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Leevi LehtoLake Onega and Other Poems |
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Biographical note: Leevi Lehto (born in 1951 and living in Helsinki), is a Finnish poet, translator, and programmer. Since he made his poetic debut in 1967, he has published six volumes of poetry, a novel, Janajevin unet (Yanayev's Dreams, 1991), and an experimental prose work, Päivä (Day, 2004). He has been active in leftist politics (during the 70's) and worked as a corporate executive in communications industry (during the 90's). He is also known for his experiments in digital writing, such as the Google Poem Generator. His translations, some forty books in all, range from mystery writing to philosophy, sociology, and poetry, including work by Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, George Orwell, Stephen King, Ian McEwan, Arthur C. Danto, Mickey Spillane, Alexander Dubcek, Josef Skvorecky, Walter Benjamin, John Keats, John Ashbery, and Charles Bernstein. He is currently working on a new Finnish translation of Ulysses by James Joyce. He teaches poetry at the Critical Academy (Kriittinen korkeakoulu) in Helsinki, and is Chairman of the Planning Group for the yearly Helsinki Poetics Conference, member of the Planning Group for the yearly Kuopio Sound Poetry Seminar, responsible for the "poEsia" series of poetry books in Finnish (Nihil Interit and Kirja kerrallaan), member of the Editorial Council of Sibila, a Brazilian magazine of poetry, and Contributing Editor for the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC). Beside English, his work has been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Russian, and Farsi. For more, see www.leevilehto.net.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844711154
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PAPERBACK
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Short
description/annotation: Lake Onega and Other Poems is a collection of poems by the Finnish experimental poet Leevi Lehto (born 1951), containing both translations from Finnish and new work originally written in English. The volume spans his later work, from mainly Modernist poems of early 90's to metrical sonnets in Ääninen (Lake Onega, 1997) and to his newst, digitally influenced work.
Main description: Lake Onega and Other Poems spans Leevi Lehto's poetry from early 90's to this day, including translated samples from his four Finnish books of poetry from this period (Ihan toinen iankaikkisuus, Otava 1991, Kielletyt leikit, Otava 1994, Ääninen, Like 1997, and Ampauksia ympäripyörivästä raketista, Savukeidas 2004). The translations are by the author, or by the author in cooperation with others; in the case of Ääninen, fully translated for the book, they also serve as examples of the authors view of poetry translation as a radical adaptation and re-writing. The volume will also feature new poems originally written in English, as experiments in "writing in second language" – an approach both justified and critically important in view of the current developments in the networks of global communication. The final poem, "Of the Help Her Art", is a conceptual piece and an experiment in "Google Poetry" from the time of the conception of Lehto's influential "Google Poem Generator".
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Excerpt from book: Lake Onega
Unpublished endorsement : Leevi Lehto’s native language is Finnish, but these poems in English are by no means mere self-translations. Expert translator and linguist, sonneteer, found-text artist, prose poet, post-structuralist theorist, and, perhaps most notably, inventor of digital poetic text, Lehto is consistently amazing, brilliant—and funny. Ranging from his early “imagist” lyric to his Google Poem Generator of recent years, Lake Onega displays an inventiveness and imagination that ushers in a new transnational poetics. Marjorie Perloff
Unpublished endorsement : In a body of work at once droll and immensely moving, Leevi Lehto “gets things right side upside down” in the variety of poetic jumping beans put in play, as if to speak at all meant taking on a rack of billiard balls coagulated in space without a table in sight. Some of the inducements of Language poetry might suggest that the authors were not native speakers. Not true, but such opportunity is now disclosed – not as legacy, but as primal swerve. And, like a boomerang, it can carom mischievously back on itself, as in the occasional pastiche of imperfectly crafted idiomatic English (“The Finnish Communists in Eastern Karelia”). The delectations of the notes invite another round of gourmandizing for English readers, who will find themselves plunged serendipitously into the haunted precincts of things Finnish, a land as remote as Middle Earth yet, like Frodo’s habitat, strangely proximate to everything you think you know. Lake Onega is a captivating document of inter-lingual poetics mapping a future that will increasingly be where poetry happens. Jed Rasula
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