From the Finlandia Prize-winning author who published the first Finnish-language lesbian novel, this week’s Translation Tuesday features a genre-defying work of autofiction from Pirkko Saisio. The eroticism of encountering a stranger—be it in a tram or a seminar room; in real life or one’s imagination—is what ties together this attempt to follow the ruminating mind. In relating the path of her own desire, our narrator asks: “Is this story actually going anywhere? And is this even a story?”—cognisant of the limits of narrative in pinning down unruly desire. In Mia Spangenberg’s translation, Siasio’s virtuosity and playfulness is on full display. “Small Crescendos” is a perfect addition to your reading list this Women in Translation Month.
“As a reader and translator, I’m enchanted by the lightness of Saisio’s prose and its rhythm and pacing, but it also poses a challenge, since Finnish is an agglutinative language and more concise than English. During revision, I focused on reading the translation out loud, as if it were a spoken word piece. Finnish can exhibit a gender fluidity that does not exist in English (there are no gendered pronouns as “hän” refers to both he and she), which may seem radical but is simply a tolerance for knowing less about people’s gender in writing. However, when Saisio writes about her love affair with an actor, I ultimately chose the word “actress” because it is otherwise easy to assume that Saisio is describing a heterosexual relationship when she is in fact not. This would be clear to most Finnish readers as Saisio came out publicly as a lesbian in the 1990s and has long advocated for LGBTQ+ rights in Finland.”
— Mia Spangenberg
When a wave crashes against a rocky shore, it sprays
glistening pearls of water into the air. Like small crescendos.
A gaze. One is at the bottom of the stairs, and another is descending
the stairs.
There’s a gaze, and the beginning and ending of a relationship are in that
gaze, with a slight
acceleration in the middle, an accelerando.
A hand grips a pole on the tram. It’s a man’s
hand, slender and beautiful, meant for some instrument, maybe
a cello or viola.
I place my hand beneath his and squeeze the pole.
And yes!
The cellist’s hand slides down the pole and covers my own. Oh those long,
thrilling seconds between stops!
And that gaze again.
You exchange glances. You’re in a heated
discussion that’s spinning like an enraged carousel. (And this
is happening in public, of course.)
Stop.
Have those eyes frosted over? Are those ice flowers?
Or is it a glimmer of understanding?
No. No, no, and no.
It turns out to be love, ripe for the picking in a strange place.
Those are the kinds of pearls restless souls collect in their memories,
relationships that begin and end within ten seconds.
They don’t lead anywhere.
They don’t need to; they’re perfect just as they are.
I can’t get used to their perfection.
I don’t believe that they don’t long for more space. More space and more
time. A future and a past.
They’re free from chaos and expectations, explanations,
disappointments.
I can’t get used to that.
Just like I can’t get used to the crescent moon lying
on its back in the black sky.
And I can’t get used to the air in the seminar room,
so full of the steamy mix of estrogen and testosterone
that it’s sometimes hard to breathe.
I can’t get used to the fact that I’m in Argentina and that Argentina
is exactly how I imagined it.
I can’t get used to the Woman at all.
She’s the tour guide of our little group.
At first I think the Woman is drunk, and it
offends me.
She wears a plastic wig, and every now and then it’s on crooked
during the week.
She talks quickly and passionately, she touches everyone
frequently, and me especially (which terrifies me a little at first),
her mood swings like a sick man in his troubled bed. (Oops,
that was a Pushkin metaphor: the Neva is tossing and turning / like
a sick man in his troubled bed!)
Yes, she is ill.
She’s undergoing chemotherapy.
She’s not an alcoholic after all; her dry skin and the shadows under her eyes
are all a result of the illness and her treatment.
She tells me about the chemotherapy when we are alone.
It’s hard for me to hear what’s she’s saying, a wave
crashes between the statues of the sea lions on the boulevard by the beach
in Mar del Plata
just as she says the word “chemotherapy.”
I can see it in her dark eyes, she’s just made a major
confession. But you can’t possibly ask someone to repeat that one word, it
would be rude,
inappropriate, condescending, all of it.
So I say with interest: aha.
Luckily one of the other participants in the seminar tells me
that very same evening that our guide has advanced
breast cancer, hence the wig.
Is this story actually going anywhere?
And is this even a story?
It doesn’t feel like it is, so I can easily spend a moment
in the Argentina of my mind, just because.
The Argentinians have their tango, and we Finns have our famous
painting of
the fighting grouse.
They concern the same thing, whereas the Finnish tango
and the Argentine tango are in no way about the same thing at all.
In my memory we danced the Argentine tango in Mar del
Plata all that week, much more than we did in Buenos
Aires, where I am about to spend a few days after Mar del Plata.
The tango is part of the dinner program every evening.
First, a pair of professional dancers step onto the dance floor.
Their performance is a ruthless rendition of the mating
ritual of birds, though it’s certainly nothing like the dance of the plump
Finnish grouse.
Maybe of the cranes.
The floor is full of necks and thighs, passionate attacks,
artful dodges, surrenders meant to be withheld, promises and
promises broken.
The professional dancers’ tango depresses the audience.
Actually it doesn’t depress anyone, other than me of course.
My evenings are ruined by my anxiety. I’m afraid someone
will ask me to dance the tango, because the professional dancers
always invite the audience to dance after their performance.
I can’t see myself trying to imitate this metaphor
of erotic courtship, and so I escape to the bar
as soon as I can.
The Woman in the wig joins me, I’m
used to her and enjoy her company.
I also enjoy her company on a long and relaxed
day we spend in a large gathering at a traditional
hacienda, eating a bull, maybe two, from start to finish.
(And after that day, I may also have included Geraldine Chaplin
in my circle of friends because, when we were introduced to each other,
she said she was pleased to meet me.
Where I live in the land of fighting grouse, we say we’re pleased
to meet someone when we are actually pleased to meet them, at least
that’s what I
do, then and only then.
And so it follows that I have the right to believe
that Geraldine Chaplin was pleased to meet me. And
if that is the case, then why shouldn’t I consider her my friend?)
The Woman and I retreat into the shadows, like cats, by the wall,
behind trees and bushes, where
we can watch those who like to move about visibly and in the open
from the foliage.
We talk often, and are silent just as often, and I don’t
have any memory of what we talked about or what we were
silent about.
As the days go by, the Woman reminds me more and more of my aunt
when she had pancreatic cancer at the end of her life.
She had a plastic wig, and moods that swung from light to dark, hot to cold,
from the microcosm
to the macrocosm, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
The last day and then the last evening arrive, along with the moon
lying on its back and the lazy murmuring of the black waves.
The door to the bus is open, the luggage is already
stowed in the hold.
The Woman and I loiter by the bus, no one
is talking, we’re in the midst of the
empty and awkward minutes before the farewells when everyone is
waiting, and no one knows what they’re waiting for and why.
And then it’s time to leave.
And before that the farewells.
The Woman embraces me, oh, she is so thin already.
Everything is over, soon her life will be, too, and after that,
mine, sometime.
We stand there, embracing, not looking at each other.
Then I get on the bus.
There, in safety, I look at her through the glass.
When the bus finally rumbles to life, she presses two
fingers first to her lips and then to the glass.
I do the same. I press my fingers first to my lips, then to the
glass.
Then I press her to my heart, close to
my aunt.
And that’s where they’ll stay, close to each other.
That farewell was the crescendo to our erotically tinged
friendship. A small gesture, such depth.
And then it’s twenty years later.
A couch.
I’m on the couch.
A friend is on the couch.
My friend is telling me about a relationship with a man.
The man is married, my friend is not.
It’s the typical story, insofar as there is a
typical story in the world.
Sexual passion is followed by feelings of attachment,
love (some kind of love, my friend says), and then
vague ideas about a common future,
long periods of indecisiveness, the weakening intensity
of feeling in love, a relationship
deepening in attachment and habit.
And then my friend says that the only possible crescendo
to their relationship
would be to die together.
Crescendo.
That’s the kind of gift my friend carelessly throws at me,
right there on the couch.
Every relationship has a crescendo, and of course many small
crescendos, too. But all love strives towards
that big crescendo.
Dying together.
I hurtle back twenty years in time to a corridor on a train.
That’s me standing there.
I’m drinking cognac with the Actress.
We’re nearing the end of our dark and stormy relationship,
we both know it.
Love doesn’t have a single color.
It can be red, but it can also be blue.
It can even be pearl gray.
Or black.
What starts as black must end as black.
Our black love began on the stage, where else?
One was performing, and the other was watching.
Then the other performed while the first one watched.
Then we performed together, but nothing really
came of it.
Con fuoco.
Forte fortissimo.
Sforzando.
And lacrimoso, from the very beginning.
I had a dream. I understood what it was about, but I couldn’t get out of the
sinking boat.
We were in a sinking boat, the same boat,
just the two of us.
We called for help, we did, even though my dream didn’t reveal
how serious we may have been about it.
My dream didn’t reveal how pleasurable it was to drown
in the same boat together.
But then my dream expanded in an embarrassing way.
Our drowning boat was actually in a swimming pool, with
an audience standing around the pool and clapping
at our performance.
Was that black love just a strange performance that would
have fizzled out early on without an audience?
I don’t know. Really: I don’t.
We don’t have a future together, that’s been clear
from the first time we met.
We have no plans, not even for the next hour.
We don’t have anything to keep us together.
Except that black thing.
And now back to the corridor on the train.
We’re on our way back to our own respective realities.
We don’t have each other, but we have lots of other things,
both of us do, in our own lives. Lives in which
we can’t share anything with each other.
We’re on our way toward those other things.
The conductor enters the corridor, sees the bottle of cognac
and tells us that we aren’t allowed to enjoy our own beverages
on the train.
But this is the kind of train and the kind of darkness that
makes the conductor believe us when we tell him that we
have to finish this bottle and see it through to the end.
The conductor nods and smiles and asks us to hide
the bottle at least.
To the end.
What does that mean?
At its most romantic and most banal
it means dying together.
Crescendo.
Accelerando.
Amoroso.
Appassionato.
Al fine.
Al fine?
The woman who is drinking cognac with me in that corridor
on the train suggests
that we open the door and jump.
She says it’s the only way we can get this
to end.
I think about it.
It seems like the only solution.
It seems tempting. It seems irresponsible. It
seems ridiculous.
It seems like the only solution.
Just then the train noticeably slows down.
We’re approaching our destination.
We’ve missed our chance, there won’t be a crescendo after all. We’ve missed
our fate, it has turned into something else.
There’s a different kind of light waiting for us at our destination,
a light for each of us.
Right now, in the pit of disappointment and relief,
it looks gray, that light.
The ones we’ve betrayed are waiting, the ones we’ve abandoned
are waiting, the explanations are waiting, everything that’s been
buried and forgotten,
everything that’s been thrown away.
It’s all waiting in the gray everyday life of tomorrow.
Love has no morality.
Where on earth did Paul the Apostle get the idea that love
doesn’t act inappropriately?
That’s exactly what love does, all the time,
and ruthlessly so.
But was there any love at all in that corridor on the train?
I don’t know, and I didn’t know then either.
What was that black thing then?
I don’t understand it, and I didn’t understand it then either.
Love has no morality, but it does have a shape.
Love comes in the shape of a wave. It rises and falls,
it attacks and retreats. Finally it retreats and retreats,
after it has crashed against the rocky shore and shattered into thousands
of pearls beyond our reach.
Accelerando al fine. The way of waves and desperate love.
Translated from the Finnish by Mia Spangenberg
Pirkko Saisio is a Finnish author, actress, and director. With a career spanning over forty years, her output includes novels, essays, plays, screenplays for television and film, and even librettos for the ballet. She has been recognized with many awards, including the Finlandia Prize—Finland’s most prestigious literary award—and the Pro Finlandia Medal, handed by the government of Finland to respected artists and writers. The essay featured here is from her 2019 collection entitled Epäröintejä: Tunnustuksia rakkaudesta, kirjoittamisesta ja esiintymisestä (Misgivings: Confessions on Love, Writing, and Performing).
Mia Spangenberg is a translator working from Finnish and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and in journals such as LitHub. She is also a regular contributor to the WorldKidLit blog. She has a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family.
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