For the Winged Words Nest the Finnish literary scholar Karoliina Lumma has contributed with an essay that was originally published in German in Jahrbuch für finnisch-deutsche Literaturbeziehungen Nr. 54, 2022. Translated into German by Stefan Moster. Karoliina Lummaa has translated it into English with poems and fiction translated by Emily Jeremiah, Fleur Jeremiah, John Abercromby and Karoliina Lumma.
“In early folklore and poetry, birds were symbols for human emotions, the soul and the art of poetry. The advent of modernist poetics changed the role of these poetic animals. Lexixal transcriptions and visual renderings of bird songs and calls, typographical representations of flight and eggs and detailed descriptions of bird life began to appear in poetry, giving rise to all kinds of bird-likenesses. From the perspective of literary criticism, this avian poetics raises new questions: how are birds in poetry, how do they influence writing, is there such a thing as poetic avian agency?” Karoliina Lumma
Karoliina Lummaa has been an advisor for The Conference of the Birds since the initial start in 2018. She is a researcher of literature and environmental humanities and completed her doctoral thesis on Finnish environmental poetry at the University of Turku in December 2010. From 2012 to 2015, she worked on a post-doctoral research project, “Avian Poetics,” funded by the Academy of Finland. In 2016, together with colleagues working in the fields of arts and social and natural sciences, she cofounded the multidisciplinary environmental research unit BIOS. Currently, she is working on a research project, “Messy Worlds” (Department of Finnish Literature, University of Turku), funded by the Kone Foundation. Lummaa is a docent in ecocriticism and has coedited Finnish anthologies devoted to multidisciplinary environmental research (2012), poetry criticism (2007; 2012), and posthumanism (2014).
Selected publications:
Kui trittitii! Finnish Avian Poetics. Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Helsinki, 2017.
An Avian–Human Art? Affective and Effective Relations between Birdsong and Poetry. In Affect, Space, and Animals, edited by J. Nyman and N. Schuurman, 163–78. London & New York: Routledge, 2016.
