Kuisma Korhonen: Renaissance @ www.leevilehto.net

Translated by Make Copies[1]
Finnish original

[...] the sonnet's predetermined form, together with it's relative shortness, have made it possible - to put it somewhat bluntly - for the crazyness to come in too [...]. [2]]

"Otavan uutisia" ("News From Otava") is part of Leevi Lehto's collection of sonnets Ääninen (Lake Onega, 1997). Ääninen has two user-interfaces: the printed book, and the Internet version, where the reader can produce ever new versions of the "Otavan uutisia" sonnet. In the present article, I will discuss Ääninen as a whole consisting of these two interfaces. Ääninen being an ever-re-borning work, I will also discuss it in connection to the Renaissance, the period when the sonnet consolidated its position as one of the most prestigious forms of Western poetry.

The term, Renaissance, comes from the French word renaissance, rebirth. It was introduced by the historians of the 19th century, to denote a cultural movement which from the 14th up until the 17th century worked to bring back to life the golden age of Antiquity after the darkness of the preceding centuries. The movement spread from South to North, starting from the 14th and 15th century Italian Humanism, then moving forward into the France, Germany, Spain, and Netherlands of the early 16th century, and reaching also England and Scandinavia toward the end of that century. It was largely a question of propaganda: the preceding centuries were not especially "dark", and the new cultural forms in fact owed much more to the Middle Ages than the Humanists were willing to acknowledge. There had been periods of cultural revival under the same term even before: the Carolingian Renaissance during the 9th Century, the Provence Renaissance during the 12th, and the Sicilian one during 13th. Now the feeling of dawning of the new age was, however, strengthened by the great voyages of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as by new cosmologies where the Earth was no longer seen as the center of the universe. Yet perhaps the single most important factor in all that was the invention of printing, the most important information revolution before electronic communication.

The Renaissance culture and literature was drawn to opposite directions by many contradictory tendencies and movements: the popular culture inherited from the Middle Ages, the learned interest in the Antiquity, the influence of the Arab world and Byzantium, the fragmentary nature of power relations, the rise of the new capitalistic economy, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and so on. In this new situation, no one world view or cultural form could any longer be dominant. The old world view was breaking apart, but the new one was yet to be formed.

The Petrarchan Sonnet

The sonnet was born in the 13th century Italy, in the legendary court of Fredric the II, where Arabs and Jews along with the troubadours expelled from the Southern France devoted their time to learned studies under protection from the Norman conquerors newly arrived from the North.[3] This meeting of cultures is evident in the sonnet: the elevation of the beloved almost to an object of religious adoration, the exact and calculated visual form, as well as the complicated rhyme patterns all originate in the Arabic love poetry.

In the history of the European vernacular literature, the sonnet represents a shift away from the medieval oral poetries toward the written vernacular of Renaissance. The term sonetto would seem to refer to a "small" or "empty" voice, or to a voice harmonized without musical support.[4] In the sonnet, the folk song's customary cycles of stanzas and refrains are replaced by a compact, fixed whole, the rhythm of which is spatial rather that vocal, the themes again being woven together into a tension-ridden field by the rhyming.[5]

For its final success, the sonnet form is to thank the famous first Renaissance Humanist, Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), whose poem sequence Rime (also known as Canzoniere) may be seen as the Mother of all poetry collections of the modern times.[6] The Renaissance knight had to master the rhymes of the sonnet as well as the art of war: in both, the lines and the form were to be kept regular, while making sure that the sword (of the word) was quick. During the following centuries, the sonnet established itself as perhaps the most valued form of the Western poetry. From William Shakespeare to Stéphane Mallarmé poets have struggled with its short but dynamic form, and it has provided the means of expression both to the Romantic longing and to the modern poetic language of the Symbolists.[7] In Finland, the earliest experiments with the form date from the 19th century, and in spite of doubts concerning its adaptability into the Finnish tradition, at least Eino Leino, V. A. Koskenniemi, Otto Manninen, Heikki Asunta, and Einari Vuorela of the 20th century poets have made successful use of it in their work.

It is customary to divide the sonnet into two parts, the first eight lines (two stanzas) forming the octet, the last six (two last stanzas) again the sestet. The turning point between them, often accompanied by a certain change of perspective, is known as volta. Because of the structural asymmetry, the rhythm tends to accelerate toward the end of the poem, and the perspective will often enlarge from personal observation toward a more universally valid experience. The two last lines can sometimes function as some sort of a final statement, a fact that might have contributed to the birth of the so called English Sonnet later on. The English Sonnet consists of three four line stanzas, plus a couplet.[8] The rhyme structure can vary from the earliest abab abab cde cde to more complicated ones, like abba abba cdc dcd or abab cdcd eef ggf.

As an example, let's take the following sonnet by Petrarch (rhyme scheme here being abba abba cde dce; the English version is by Maurice Bishop):

The speaker feels love to be both sweet and painful, and culminates his sentiments into an oxymoron typical of Petrarch: "viva-morte" "life-in-death". This also brings forth a certain doubt concerning the speaker's own self and will: "come puoi tanto in me, s' io nol consento?" ("how can you rule me so, if I'm not fain?"). After the volta, however, the speaker's personal pain develops into an insight about the futility of his grievances: "E s'io 'l consento, a gran torto mi doglio." ("And if I'm willing, why do I suffer so?") The contradiction between the pain and the pleasure of love will be seen as part of the general human condition. The human soul is, as Petrarch with his metaphor lets us think, like a boat pushed back and forth by the wind ("Fra si contrari venti, in frale barca"), and man's knowledge will not be able to scrutinize the secrets of his desires.

According to the scholar Paul Oppenheimer, the sonnet represented the birth of the modern self. The literary poem, freed from the chains of song, strengthened the sense of a personal experience: you could read it by yourself, silently, perusing it. The sonnet's form again made possible a certain sense of progress - here the poet, as opposed to the troubadours, did not just go on weltering in the pain and agony of his love, stanza after stanza, but instead struggled forth toward a resolution, where his own suffering was given meaning as part of a larger whole. Oppenheimer sees an equivalent pattern in the numeral ratios between the parts of the sonnet. Based on the ratios between the sestet, the octet, and the twelve lines preceding the final couplet, he forms the series 6:8:12, which represented cosmic harmony in Plato's Timaeus, already well known in the Middle Ages.[9]

Leevi Lehto's Ääninen

Leevi Lehto's collection of sonnets, Ääninen[10] (1997), was published both as a book and on the Internet, where it is available at www.leevilehto.net. From the very first lines on, it is evident that the sonnet form here conveys a world differing sharply from the one in which Petrarch lived:

Lehto's world is that of computers, golf, flipper, and various messages. Even now, man is not at the level of his or her desires, but to describe the human condition, the "bark" metaphor has been replaced with images borrowed from information technology. For instance the phrase "siisti käyttöliittymä", literally "neat interface", can be read to refer to the book itself or to its Net interface, but the rhyme will connect it also to the word "sä", (colloquial for "you") - as if man were only a user interface customarily referred to by blatant and misleading terms like "I" or "you". The banal absurdity of the second line ("Abdullah puts. Ben Lampion gets tees.") again ridicules the "neatness" of this interface. The information revolution has broken down the traditional structures of meaning, and in stead of the argument of Petrarch, at times obscure but still unified, we now have a flashing, fragmentary, and often absurd diction, where sentences tend to break off midway and thought flees from the reader.

After a few poems you start feeling dizzy, like after shuffling through the TV channels or listening to the radio static noise. What can you reach and seize in this chaos of information? Where to get a steady grip? And whose words are we trying to make sense of, anyway?

In his Afterword, Lehto reveals that almost all the texts "were originally compiled from existing material, mostly put together in an arbitrary way". A poem can be based on a Finnish language literary work just laid out as a sonnet, as in "Sonneja on meillä useasti" (Bulls We Have Frequently, which perhaps should be called "bullet" in stead of "sonnet"). Another can be compiled of random words taken from various sources, first put together into sonnet-like form, then worked on (see the title poem, "Ääninen"). Sometimes the poet has modified an existing sonnet, or just retained its rhyme words for support in writing a new poem. There are also poems based on sonnets in foreign languages, in sound translations. As Lehto notes, many of these methods can be found in the "Experiments" list at the home page of Charles Bernstein, the American poet and Professor.[11]

So who is the writer here, Lehto, the chance, or the language itself? Lehto says his ideal to be "more and more full nonsense and dada", at the same time admitting of being "powerless before [his] meaning-demanding over-selves [Über-Ichs]". A completely meaningless language is almost impossible to attain, at least as far as one uses understandable words. Even an at the first sight totally absurd mass of text will eventually yield meanings, with a certain necessity, and regardless of how randomly it was generated in the first place. "Well, the words don't deprive us of meaning / while not granting it us, either ", as is said in the poem "Päällysvieras" (An Epiphyte)

As an example, let's take the poem printed in the beginning of the present article, "Otavan uutisia". The poem proceeds for the most part in a customary enough trochaic-anapestic rhythm, in a somewhat clumsy and irregular manner. The first five lines are rhymeless, but toward the end the sound gets thicker, and the rhyming more or less complete (abcd ebbd dcc bcd). At the surface level, the poem seems to tell about a person living somewhere in Kamppi or Punavuori (two adjacent neighbourhoods in downtown Helsinki), the mother of whose is a poet, and whose father likewise seems to connect to the literary world (literally: "just for fun a pseudonym for a well-known writer"). The poem's ironic title, taken from the name of a publication of a prestigious Finnish publishing house, also points to the same direction.[12] The numerous literary allusions make us think of the protagonist as a literary worker of sorts himself; he now feels like having lost his (or her) peace of work - possibly on account of the woman lingering in the room. The room of course can be either a concrete apartment house condo, or a symbol for a person's selfhood, and the woman real as well as imagined. The quarters of downtown Helsinki compare to Paris as depicted by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), both locations opening a view to the water swelling under the frozen consciousness - to the unconscious. "Luckily" these separate fixed points " will all be connected, to form a pattern": in other words the poet's work will inter-connect separate things to form compounds laden with meaning. Through these patterns the poet will "grow to reach his (or her?) proper size" - a private experiment has moved up to a level where the earlier identities, gender-related or not, cease to mean anything, the poet being just "somebody" who realizes "being androgyne".[13] This way, we may discern a certain volta in the poem, not so much as turning-point between octet and sestet as in the form of a slide starting at line seven, in which the difficult childhood, the problematic liaison-d'amour, and the agony of writing seem to give way to an insight of his personal writerly call.

Somewhat in the way of the English sonnet, the last two lines can be seen as forming a separate unit, where the poem and the poet finally manage to free themselves from the earlier restrictions: "One misty morning the prisoner / escapes... and the story unfolds like a nut". In the nutshell of the sonnet, we have a story about the difficulties and possibilities of the creative work behind the products advertised in the publisher's magazine.

Ääninen 2.0 beta

With "Otavan uutiset" all interpretations will be even more insufficient than interpretations in general. Namely, the Net interface of Ääninen allows us to create a practically unlimited amount of new versions of the poem. On the web page Ääninen 2.0 beta the user can decide how widely he wants the poem to vary, how much alliteration it should have, whether its rhyme scheme should follow the original, be a variation of it, or free, and whether he would like to "freeze" some lines so they won't change next time. Then just a click at the bullet "New Version", and with the help of a random generator the program creates a new poem that will resemble the original syntactically, only the words this time drawn from a database containing all the words used in the sonnets of Ääninen.

I gave the program a go and tried to create a poem of my own. Wanting to get as far as possible from the original, I adjusted the variation to the maximum, the alliteration to the minimum, and the rhyme scheme to "free". The result was the following:

The poem's style, with its lyyli's[14], tequila's, and asses, was more harsh than what the poems in Ääninen had prepared me for. Poor Lyyli, her behind speckled after getting the hit. What piece of information this woman, brandished as witch, had possibly revealed to deserve such a fate? A name of a descendant?

But this was not all. I expected the program to create a unique, personal poem for me, all right. But I didn't except anything this personal. " One misty dawning the woman then escapes, so / Korhonen will slobber like a highway.". This was an offence! I, Kuisma Korhonen, would never slobber after women! And how is a highway supposed to slobber, anyway? My old friend Jukka Mallinen did not get such a nice treatment, either: " the younger marchals - Groundswell, / proceedings of the Pig, and of Breeding Value [...]will be searched together, into a Mallinen, / whom someone's also fucking to his levers cold".

I tried to keep my head cool. The program had chosen the words by random from among all the words in the collection. There was no-one among the snippets of code wanting to offend me. In the original context the word "Mallinen" admittedly referred a mutual friend of Lehto's and mine, but the tone of the poem dedicated to him was gently ironic rather than offending.[15] As for the word "Korhonen", it originated from "Back office", a poem seemingly depicting the world of business and exhibiting the line "Korhonen Pentti yhtiön mahdollisuus" ("Korhonen Pentti the chance of the firm"). Well, there's no lack of Korhonen's in Finland[16].

Still. would it just be possible that Lehto had managed to slip into his page some small program that would infect the surfer's computer and fish up his name from there? His acquaintances' names? His life? His...?

I began to feel paranoid. I could not avoid it. Doesn't reading literature always demand a certain amount of paranoia, make us connect the unconnected, and form random details into a big, meaning-laden plan? Everything can't well be just chance either, can it? There is always someone lurching behind and sending messages intended just for me - be it God, CIA, or Leevi Lehto...

The tradition

The Modernist movement of Finnish poetry, also known as the "Fifties Modernism", valued pureness of expression. For it, the poem should strive for so exact an expression as possible. This kind of poem created a sense of the author as the guarantor of meaning, both intimate and universally valid at the same time. The allusions to preceding poetry were carefully chosen, and the traditional forms, rhymes and metrics, were banned.

Ääninen is in many ways a protest to the poetics of the Fifties Modernism. First, it flirts openly with the earlier tradition, using - in Twentieth century! - beside the sonnet form itself, also traditional metres and rhymes. Secondly, in Lehto's poems, the thoughts and the images seem to build out randomly, the guarantor subject being replaced with the cacophony of random fragments and words allotted by the computer. Lehto makes use of aleatorism, a method prevalent already in Dada and Surrealism, but one that in Finland wasn't discovered before the Sixties. Most pointedly, the sonnet machine of Ääninen brings to mind Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) with his collection Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (1961), where the poet - himself also with affinities to Surrealism - cut the lines apart so that the reader could use them to create "about" one thousand billion new poems.[17]

But is Ääninen's relation to the Renaissance sonnet tradition only ironic? Should these puttings and asses be seen just as abuses and insults to what has gone on before? Doesn't this shameless patchwork have other intentions beside trying, in Mallinen's words, "to dig out the stomach of Sublimity's paper horse"?

In his radio discussion with Piritta Maavuori, Lehto explained his choice of the sonnet form in ways indicative of high respect instead of mockery:

[...] while searching for a way onwards from Modernism, I came to feel it quite natural to go backwards ... and in this, choosing the sonnet represents a certain megalomania, in other words, why not go straight for this, the most mature and in a way most classic - and in another, also most demanding - form [...]

In his Afterword, "To the Reader", Lehto tells about how he only afterwards understood the Finnish word "ääninen" actually to be a literal translation for the term "sonnet", small voice; likewise he only afterwards realized, that the Russian word, Onega, featuring in several poems of Ääninen, besides being the family name of Pushkin's well-known hero, also refers to the same lake as the Finnish "Ääninen".[18]

Ääninen is virtually bursting with allusions to the preceding literature: Sidney, Keats, Manninen, Paavolainen, Leino, Pushkin, Haavikko - just to name a few - speak in parallel with mystery stories and Corporate Annual Reports. "The stories that follow date back to / The seven centuries before this one", the poet writes in "Käyttöohjeen sijasta" (Manual By Proxy). In his Afterword Lehto states:

Though it's not my business to give instructions for reading, it seems to me that in these [literary allusions] it is not question of interpretational hints added to the rest of the stuff (as often is the case in the Modernist tradition), but instead of residue and echoes from earlier, now deleted, denied, or questioned meanings. Hopefully they will foreground the palimpsestic nature of all writing: the fact that it is ever impossible for us to just open our mouths and start speaking "out of the emptiness of our mind".

Lehto's conception of language is post-modern: the belief in the language as a spontaneous self-expression of the speaker is gone and has been replaced by a view to language as something learned, borrowed, and circulated.[19] At the same time, his conception of language also tangles the pre-modern. The writers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance likewise borrowed uninhibitedly from their predecessors, letting fragments taken from others give form to their writing. The idea of poetry as something ultimately depending on the writers unique inspiration only became prominent at the time of the 19th century Romanticism - before that, Shakespeare and the likes did not pay respect to the copyrights any more than the present day cyber-writers downloading stuff from the Net. Even Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who in his Essays (1595) aims at a certain intimate self-portraiture, confesses having hid in his text long extracts from Seneca, Plutarch, and many others, so that those who feel like mocking his writing would end up having mocked the idolized authorities of Antiquity.

As noted by Mallinen, Ääninen connects to the American post-modern poetry movement known as the Language School, which is utterly conscious of its own language and wants to approach it as material rather than as a neutral tool to express thoughts. Still, already the Renaissance writers - and notably those of late 16th and early 17th century - were emphatically conscious of the preconditions of their writing. Lehto himself has confessed his debt to Philip Sidney (1554-1586), a remarkable poet of the English Renaissance; Ääninen even features a translation from Sydney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. In this, the sonnet 45 in the sequence, Sidney has the lover complain to his mistress about how she will shed her tears more easily for some fanciful story than for him, concluding: "Then think, my dear, that you in me do read / Of lovers' ruin some sad tragedy: / I am not I, pity the tale of me." As later in post-modern literature, the lover is revealed as story, the self as writing.[20]

The sonnet form came to create a formula not only for the arrangement of words, but also for idealizing the sexual desire, for elevating it as the metaphysical principle of truth and beauty.[21] In the poems of Petrarch, Ronsard, and their followers the personality of the loved one is actually of little importance. Dante's mistress is Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, Ronsard's Hélène - what stays is the form of the sonnet, the mistress again being replaceable. The sonnet form has taken the place of the subject, and will go on producing as many loved ones as there are names in the language. In this perspective, it was not a coincidence that the Renaissance later also adopted the art of printing, invented earlier by the Chinese: the modern self produces itself as a textual machine capable of reproduction and variation rather than as free will.

So the idea for Leevi Lehto's sonnet engine is already there in the sonnet form itself. Ääninen ironizes the sonnet not only by dealing with non-lyrical, even banal subject-matter in this traditionally so sublime a genre.[22] As Ääninen goes on allotting new lines, the sonnet - and more generally, the language with its ability to produce great ideal principles - reveals its mechanistic nature, as if the poet's enchanted exterior would hide under it a rusty and wheezing clockwork.

The collapsing of the modern conception of language and subject, together with the fragments welling forth from the past, will also give rise to a certain ephemeral melancholy in the reader of Ääninen, of the kind the Renaissance writers must have felt when looking at the ruins of Rome or trying to assemble the rare remaining fragments of the Classical literature into something intelligible. The reader is in the midst of a skeletal dance of literature: the old poetical forms and idioms still hold together, only without the surrounding meat and context that would give them their meaning. Maybe what is dying is the literature itself: "Internet will destroy the art's conditions of existence as we know them", Lehto said in an interview in Suomen Kuvalehti. [23]

Play, laughter, doubt

If literature from Dante and Petrarch on was a pursuit for unworldly love and worked to produce the ideality of the written word, it was also play, laughter, and doubt, an unravelling of this same ideality.

There was no one Renaissance. Instead there were a host of competing world-views, and soon also those who, like Michel de Montaigne, in the midst of this plurality of truths would ask themselves, surprised: "What do I know?" It was not a coincidence that the greatest classics of the Western literature, Montaigne (essays), Shakespeare (drama), and Cervantes (novel), wrote during the Golden Age of the Renaissance scepticism. Literature demands, as realized by John Keats (1795-1821), a Romantic poet often cited and much respected by Lehto, a "negative capability " (also the title of the last poem in Ääninen): an ability to live in the world of uncertainties and mysteries. In other words, ability to play.

Parallel to the Petrarchan sonnet, there was also the very lively Renaissance of the most profound and blasphemous enfant terrible of the French Renaissance, Francois Rabelais (1494-1553), with its gourmandizing with food, drink, and language. Here the language is capable of bending itself into endless cataloguing, neologisms, pastiches, pseudonyms, parodies, nonsense, puns, and all kind of tastelessness. Yet the reader cannot assure her- or himself that all is just joking and jesting. Everything can refer to everything, and beneath the jokes that concentrate on the lower body-parts there may be hiding a great cosmic vision about the unity of life and death. Rabelais' pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier praises in the Foreword to his Pantagruel (1532) the book's ability to cure all possible and impossible ailments from gout to pox. Lehto is no second to him in praising his own poems in "Käyttöohjeen sijasta": "Though accompanied by an insipid scent, / [the stories to follow] Come handy in exterminating bugs / In house, and in the bower, hence / Causing jams in inward traffic - thus // Stimulating kidneys, or kids". On the other hand, Rabelais' parodic poems, "Fanfreluches antidotées", and his novel Gargantua (1534) are no less "dada and nonsense" than the products of Lehto's sonnet engine. Had Rabelais written sonnets, they could have looked much like Ääninen.

Lehto's Ääninen, together with it's computer version, is a representative of Renaissance, after all. Not perhaps of the Petrarchan Renaissance, but rather of that eternal Renaissance, rebirth, where poetry is born from doubt, laughter, and dance on the ruins of the old culture, changing itself by every click.

Let us play then. Let's go on clicking, only saving ("freezing") a line every time it has a shred of beauty to it, up until we have completed a new poem. The reader cannot remain just a reader, and the interpretation is never far from the writing. This is where I got, after about a hundred mouse clicks: to critique of market and to kings floating as stories:

References

1 Published in Finnish in Runosta runoon (From Poem To Poem), edited by Sakari Katajamäki and Johanna Pentikäinen, WSOY 2004.
2 Leevi Lehto as interviewed by Piritta Maavuori in Finnish Radio ("Tanssiva Karhu", 23.11.1997).
3 The invention is sonnet is generally attributed to Giacomo da Lentino (1188-1240), a "lawyer" in Fredrik's court. The form immediately became very popular, and sonnets were composed, beside the king and is his courtiers, also by the poets of the Italian "new sweet stile" (dolce stile nuovo), notably by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), who in his Vita Nuova uses it to praise his Beatrice.
4 Paul Oppenheimer: The Birth of the Modern Mind. Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 181
5 For Ezra Pound (1885-1972), the sonnet represented a stage of decay after the golden age of the troubadours. In his opinion, poetry should not detach itself too much from music. Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading, 1934).
6 For the spreading of Petrach's influence in Europe, see Pierre Blanc (ed.): Dynamique d'une expansion culturelle: Pétrarque en Europe, XIVe-XXe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2001.
7 The following is a somewhat random sample of masters of sonnet from the Rennaissance on to the 20th century Modernism: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Maurice Scève, Pierre de Ronsard, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser (In Renaissance); Lope de Vega and Luis de Góngora (in late Renassaince, also known as manierism, or the baroque); August von Platen, John Keats, and Gérard de Nerval (19th century Romanticism); Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud (19th century Symbolism); Gabriele D'Annunzio, Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Federico García Lorca (the 20th century Modernisms).
8 For the development of the English sonnet, see Michael Spiller: The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 1992.
9 Oppenheimer 1989, 3-25.
10 Leevi Lehto: Ääninen. Helsinki: Like, 1997. Lehto debuted as a poet in 1967. Ääninen is his fifth and, as of this writing, latest collection of poems. In an interview for Suomen Kuvalehti, September 22, 2000, he announced his intention to stop writing poetry (Liisa Joensuu: "Runoilija ja verkkoanarkisti"). Beside poetry, Lehto has been active in politics, as a translator, in business, and as the editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine Tuli&Savu.
11 Charles Bernstein: "Experiments".
12 In a personal email message, Leevi Lehto recalled all the poem's material having been extracted from the magazine in question. Otava published Lehto's four books of poetry before Ääninen.
13 Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own (1929) famously claims a great writer always to be an androgyny, i.e. capable of assuming the roles of both sexes. The theme is frequent also in the sonnet tradition, cf. Shakespeare dedicating a large part of his sonnets to a young man, whome he praises in terms more normally reserved to describe female beauty, calling him his "master-mistress".
14 "Lyyli": colloquial in Finnish for "woman", "chick".
15 "Jukka Mallinen", in Ääninen. Jukka Mallinen wrote an excellent review of Ääninen, published also at www.leevilehto.net (Finnish only).
16 Korhonen is the second most common surname in Finland. (Tr.)
17 There are now several online versions of Queneau's work. The development of the computer technology has opened many new possibilities for the use of aleatoriness, for examples see Electronic Poetry Centre. In Finland, the question of "cyber textuality" has been approached by, among others, Markku Eskelinen (Digitaalinen avaruus. Helsinki: WSOY, 1997, and Kybertekstien narratologiaa: digitaalisen kerronnan alkeet. Jyväskylän yliopisto, 2002), and Raine Koskimaa in Digital literature: from text to hypertext and beyond. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2000.
18 "Ääni" is Finnish for both "voice" and "sound", "nen" again being the ending for deriving diminutive forms of substantives. "Ääninen", while not idiomatical, thus means "small voice". In its most common use, the term "Ääninen" refers to Lake Onega, in Russian Karelia, were Finnish is still spoken. This was the furtiest the Finnish troops advanced during what is known as The Continuation War, 1942-45 - too far in many people's opinion, me included. Anyway, I believe I was thinking of this connotation when choosing the title, Ääninen being the first place name to come into mind. In Ääninen, I deliberately wanted to go "too far", in more than one way. - Leevi Lehto's note, February 2005.
19 Of the big names of post-modern thinking, Lehto has translated into Finnish Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, among others. His translations also include one of the seminal works of post-modern poetry, John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991, Vuokaavio, 1994).
20 "Somebody called Astrophil and Stella the first deconstructionist work of poetry. In a very interesting way, it seems to dwell on exactly the same themes as I do here. the questions of identity, and to who's talk we are listening, in the final analysis..." Leevi Lehto in his radio interview. Lehto and Maavuori 2003.
21 See Oppenheimer 1989, 58-63.
22 In fact, already the German poet Andreas Gryphius [1616-64] used sonnet to descibe war in a notably relistic way.
23 Joensuu 2000.