Nordic Poetry Center

Introductory Remarks in Joint Finnish-Russian reading at Cafe Bilingua, Moscow, November 29, 2008

Translated by the Author

Good evening, everybody. Tomorrow, at Non/Fiction book fair at 4 pm, there will be a presentation of this Finnish anthology, “Border Country Speaks” (Говорит пограничная страна), to which me and Sergej Zavjalov contributed as translators. Sergej now is living in Helsinki and knows the context better then me, so he will tell us about it in more details a bit later. For my part, I just want to introduce the whole thing in a very general way. It will combine Russian and Finnish poets who will read alternately.

As for the Finnish poets, I would characterize them as representatives of an ultra-formalist school or trend not only in the contemporary Finnish but also worldwide poetry. Some of them use destroyed, internationalized language of the Internet blogs, chats, other texts from the web – that is, different, “fallen”, vulgar forms of literature, and speech genres. Others are more futuristic in their addressing the sound and the word, and in destructing the both by means of computer programs; our good friend Leevi Lehto, for example, invented Google Poem Generator, in other words he works with what in contemporary art is called found objects or ready-made. I think it’s interesting, for in our tradition such practices are not that well elaborated – sure, we can recall similar experiments in our Futurists, Cubo-Futurists, Imaginists, Nichevok’s, but still it’s a very marginal thing today, so I think we should be curious to see how these radical practices are at work in the neighboring Suomi (Finland)…

I myself translated for this anthology Leevi Lehto’s essay where he describes his trajectory from the more or less comprehensible conventional poetry to the experiments with the Internet and Google Poem Generator. He also depicts his connections with American Language poetry and his view of the international or globalized poetry, which is being written today in(between) many languages at once. His essay’s title is “Plurifying the Languages of the Trite”, a subversive paraphrase of the famous Ezra Pound motto “To purify the language of the tribe”. Unfortunately, this word-play cannot be properly rendered in Russian, so I simply translated the meaning as it is.

Well, what unite these four Finnish poets who will read tonight is this very addressing the trite, the vulgar, low modes of language and speech. And now I’m going to moderate the readings, but before that I would like to clear the floor for Sergej Zavjalov.

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