EPIC WINS (2)
By:
May 30, 2011
Second in a series of translations/variations of epic poems, by various HiLobrow contributors. For more Kalevala retellings by James Parker, click here.
Swept by the romantic nationalism that made modern Europe a patchwork of feverishly-imagined communities, 19th-century Finns went in search of a distinctive identity rooted in their barbed and frost-clipped language and the boreal forests from which it emerged. The physician and linguist Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) sought the roots of that national spirit in Karelia, the land of lakes and taiga that rolls from eastern Finland into latter-day Russian and Estonia. Collecting thousands of lines of oral poetry from kantele-strumming singers in the Karelian backcountry, Lönnrot limned the arc of an epic in their tales of the god-wizard Vainamoinen. Much of the story recounts his attempts to acquire the a magical object called the Sampo; variously described as a grinding mill, a primitive astrolabe, or the Pillar of the World, the Sampo is perhaps the original Macguffin. But in this section of the epic, lovingly ripped up and rearranged by longtime Hilobrow friend and contributor James Parker, the Sampo makes no appearance. Here, brooding Vainamoinen is challenged by the upstart Joukahainen, a whelp-wizard ignorant of the danger he puts himself in with his doggerel music. Spilled by Vainamoinen, songs have the power to wither crops, slay monsters, and make worlds — the very sort of properties Elias Lönnrot hoped his epic would furnish a hopeful homeland. —Eds.
WIZARD BATTLE
[being a bastardization of Rune 3 of
The Kalevala, lines 1-278]
A tree-stump his seat,
Vainamoinen’s at his pipe again,
puffing away, brows shaggy with
thought.
Silent utterance of smoke goes up
into the big blue, the purifying
afternoon.
He lowers the pipe and sings,
lazy chant like smoke-rings,
deep rhymes, elemental
accountings
that charm the glade to a
stillness —
the buzz and tick of the summer.
A verse, a verse, another verse…
Ah! Such songs.
Tingling the wires of reputation,
every rival bard’s frustration,
across the heaths of Kaleva.
Then he plugs his mouth with the
pipe,
slurps air,
and puffs and re-puffs.
*
Miles away, in well-farmed Lapland,
young Joukahainen savagely mops
his plate.
“What is it, son?” asks Mother.
She waits.
(Mother, oh Mother,
how many times have you waited
thus
at his bedroom door,
at the entrance to his cave
of moods?)
“What is it, son?” asks Father.
He waits.
(Father, oh Father,
have many times have you waited
thus,
feeling your skull-plates grate
and shift?)
Now the boy erupts in oaths,
spits gravy:
“VAINAMOINEN IS DRIVING ME
CRAZY!”
Alarmed, the sparrow quits the sill.
The fireside dog lifts a dozy ear.
“Distinguished Vainamoinen?” asks
Mother.
“The greatest of our singers?”
“Ach! He is my nemesis!”
“Bit remiss of your nemesis not
to have heard of you,” observes
Father.
“I mean to say — working your
downfall with never a word
of you?”
The boy’s on his feet, chair going
over behind.
“Fetch my sleigh! There’s going to be
a bard-battle.
My sleigh, I say!”
“But…” Mother begins to wring her
hands.
“But he’ll sing you into a snow-heap,
he will,
wad you in there with whiteness
and chill!”
“My boy,” adds Father, “he’ll
have you
cold as a frostburned carrot,
and croaking like a broken parrot.”
“He’ll pack your gizzard with
blizzard, this wizard,”
says Mother. “O leave him alone!”
“Bah!” says the boy. “I’ll wind up his
whiskers for him.
And now: the lens of day is failing.
Shadow spreads
from the greedy wood. I must
away!”
“But son — !”
“No more! Enough parent-prattle.
My horse is having tremors in
his traces,
my hell-gelding, greedy for action.
One flick of the beaded lash across
his flanks
and the sparks spatter back at me.
Forward, Fire-Eater!”
Snow whizzes under the sleigh
runners.
“Son!” cries Mother.
“Let him go,” says Father, weary
beyond weariness.
“Let him go.”
*
So brimstone-nostrilled goes young
Joukahainen
towards the heaths of Kaleva,
brimstone-nostrilled his little horse,
a hectic progress, snorting through
the snow.
A day he travels, another day,
a third,
and then — who’s this, coming
towards him?
It’s that old wizard Vainamoinen,
sleigh-borne,
cruising crookedly through the
wilderness,
muttering, making his wizard
rounds.
Drinking? Yes, he’s been drinking.
He smells slightly of vomit
and his beard glitters behind him
like the trail of a comet.
Joukahainen meets him,
meets him head-on,
in a rending of runners,
in a tangling of traces,
in a cracking of horse-collars.
What an impact!
The sound of it flits across white
fields.
Wrenched sleigh-shafts smoke in
the stillness.
“Young man,” says Vainamoinen
at last,
“might I enquire as to your family
background?
Are you perhaps from the tribe of
Roadhog,
or the clan of Careless Driver?”
“My name,” says the boy,
“is Joukahainen the Youthful. And
you are…?”
“I am the sage Vainamoinen,
a harmless traveller on these
snow-roads.
You tell me you are Joukahainen
the Youthful.
Very well, let an old man pass.”
“If you are truly the sage
Vainamoinen,” retorts the youth,
“famous across the heaths of
Kaleva,
famous all the way to the farms of
Lapland,
then you can sing me right off this
snow-road.”
“Me?” asks Vainamoinen. “I’m
retired.
I sit under a blanket, or potter
about.
No singing. The cuckoo sings in my
garden,
that’s all I know about singing.
I would love, however, dearly love
to hear one or two of your songs.”
“Hear them you shall, grandfather,”
says Joukahainen, and sings, thusly:
“Smokeholes go in the ceiling.
The fireplace holds the fire.
The seal he swims at his watery
whim,
Which all the fish admire.
The Northman ploughs with a
reindeer.
In the South they use a mare.
An elk is the choice of the gristley
Lapp,
Because the ground is tough up
there.
The pike eats whitefish, he’s a
spawn-at-night fish.
The perch is a fellow who — ”
“But these,” interrupts Vainamoinen,
“are childish sounds, aren’t they?
Nursery rhymes. Speak more
deeply!”
Joukahainen colours, inhales, tries
again.
“Handle damp clods,” he sings,
“if you’d feel how the world began,
how mud spoke to mud, with murky
electricity.
Stick your finger in the — ”
“Womanish noises,” says
Vainamoinen. “Laundry songs.
Come now, speak more deeply!”
Joukahainen colours, inhales, tries
again.
“At the beginning of this whole
operation,” he sings,
“I was person number six or seven.
The scooping of the sea-bed,
the mountains heaped up with an
elbow-heave —
nearly all of that was me.”
Comments wise old Vainamoinen:
“These verses of yours, if I may say,
are poor as a pinched fart.
Let me tell you something
about the beginning of the world,
boy.
I, Vainamoinen, was there.
I saw the cosmos branched with
black,
and the frozen disc of the zodiac.
All pale I hung at Heaven’s precipice
and the stars formed in my beard,
like ice.”
“Old boaster!” cries the broody
Lapp.
“Tell it to my sword!”
His blade twangs in the air.
“Put it away,” says Vainamoinen.
“I don’t fight amateurs.”
“Fight me,” says Joukahainen.
“or with my singing I’ll
plonk you right in my father’s pigsty,
face-up under a farrowing sow!
My songs make corpses, old man.
This one I drove deep into a
dunghill.
That one I crammed into a corner of
my cowshed.
Fight me! Fight me!”
“Indeed,” says Vainamoinen,
“you have succeeded in getting my
goat.”
And begins to sing…
ALL INSTALLMENTS: INTRODUCTION: Laughter in the Womb of Time, or Why I Love the Kalevala | RUNE 1: “The Birth of Vainamoinen” | RUNE 2 (departure): “Vainamoinen in November” | RUNE 3 (1–278): “Wizard Battle” | RUNE 4 (1–56): “A Failed Seduction” | RUNE 4 (300–416): “Aino Ends It All” | RUNE 5 (45–139): “An Afternoon Upon the Water” | RUNE 5 (150–241): “The Blue Elk” | RUNE 5 (departure): “Smüt the Dog Praises His Seal Queen” | RUNE 6 (1–114): “Therapy Session” | RUNE 6 (115–130): “Joukahainen’s Mother Counsels Him Against Shooting the Wizard Vainamoinen” | RUNE 11 (1–138): “Introducing Kyllikki” | RUNE 17 (1–98): “The Dreaming Giant” | RUNE 23 (485–580): “The Bride’s Lament” | RUNE 30 (1–276): “Icebound” | RUNE 30 (120–188): “The Voyage of the Sea-Hare” (Part One) | RUNE 30 (185–188): “Losing It” | RUNE 30 (departure): “Across the Ice” | RUNE 30 (departure): “Song of the Guilty Viking” | RUNE 30 (departure): “The Witch’s Dance” | RUNE 31 (215–225): “The Babysitter” | RUNE 31 (223–300): “The Screaming Axe” | RUNE 33 (1–136): “The Cowherd” | RUNE 33 (73): “Song of the Blade: Kullervo” | RUNE 33 (reworked): “The Breaking of the Blade” | RUNE 33 (118–284): “The Cows Come Home” | RUNE 34 (1–82): “The Pipes of Kullervo” | RUNE 45 (259–312, departure): “The Wizard’s Secret”.
EPIC WINS: SERIES INTRO by Matthew Battles | THE ILIAD (1.408-415) by Flourish Klink | THE KALEVALA (3.1-278) by James Parker | THE ARGONAUTICA (2.815-834) by Joshua Glenn