Happy birthday, Hilja Onerva Lehtinen!

Jospa voisi herätä
uuden onnen uskoon,
loimuellen liittyä
kuin päivä aamuruskoon,
elää elo uudelleen
tuikkivine toiveineen;
ja kun sitten, sitten taas
joutuis elon ilta,
onnellisna kadota
kuin päivä tunturilta.

I wish that I could arouse
trusting happiness,
burning flames to blend, like those
which blend nights and days,
like the life anew, with drops
of its shining, burning hopes;
and again when timeless
life’s twilight is hurrying,
disappear in happiness
like the day from mountains.

Hilja Onerva Lehtinen was born 28.04.1882, in Helsinki, the only child of Johan and Serafina Lehtinen.
By the age of  seven, Onerva was left only with her father and grandmother, her mother being hospitalized in a mental institution.
Little Onerva learned to lie about her mother later on, saying to her classmates that she would be orphan, although her mother died in 1930.
The future great writer and female voice of Finland grew up having as best friend her father and being spoiled and overprotected by the grandmother.
Onerva will become famous by the age of 17 after publishing her first volume of poems ” Sekasointuja” in 1918, shocking her audience with a daring expression of poetry, with her passion, sensuality, “joie de vivre”:

“Yhden kerran elämässä tuliruusu aukee
yhden yö se kukoistaa ja aamulla jo raukee;
sill’ on syvä silmänluonti kutsuva ja kuuma,
sill’ on hehkuheteillänsä keskiöiden huuma.

Sill’ on lehti verinen ja purpurainen huuli,
sill’ on tuoksu huumava kuin kevätaron tuuli.
Taita tulikukkanen ja juo sen kuuma mesi,
elä hetki, nauti hetki, kaadu paikallesi!”
( Tropiikin alla)

Her penname becomes L.Onerva for the rest of her blessed life. Her writings break the traditional waves and psychological concepts of human being and come closer to inner vision of Freud’s psycho-analysis. Her words, her poetical images show the deep need of freedom, rebellion, confusion:

“minä olen vankina vaarallinen
ja kelvoton alamainen!”
(Resitatiivi I)

Although her intimate relationship with Eino Leino made her known as “the muse and lover of the greatest poet” and took away from her  the right to be herself in front of posterity, to be known for her wonderful mind, for her extraordinary vision and talent for poetry, Onerva was silent and she never gave up her faith in E. Leino, being for him a friend, a sister, a mother. This loyal friendship only her husband, the magnificent composer Leevi Madetoja, understood and accepted.
People around them talked, judged, labeled. Onerva became a silence, like her name : HILJA. She was surrounded by silence for decades. A few books written about her and most of the time about her intimate life.
Nobody inclined the head above her writings just to built a book about “the poetry of Hilja Onerva Lehtinen”. I deeply breathed the book of Reetta Nieminen, “Elämän punainen päivä”, the only book which really concentrates on L.Onerva’s creative life, a real scientific book, not a page from a gossips newspaper.
The events of ones life should not be more important than what their mind created. But the world of today is more interested in trivial aspects than the creation itself.
In my heart, today the flag of Finland is waving all over the country, wishing to “the fire rose of Finnish poetry”: Happy birthday in eternity for 130 years,  Hilja Onerva Lehtinen!

by Maria Magdalena Biela