Participants | Programme | Articles |

Excerpt from draft programme:

The theme of the Littera Baltica meeting presently being arranged is "Floating Bridges – Tradition and Change in Literature".

The Baltic is a region of many diverse cultures, languages, and literary traditions, which of course have been in a state of continuous flux and intermix throughout history. In other words, there has been a constant traffic of words, not only of trade, across the Baltic. A recent example is the translation of Lithuanian poetry into Swedish by a group of Swedish and Finnish-Swedish writers, resulting in three volumes of poetry in the process of being published. Many writers have been able to spend a creative interlude at the Baltic Centre of Writers and Translators in Visby, Sweden. By a little stretch of the imagination, and by connection of the Nordic languages, the Baltic can be said to extend not only to the coasts of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, but all the way to the coast of Iceland.

The present theme represents an attempt to look backwards, forwards, and sideways simultaneously. What does the differences in the literary traditions which exist between the Baltic regions mean in terms of the historical necessities which have shaped them? What does diversity itself mean as a condition for literature? It is a researched fact that literary creativity has been found to sprout forth from the crevices, borders, and divides between cultures more often than from uniform cultural hegemonies, Edith Södergran and her Cosmopolitan mix of languages and traditions being just one example of the amazing fertility of the overlapping ground of Finnish and Russian culture; the Parland brothers being another.

How much do we feel closed in by tradition and forced to break out of it, and if so, in which direction? How much do we in our writing bring homage to our forebears? What is the specific mix of old and new, traditionalist and iconoclast of each of us, and how much have we been influenced by sideway glances at what is happening in the neighboring literary culture? This glancing sideways as a potentially fruitful literary influence may be especially true of the Finnish-Swedish condition of two widely separate linguistic and cultural literary traditions existing side by side in the same restricted national space, bur it may also be said to hold true of the Baltic region as a whole. It is to explore all of these questions and hopefully many more that we wish to invite you to a meeting in Turku, Finland, 4-5.10.02.