Centre for Romanian Studies

Poetry in Translation (CXCVI): Eeva-Liisa MANNER, (1921 – 1995), FINLAND, “Assimilation”, “Integrare”

ASSIMILATION
Eeva-Liisa Manner
(1921, Helsinki – 1995, Tampere)

I will show you a way
that I have traveled.

If you come
If you come back some day
searching for me

do you see how everything shifts
a little every moment
and becomes less pretentious
and more primitive
(like pictures drawn by children
or early forms of life:
the soul’s alphabet)

you will come to a warm region
it is soft and hazy
but then I will no longer be me,
but the forest.
* * * * * * * * * *

INTEGRARE
Eeva-Liisa Manner
(1921, Helsinki – 1995, Tampere)

Îţi voi arăta drumul
care l-am urmat.

Dacă vei veni
Dacă vei veni într-o zi înapoi
căutându-mă

oare vezi cum lucrurile se schimbă
câte un pic în fiecare clipă
ca să devină mai puţin pretenţioase
şi mai naive
(aidoma desenelor de copii
sau formelor de viaţă primitive:
un alfabet al sufletului).

O să vii pe meleaguri calde
un aer blând în ceaţă
dar atunci eu nu voi mai fi eu,
ci doar codrul.

(Rendered in Romanian by Constantin ROMAN, London,
© 2013 Copyright Constantin ROMAN)

* * * * * * * * * *

SHORT BIO:
(from Wikipedia)

Eeva-Liisa Manner (5 December, 1921, Helsinki – 7 July 1995, Tampere), Finnish poet, playwright and translator. Although born in Helsinki she spent her youth in Vyborg (Viipuri). Manner started as a poet in 1944 (Mustaa ja punaista; “Black and Red”). From her breakthrough collection of poems, Tämä matka (“This Journey”, 1956) she has been seen as one of the most influential modernists in postwar Finland.
Eeva-Liisa Manner wrote over fifteen original collections of poems, plays for theater and radio, novels and short prose. She translated widely contemporary and classic literature, including names like William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Hermann Hesse, and Franz Kafka.
Her work has been translated to many European languages. Translation of Manners Selected Poems in English was published in 1997.
Manner about her youth:
The war years shadowed my youth. I was seventeen when the Russian planes started bombarding my home town of Wiborg on 30 November 1939, damaging it badly. At armistice, Wiborg had to be yielded, it remained behind the border – an endless source of nostalgia for one who had a catlike, persevering fondness for homestead. Even as a ten-year-old, I had spine-chilling dreams about the destruction of Wiborg, and from those times onwards I have been haunted by reflections about the nature and mystery of time. I believe that we have a false conception of time; everything has already happened somewhere in an unknown dimension.