Lingual Things

The poem “Fingerspitzengefühl on the Japanese Te-form” at the end of this essay is a linguistic mishmash. It was originally written in Finnish, but contains Japanese sentences, was translated into English, and has German in the title. Sounds like misunderstood fusion cuisine that throws blood crêpes, salmon sushi, pecan pie, and pilsner on the same plate. This essay is not so much about why I wrote such a poem (it just “emerged”, so I’m innocent), as it is about languages, specifically Japanese and Finnish.
“Fingerspitzengefühl on the Japanese Te-form” is one of those poems that doesn’t clearly articulate their purpose, whereas essay writing usually brings order to chaos. Which approach works best? My answer is at the end of the essay, although the real fun for me is comparing styles.
I first learned about TE-form online and was immediately interested. It is a Japanese linguistic feature that has many functions. Sometimes it connects two actions like a conjunction, while other times it indicates that something is happening now, a bit like the -ING form in English. The TE form can also make a request more polite by adding TE to the verb. Finnish also has a (sort of) polite TE form. For example, in the sentence “OttakaaTTEN lisää kahvia” (which means “Please take more coffee”), TTEN makes the request less commanding and more relaxed. Since it is an old-fashioned phrasing that is no longer used in everyday speech, it’s also a slightly humorous way of using language. The request can be made even more relaxed by using the longer ending “OttakaaTTENHAN”. In Finnish, it’s possible to create monstrously long words by adding as many suffixes as possible to the root word.
For example, the word
“epäjärjestelmäLLISTYTTÄMÄTTÖMYYDELLÄNSÄKKÖSÄKKÄÄNKÖHÄN” contains six suffixes after the root word “epäjärjestelmä” (“unorganization”). This particular suffix monster is only theoretical, but still real Finnish. In this kind of language discussion, it’s also worth mentioning
“Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”, a Welsh village name that looks like someone had a heart attack on the keyboard.
Languages that use a lot of suffixes are “agglutinative,” and languages that prefer to put more words in sentences are “analytic.” English is more about adding words, which is one reason why it can torture us foreigners with phrasal verbs. For a native English speaker, it may come as a surprise that many common English expressions are harder for a foreigner to learn than those so-called five-dollar words. For example, “get” and “on” are such abstract words that a foreigner really has to work to learn what “get on” and other get combinations mean. Unfortunately, most of these phrases have to be learned to sound natural to an English speaker. Finnish and Japanese are more about additions, so the English, analytic inessive “IN a house” is agglutinatively “taloSSA” in Finnish. The Japanese version is harder to express because in Japanese everything, and I mean everything, seems to depend on context.
The importance of context is one reason why the Japanese language (in an interesting contradiction to the culture’s minimalist visual aesthetic) appreciates writing where the core message can be shorter than all the seemingly unnecessary extraneous stuff around it. I find that kind of writing empowering. For a long time I blindly trusted such sources as the Hemingway Editor, along with trustworthy experts who say, even here in Finland, that a good sentence consists of a maximum of three words (to exaggerate only slightly). Finally, this frustrating demand for super-simple, super-short sentences drove me to run some of Michael Cunningham’s masterful sentences through the word counter, only to find that he clearly does NOT use his Hemingway Editor! What a relief that there’s still sense in the world, along with long sentences. Both are found in Japanese, which also has a healthy relationship with the passive voice.
In many languages the passive is just one useful strategy among others, but unfortunately English is not one of them. I wish it were. Really. A language that has gender-specific pronouns but also avoids the passive voice leads, at least for us foreigners, into the she or he trap (a few examples later), which could be avoided by using passive voice. In Finnish we have only one pronoun “hän,” which means all genders and sometimes even animals.
Some words are so onomatopoeic that even a foreigner, upon learning the meaning of the word, immediately understands it. “Dokidoki,” or, depending on the context, “doki doki,” is a wonderfully onomatopoeic Japanese word that means heartbeat, being positively excited, nervously anxious, or even scared, among other things. It’s also as catchy as an advertising jingle that immediately gets stuck in your head.
Not only languages, but individual people instinctively use the power of double words to invent their own neologisms. A teacher of mine used to say “tökitöki” (“poke poke”) to express that we students should now double-click with the mouse. “Tökitöki” sounds Japanese, at least to a Finn. Sometimes we deliberately play with the ability of our language to sound Japanese. A well-known example is “jokohama humahutan”—although a real Japanese might raise an eyebrow at its supposed Japanese sound. The phrase roughly means “Would it be time to finally hit (a person who has been irritating the speaker for some time)?”, and the verb “humauttaa” suggests that the blow should be delivered particularly with an axe or a log. The message is in deep contrast to the sophisticated and highly advanced Japanese culture, which cannot be said of us, a relatively young nation with a long history as an uncivilized backwater of Sweden.
In this poem “Fingerspitzengefühl on the Japanese Te-form,” the sentences containing the TE-form are “tabeTE kudasai” and “fueTE kudasai.” They roughly mean “please, feel free to eat” and “please, feel free to reproduce”—and if the translations are not the most accurate, I beg the forgiveness of the Japanese people, hoping they won’t humahuta me with anything. I’m fully aware that in Japanese, even the smallest changes in words can create not only false, but catastrophically false meanings. In the poem, the (hopefully correct) TE-formed requests are made when the speaker of the poem is awake, perhaps on a light Scandinavian summer night. There, she or he (!) makes art and waits with a bouncing heart for this request to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, the speaker is surrounded by human culture, which is already decaying, and vital nature, which is still ready to eat and mate.
Why does the poem focus on female mosquitoes? Does it imply that all women are bloodsuckers? No. Sex is mentioned because only female mosquitoes suck blood. They have to, because they lay the eggs. Male mosquitoes can take it easier, so they just suck nectar from flowers. So the poem is saying that all men are lazy drinkers who let women do all the hard work? No! Neither of these fauna fun facts is a gender commentary, but anything in a poem can easily be interpreted as a metaphorical or between-the-lines commentary on us humans. I at least make such interpretations unless there’s a good reason not to. Of course, we poetry readers all know that poems are sometimes like marketplaces, where random elements just bustle about, forming random and intentional juxtapositions from which something poetic eventually “emerges” (or not). One poetry strategy that achieves depth through juxtaposition without saying things directly is, of course, Japanese haiku, which is also known for its ability to use elements of nature artfully.
Today’s poetry world, especially the Anglo-American one, tends to favor socio-political themes (here, the term “socio-politicals” is used loosely to encompass issues such as gender, post-colonialism, and body consciousness). The theme of “class” is largely absent. Perhaps this is because the most intense period of class-conscious poetry had already passed and faded somewhere between 1960 and 1980. Unfortunately for class-conscious poetry, the suffix “ism” became too closely associated with the root word “social,” which caused problems, especially after the fall of communism. Moreover, class-conscious poetry has never been so much about classes as about one class, the working class, or sometimes the proletariat. The middle and upper classes are also classes, so why is class-oriented poetry never about them? Could it be that because poetry is considered a high cultural medium, the rest of poetry is already about them, although whenever this is said aloud, the high class status of poetry is immediately denied.
Nonetheless, perhaps today’s socio-political poetry, despite its broader lens and wider scope, can be seen—if not as the direct descendant of the Marxism-fueled class-conscious poetry of olden times—at least as its distant relative. In any case, both of them were originally nourished by the same source: the sincere desire for social justice.
Since socio-political themes are very much in vogue, it’s natural to see gender and human layers even in female mosquitoes. How useful it would be if a writer could occasionally add such affixes to express that this time the word is in its basic meaning.
Considering that the most wanted poems are not about mosquitoes or nonsensical writing, have I made a double whammy with a poem that consists of both? Maybe, but at least one thing is for sure: it’s never a mistake to be inspired by other cultures and celebrate their special features.
Coincidentally, today is the day of national sorrow in Finland: The subcontractor hired by the city of Helsinki, who was only supposed to carefully trim a few branches from our only sakura park, brutally cut them, and at the wrong time of the year. The park was the place where also we Finns could have celebrated Hanami, the coming of spring and the opening of the cherry blossoms. In the news about the sakura massacre, it was also said that the park was originally a gift from a Japanese immigrant Norio Tomida, who arranged the funding to give something back to our country. This (undeserved) gratitude was something truly moving to read about, and what a poetic idea that was—to give cherry blossoms to another culture. Then a backwater subcontractor with the lowest offer and zero supervising humahutti the sakuras down.
Without the subcontractor, the large audience would never have known the beautiful history of the park. So was it good that the disaster happened? After all, not all the trees were destroyed, and after four years, the ones that were, will blossom again. In the long run, the increased knowledge of the park’s history will mean more than these four years. Life is full of similar paradoxical, questionable, and messy things with contradictory layers. It would be easy to argue that this is why I write poems that are nonsensical messes. I have seen this excuse used, but I find it a lazy approach. Life is a mess, yes, but art is not life. Art is an opportunity to offer interpretations, analyses, and even bold attempts to bring order to that mess. If art doesn’t do that, isn’t it just imitation, a false kind of realistic portrait, a mess portraying a mess? While mess can work in visual arts (Cy Twombly’s paintings come to mind), for me, written art is at its best when it truly tries to say something meaningful about mess.
I have come to believe that the visual arts are ahead of all the other arts. One reason is that they started so early (cave paintings, not cave writings), and although singing and dancing must have existed earlier, visual artists were the first to be forced to move farther from their original territory. The new technologies made their work better, at least in terms of photorealism, so they had to search for new reasons to exist, like adopting new cool trends and painting under their influence. In the end, the visual arts even made us, the public, accept these new, artificial ways of representing the world. Still, even the fiercest Fauvist painter might have felt in his or her (!) heart that the trend probably wouldn’t last forever and been stressed about the need to find the next best thing. Who said that art was about creating? In many ways, it’s just another rat race.       When it comes to describing chaotic life, art must lie, just like politicians do. Sounds provocative, but I enjoy these kinds of wrong/unstylish juxtapositions, and what could be worse cuisine than politicians and artists? Unstylish or not, art is in permanent pre-election mode, promising that the mess of life can be packaged into neat stories, which approach requires oversimplification and, in literature, blurbs that often promise more than the content delivers. Simplification is necessary, however, to at least say something more interesting than “life is a mess.”
We, the audience, tend to be less willing to accept abstraction in literature than in the visual arts, and no wonder: communication is at the heart of writing, and otherwise than in the realm of painting, there’s no new technology that could make its core task better, at least not yet. So, like most readers, I feel that the narrative arts are at their best when they carry out this function. It’s my own personal paradox that I write nonsensical poetry, but life is full of paradoxes. I sometimes (always) have the fear that the beta readers of today’s literary magazines read everything through a representative, especially socio-political, lens, and if they don’t get what they want, they humahuttaa with the axe. This is of course just a harsh oversimplification, but didn’t I just say that one have to oversimplify, even lie, in order to at least say something?
Despite my preference for clarity, there’s something special about poetry that hides its message. If one can enjoy both representational and abstract visual art, why not enjoy both representational and abstract writing? So I continue to study poetry that is more abstract than concrete, hoping that one day I will understand why I prefer it even against my own liking. Of course, the answer may already be between the lines, and I’m the only one who doesn’t see it. It’s a universal fear: we humans want to be seen, but at the same time we want to remain safely invisible, especially when there’s a risk that others will see something in us that we don’t. Then, when we realize that they really are watching, and they really, really see—that’s dokidoki.

Fingerspitzengefühl on the Japanese Te-form

in a small dead town
an oil spill on a puddle

in the evening, a purple sky
like a distant, reluctant smile

as a kintsugi
of a stoned window

a large enough scale
and disorder is warmth

on a billboard with a frozen text
and still running stream of subtexts

what does it mean to suck
the wound of one’s own

on the table, a knife
beside the finest Japanese paper

that wants to know
what it is to be

a wound
surrounded with mosquito females

and to say with a pounding heart
into the living night

tabete kudasai
fuete kudasai

dokidoki
dokidoki
dokidoki