ABSTRACT
It is an apt coincidence that a translation of Pentti Saarikoski’s quirkily erudite, soul-searching, yet also frank and down-to-earth Trilögy (1996), penned in Finnish on the chilly Swedish island of Tjorn, has been finely produced in hot, sandy New Mexico by La Alameda Press. This geographical paradox sums up amusingly the ultimately endearing (if sometimes irritating) Saarikoski (1937-1983), who traveled far and wide during his too short lifetime and had a marked predilection for the “topsy-turvy.” He was also—to cite another warm and dusty spot—the foremost Finnish translator of ancient Greek literature. He rendered Aristotle’s Poetics, Sappho’s poems, epigrams from The Greek Anthology, some of Euripides’s plays (and Plato’s dialogues), and especially fragments of his beloved Heraclitus, whom he appointed “a staff member of [his] poetry.” “What I’m after are the dead,” he revealingly remarks, “and unborn gods / Nothing very problematic about the era of angels / in which we now live.” Besides Greek, which deeply informed the directness and essence-seeking qualities of his verse, he translated from Italian (notably Italo Calvino), Norwegian, Swedish, German (Bertolt Brecht), and extensively from English. From our literature, his renderings comprised books by Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Philip Roth, John Barth, Anais Nin, and Allen Ginsberg. He put John Lennon into Finnish and—as tellingly—James Thurber.
