Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Last June the master Nieminen – poet, translator, sinologist – was sixty. So we – a group of his friends, publishers and colleagues – set off on a visit to Myllykylä to congratulate him. This is the village where, with his wife, Nelli, he has been teaching primary school since the early 1950s – right up to his retirement, at the end of the 1989 summer term.

At the approach to the school, the road petered out into a single gravel track, and someone announced his astonishment that roads like this were still around in Finland. It brought to mind a poem of the master’s: More…