locked

Last week, Finnish class. We were studying the Finnish modernists, and suddenly, in the middle of a poem by Haavikko, this glorious phrase appears.

kaikki ovet on lukittu auki

which I would (badly) translate as all doors are locked open

This is, of course, modernism and thus nothing is as it seems. But it also allows me to dig out my own meanings. And the meaning I find in this exquisite phrase is something along the lines of, there are possibilities and they can't be got rid of, not even if I wanted to. Every door around me is permanently open.

Possibly the most beautiful thought I have ever stumbled across.


(The poem is called Neljäs runo, from Talvipalatsi by Paavo Haavikko. Published in 1959.)