Kaarlo Sarkia

Kaarlo Sarkia (11 May 1902 – 16 November 1945) was a Finnish poet and translator who was influenced by romantic poetry. His poems include motifs like childhood memories, love, landscapes and dreamworld, and in his last collection of poetry also his personal death and mankind's sufferings. Together with Uuno Kailas, Sarkia was the most prominent Finnish poet of the 1930s. As Kailas, his poetry also had homosexual themes.

Kaarlo Sarkia

Quotes

• Vain henkäyksen verran riemus kesti,
  vain silmänräpäyksen tuskas syvä.
  Maan helmaan lempeään kuin peltoon jyvä
  nukahdat hiljaa, uinut suloisesti.

  Niin Kauneus, min täyden kasvun esti
  tään elos vajavuus, nyt täydentyvä
  on kuolemassas, muotoon ylentyvä
  kukoistavaan ja uuteen tuhannesti.

  Maa sinut sireenien, niinipuiden
  suo hautaas haparoiviin valkojuuriin,
  vie suonet umpuihin, ja suvikuiden.

  tulessa kukkiin hunajaisiin, suuriin
  puut puhkeaa – näin untes säteileväin
  suloista täyttymystä kantaa keväin.

  • Translation: Your joy is only moment’s exhalation,
    at most a blink of eye is your dejection.
    As sweetly falls your silent sleep’s protection
    you sink in soft earth’s breast, like wheat’s oblation.

    Thus Beauty, whose completed germination
    was hindered by unfinished life’s perfection,
    will in your dying see a resurrection –
    a thousand-fold its great reanimation.

    For when you’re in your grave you’re handed over
    to probing roots of lilac and of lime tree,
    to buds the sap is drawn above the clover.

    aflame to burst in summer’s honeyed finery
    of blossomed trees, and so your radiant dreaming
    will sweet fulfilment find in springtime’s teeming.

  • Lingua Fennica, Translation by Rupert Moreton