Selected Writings

by Mirjam Tuominen, David McDuff (Translator)

Mirjam Tuominen was a major poet and short story writer, as well as a distinguished essayist, translator and artist. Her work progressed through traditional prose, modernist poetry and abstract painting to Roman Catholic mysticism. She is one of the trio of great Scandinavian women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Karin Boye – all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books. Her stories are often about love’s intensity, its eroticism and tenderness, about jealousy and struggles for power between men and women. They are acute in their depiction of small town life in Finland in the 1940s, and in capturing her sense of dread at the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies during the War. Everything she wrote afterwards was scarred by the horror of the Holocaust, and in particular by one news story of a German soldier who threw a Jewish boy into a sewer because the boy cried when the soldier was whipping his mother. Mirjam Tuominen had a frightening, self-destructive ability to react directly to the suffering of others, and much of her poetry can be traced back to her anguished response to this one incident. Her poems are obsessive in confronting guilt, vulnerability and power, in their searching for absolute truth in a world she saw as split between victims and tormentors. Mirjam Tuominen was drawn to writers who were vulnerable and tormented outsiders. She translated their work, and wrote powerful studies of ?gures such as Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Hölderlin and Cora Sandel. Her essays shows the extent of her identification with ‘Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with an extreme and almost intolerable intensity.’ David McDuff’s edition includes selections from Mirjam Tuominen’s poetry and stories, as well as her seminal essay Victim and Tormentor. It is introduced by her daughter, the writer Tuva Korsström.

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1994

Reviews

[Ignacio Unamuno · Rating 5 out of 5]

¡Qué hallazgo es Mirjam Tuominen!

Una poeta finlandesa, de mediados del siglo XX, que escribió sobre los horrores del fascismo, que leyó incansablemente a Rilke, Hölderlin, Kafka, Proust y Sandel, que fue internada en el manicomio y que, al borde de su vida, se convirtió al catolicismo era lo suficientemente anómala como para no llamar mi atención. Busqué por todas partes libros suyos, pero ninguno estaba traducido del finés. Por fin, di con este librito, traducido prodigiosamente por David McDuff, y quedé gratamente estremecido.

Consideraré a Tuominen, a partir de ahora, la escritora más infravalorada de los últimos tiempos. Sólo hay que empezar a leer sus relatos sobre una infancia simultáneamente jovial y dolorosa para quedar prendado de su introspección. La respetuosa narrativa de atrocidades cometidas por nazis logra darles palabras acertadas, no triviales, a sucesos innombrables. A mi gusto, su prosa está plenamente ejercitada en la meditación sobre las soledades, los sufrimientos y la incomprensión.

Sus poesías, por otro lado, son difíciles. No dejan, por eso, de ser buenas. Simplemente se requiere de una visión madura, no ingenua, sobre la mística del lenguaje para penetrar en estos versos. Tuominen es muy consciente de que, en los horrores genocidas del siglo XX, las palabras deben ir mucho más allá de las descripciones, las representaciones, las catalogaciones. Y, por eso, su poesía escapa a toda superficialidad. En particular, el poema que concluye el libro, “Retrospect”, de 1959, tendría que estar a la altura de un Celan.

Definitivamente, Mirjam Tuominen merece muchos más lectores.