Vastaanoton kiinalainen erehdys

runoilijan ja kääntäjän sekoittuminen Pertti Niemisen runoilijakuvassa

• Tuulia Toivanen Jyväskylän yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74681

Abstract

A Double Mistake of Reception – the Inseparability of Poet and Translator in Pertti Nieminen’s Authorial Image

Pertti Nieminen (b. 1929) started as a modernist poet as well as a translator of Chinese poetry in the 1950’s, at the height of Modernism in Finnish poetry. In literary history, Nieminen has been viewed primarily as a translator, even if he has published 15 poem collections of his own (1956–2003).

In this article, I present some points of departure for the reassessment of Nieminen’s authorial image by discussing the reception of his poetry. My hypothesis is that the recipients have recognized mainly a “Chinese Nieminen”. In addition, for the reviewers, the poet has become inseparable from both the translator and the poetic self.

According to the principles of “modernist reading”, the text is understood to be autonomous, independent of its author. In spite of this, the personality of the author, the sinologist, has influenced the interpretations of Nieminen’s poetry, as recipients have tried to find some Chinese features in his poems. This attempt has led to problematic readings and to seeing Nieminen as “The Sage of the East”.

By comparing the recipients’ readings both to the poems themselves and to Nieminen’s readings of his own poems, I demonstrate how these interpretations are either consistent (successful reading) or inconsistent (mistake in reception) with each other. The inconsistent readings often imply a narrowing down of the scope of interpretation. My analyses reveal e.g. how Nieminen’s connections to the Anglo-American Imagists have been forgotten, while most features of his poems have been mistakenly seen as “Chinese”. At the same time, the recipients’ views of exotic China and the Chinese language are over-simplified, even erroneous.