Paavo on psephology

In view of the authoritarian side our Prime Minister has been showing in recent weeks, I'd better not break the law which forbids election day propagandising.

I can't resist quoting, though, one of the many fine short poems - poems which are at once gnomic and aphoristic - that the Finnish* modernist Paavo Haavikko produced during his career in the second half of the twentieth century:

I vote for Spring, Autumn gets elected, Winter forms the cabinet.

I think about Haavikko's poem every time I vote.

*In case you're wondering, I don't know Finnish: on the page, the language looks to me almost as full of strange spellings and syntactic thickets as Basque, or Rotuman. I rely for my knowledge of Haavikko on the Finnish-American translator-poet Anselm Hollo. Back in 2008 I included Hollo's translation of Haavikko's The Winter Palace in my list of the twenty great long poems of the twentieth century.

[Posted by Scott/Maps]