Pentti Sammallahti is a Finnish photographer known for his meticulously composed black and white images that blend landscape, animal life and the quiet rhythms of everyday existence. Born in Helsinki in 1950, he began photographing in his early teens and became one of Finland’s most internationally recognised photographers. Deeply influenced by the humanism of French photography and the poetic sensibilities of his native Nordic environment, his work often evokes a sense of stillness and contemplation.

I

You begin to think of the years,

each one of them by name:

the Year when Joy was born

and the Year of Fame.

Recall:

the Rains Came Late That Autumn,

White, and Black as Coal,

the World’s Roar and Thunder,

the Year when You Grew Whole.

II

The dispirited houses of rulers.

The proscribed colours,

the senescent gold of churches.

The bouncing highways of pale dust,

the forests grown into cohorts,

the scabby legs of the children in village outskirts.

III

Darting caravans of tarnished trains,

the redeeming introversion of gates,

the soporific vibrations of slow wagons,

The rubber-like sound of fresh walnut.

Stirring shadows of roadside trees,

positive hens in purposeful alleys,

optimistic plumb trees in gardens,

the smell of tobacco, liquor, infrequent coffee,

rolling songs of the embracing nights.

The time is fulfilled again grandmother’s father dies,

fathers step out from their backyards, mothers form food chains of their own,

laugh, clatter in the kitchen, squabble, stew cabbage, slaughter a pig.

The monotonous houses of rulers.

Receding fathers.

carrying their children…

IV

Have you thought about the Tisza

how it flows.

V

“You go first,” said one twin brother,

an old man, to the other.

“No, you,” the other answered,

born later,

patting him on the back and nudging him lightly, with a caress,

his hand growing bony.

I watched them from behind on a cloudy day,

lying on a hillock.

According to the higher revelation I received,

this had already begun quite early:

the one who went ahead was born first,

nudged by the other coming behind.

VI - Your Native Land (to Jaan Kaplinski)

When you are gone and set your feet again

on familiar land,

its dust, its colours, when the white birches

wind their branches

about your head

and you hear the buds growing

with a humming in your ears,

it will be ever the harder

to remember more and more:

the Pole Star’s ascent,

descent,

its movement no broader than a hand

above your head, the drowsy clanking of trains,

the brazen glare of the halogen lamp.

Inside your head, this small

northern land

becomes smaller and smaller,

bigger and bigger become

tomorrow’s morning tea,

sage, red tomatoes,

the unending succession of

future mornings.

VII

I turned around

and there she stood,

regarding a generation

of which she could have no first hand

information.

No, grandmother.

It was timeless youth I was thinking of,

its doors growing heavy,

the rusting of locks,

and how people are, each in his way:

at that age they don’t go to school anymore,

somewhere they believe in God.

Around us even then, I guess, were

the wide sky, the earth’s vastness,

the stream of feelings crossing

the universality of solitude.

VIII

The horses whiny there on my right

on the other side of the trickle

the sausage is hot

is Ceausescu a philanthropist, I wonder.

The water in the trickle is dirty,

there is fruit in it,

brown water, but it doesn’t smell yet

soon I’ll throw this paper into it

once I have passed those on my left

in their brimmed hats

they sit there and watch

one should respect old people they talk always

about important matters

I hear the one sitting nearest saying:

– If I make it alive,

I shall buy me a hat

with a broad brim.

The others have nothing to add

and then I’m past already.

IX - Honnos, My Fiddler

Between the sound of the river,

the sound of the railway,

under the deep sky of Feketeto.

between the edges of the boxlike lorries,

between the searching looks of the police

and your dancing family,

among the loitering gorgios

you cast the sound of your trumpet violin.

By your dust-gathering boots

your little brother’s drum, it’s rumble:

you do not hear.

Before your eyes, your distant

eyes,

your sisters raise their hands

and you don’t see:

nothing goes into your eyes

but this music,

the resounding pictures

of your trumpet trumpet violin,

swift and accurate,

beginning now, now ending,

filigree works of sound.