Tinshoegirl
I think I was around five years old when I first heard Kaija Koo's song "Tinakenkätyttö". I was hanging out with my then-best friend, and she had the song on her tiny Sony Ericsson mobile phone. She played it for me, and I fell in love with it instantly. For some reason, I only came back to it years later, when I had already entered elementary school. I rediscovered the song through my mom; she's a huge Kaija Koo fan, has been as long as I remember. We used to listen to her albums in mom's old Peugeot car that had a CD player. One of those albums that mom had was the record where "Tinakenkätyttö" was initially released on. I could feel myself traveling back in time, to my best friend's tiny bedroom, sitting on her bunk bed and kicking air as the crackly speaker played the song for us. A simpler time, I thought. I think I was around ten at that time.
When I was a kid, I struggled a lot with understanding what words meant. It was frustrating because I have always been verbally talented, but as a young child, I sometimes just couldn't make out the simplest words and their real meanings. I could go on huge metaphorical tangents about the colors of the sky, but I would not understand the meaning of a basic Finnish verb. Granted, Finnish verbs are tricky and kind of mean, some of them have dozens of different definitions.
Especially the one in "Tinakenkätyttö".
If you look up the word "palaa", you will find so many different definitions for it that your first instinct might be to question the dictionary you're using. But then you realize you're using the official Finnish dictionary published by the Institute of the Languages in Finland, so they can't be wrong. But how is this word a verb and a noun at the same time, and how do each of those have tens of different meanings?
"Ja unissaan hän palaa pulpettiin, ja tinasotilasarmeija tukkii toisten suut."
TINSHOEGIRL – POLYPTYCH; FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: and the tin soldier army shuts everyone’s mouth, in her dreams she burns down into her desk, in their dreams they return to their desk, in her dreams they return to her desk
The first time I heard those lyrics, my brain immediately pictured a girl sitting in her desk, engulfed in flames, burning alive. For years to come, this would be the only interpretation I had of the lyrics, because one of the definitions for "palaa" is "burn".
It was much later that I discovered that the more likely meaning of the word is "return". I thought maybe that made more sense in general, but for some reason, my brain was still heavily latched onto the girl burning down in her desk.
Finnish is one of those cool languages that does not have gendered pronouns. The only third singular pronoun is "hän", and that is used universally for all people of all genders and sexes. In one sentence, there can be two different people of either different or similar genders, and you would not know that based on the pronouns.
So maybe it was they who was returning to her desk all along.
ichigonya
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