‘These shirts I borrow from the Finnish’: the Kanteletar and the fabric of loss in Peter Sirr’s ‘A Journal’ (original) (raw)

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Abstract

This essay examines the personal, cultural and linguistic exchanges explored through textile metaphors in Peter Sirr’s 1994 poetic sequence “A Journal” (from the collection The Ledger of Fruitful Exchange). In this sequence, Sirr draws on The Kanteletar, a collection of Finnish folk verse originally published 1840-1841 by Elias Lönnrot, who also compiled the more widely known folk epic The Kalevala. Sirr’s adoption of the Finnish poems’ textile imagery allows him to interrogate the complexities of personal and cultural communication, as the sequence charts the end of a relationship between the poem’s speaker and his Finnish lover. Textiles assume multiple functions as metaphors and material objects: they act as personal and cultural references, as formal and structural devices, and as symbolic manifestations of intimate, emotional crisis. Sirr’s engagement with Finnish folk verse is thus thematic as well as formal, and articulates a desire to inhabit the lost lover’s idiom through numerous attempts of linguistic and cultural translation, and the literal and figurative processes of stitching and weaving.

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How to Cite

Karhio, Anne. 2018. “‘These Shirts I Borrow from the Finnish’: The Kanteletar and the Fabric of Loss in Peter Sirr’s ‘A Journal’”. Review of Irish Studies in Europe 2 (1):208-24. https://doi.org/10.32803/rise.v2i1.1726.

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