Selected Writings - Paperback

by Mirjam Tuominen (Author), David McDuff (Translator), Tuva Korsström (Introduction by)

Mirjam Tuominen was a major poet and short story writer, as well as a distinguished essayist, translator and artist. Her work progressed through traditional prose, modernist poetry and abstract painting to Roman Catholic mysticism. She is one of the trio of great Scandinavian women poets, along with Edith Södergran and Karin Boye - all three published in English by Bloodaxe Books. Her stories are often about love's intensity, its eroticism and tenderness, about jealousy and struggles for power between men and women. They are acute in their depiction of small town life in Finland in the 1940s, and in capturing her sense of dread at the alarming upsurge of Nazi sympathies during the War. Everything she wrote afterwards was scarred by the horror of the Holocaust, and in particular by one news story of a German soldier who threw a Jewish boy into a sewer because the boy cried when the soldier was whipping his mother. Mirjam Tuominen had a frightening, self-destructive ability to react directly to the suffering of others, and much of her poetry can be traced back to her anguished response to this one incident. Her poems are obsessive in confronting guilt, vulnerability and power, in their searching for absolute truth in a world she saw as split between victims and tormentors. Mirjam Tuominen was drawn to writers who were vulnerable and tormented outsiders. She translated their work, and wrote powerful studies of figures such as Kafka, Rilke, Proust, Hölderlin and Cora Sandel. Her essays shows the extent of her identification with them: 'Kafka must have felt the conflict between the demands of his inner being and those of the world around him with an extreme and almost intolerable intensity.' David McDuff's edition includes selections from Mirjam Tuominen's poetry and stories, as well as her seminal essay Victim and Tormentor. It is introduced by her daughter, the writer Tuva Korsström.

Author Biography

Mirjam Tuominen (1913-1967) was born in Kajana, Finland, and grew up in a middle-class family in Helsinki in an atmosphere very much characterised by the early death of her father. She graduated and after the war divorced her artist husband Torsten Korsström. With her income as a writer and critic, she managed to provide modest living conditions for herself and her two daughters. After a mental breakdown in the 1950s, she converted to Catholicism. She made her debut in 1938 with Tidig tvekan and in her subsequent short story collections Murar (1939) and Mörka gudar (1944) described the female psyche, guilt, and fear, while Visshet (1942) is about the witch hunts and the violence of the Nazis. With her insistence on innovative artistic expression, her works are at the centre of wartime Finnish modernism. She continued her analysis of violence in her confessional book Besk brygd (1947). In the 1950s she published confessional poetry and in 1961 the religious meditation book Gud är närvarande. Mirjam Tuominen's earlier writing was well-received, while her subsequent books were not understood, and her later Catholic poems were rejected by the publishers. In the 1980s and 1990s she was again successful with a three-volume selection of short stories and poems. David McDuff's English translation, Selected Writings, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1994 with an introduction by Tuominen's daughter, Tuva Körsstrom.