In spring 2006 Kalevi Aho came across the posthumously published collection The Book of Questions (1974) by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner. The collection consists exclusively of questions, many of which are strange or unusual in character: they force the reader to look at things in an entirely new perspective. Aho selected the texts for the 24-minute song cycle (2006) from Neruda’s questions and combined their Finnish translation (by Katja Kallio) into eleven new sets, ea...