Book review | The Californian hermit poet is the last of his kind – It took two years for the paper contract to arrive in Finland

Poems

Gary Snyder: This moment. Finnish Tero Tähtinen. 87 pp. Enostone.

American Gary Snyder (b. 1930) seems to be the last living writer of the 1950s beat generation, when a bookseller who reached a respectable age Lawrence Ferlinghetti too (1919-2021) changed diocese a few years ago.

The importance of the Beat writers is not exaggerating one bit if it is claimed that the 1960s, with its various social, spiritual and artistic upheavals, would have been very different without their curiosity and thirst for life.

by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) Dharma bombsSnyder, also known as the role model for Japhy Ryder, the main character of the work, introduced Kerouac, For Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and other city kids, two big things, wild nature and Buddhism.

Snyder’s last collection for the time being also bursts with poems connected to these themes This moment (This moment, 2015), according to the publisher, publishing the Finnish translation was not a quick project. Snyder himself wrote his masterpiece inspired by Chinese visual art Endless mountains and rivers (1996, Finnish JK Lovely 2011) for more than forty years, so you should expect good things from him.

Snyder has lived for a long time in a house he built himself in a remote place in the mountains of California, and what if This moment contains a charming ode to his Macintosh laptop, the author could not be reached electronically, at least for contractual matters. It took two years for the paper letter to arrive from the mountains to Finland, and as a condition for the translation rights, Snyder demanded that the publishing house donate one hundred euros to nature conservation. It is now printed on the books and covers that Enostone donated this amount to the Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation before the work was published.

Finnish translator Tero Tähtinen says in the afterwords of the work that he visited Snyder in the Sierra Nevada ten years ago and discussed, among other things, his quality as a poet.

When Tähtinen mentioned the term “court poet of deep ecology”, which is often repeated in author introductions, Snyder had responded in a heated tone that he is not a poet of nature but of work. Snyder really likes to describe the work as much as he does, even looking for erotic tones Kalle Päätalobut hardly as long-winded.

Snyder’s work descriptions take the reader to special places, each of which has its own nature. Although Snyder’s base is in California, the book also spans literally all over the world, from Madagascar to Alaska.

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Snyder bull-headedly heads straight for death and films the entire process.

Immediately in the first poem “Pahkurainen” the insect-eaten pine is split with a “borrowed splitting machine from Briggs & Stratton/ twenty tons of pressure/ a wedge at the end of a piston-like push rod”. At the end of the poem, the pakhkura reminds me of Snyder’s late wife, whose death and cremation process, and which ends the collection, “Mene nyt”, is one of the finest texts in Snyder’s entire production.

Tähtinen compares a death poem Kai Nieminen to a fine collection I woke up from the dream again (2021), but while the latter describes life without a spouse after his passing, Snyder bull-headedly heads straight for death and describes the whole process. The poem is not for the faint of heart.

Combining the mythologies of indigenous peoples, Buddhist wisdom, nature observations and the sweat of a worker, Snyder is above all a pluralist, a friend of diversity, for whom talk of one great nature must so
und like monotheism. As usual, the monotony of Christianity also gets a ride in the new book: “Innumerable minor deities are waiting for the start of their reign and are just learning who they are”.

Tähtienen’s translation is of a high standard. Only in a few bits of dialogue and other register changes do the poems not achieve the natural breathability of the original text.