Paavo Haavikko’s Talvipalatsi (The Winter Palace) represented the culmination of a decade of innovative work that helped introduce modernism to Finnish-language poetry in the 1950s. A series of nine long poems, it should be seen as one unified text in which each poem uses recurring images to build new layers of meaning—a technique that Haavikko describes in the opening lines of the “First Poem”:

“Chased into silver, / Side by side: / The images. / To have them tell you. . . .”

He uses a recurring set of images—a house, a journey, a forest, the Winter Palace, a bird, a poet—which are realigned and take on new meanings throughout the cycle.

A kind of metapoem, the work deals chiefly with the act of writing, the creative process, and the place of the new poetry. Using a mixture of everyday and poetic language, Haavikko calls attention to language and to the poet himself. For example, in the “Fourth Poem” he writes,

“This is a journey through familiar speech / Towards the region that is no place,”

while in the “Third Poem” he comments:

“Tourist, listen, perhaps you don’t even know / I hardly get my expenses back, writing these poems, on my way / To the region that is no place.”

The poet’s journey to “the region that is no place” takes him from the forest,

“through the Winter Palace, / Built in 1754–1762,”

and back again to the forest, encompassing both nature and culture, Finland and abroad, present time and historical time. But above all the journey takes place in the poet’s mind,

“Under the roof / Thatched by my hair,”

as he writes in the “First Poem.”

In the “Second Poem” he describes an encounter with an “exalted being” in a bottle, who fails to help him; later he remarks,

“I let the exalted being out of the bottle and she / Was finished! emptied! aborted!”

In the “Fifth Poem,” echoing a theme of Finnish folk poetry, he has a dialogue with an all-knowing child who turns out to be

“full of contraries, / . . . boy and a girl, / one and two.”

The child advises him,

“Why are you praising the language that rules? / . . . why shouldn’t you try to be free?”

The idea of freedom is repeated and emphasized at the end of the cycle in the “Ninth Poem,” which ends with a vision of the poet

“at the bottom of the sky, / When the sky is thin, . . . / And the soul / is set free.”

Bibliography
Haavikko, Paavo. The Winter Palace. In Selected Poems by Paavo Haavikko. Translated by Anselm Hollo. London: Cape Goliard, 1968.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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