Leevi Lehto

Leevi Lehto is a Finnish poet, translator, publisher, programmer, performer, and self-taught composer. Since 1967, he has published six volumes of poetry, a novel, an experimental prose work, and a collection of essays. Active in left politics during the seventies, he worked as a corporate communications executive during the nineties. He is known for his experiments in digital writing, such as the Google Poem Generator. Marjorie Perloff describes his volume of poetry in English, Lake Onega and Other Poems, as “consistently amazing, brilliant — and funny.”

Lehto’s translations, some forty books in all, range from mysteries to philosophy, sociology, and poetry, and include works by Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, George Orwell, Ian McEwan, Joseph Svorecky, Walter Benjamin, John Keats, Omar Khayyam, John Ashbery, Mickey Spillane, and Charles Bernstein. His new Finnish translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses will be published by the Helsinki University Press in 2012. Since 2007, Lehto has run a press of his own, ntamo, through which he has published almost 100 books, most of them critically acclaimed experimental poetry.

Lehto also performs his own poetry and others’ internationally. Notably, he has versioned the works of Finnish writers from the so-called “traditional” period. The Finnish critic Aleksis Salusjärvi describes Lehto’s performances as “foregrounding an atavistic, affective voice roaring almost deafeningly … as if performance and voice themselves were the subject matter.” Recently, Lehto has begun performing with drummer Tero Valkonen, bringing his sound deeper into the borderland between speech and music.