...from the foreword of Helena Idström's Danish translation of Pentti Saarikoski's BREV TIL MIN HUSTRU
above: Pentti Saarikoski below: Peter Laugesen
...I dag stimler hele verden sammen og betaler formuer for at lege beatniks i en måned på The Jack Kerouac Institute of Disembodied Poetics i Colorado, men i halvtredserne var Kerouac udkant, og det er han stadig.
Ligesom Pentti Saarikoski. Udkant og hovedvej på en gang. Sådan er Finland. For Saarikoski var Finland mere russisk end svensk. Han så ikke noget større fællesskab med Scandinavien. Faktisk, tror jeg, at hans største inspirator var Vladimir Majakovskij. Det er ham, han skriver videre på, også i sine rejsebøger. Læs Majakovskijs komisk fortvivlede artikler fra New York, hvor han som en slags sprogløs revolutionær superstjerne, som en rød gorilla, brøler uforståelige sætninger i sit gyldne cocktailbur.
Den Vladimir Majakovskij, der hjemme i Rusland talte med godsvogne og pistoler, talte til millioner.
Dengang spillede digteren en rolle, som digteren i dag ikke længere har. Skiftet skete i Pentti Saarikoskis generation. Han er den første finske postmoderne. Han talte også til millioner, men de hørte ikke længe nødvendigvis efter. Verden var en anden, men ingen ved, om den kulørte ørken vil være evigt. Majakovskij så det:
Ærede kammerater
i kommende århundreder
Når I roder
i dagens
forstenede lort
og udreder vor tids vedvarende mørke
kommer I
måske også til
at spørge efter mig.
Today, the whole world flocks and pays fortunes to play beatniks for a month at The Jack Kerouac Institute of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado, but in the fifties Kerouac was on the fringes, and he still is.
Like Pentti Saarikoski. Outskirts and main road at once. That's how Finland is. For Saarikoski, Finland was more Russian than Swedish. He saw no great commonality with Scandinavia. In fact, I think his biggest inspiration was Vladimir Mayakovsky. He is the one he continues to write about, also in his travel books. Read Mayakovsky's comically despairing articles from New York, where he, like a kind of speechless revolutionary superstar, like a red gorilla, roars unintelligible sentences in his golden cocktail-cage.
The Vladimir Mayakovsky who spoke with freight cars and pistols at home in Russia spoke to millions.
Back then, the poet played a role that the poet no longer has today. The change happened in Pentti Saarikoski's generation. He is the most daring Finnish postmodernist. He also spoke to millions, but they didn’t necessarily listen for long. The world was another, but no one knows if the trashy desert will last forever. Mayakovsky saw it:
Comrades,
honourable descendents!
Raking
the petrified muck of today
probing the darkness that once impenned us
you may chance
to ask about me.
(I used Dorian Rottenberg translation of the extract from Mayakovsky’s Aloud and Straight)