Auringonvihreä

by Gunnar Björling, Pauliina Haasjoki (Translator), Peter Mickwitz (Translator)

Gunnar Björlingin Auringonvihreä on ajattelun ja muodon suitsimatonta luovuutta. Alkujaan omakustanteena julkaistu, moniaineksinen kokoelma julistaa ja laulaa ylistyslaulua, muttei hetkeksikään kadota ristiriitaa, komediaa ja kirjavuutta. Björling suhtautuu abstraktioihin, olentoihin ja esineisiin yhtäläisellä tuttavallisuudella ja hellyydelläkin. Kaiken takana on ehdoton pyrkimys rajoittamattomuuteen ja suhteellisuuteen.

Auringonvihreässä Björling astuu esiin koko laajuudessaan: yhtenä hetkenä hän on filosofi, toisena runoilija ja sitten taas aforistikko, välillä hän kirjoittaa proosaa, joissakin teksteissä on esseen piirteitä. Tässä teoksessa Björling on lähestyttävä ja kutsuva mutta myös röyhkeä, toisinaan suorastaan raivostuttava.

Auringonvihreä (alkuperäinen teos Solgrönt, 1933) on ensimmäinen suomeksi käännetty kokonainen Björlingin runoteos.

Genres: Poetry

129 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Finland-Swedish modernist poet, whose work is characterized by his attempt to find "words and more than to understand / words and that no other is". Most of his career, Björlingt suffered from lack of understanding – he was the most radical of all the modernists, a devoted dadaist, and labelled incomprehensible by the majority of the public.

Now is not dead
it is a voice
barely shimmering
in this night of light
and between space and sea
(1953; transl. by David McDuff, from A way to measure time, 1992)

Gunnar Björling was born in Helsinki, the son of Edvard Björling, a post-office official, and Lydia Maria Rivell. After Björling's father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1896 and was unable to continue with his work, the family fell into poverty. His childhood and youth Björling spent in Helsinki, Viipuri, and Kangasala. In 1901-02 Björling attended military academy in Fredrikshamn, but returned then to Helsinki, where he actively participated in the struggle against attempts to russify Finland.

Björling studied philosophy at the University of Helsinki, graduating in 1915. An atheist, misfit with his unconventional opinions and informal relationship with his students in the Swedish Normal Lyceum, Björling eventually abandoned his career as a teacher. Moreover, Björling was openly a homosexual, which made him something of a renegade; once he was put under house arrest. Because of his sexual orientation, he was also vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation. During the Civil war (1917-1918) Björling remained in Helsinki, which was ruled for a period by Reds, but kept a secret White radio sender in his basement. It has been claimed, without evidence, that Björling was on the boat, that carried the condemned Socialist writer Maiju Lassila to his death. Lassila was shot while trying to escape, or drowned, before the boat reached Sveaborg. Björling never published an account of what he allegedly witnessed. After the war, Björling devoted himself entirely to writing and drew around him a group of disciples who wanted to renew Finnish literature.

As a poet Björling made his debut at the age of 35 with Vilande dag, published by Daimon, a short-lived publishing company founded by the writer L.A. Salava. The collection of prose poems showed Björling's knowledge of the work of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, whose famous collection of song poems Gitanjali had been translated into Swedish in 1913.

Björling was deeply influenced by positivism and Edward Westermarck's relativism. Also Nietzsche, Jean-Marie Guyau, and Henri Bergson left traces on Björling's thought, which he early presented in in articles written for the magazine Quesego, and in Korset of löftet (1925), an expression of "a universal dada-individualism".

After his hectic dadaistic period in the late 1920s, Björling published Kiri-ra! (1930) and Solgrönt (1933), in which he began to use motifs from everyday life and nature. "Jag skriver inte litteratur, jag söker mitt ansikte och fingrarna" (I don't write literature, I'm looking for my face and my fingers) he said. Björling's world did not have grammatical or syntactical continuity, language was broken down, it was always open, moving, unfinished, in which "luft är och ljus" (the air is and light). Crucial for his thinking was the idea of the endless flow of life; nothing is complete, nothing is perfect. "Life is the banana the monkeys do not reach," he once said. In his striving to capture escaping moments of life, Björling constantly struggled with the limits of language, painfully aware of that words cannot render fully one's personal feelings. Accepting this, his radical nihilism gradually changed into self-examination, calmness, and metaphysical attempts to be one with the world: "a poem is my life", he wrote in Ord och att ej annat (1945).

During the Continuation War (1941-44) an air bomb hit the house where Björling lived and destroyed all his manuscripts. In the 1940s and 1950s his bas

Reviews

[Julia Eriksson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man gillar ju nån som bara kör.

[Armi Harmit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minä olen lude
ja minä olen kuohu
ja semmoista viiniä jota kukaan ei juo,
minä olen marttyyrinnaula ja kaikkien kaikkien orja.
Minä kuin kala, sappesi.

Käärmeenmyrkkyä olen minä tässä pienessä huoneessa
mustekala olen minä kaikkien aikojen lukukamarissa
mehupilli epileptikon tanssiin, suolaisessa lohdussa raikas pimeys
kun kaikki on hiljaa.

Syvemmällä kuin muissa on pyhäinhäpäisy
minussa.
Minä en ole varma, ryntään kaikkiin ilmansuuntiin
minä kavahdan, ja tunnen vain että olen vähällä rikkoa,
ja rikoin.
S. 55-56.

"Esipuhe tähän kirjaan" oli myös lajissaan loistava lihapullineen päivineen. Hienosti kaikki taipuu, "muotoa purkavina ja rakentavina kielinä", käännöstä myöten. Pidin paljon runsaudesta, rönsyävyydestä ja ryöppyävyydestä, joita asiantuntijakärsivälliset ja -innokkaat alku- ja jälkisanat selvittävät. Edellämainittujen lisäksi pidettäväksi löytyi kaupunkirunoista tähänastinen suosikki sivuilla 95-69, "Tahdon elää kaupungissa niin kuin se on, ..."

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meditoin.

[Epifras]

kanonsalut

säger den glada vetenskapens den gudärdöddiktaren

och murarna rämnar och vi ser solen igen

[E.E. Leivo]

Rikas ja pursuileva & hieno suomennos.