A Note on the Recordings

These English drafts and variations on my sonnets in Finnish clearly fall into the category of "poetry in a foreign tongue", which some say may well be the mode of poetry to come (English spoken as a second language being the Lingua Franca...)

But what is the meaning of "foreign" here? Am I trying to assimilate myself into the English poetical tradition(s), or rather addressing the non-native English speakers, with their, necessarily, different expectations, preferences, and understandings?

Maybe neither - maybe all I can account for are the specific relations between the Finnish and English languages, and the dynamics of the (never-ending) transitions from (which?) one to the other?

When wondering about the obvious lack of audiences for this kind of ("artificial") writing (short of members of Walter Benjamin's "pure language" society), I came to think of the possibility of the reception being artificial, or artificially mediated, as well.

I ran some of the drafts through a tool called TTSApp, included in Microsoft's Speech SDK 5.1, and representing the present status of the company's "Text-to-Speech Engine". This tool is a rather basic one, and in recording the performances, I used only minimal extra instructions, such as indicating line breaks where the application seemed impertinently to ignore them , and adjusting the basic speed of reading.

Other uses for this kind of technology might include having the translation ("target text") be read by the foreign (or "source") language engine, or instructing the native language engine to be sensitive to foreign influences, especially deviant stress patterns. Who knows, maybe these kind of "alternative" artificial readings will develop into being an essential part of the future literary works.

The samples and their performers are: