialdemokratisk regering.

I ett samhälle där opinioner,  debatt, skolväsen – hela samhällsklimatet formats av detta socialdemokratiska etablissemang.

Och jag grips av samma förlamande depression, samma kvävningskänslor som i 1930-talets monolitiska Finland.»

Marianne Alopaeus, Drabbad av Sverige (1983) 

Mirjam Tuominen - complete works

The Swedish publisher Eskaton has begun its republication of the work of Mirjam Tuominen in ten volumes. The first two volumes in the series are Besk brygd (1947) and Tema med variationer (1952). The first reviews have begun to appear - notably a very positive one in Bernur.

For a short introduction to the new series and the current resurgence of interest in Mirjam Tuominen's life and work, see Hbl Litterarum.

Nudge review

Here's a nice review of my translation of Tuula Karjalainen's biography of Tove Jansson.

Tove Jansson: Work and Love

I now have an advance copy of my translation of Tuula Karjalainen's biography of Tove Jansson, which will be published by Penguin's Particular Books imprint on November 27. Am pleased with the production of the book, and the clarity of the illustrations and artwork.

Tove Jansson Letters

My translations of selected letters of Tove Jansson and an introductory essay by Pia Ingström are now online at the Books from Finland website.

Laborare et Amare

I'm working on a translation of Tuula Karjalainen's new biography of Tove Jansson, Tove Jansson – Tee työtä ja rakasta (Tove Jansson – Work and Love, Tammi, 2014) for Penguin Press, UK. In addition to illustrations, the Finnish text also contains excerpts from Tove Jansson's letters and notebooks, and these I am translating from the original Swedish. The English edition is scheduled for publication in autumn next year.

The Great Flood (2)

Sort Of Books say that they are publishing my translation of Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen as The Moomins and the Great Flood in October 2012. There's some information on their website.

Update: the translation is now published.

Christer Kihlman reassessed

Hufvudstadsbladet’s Pia Ingström has been rereading the novels of Christer Kihlman (b. 1930), Finland’s doyen and former enfant terrible of “confessional literature” who was at his most productive in the 1960s and 70s, but whose literary activity subsequently became more sporadic.  Kihlman’s breakthrough novel Se upp, Salige! (1960) has  been reissued in a new edition by Söderströms, though readers of English will have to wait.  Four of his novels are, however, available in English versions, and one wonders whether the renewed interest in his work may also extend to the English-speaking world. Certainly, as Pia Ingström points out in her column, Kihlman’s work is not short on interesting, contemporary and universally human themes, whether it be marital conflict, family breakdown, homosexual prostitution, alcoholism or drug addiction – “Frågan är om inte Kihlman är bättre ju värre han är” (The question is whether Kihlman is not better the worse he is), she writes, and there may well be something in that, for he was probably at his best as a writer when exploring what Gunnar Ekelöf called the “bottom” (botten) of human nature and  experience. At all events, one looks forward to seeing the republication in Swedish of more of Kihlman’s controversial but surely not superannuated output, much of which has been out of print for a long time. After all, in the intervening years since the 1970s confessional literature has never entirely gone out of fashion in the global literary market, and may even be on the way back to prominence again.

Bo Carpelan (1926-2011)

The Literary Saloon notes that the Finland-Swedish poet and novelist Bo Carpelan has passed away at the age of 84:

quote: He was two-time winner of the Finlandia Prize (for Urwind and Berg), and also won the Nordic Council Literature Prize. See, for example, the books and writers page on him, or this interview at Books from Finland.

Quite a few of his books have been translated into English, including the interesting Axel; see the Northwestern University Press publicity page, or get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Update: Pekka Tarkka has written an in memoriam.

Chitambo - 2

(continued)

Mr Dreary could probably have thought of many other names to replace the unfortunate Fram, had he been given a little more time and not been ambushed by the priest during the ceremony itself. There were several wonderful names to choose from among ships that had steered out upon uncharted seas. Think of the proud squadron with which Fernando de Magallanes embarked on his perilous voyage. Trinidad! Concepcion! Victoria! What radiance surrounded these names! I would willingly have possessed one of them. How easily they have evaporated, those names my schoolteachers tried to imprint on my memory – but the names which Mr Dreary taught me in the happy truancy of the imagination will never be effaced. Their symbolic splendour has only grown more beautiful with the years, like the splendour of old gold.

I can still distinctly feel the thrill of delight that crept down my spine as I sat on my stool at Mr Dreary’s feet, endlessly listening to his stories from seafaring history. Only the loftiest heroism was capable of satisfying me, and stories that lacked elements of defiance in the face of death left me quite unmoved. Mr Dreary himself derived indescribable enjoyment from moments of this kind. When the critical situation was upon the desperate, starving crew and they were threatening to mutiny, he would fall suddenly silent and give me a meaningful look. I would quiver with excitement and my little heart beat violently, but I did not move and uttered not a word, just fixed my gaze on his lips. Then he would get up and strike a cocky pose, as one does on deck in an extreme situation, with death before one’s eyes, and hurl out some incredibly heroic words by the leader of the expedition:

‘Though I am forced to eat the leather on the ships’ mast yards, I shall not perish until I have completed my work.’

We both had a passionate love for lines of this kind. They formed the longed-for climax of every story, and when it was finally reached we fell into each other’s arms, gripped by an inexplicable emotion which neither of us was able to control. We heard the wind singing in the ships’ rigging and saw that it was still the same wind singing the same intoxicating song: glory calls us, calls us... Such was the wind that filled your sails, my childhood’s Trinidad, Concepcion, Victoria!

If anyone had seen me only at home or at school they might well have thought that I was the virtuous daughter my mother wanted, a veritable Virgin Mary. In this world I lived asleep. A heaviness rested on my soul and my body, I felt tormented by my clothes, my pigtails, my duties. This profound discomfort made me apathetic, something I suppose to be the precondition for virtuous conduct in childhood. My mother did all she could to foster the domestic virtues in me, the only virtues a girl in our circles was thought to need. She placed special emphasis on dusting.

That repugnant ceremony was performed each morning with minute exactitude, under my mother’s implacable gaze, with the result that I came to hate every piece of furniture and every room in our home. I loathed all those objects so profoundly that I would probably have kicked them and broken them apart, had not fear held me back and compelled me to assume an air of submission and go around dusting and polishing in a manner that was idiotic and absurd. Lord knows, if only there had been an interval of a few days since the last dusting, some dust might have actually gathered, making one feel some purpose in what one was doing. But no, the whole point of womanly labour is that it must be so refined that it cannot be seen! This total absurdity is typical of all such work that is considered to belong to woman by nature.

It was the same with the work which is so tellingly called “handwork” – as though women would ever be allowed to do anything with their brains! Patching and darning was all right. Not because it was enjoyable, not that either, slow and tricky and petty like everything else in our home, but at least it was a task worthy of a human being compared to all those silly tablecloths and monograms and embroideries on which one was supposed to spend one’s time. Cross stitch and stem stitch, fore stitch and back stitch and pothooks of every conceivable kind, devilishly devised in order to give the absurdity a semblance of meaning. When the hole was darned and the torn cloth patched one did at least have the satisfaction of having done something sensible. But all those unneeded tablecloths, piles of which lay in the chest-of-drawers and were taken out once a year to be aired – they were the real handwork. Into their strange patterns Mrs Dreary and her friends poured all their womanly ambition. These patterns they showed off to one another every time they met, and woe to anyone who had “forgotten her handwork” and without this covering mantle simply sat down at the coffee table to hear gossip and drink coffee. The others would purse their lips and say that it could happen to anyone and not everyone always had a suitable piece of handwork ready, but their tone and looks said all too clearly that this woman was a sloven. They knew the sort of thing that women like her got up to. In fact, the handwork was much more than it professed to be, it was one of the great symbols of decorum, a sign of its possessor’s social status, a testimonial of respectability, conscientiousness and virtue.

In this company I had to sit, decently bowed over a piece of handwork, in an unbearably cramped position and also under close surveillance. My hair was drawn back so fiercely that it hurt my scalp, my nose shone from continual washing with soap and water, my undergarments were so thick that I could hardly move, my dress was so tight and my neckband so high that a straitjacket would truly have come as a relief. The old ladies beamed with contentment and said: Your daughter is a great credit to you, dear Agda. In this company I learned to loathe my own sex. From the dull apathy in my inner being this incipient gleam of fighting spirit rose slowly but surely to the surface of my consciousness.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff



(to be continued)

Chitambo

Some excerpts from the novel Chitambo (1933), by Hagar Olsson.


I, Vega Maria Eleonora Dreary

I was born in 1893, of course. That, as everyone knows, is the proudest year in the history of Nordic polar research. It was the year in which Fridtjof Nansen began his world-famous voyage to the North Pole aboard the Fram. Mr Dreary viewed this as a personal distinction and a sign that fate had fixed its gaze on him. He at once took it for granted that I was destined for great things, and he also showed much skill in fostering the same foolish idea in me...

My father had decided that in order to commemorate the notable year of my birth and place the seal upon my unique position in life I should receive at my baptism the strange-sounding but all the more meaning-laden name of Fram (forward). My mother was naturally in despair. At first she said nothing and dedicated herself instead to gathering allies for the expected confrontation. In the usual irrational way of women, she ran to the neighbours and complained. They listened, slightly amused and slightly scandalized. The most benevolent of them tried to persuade her that it was merely one of Mr Dreary’s jokes, but the malicious did all they could to egg her on. Mr Dreary smiled contentedly into his beard and thought: let the old women chatter – the girl shall be called Fram! Being able to vex my mother and her pious friends with this was a source of indescribable enjoyment for him. The more scandalized they felt, the more clearly did he feel his superiority in their milieu.

On the same day that the holy rite was due to take place, the storm broke. My mother wept and pleaded and wrung her hands, but to no avail. Mr Dreary was immovable, and remained so.

Weeping, my mother took me to be baptised. She quietly informed the godparents that the girl was to be called Maria Eleonora – a Christian and perfectly respectable name. There was a sense of relief, a conviction that Mr Dreary had backed down. He went about beaming, extending cordial greetings to everyone. But when the priest arrived, Mr Dreary raised his voice and curtly informed him that the girl’s name was to be Fram. In a longer statement, delivered with suitable gravitas, he set out the considerations that had led him, as the girl’s earthly guardian, to make this choice. This speech produced general despondency.

People in difficult situations often have brilliant ideas, and so it was with the priest. Like a flash of lightning out of a clear sky the name Vega suddenly presented itself to his inner vision. As an Arctic exploration vessel, the Vega was as illustrious as the Fram, was it not, and even more so! After all, there was still uncertainty as to how the Fram would fare.

One fine day it might perhaps be learned that the ship had gone down and all its crew perished. That was something Mr Dreary had not thought of. He grew pensive and rather long in the face. No, the Fram was not yet something to raise a cheer for, but Nordenskiöld’s Vega, now – there was a name that would surely fit. With such a name one could calmly sail into life’s storms. And then, too, Nordenskiöld was one of us, a meritorious son of Finland.

The priest did not need to say more. He had touched the most sensitive strings in Mr Dreary’s heart. Moved, Mr Dreary thanked the eloquent priest for drawing his attention to these symbolic circumstances. Then he said:

‘Let the girl be called Vega.’


translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

(to be continued)

Journeys

By Mirjam Tuominen

I


I came to a land where freedom had been realized or was at least believed to be very close to its full realization. For the people here the word freedom could consequently not be applicable to themselves but only to other peoples who had not yet discovered the happiness-making formula that means the realization of freedom. In this land, therefore, the people talked much and with a strong sympathy for all the people beyond the frontiers of their own land who were not free. It was said that one ought to exert oneself to the uttermost in order to liberate all the lands and peoples of the earth. On the other hand, it would hardly have been the right thing if it had occurred to some compatriot to longingly invoke, for example, the concept of freedom in an internal context, to himself or any of his fellow-countrymen. To be sure, it was not forbidden by law to use the word freedom in that last-mentioned way, but a universally sanctioned convention in reality liquidated the word freedom for any contexts other external ones.

Since everything in this land was so new, so thrillingly and inspiringly new, I became like a child, reborn, receptive and avid for knowledge, and also became involved in teaching in a school. By day and by hour I received proof which confirmed that freedom really was being realized in this land as in no other. On the way to work, in buses, trams and underground trains the workers sat studying books which promised them the chance of experiencing freedom completely realized even in their own lifetimes; a mother married to a simple sailor told me with eyes moist from emotion that there was every reason to expect that her son would attain the rank of admiral one day, and everywhere there was testimony to the fact that here women were acknowledged as beings equal to men with all their human rights acknowledged: among other things the fact that within the military profession they possessed the rank of captain, major and even colonel.

In the light of such experiences, the old world I had left behind receded ever further into my consciousness like some primeval night, half-real. Here I had been born anew, here everyone was happy - there was no talk of anything else - and everyone was firmly resolved to save the whole world, against the whole world's will, if necessary. Everyone lived for the mutual welfare of everyone else.

But of course, I could not forget the old world completely, and as is often the case when one tries to repress painful memories, the past returned in my dreams at night.

And I dreamed that I was trying to invoke the word freedom. That merely to suceed in uttering and adducing freedom on my own inner - melancholy, for example - personal behalf would offer me the most nameless solace and happiness. But I could not utter the word, so strong on the other hand, also in the dream, was my conventional awareness: countless inhibitions made the syllables stick in my throat, until, sobbing with anguish, I reached the point where the four letters: f, r, e, e -- crossed the threshold of my consciousness. I knew they were there, but I did not utter them, I did not even think them.

When I woke up I was soaked through as after the most terrible nightmare.

And I said to myself that this was not suffering but imagined or pretended suffering. But in this dark night my repressed primeval consciousness refuted this assertion and said that it is precisely when we tell ourselves that we are only pretending to suffer that we really do suffer, for why should we acknowledge a suffering about which we can do nothing? The soul is mortally sick - but the soul's suffering is always imagination.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Mirjam Tuominen - 9

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

The collection Monokord (Monochord) appeared in the same year as Under jorden sjönk. It was followed by Dikter III (Poems III, 1956), Vid gaitans (By the Gaeta, 1957), and I tunga hängen mognar bären (The berries ripen in heavy clusters, 1959. For a short period in the mid-fifties Mirjam Tuominen was unable to write and started to draw instead. Some of her pencil drawings were published in Dikter III.

The period without words was provoked by two short spells of internment in a mental hospital. This happened against Mirjam Tuominen's will and she interpreted it as an act of deceit on the part of her relatives. She forbade her mother, sister, ex-husband and most of her friends to have any contact at all with her or her daughters.

Tuominen's attitude to society during the later period of her life could be described with the words she herself used about Strindberg's paranoia: it implied a division into two halves, one consisting of enemies and the other of future enemies. She gradually isolated herself from the rest of the world. Her life became the 'work illness poverty' she had anticipated in Under jorden sjönk.

She allowed herself only the company of those spiritual companions she loved and trusted: angels, saints, her dead father and a varying number of dead writers, artists and philosophers:

FREUD

You who do not want to believe
you have never looked into your brains
I have looked into my brain
I have looked into a shaft
I have burrowed in a mine.
Forty years I burrowed
Moses in the desert in a mine
half a human lifetime
until I got there
A trauma lifted
a pressure vanished
I was inside the vein
brilliant gold flowed out.
Half a human lifetime
in order to get there.
I am in the subconscious.
Another half
in order to will the pure.
My patience is long
as the prophet's in the desert.
A cry comes from mountain peaks:
'I am a stranger
in a land that is not mine.'
I am making it mine.
I will only be content
with the best
the best in man.
Sediment is not water.
I will only be content with water
clear fresh from the primordial source.

But she could not ban the demons, the devils and the tormentors from her inner world. She chose solitude, silence and light, but she also received a chorus of evil voices from Hell. She was never able to free herself from her inner visions of the war and the concentration camps. It was precisely those visions that may have caused her illness. She developed a frightening and self-destructive ability to react directly and actively to political news from outside. The atomic bomb, the Korean war, the execution of the Rosenbergs disturbed her particularly. But even those visions of horror were turned into poetry:

but the child followed the ball's fate
was carried on women's backs in gypsy bundles mass migrations
was gassed beaten to death kicked
hurled into sewers
thrown from burning houses
by desperate homeless mothers
German Polish Jewish Russian
now without distinction
doomed for racial impurity
never found any refuge
other than the nether world of cloaca
where mothers were glad
if sometimes a washroom was opened for them
dirty as in the bistros of southern seaports
with a toilet hole in the floor
and a device with a grating
for the washing of the inner sexual parts
here they could relieve their bowels or bear the child
which an unknown father of unknown nationality had given them
while they slept unconscious of anything
but dreams of home and gentle stars
and tranquillity's narrow sickle-moon on deep blue late autumn nights...

(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 7

By Tuva Korsström (continued)

Mirjam Tuominen left Nykarleby, at first for short spells of time, and then finally for good.

'The decisive thing had now happened,' she writes in a short prose piece called Skilsmässa (Divorce) in the book Tema med variationer (Theme with Variations, 1952). 'They were separated, spiritually and physically irreconcilable – and what divided them was stronger than reason and will, stronger than instincts and desires.'

What caused the divorce was not only male jealousy at the woman's 'fornication with spirits, demons and non-personified men' which Tuominen describes in Skilsmässa. It was perhaps above all the jealous, all-consuming attention she herself paid to her own spirits and demons. She demanded solitude and wholeness. At the same time she was torn apart by her own demons.

For a while she lived with her mother and sisters in her former home in Helsingfors – an old, dark apartment, similar to the one in which her little heroine Irina has nightmares. A few years later, as a single mother, she was allocated municipal apartment in Kottby (Käpylä), a suburb of Helsingfors. She moved there with her two daughters and lived there until she died.

The book of prose sketches Tema med variationer reflects this new phase in Tuominen's life. Stories like 'The New Houses' or 'Ahti laughs' derive their origin from the new environment: a row of recently and poorly constructed tenement houses, filled with large working-class families, gypsies, alcoholics, social casualties and rootless people from all over post-war Finland.

This apartment was the first that Tuominen felt to be entirely her own. It was with a sense of triumph that she sat down at her typewriter in the early morning hours. Outside her window construction workers climbed on scaffolds. All around new houses were going up. There was a kind of pioneering spirit in the air.

Kaveri - kamrat - toveri:‘ (comrade) they shouted in the pouring autumn rain, in thirty degrees of frost, Then one had a sense that it was not they, these fellows well wrapped up and yet lightly clad: young and old - who were carrying out the work, But angels, While the men - old and young - stayed at home in order to drink hot milk - Kaveri - kamrat - toveri: in a long line at 7 in the morning they came. They laughed. They whistled. And did the work: Together. In broken Swedish, in broken Finnish, natural Finnish, natural Swedish, natural Yiddish - homeless people from Karelia, homeless people from Hangö, homeless people from some concentration camp in Central Europe...

With Tema med variationer Mirjam Tuominen embarked on a stylistic experiment on the borders between prose and prose poetry. While hitherto she had employed a timeless and classical literary language, now she strove for the inner leaps of the stream of consciousness.

She was moving from prose to poetry.

<(to be continued)

Mirjam Tuominen - 6

By Tuva Korsström
(continued)

Two of the most enjoyable essays in Stadier concern the letters of Proust and Strindberg. Proust was one of Mirjam Tuominen's constant companions and she read the volumes containing his letters over and over again. Her description of Proust is characterized by the tender irony she used when writing or talking about her literary favourites. Proust was just another of those unpractical victims who make themselves hopelessly absurd whenever they undertake something.

His letters are as a rule very considerate, so considerate that they may seem to consist of nothing but politeness, flattery, almost. He is so polite that his politeness sometimes kills itself and becomes an impoliteness, because his equally great need for sincerity gets in the way. The result is an intricate arabesque with a succession of constantly new explanations, each of which annihilates the last.

Strindberg was one of the authors whom Mirjam Tuominen read intensely for a while but later rejected. She describes in her essay, not without irony this time, too, the restless Strindberg who included the whole world in his private life and then suffered from having it there, who could not live without women and then suffered from being at their mercy.
She writes with perspicacity about Strindberg's paranoia:

He could renounce neither woman nor the world... Subsequently mankind appeared to him as divided into two halves, one containing enemies, and the other containing people who were not yet his enemies...
For Strindberg Sweden was Little Puddleton, and anything else one would not have expected, it gave him paranoia, and that is very understandable, even if one might have wished that his brain had retained the upper hand.

It is worth noting that a large number of Tuominen's prototypes were men: mostly unusual, 'unmasculine' men like Kafka, Proust, Rilke or Hölderlin. What preoccupied her, just as it would preoccupy the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva decades later, was not the problem of masculine and feminine but that of marginality and dissidence.
Female artists who fascinated Tuominen included, for example, the Finland-Swedish poet Edith Södergran, the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, the French philosopher Simone Weil, and the Finland-Swedish painter Helene Schjerfbeck. These women, like her male favourites, are characterized by the vulnerability of marginal beings. They are all in pursuit of the same self-consuming search for the the absolute.
Of Cora Sandel, Tuominen writes:

This writing is in the highest degree feminine, as feminine as Strindberg's is masculine, it constitutes an index of features that are normally feminine, raised to an intensified and therefore abnormal level of emotion in the same way as Strindberg in his writing becomes an index of the `normally masculine at an extremely heightened level of emotion. I have never seen a portrait of Cora Sandel and I have no idea what she looked like, but something of the same terrifying, at once defenceless and strong, expression that is reflected in Helene Schjerfbeck's self-portraits emanates from her writings; a white face with dark, wide-open eyes, the expression of a being mercilessly incorporated into the nerve of life's essence and with the same mercilessness exposed to the conditions of reality; extreme sensitivity and extreme, overpowering temperament are here united, the fruit is extreme shyness, a scream of existential agony.

(to be continued)