Lines from Karelia

Between 1932 and 1939 my great-aunt Lisi Hirvonen wrote a series of letters from Soviet Karelia to her sister in Saskatchewan, my grandma Anna Mattson. Fifteen letters survive.

These letters have been translated from Finnish into English by Iiris Pursiainen (BA Honours, DipTrans, MCIL), who lives near Bristol, England.

To bring these letters into the public domain, Lines from Karelia was published in 2011 by Arrowhead Press.This limited-edition pamphlet contains:



Lisi Hirvonen in Duluth, c. 1930




All fifteen letters in English translation  

 

 

Some of my poems responding to Lisi's letters  

 

 

Holograph copies of three of Lisi's letters  

 

 

Eight rare photographs  

 

 

My foreword explaining the historical context   
and the ultimate fate of my great-aunt Lisi   





First page of Lisi's letter from a lumber camp in northern Karelia, 5th February 1933

 

The originals of Lisi's letters are now in the Clara Thomas Archives, York University, Toronto, in the Varpu Lindström fonds, F0558. The finding aid for this important collection of Finnish Canadian immigration materials is here and the call number for Lisi's letters is 2009 025 /042 (12).

 



Women workers at Petrozavodsk ski factory, 1930s, where my great-aunt Lisi worked.
She said in her letters that she was a shock worker.



SONG OF THE SHOCK WORKER 

In 1935 at 36    I let my body go electric

shocked it into work that squeezed an extra 

 

dozen minutes out of every hour

multiple seconds out of every clock-tick.

 

Who believes arithmetic?    My body flew beyond it.     

For every pair of skis I polished off      I notched  

 

a cross on the window ledge        racked them up

like pikes in rows     threw myself into cut-short nights 

 

but sleep was full of chinks      the swing of blunt axes    

dead crows hung upside-down    from birch poles 

 

their limp wings       black flags in vast fields     

flapping through my dreams.       So I bolted  

 

life onto my workbench      hands hardened by fire   

fingers charming as  fish-hooks     with the sprung grace    

  

of ski tips    my thumbs tough as tempered steel.

My teeth sizzled     as I sharpened skis   

 

sanded them smooth along the grain for swiftness  

left them rough the other way      so skiers never slip   

 

backward.       Backward? I never go there.

My eyes always press forward     like headlamps  

 

on the car I used to own with Eino in America.

Let him clamp wooden strips on his feet     

 

race to other villages through endless trees    

cut lightning trails      through drifted snow.      

 

I’m a worker not a skier.    Smile Lizzie smile

grin Lizzie grin      the bosses say      

 

I’ll win a prize for sure.   Work is my power:   

the sweet electric therapy       of sweat on skin.

 

© Nancy Mattson

To order Lines from Karelia, please contact Arrowhead Press