Finland-Swedish poet Catharina Gripenberg

A poetic detective

BY ANN-CHRISTINE SNICKARS

Sparks flew around Catharina Gripenberg’s (b. 1977) first collection of poetry, which was published three years ago, På diabilden är huvudet proppfullt av lycka (The head on the slide is packed full of happiness). It contained poems about friends and tenderly brusque love poems, unsentimentally written in high gear. Gripenberg has also had to adjust to being regarded as a sort of official Finland-Swedish beginning for a type of new poetry by young writers where the poet uses her linguistic talent to the maximum at the same time as she (in Swedish-speaking Finland, the poet is often a she) seems not to take herself all that seriously. This new poetry may feel light and humorous at first glance, but you soon find that it is making its own way towards a new seriousness.
In spring 1999, Catharina Gripenberg was asked to write a one-act play for Hangö Teaterträff, the main Swedish-language theatre event in Finland. The play was to be rehearsed quickly and was mainly intended as an addition to the festivities, but it was so well received that it was later recorded for television. The play is called En finner en ö (One finds an island), a light paraphrase of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books. But in One finds an island, the mystery defies solution, and instead the plot thickens, and there we are with a thick fog, an island and a decimated company. We have outgrown the simple game and what we are left with is “One on a Secret Trail. One is Together Again. One Goes Down to the Sea. One Goes to Smuggler’s Top.” etc.
In her second, and most recent, collection of poems, Ödemjuka belles lettres från en till en (Humble belles lettres from one to one), Catharina Gripenberg processes the motive of one separate individual even further. ‘Belles lettres’ here refers in a more universal sense to fiction as perhaps one of the rare places where a person is still respected as an individual, though it cannot be taken for granted even there any more.
Through her writing, Catharina Gripenberg creates a world of her own out of fairy tales, nonsense, everyday life. One section is called ‘Family letters’. This game of mummy-daddy-children has a childish surface level but there is also a serious depth underlying it. It is all about primary relationships, but on a grammatical level, so to speak. The tenses consist of making contact and saying farewell – in writing, the letter is the format which can comprise them both.
Catharina Gripenberg also sketches a literary environment which is her own, somewhat like Tove Jansson and Eva-Stina Byggmästar have done in their own works. But Gripenberg’s written landscape is more misty and fuzzy in outline, although extremely full of tangible detail. It is evidently a world which is aware, as it were, that it is fictitious, imagined – or dreamed.
You find yourself in this world in a poem called ‘Travel bureau blind alley’, for instance. It makes you think of Alice in Wonderland, and the writer has indeed said that Alice in Wonderland has inspired her. But this is not a Wonderland you can leave by simply waking up, because to visit it is to wake up. Perhaps this is a quick rehearsal for the difficult process of becoming (and remaining) an individual, something which is described in many folk tales, but in a more tangible and less sensitive way. At times, the setting feels like a doll’s house, where you can play with and move the figures that you have been given. Playing like that, you hold the strings, you can create you own parents, for instance. And that happens in the poem which begins “I stepped in through the door when my father was three years old/ and sitting at the kitchen table playing with a ball of yarn.”
To play is to learn to penetrate the border between imagination and reality. To play detective is to find an unambiguous solution, but in a ‘poetic detective story’, as the writer herself describes the play, poetry makes all future unambiguity impossible. One of the characters outlines the premise of the investigation in the introduction of the play: “And the clues kept falling and falling from the sky and they covered the ground, they kept falling and falling and they covered the clues with clues.”

Ann-Christine Snickars is a literary critic and cultural journalist

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow