Sevenths and Souvenirs

Some poems by the contemporary Finnish poet Tomas Mikael Bäck, from his collection Memoarer och annan dikt (Memoirs and other poems), Schildts 1997. The translations are mine.

Bäck (b. 1946) is a Finland-Swedish poet - i.e. his mother-tongue is Swedish, and he belongs to Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. In his first collection of poems, Andhämtning (Drawing Breath, 1972), it's already possible to observe his interest in Oriental philosophy and poetry, as he makes use of the haiku form. In the 1980s his style of writing became more open and diary-like (Srångmarsch på stället, Running on the spot, 1985). In addition to short poems, prose poems and aphorisms, Bäck has written “nonsense poetry”. He has published 14 books, the most recent of which is Sol-sordin (Sun Mute, 2000).
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Why did so many buses go
To Kyyjärvi of all places,
when I was young?
Why did the sun-drowned March firmament
thrill to Schumann’s Lied
Ich wandre nicht,
smoothly captured in the morning
on my tape?
Why could nothing,
not even for a moment,
properly shake me
from the sense of being outside,
from the belief that direction was lacking,
that existence remains enigmatic?




Our story was doomed to end with a crash.
I suppose it was as you said: we had already caused each other
too much pain. But there is something
offensive in the very staging
of the break-up.
You turn round on the way out, bid a final farewell,
and then pass through the hospital gates. You have a sense of reality,
of course you will manage. I still wonder
through what moods you walked back that day,
towards the city’s silent afternoon alarm! Sorrow – or
just relief? In my bare room voices must
recapitulate.




Our last excursion à deux:
he is already mute. By train
to Tavastehus. There is nothing to say!
It is a sparkling winter’s day, sun gleams.
Doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t want to see the Sibelius Museum.
I talk anxiety, talk sorrow.
Then sevenths, souvenirs are bought: Clifford
Brown, Sarah Vaughan. Home exists though, the sound
of flight. What sun?
The orbit is defined
by an unknown heavenly body.




My friend and colleague
lived at the address
Central Street 124, Karis.
I could never really
digest the address’s contradictory
message, or get over the sense
of market town melancholy: what sort
of centre exists only
as the departure time
of the train!
To soften the pain
I felt I used to
buy expensive children’s books
in the local stationery shop.
The daughter was by then
just about the right age for cucumber dances.
The bookshop was owned by a friendly lady,
with exemplary swiftness she learned to
give encouraging discounts.
My friend and colleague is out of it,
(since dark whirlwinds
had destroyed the idyll)
somewhere else, far away.




Near the gates of the cemetery
lay an old factory, a small workshop –
damn it if the comparatively tall
brick chimney wasn’t rectangular!
The whole place charred with an eternity of soot-black
and smoke vapours.
Some time in the fifties there was an attempt
at one last adaptation to the present:
half-heartedly cars began to be repaired.
Then it was all quickly over.
The place, which had helplessly floated above its mystical
past, in scarcely comprehensible presence,
faded away without trace, became one
with the groves of downy birch. Has never existed?

Those last two years mother was plagued as usual
by her eczema; wordless we wandered
on August afternoons along the levelled
Brändövägen, there was no longer
any softness in the play of light –
an orange-coloured withdrawal.
Of her depression she could say nothing,
wanted something else: everything must happen, what does
the determinist know really?
‘I must go in here
for a moment, wait for me, it
won’t take long.’


More poems by Tomas Mikael Bäck can be read at the remarkable online anthology of modern Finnish and Finland-Swedish poetry Electric Verses, a web publication that is probably unique in its genre.