Poetry
Runot
Not translated into English
Kaarlo Sarkia · 1944
Synopsis
The author's four collections, published from 1929 to 1943, followed by poems left outside the collections and by his translations. Childhood memories, love, landscapes and the world of dreams recur in them, with a longing for unattainable dreams and for beauty; in the last collection, the death of the one who writes and the suffering of men take up all the space, and several poems reject war. The form is fixed, the rhythm and rhyme handled with virtuosity.
Context
He himself gathered his collections into this volume in 1944; the last, published in the middle of the war, had earned him the charge of lacking patriotism for his pacifist poems. The book opens with a poem that Uuno Kailas had dedicated to him, copied in his own hand, then with a long study by Kaarlo Marjanen, who sees the work advancing in waves, collection after collection, from withdrawal to openness. The final translations include Baudelaire and Pascoli. Reprinted in 1964, 1977, 1991 and 2016, it has gone through at least fifteen printings.
Who it is for
A large volume of verse, nearly five hundred pages, in Finnish. Fixed forms with heavy rhyme, which translation loses almost entirely: the music is what makes the book valuable.
Prizes and reception
The edition through which this poet has been read since 1944; together with Uuno Kailas, he is regarded as the most significant Finnish poet of the thirties.