Translator at work: St Jerome, translator of the Latin Bible in the late 4th century, is the patron saint of translators and librarians. Leonello Spada's 1610s painting, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Picture: Wikimedia

Why translate, asked the late Herbert Lomas thirty years ago in an issue of Books from Finland (1/82) – the pay’s absurd, one’s own writing suffers from lack of time, it’s very hard to please people. And public demand for translation from minor languages into English was almost non-existent.

But he also admitted that translating is generally a pleasurable experience: ‘You have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.’

For Bertie Lomas, translating equalled putting on a mask and finding a self you didn’t know you might have: ‘In these solitary theatricals one actually does become creative: it’s not merely a job of transposition. It’s a job of invention: in each poem you have to invent a new personality.’

From time to time translators ponder their work in writing, and discussing translation of poetry seems to dive deepest. For example, as English (Teutonic syntax!) has a much larger vocabulary than Finnish (Finno-Ugrian syntax!), Lomas found that ‘crucial decisions are being made with every word’.

Tarja Roinila,who translates from Spanish, describes in a recent article a process of making a Spanish poem – with her co-translator Coral Bracho – out of Harri Nordell’s poem. The fact that Finnish is a synthetic and Spanish an analytic language makes Nordell’s inventive use of compounds particularly difficult to translate. What would valokupolikiihko (valo = light, kupoli = cupola, kiihko = fervour, passion, frenzy) be in Spanish (Romance syntax!) – what does the word mean? What’s the object of this passion or frenzy, is the cupola made of light or does it just reflect it? The final version, éxtasis-cúpola de luz, sounds rhytmically interesting, says Roinila, as the emphasis of the two first words is on the first syllable, which is rare in Spanish.

A translator has to abandon the letter of the original poem, and this destroys the poem. But it is the letter that the translator is able to work on. The translation of a poem is not possible or impossible – the task is to create a new poem.

The question of why poetry should be translated is cultural and political, Roinila concludes, and the answer must be cultural and political too. ‘Our language needs it, our literature needs it, it enrichens our ecosystem.’ Neither is translation some ‘extra task performed on the original work, but an organic part of its life. Translation, like reading, is part of poetry’s way of breathing.’

In his later life Herbert Lomas admitted that the situation has changed a little for the little better. The pay might still be absurd, and it’s still very hard to please people, but interest in reading translated poetry – which implies that there is interest among publishers bringing it about – has slowly grown, and not just in England.

For a poet, translation is like playing scales on the piano, he said; ‘it may extend one’s knowledge of what poetry can be.’ For non-poets, poetry extends one’s knowledge of what language and literature can be.

Here’s an example of Bertie Lomas’s rare skill of inventing a form: a poem by Kirsi Kunnas for children. Bertie has translated rhyme, fun and play – as well as the idea of the original (which will be particularly appreciated by those who can read Finnish).

Starfish

Starfish, living on the ocean bed
with tons of water
on her head,
           said:
     'I don't dread
     any load.
        I've pointy thumbs
        a plumb flat bum
and lots of pressure-proof brats!'

Meritähti

Eli merenpohjassa Meritähti
tuhat tonnia vettä yllä.
      - Minä jaksan kyllä,
      sanoi Meritähti.
      - On terävät sakarat,
      ja litteät pakarat
ja paineenkestävät kakarat!

Books for a desert island? Photo: Patrick Verdier (Wikimedia)

Might Tolstoy’s War and Peace  be the epitome of a novel that qualifies for reading on a desert island? (Maybe along with Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, and possibly The Gateless Gate (the Zen Buddhist kōans). After all, who’s got time or energy for some 1,500 pages of a wartime story from the Napoleonic era with too many characters (580, and so many of them called Pierre)?

We do tend to consume everything quickly: busy busy! We eat fast, we talk fast, we exercise fast, we fast-forward through movies. We devour books like fast food. Hurry hurry! On to the next one, whatever it is, don’t hang about!

In her book Carscapes, featured on these pages, photographer Merja Salo notes that the modern world is characterised by ever-increasing speed; invoking the French philosopher Paul Virilio’s term dromology (from the Greek dromos, ‘to race’; the science or logic of speed), Salo illustrates how cars embody this logic.

Occasionally we may start reading a novel that refuses to be devoured: our eyes hurry forward from page to page in our desire to find out quickly what it’s all about, but our mind can’t keep up – and the finer points of the work remain obscure to us. The book requires something more from us than we, in our perpetual restlessness, are prepared to give.

We’ve often discussed this phenomenon with people who read books for a living, working with translators and publishers in Finland and elsewhere. If a novel is a literary work of art, a tad more intellectually demanding perhaps than the average blockbuster, the method of galloping through it while munching a sandwich (occupational hazard) may fail totally. One has to seek out some peace and quiet, sit down, start over; only then will the pleasure of reading re-emerge.

In a newspaper review of the new novel by Kristina Carlson, William N:n päiväkirja (‘William N’s diary’) – translated extracts from which we’ll publish soon – one critic cautioned that ‘one should not reject this book at first sight, thinking, “who cares about a lichen researcher living in the 19th century?” ’ and that one should not ‘devour’ it either (as the novel ‘requires time, like an old bottle of Burgundy’).

Oh dear. Why on earth would a novel that features a scientist living in a time and a place remote from ours make us shy away from it? Are our own contemporaries (and their eternally failing relationships…) the only suitable subject matter to attract readers? Why the assumption that readers are looking first and foremost for something instantly recognisable?

It is, however, possible that some daring individual still might consider reading War and Peace, despite the fact that the novel features aristocrats in early 19th-century Russia.

The journalist and writer Anna-Lena Laurén, in her column (in Swedish only) published in the Helsinki newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, quotes a friend who advised her to read just the bits about peace and skip the bits about war.

In Laurén’s opinion, Tolstoy never fails in making every single character, down to the lowest cynic, a complete human being. She developed a satisftying method of her own: ‘War and Peace must be read in long stretches…. It’s a book you have to throw yourself into and not let go of. If you’ve tried to swim the crawl you’ll know what I mean. Head above the water – down holding your breath – up to grab oxygen – down again, all the way to the end.’

Reading requires brains and effort; that’s all there is to it. And in our busy, busy lives it might be useful to bear in mind another of Paul Virilio’s dromological theses: ‘The more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases’.

What are books made of? Picture: Wikipedia

‘The worst of all is if the writer forgets writing and starts turning out books.’

This thought is from the poet Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen’s introductory talk at the Lahti International Writers’ Reunion (LIWRE), which took place at Messilä Manor between 19 and 22 June. ‘There’s too much talk of the stunting of the book’s lifespan and the economic life of the publishers,’ she continues. A writer ‘must not forget that he or she is responsible to the work of art, nobody else, not even the readers.’

Today, book publishers are responsible to capital and productivity, and a work of literature resembles a product with an invisible best-before marker. Is its life a couple of months, like ice cream? Books delivered to the shop in September are already old-hat in February, and are best put on sale.

An article by Martti Linna in the Finnish Writers’ Union magazine (Kirjailija, 2/11) deals with the maculation that is mentioned in publishing agreements, or the destruction of copies of ‘old’ works. The unsold copies of one children’s book published in the autumn of 2008 were destroyed at the beginning of 2011. For the author, the destruction of a work is, of course, a cause of sadness; for the publisher it is merely the elimination of an item of expenditure. The development of print-on-demand services will perhaps put an end to both the storing of books in warehouses and the sadness of writers.

Faces sell the printed word. How old a new writer is, and what he or she looks like, is important. It is more difficult to sell an ‘old’ and ‘ugly’ writer to the media, both at home and abroad. (That is, if the ‘old and ugly’ writer is a woman – in the case of a man things may be different, we think, although good looks are of course an advantage to men too.)

We have also heard of writers being warned by their editors not to write ‘too intelligently’ in order not to hamper the marketing of the book. This is linked to a paradox that we just can’t get over: Finns are more highly educated than ever, so that there is no need to suppose any lack of intelligence or knowledge when what we might call products of the spirit are designed for publication. Playing safe may perhaps bring coins into the till, but it won’t result in art.

Youngish women with camera-friendly faces sell like hot cakes. As the Finnish author Pirkko Saisio said (in a feature entitled ‘Menestystarina’ – ‘Success story’ –  by Pekka Hiltunen, published in Image journal 5/11), ‘I have heard that foreign agents always ask three things about Finnish writers: how many copies have they sold in Finland, how old are they and are they good-looking. These are very influential today. ‘Whether their work are the stuff of classics or reduced-calorie-ice-cream-human-relationship prose is, of course, irrelevant to the media, which need a constant supply of new interviewees. In a celebrity culture, writers are considered to be functioning members of the profession of publicity – which is pretty rich, considering that they actually practice their profession in solitude.

Underestimating the reader is always short-sighted and intellectually impoverished – whether it is done by the writer or the publisher. Being a writer may be a profession, but ‘writing cannot be performance,’ said Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen.

In our job editing a literary journal, we often find ourselves leafing through texts which, you can somehow tell, have before publication been polished for years in creative writing schools, publishers’ offices and writers’ workshops in order to produce a publication. What is missing, though, is the convincing passion and skill, the certainty and self-confidence with which the writer takes the reader where he or she wishes.

It is the voice of original talent and intelligence, not to be found at writers’ workshops or publishers, but in solitude and in thought.

Goddess of victory: charioteer and runner Nike (constructed from the damaged statue of Nike of Paionios, from ca. 420 BCE). Photo: Wikimedia

No one should ever start a piece with ‘already the ancient Greeks…’ , but here goes:

Already the ancient Greeks practised the noble arts of sport. The Romans extended the cultivation (their word!) of culture to leisure, amusing themselves by throwing Christians to the lions. Formula F1 came a couple of thousand years later, as did post-modern art, sitcoms and reality TV, whose presenters take the place of lions and whose celebrities are today’s Christians.

The Olympics, founded by the Greeks, were in full swing as early as the seventh century BCE, until the Christian Roman Caesar Theodocius I banned them as irretrievably pagan in the year 393. However, they were revived 1,500 years later.

In Europe, the various tribes organised themselves and began to form societies; the continent divided into nation states which, in addition to fields and sports, began to cultivate their own languages and, through them, science and art.

In his new non-fiction book, Urheilukirja (‘A book about sport’), novelist Tuomas Kyrö examines sport in Finland through history and his own experience. After an active early youth, Kyrö is now more of an armchair sportsman, but he seems pretty omnivorous in his tastes. According to him, sport is essential to the survival of nation states because of the constant competition for growth among nations. Of which, of course, the Olympics is the ultimate stage, or stadium.

In the Finnish nation state, sport and the arts are not merely juxtaposed but sometimes set against one another, certainly where state sponsorship is concerned. Fortunately, in addition to the niggardly hand of the government, the cultivation of matters of the spirit are funded via the lotto and the football pools, in other words directly from the generous (or greedy) hand of the people.

A new comparison has sparked debate in the Finnish media: the True Finns party, which is seeking power in April’s parliamentary elections – and, according to the polls, is likely to get it – has announced in its manifesto that ‘The fine paintings of Edelfelt and Gallen-Kallela and Sibelius’s world-famous symphonies are internationally recognised…. The True Finns feel that the preservation of the Finnish cultural heritage is of primary importance compared to supporting post-modern contemporary art. Government arts funding should be directed in such away that it strengthens Finnish identity. Faux-artistic post-modern experiments, on the other hand, should be left economically to individual sponsors and the free market.’

The party’s website also states: ‘Funding for excellence in world-class sport should be increased at the expense of the arts. It would, in the end, be a question of extremely small sums. To ensure the London (Olympics) project and one gold medal, all that would be needed would be around three million euros of extra funding for effective training…. For sport is the circus entertainment that interests the people more than the state-funded arts, which are also in a certain sense elitist…. Prowess in world-class sport and keep-fit for ordinary people  always go hand in hand. Olympic sports have always played an important role in our national identity.’

The winner's game: since the 1928 Summer Olympics, the obverse face of the Olympic medals bear Nike's figure. Photo: Wikimedia

So three million is the price of one Olympic gold medal? Of course, there is no guarantee of one, even with this sum. Prowess in world-class sport and keep-fit absolutely do not ‘go hand in hand’. Democracy does not mean that everyone has to be interested in the same cultural matters. Quantity is no guarantee of quality; what ‘the people’ like cannot be more ‘right’ per se than what interests the ‘elite’. Feeding Christians to the lions is not admirable in human terms, however much the people liked it.

There’s much to mock in this new admiration of the cultural heroes of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The ‘Finnish national’ artists Albert Edelfelt and Axel Gallén (later Akseli Gallen-Kallela) and the composer Jean Sibelius were also mondaine cosmopolitans seeking their training and a large part of their inspiration abroad (and their mother tongue was not Finnish, by the way, but Swedish).

Finnish identity and Finland’s national heritage were not born out of powers primordially ‘Finnish’. A return to an idealised past is not possible, not now, not ever. ‘National identity’ remains a notoriously debatable subject.

Ever onwards: Nike of Paionios (the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, Greece). Photo: Wikimedia

But aren’t sports and arts both such fun! Coming up on the Books from Finland site next are extracts from Tuomas Kyrö’s sports fan book, and in it, he also talks about the arts: ‘Competition, dance, theatre, rally-driving, literature, ball-games, individual sports, video installations. What they are is play. Immaterial and pointless activity. But, to their makers and participants, perfectly meaningful…. Completely pointless, and damned important.’

Abckiria (‘ABC book’, 1543): the first Finnish book, a primer by the Reformation bishop Mikael Agricola, pioneer of Finnish language and literature

In August 2010 the American Newsweek magazine declared Finland (out of a hundred countries) the best place to live, taking into account education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism and political environment.

Wow.

In the OECD’s exams in science and reading, known as PISA tests, Finnish schoolchildren scored high in 2006 – and as early as 2000 they had been best at reading, and second at maths in 2003.

Wow.

We Finns had hardly recovered from these highly gratifying pieces of intelligence when, this December, we got the news that in 2009 Finnish kids were just third best in reading and sixth in maths (although 65 countries took part in the study now, whereas  in 2000 it had been just 32; the overall winner in 2009 was Shanghai, which was taking part for the first time.)

And what’s perhaps worse, since 2006 the number of weak readers had grown, and the number of excellent ones gone down.

All in all, though, the Finnish educational system has a good reputation. A recent article in the British Guardian newspaper claims that freedom and flexibility flourish in Finland: ‘every Finnish child gets a free school meal, and a free education, which extends to university level’.

It is worrying, though, to follow the news reporting of the 2010 university law. It separated the universities from the state, introducing a demand that universities raise their own funds: in addition to state funding, universities are now charged with raising private funds for capital investment whose profits they are free to use as they wish.

But, as it happens, until now fundraising appears to have favoured universities of technology and commerce. Simultaneously, courses in the humanities are disappearing all over the country as faculties are reorganised. The teaching of philosophy, for example, has ceased in eastern Finland. University employees have expressed doubts that monies raised from business won’t be distributed evenly;  as it happens, the majority of university board members come from outside academia.

In its visions of what the country should be doing in the future, a brand new report by Finland’s Country Brand Delegation, published this month and  entitled Consider it solved!, has lots to say about the positive effects of education of the past: ‘High-quality education based on equal opportunity has played a key role in the success story of Finnish society. Education has created prosperity, safeguarded democracy and evened out differences between regions and social classes.

‘Finnish basic [primary and secondary]  education is the best in the world. The next major objective is to get universities and higher education institutions up to that level – among the best in the world – where basic education already is.  – - Free higher education has in practice enabled students to change the selections they have made as well as change sector.’

But academic freedom and the choice of subjects has already now become more limited – for humanists in particular. On top of that, tuition fees are also coming to Finland: goodbye to free education, then?

Culture is based on education: if education narrows, so does culture.

As for the best place to live, according to a new report by Finland’s National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), the quality of life in Finland is relatively high – but socio-economic differences have grown rapidly. The risk groups for the weakest quality of life are the unemployed between 18 and 25 years of age and old people over 80, who together make up 29 per cent – almost a third of the population. And now, in 2010, the number of children living below the poverty line is approximately the same as at the beginning of the 1970s. Unemployment is high among the young – more than 21 per cent, and growing.

What will happen in the future to the differences between social classes, formerly ‘evened out’ by Finland’s ‘high-quality education based on equal opportunity’? The danger is that the humanities will be defined as ‘unprofitable’. In that case, what will happen to those PISA results (the apple of the eye of so many Finnish politicians)? For not only culture, but of course the whole of primary and secondary education, depends on the humanities.

____

*) You can download the whole report or parts of it, in English, Finnish or Swedish, by clicking the site address at the end of the Foreign Ministry page here.

Money, money, money... Photo: Twid/Wikipedia

Through his work, a writer provides a living for both himself and his publisher. The publisher makes his profit through the work of his writers, and both parties are satisfied. Is this how it goes?

The novel Puhdistus (Purge, 2008) by the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen (born 1977) has been translated into 13 languages, including English, and by now it has sold who knows how many copies.

One would imagine her publisher would like to live happily ever after with his superstar, and perhaps also vice versa – for WSOY (est. 1878) has long been one of the most powerful, as well as the most enlightened, publishing houses in Finland.

Well, no – Oksanen had not been happy about the way the directors at WSOY had begun to treat the company’s authors, and after a period of public acrimony, also involving other authors, WSOY last June announced it would not be publishing Oksanen’s next work, and so the two parted ways. (Obviously Oksanen had no problems in choosing another publisher, and her next book will be published by Teos.)

In June WSOY also sacked about 30 of its employees. This made its authors wonder who they will be working with in the future, as the number of editors in the Finnish fiction department was reduced just to a couple.

The internet publisher Leevi Lehto notes in the interview we published last week that according to Jacques Eijkens, the Dutch CEO of Sanoma, which owns WSOY, ‘the financial significance of works of literature was just “small potatoes”.’

From the CEO’s point of view, or in purely monetary terms, that may be so: in 1999 WSOY became a part of Sanoma, one of the biggest media concerns in Europe (even though the ownership still is Finnish by 90 per cent); WSOY’s turnover is less than one per cent of Sanoma’s.

In Finland, as elsewhere, the publishing world has been perturbed by, among other things, an overly narrow focus on the profits demanded by publicly quoted companies and the influence of electronic readers on printed books. When any business starts to grow, it faces the question of whether or not to issue publicly quoted shares. And if it does, its first responsibility becomes a financial one, to its shareholders.

Worried authors – just ‘small potatoes’ in the business? – may then bleat, ‘Publishing is not just business…’ And they are right.

Traditionally writers enjoy a more or less close relationship with a representative of their publisher, i.e. a human being (an editor). Hannu Raittila, an ex-WSOY author, has said that despite the fact that a publishing company is a business, it is also a cultural institution, which in turn means that the business idea must be based on the continuity of the business, not on the maximising of the profit for the shareholders.

As marketing likes to deal with ‘brands’, authors, too, according to this overweening pursuit of profit, had better make themselves easier to ‘sell’ to book buyers. A very annoyed Jari Tervo (one of the best-selling writers of WSOY – and of Finland), declared, in an article published in Suomen Kuvalehti this autumn, that he’s certainly not ‘a brand’ – as a brand is something predictable.

Raittila’s claim seems viable, as small publishers do thrive – if they handle their business skilfully. A good-quality work of fiction may not bust blocks, but it will be modestly profitable. And it won’t be a brand.

It will be read. Which is, we believe as readers (and buyers) of books, the idea of publishing.

Let’s hear it for the small potatoes.

Illustration by Joan Barrás

‘Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honour of a critic,’ said the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius.

No, probably not; but people still read what the critics write – and, sometimes, also what they wrote fifty or a hundred years ago.

An annual list of professions most highly valued by the public in Finland is always headed by surgeons. Shepherds generally feature at the bottom of the list. But critics fare none too well, either – a couple of years ago they were ranked between butchers and gravediggers. Which, of course, can be interpreted, in metaphorical terms, either as hilarious or tragicomical.

Things are not going too well for critics the world over: the position of traditional newspaper criticism is weakening as the column inches of the arts sections shrink and social media offer everyone who wishes the opportunity to be a ‘critic’. For example, the showbusiness magazine Variety recently fired its theatre and film critics. Who needs professional critics?

Theatres, for example, now prefer to quote comments from the public, not critics, on their websites; and no wonder, because in those comments details glisten, sparkle and dazzle like the shelves in a bathroom accessory shop: everything and anything is just brilliant, absolutely great, wonderful, super. But what did the performance mean? What was its issue, context, artistic, ethic, political value? Was everything really brilliant, super?

In the case of the theatre, what is left of this ethereal art form after the curtain finally falls? Personal memories, photographs, the odd video recording perhaps – and thus far, reviews in the media. The revered theatre critic of the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Michael Billington, pondering why critics matter, quotes (in the paper’s ‘Critic’s notebook) a Shakespeare professor: what the critics provide is ‘a hedge against amnesia for the next generation.’ Theatre criticism is written by people who specialise in the art and its meaning in society.

It is, incidentally, highly debatable whether a professional critic needs to ‘love’ the theatre – but he/she should love writing about it, because it’s his/her profession. Just as actors should love acting and singers singing, right?

Another quote, from the US newspaper Today: ‘Why should people listen to the 2000-word opinion of a film scholar and historian with years of experience when they can find out about “Lars and the Real Girl” from a high school geek writing on an iPhone?’

Yea, that’s the question. But surely there isn’t anyone truly interested in the arts – literature, cinema, theatre, fine arts or music – who doesn’t enjoy reading a well-written review – by a pro who can write. Simply: a review written with personal commitment, perception and passion is a joy to read.

And if I subscribe to a newspaper, on paper or online, I expect to get what I pay for: stuff thought out and written by professionals, whether about politics, society or culture.The British (Academy Award-winning) dramatist Christopher Hampton once said, ‘Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp post how it feels about dogs.’

This quote seems also to be attributed to Hampton’s colleague John Osborne – they both were arrogant young men of the theatre some fifty years ago. But largely thanks to their barking, leg-lifting contemporary critics, they’ve received plenty of fame, praise (available to posterity in the media archives) and awards. A good critic’s nose works, no matter how dimly the light shines.

This comment on new fiction could have been presented by anyone who’s been reading new Finnish novels or short stories. The commentator was, however, the 2010 British Orange Prize judge Daisy Goodwin, who in March complained about the miserabilist tendencies in new English-language women’s writing.

Jouni Avelin, editor of Kulttuurivihkot (‘Cultural notes’) magazine, said in this year’s first issue: ‘There are two themes in new Finnish fiction: men’s mid-life crises and young women’s erotic adventures – all Finnish literature is the literature of anxiety…. Sex is never nice, life stinks, shoes pinch….

‘The main character hates himself and his mother, who loathes her husband, who can’t stand his children or his parents, who hate everybody who enters the house, either through the door or the TV set. All suffer save suffering itself…. The novel is always the main character’s confessional: life is the same as life in other novels.’

It has to be admitted that playful, happy and sunlit fiction is slightly on the rare side, as we have cause to note, year after year, at the Books from Finland offices. Not surprisingly, as virtues are so much more boring than vices.

And the grimmest genre of all, crime literature, very popular in the Scandinavian countries – as well as in Finland – has been very exportable, as is proved by the best-selling lists of translated fiction all over the world. Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, Håkan Nesser…. Leena Lehtolainen and Matti Rönkä are two Finnish writers of crime literature who have recently become popular in Germany, in particular.

(It is somewhat puzzling why crime fiction, entertaiments dealing with death, murder and violence, is so abundant in these ‘welfare societies’ in the North. Can anyone explain? Has anyone tried?)

In the first issue of 2006 of Books from Finland the literary scholar Michel Ekman wrote under the title ‘Life is too short’, expressing a personal (and unusual) view: ‘What literary genre is more slavishly bound by the compulsion of plot than the detective and the thriller? (And consequently, more stereotyped in its particulars and its structure.) Opera, of course, and one can just imagine the joy of watching Tosca without music.’

In contemporary Finnish drama, the nuclear family is definitely a huge favourite; skeletons rattle in the cupboards as grim primary relationships are taken out for an airing, the traumas of the Winter War are omnipresent, lovelessness continues unto the third and fourth generation and the fear of a global ecological disaster paralyses the young.

The grim stories occasionally bring to mind those dark 19th-century fables of those German fabulists, the Grimm brothers: in them people are burnt alive, chopped to pieces and tortured: early crime literatur – for children!

It’s not that life isn’t sometimes grim and that fiction shouldn’t be written about it – it’s just that the weighty realism of fiction often falls on to the reader’s neck like a ton of bricks, as do the repeated patterns of this modern miserability. (Thanks, Mr Chekhov, for your philosophy – to quote you freely, art should depict life as we see it in our dreams, not only just as it is or as it should be.)

Coming up soon on this site is a fantastic story for you to read, set in a (sc-fi-ish) future, about the similarities between silicone and human flesh, by Tiina Raevaara; it may not be a very sunny story, rather a grim(m) fable, but we think it’s exciting, and not without humour. We’ll be introducing some new drama, too – Finnish drama has been enjoying renewed success at home in recent years and is now also getting exported – with themes other than devastating family life.

You’ll find samples of fiction on this page in which life is not ‘the same as life in other novels’, so stay with us!

The final truth remains unprovable; opinions rage. But what demonstrates what is read the most are the best-seller lists. Would you, dear reader, be interested in Fart: A Spotter’s Guide (Craig S. Bower, tenth on the Finnish list of translated fiction in December)?

Or would we, the Editors, buy, for example, Juha Vuorinen’s latest book? More than 850,000 copies of Vuorinen’s 19 books have been sold over the past 11 years. His Juoppohullun päiväkirja (‘Diary of a crazy drunk’) – which really did begin life as a journal – has sold more than 150,000 copies, and Vuorinen is now writing the fifth volume. His most recent book, a funny crime thriller called Painajainen piparitalossa (‘Nightmare in the gingerbread house’), was eighth on the Finnish fiction best-seller list in December.

The Juoppohullu books are all about, yes, well, the ravings of a man under the influence. It’s extraordinary how many readers are gripped by the graphic description – inebriation, hangover, vomiting, sex etc. – of alcohol and its effects. Finland, it’s true, leads the Nordic countries in alcohol consumption, and a every third person of working age misuses the stuff. Because Vuorinen writes with comic fluency (and accuracy?), his boozy novels have also risen to prominence in Estonian, Norwegian and Swedish translations.

And is number one on the December list, Dan Brown’s latest megaseller, an unusually fine novel? Or The Winner Stands Alone by Paulo Coelho (‘loved by readers, hated by critics’), at number three?

The number one spot on the Finnish fiction list went, slightly surprisingly, to a novel by  Antti Hyry (born 1931) for his 400-page novel Uuni (‘The stove’). The book was the newly announced winner of the Finlandia Prize, which always attracts a great deal of media attention and is designed to stimulate book sales. It clearly does its job.

It’s not really a fact that ‘critics’ mostly hate what ‘readers’ – as if these really were two separate categories – love; often, opinions converge, as for example with the 2008 Finlandia Prize winner, Sofi Oksanen’s novel Puhdistus (which will be published in English by Grove/Atlantic in April, translated by Lola Rogers).

So which, dear readers, will we be offering you in 2010? Well, we won’t be constrained by the narrow strictures of what’s considered good writing, any more than we will pander to what sells most. Instead, as always, we’ll be trawling the publishers’ lists for what’s interesting, innovative, quirky, compelling, endeavouring (as Books from Finland has been doing since 1967) to seek out examples of interesting, original literature, both fiction and non-fiction. And as always, we’d like to hear your thoughts about these pages.

The year begins, aptly, with wintry prose poems by Sirkka Turkka: ‘Trees have the snowy faces of ancestors, and on the road where dogs walk in their wind-blasted trousers, silence eats itself like silk.’ More poetry is on the way, as Jyrki Kiiskinen (an author and poet himself, and once editor-in-chief of Books from Finland) takes a look at last year’s new verse. A short story by the Russian-born Zinaida Lindén scrutinising the life-story of a former citizen of the Soviet Union will be next – and as the new spring novels start appearing, we’ll keep you posted.

Wishing you a great year in the company of good books, from Finland and elsewhere,

The Editors

It’s true, though, that there’s little of the carousing that characterises Christmas celebrations further south; by and large, people stay behind closed doors, and there’s plenty of time, in the dark mornings and evenings and the brief twilight between them, to eat and drink and sleep – and, for those whose souls are not entirely claimed by the television and food-induced torpor, to read.

Here are some suggestions of hand-picked, freshly translated Finnish winter reading from the Books from Finland website to snuggle up with: excerpts from new novels by Kristina Carlson (set in England in the time of Charles Darwin), Jari Järvelä (telling the sooty tale of a female chimney sweep) and Juha Hurme (who gives Finnishness some rather unusual definitions), or new poems by Ilpo Tiihonen (about fakirs, beggars and poets); or a most beastly story for children (recommended for adults, too) by Roman Schatz, an essay on the meaning of life by Kari Enqvist; or, or… our archives are full of good reading for those with the time and the inclination to browse them.

This year, our imaginations have been caught by one of the best-known pieces of Finnish Christmas music, Sylvia’s Christmas song, which has time and again been voted the best-loved Christmas tune. You can listen to it here in a performance by the evergreen Tapani Kansa, a versatile performer of both trad and pop. Written, in his native Swedish, by the multitalented 19th-century teller of fairytales Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898), it neatly overturns the romantic admiration of southern Europe so common in these northernly latitudes. ‘But up in the rafters there hangs high above, / The cage that imprisons my soul’s turtledove; / And quiet are now all the prisoner’s groans, / But oh, who pays heed to a prisoner’s moans?’: Anniina Jokinen has translated two of the four stanzas into English, see this page of her website. Here are the same two verses in the original Swedish:

Och nu är det jul i min älskade nord,
är det jul i hvårt hjärta också?
Grenljusen de brinna på rågade bord,
och barnen i väntan stå.
Där borta i taket, där hänger han än,
den bur, som har fångat min trognaste vän.
Och sången har tystnat i fängelseborg,
o, hvem har ett hjärta för sångarens sorg?….

Och stråla, du klaraste stärna i skyn,
Se ned på min älskade nord!
Och när du går bort under himmelens bryn,
välsigna min fädernejord!
I blommande vårar, på gyllene strand,
hvar finnes ett land som mitt fädernesland?
För dig vill jag sjunga om kärlek och vår,
så länge din Sylvias hjärta slår.

Dated Christmas Eve 1853, the poem is set in the southern climes of Sicily: looking at Mount Etna and listening to birdsong, the poet thinks about his own cold, faraway country in the north. Singing its heart out, the little bird (not a turtledove, in fact, but Sylvia atricapilla, the blackcap), is caged, and this has sometimes been interpreted as an allegory of Finland’s position under Russian rule in the mid-19th century. But finally, despite the lovely scent of oranges wafting in the air, the poet cannot restrain himself from praising his dear homeland as the best in the whole wide world.

The music is by Karl Collan (1828–1871), who gave the text a yearning setting that is guaranteed to bring tears not only to the eyes of ex-pat Finns but also to those of quite a few at home in Finland.

True enough, at this time of year blackcaps have migrated to warmer climes – but we do have the reindeer and Joulupukki (the yule goat) to brighten the gloom. No baby Jesus brings us our gifts, no Santa Claus attempts to squeeze himself down the fireplaces to drink sherry, no: from his home on Korvatunturi Fell, the one and only, genuine, original Joulupukki rides (business as usual) in his present-laden sleigh, pulled by (edible and renewable) reindeer, and that’s that. Ho-ho-ho!

We wish you all happy holidays, a very merry Christmas and a new year filled with peace, joy and good reading.

Photo: Soila Lehtonen

We want to make our website primarily a place for reading – not, in other words, for clicking, going on to the next thing. To think to the end what cannot be thought to the end elsewhere, as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said of his experience of staying in what was, at the turn of the 20th century, still Finnish Karelia. So you will not find our texts littered with links; for the most part, links appear at the end of a piece, not in it.

But we love the freedoms of our new medium. This month we’re introducing a new feature, the three little boxes that appear at the top of this page. We’ll use them for all kinds of little snippets: news we want to pass on, funny stories we’ve heard, links worth following, what’s coming up here on our website.

Since we last wrote, summer holidays have come and gone, Books from Finland has moved offices, just across the street (chairs and desks, books, computers, files and 42 years’ worth of archives!), children have gone back to school, the busy life of autumn has started. But through it all, there’s always the book in your handbag or your briefcase, Books from Finland, perhaps, for sneak peeks on the computer through the working day or after it is done, or on your mobile phone. That is the power, and sometimes the solace, of literature; and the fact, here at Books from Finland, that our business is words means that the whole world can be our subject.

New novels, stories, poems and reviews are on the way to this website, so stay tuned! And as Helsinki is frosty already, here’s an autumn offering, by one of our favourite poets, Ilpo Tiihonen, a master of rhyme (as is his translator, Herbert Lomas).

The Editors

Under Arcturus

Even in autumn, at the very beginning,
the omens were all bad:
‘Oh who can make a start with death,
after the ice we’ve had?’

But though the witches warned and spat,
they tackled their first snow-weather,
and hand in hand and side by side,
huddled close together.

Leaves had wafted, light and yellow,
in the damned dirt to lure us,
but the spruce trees stood, with spruce you see
the height ot the night, the way to Arcturus.

They felt the point of the diamond mirage
that blinds the eyes with its glow,
but even so, in this frosty garden,
in their fevers, they stared at the snow.

As if they were toasting November, and their lips
scorned death, in revolt,
they pressed their kiss on the mouth of dawn
and time was given a jolt.

From Tähtipumppu (‘Starcombo’, WSOY, 1992)

Translated by Herbert Lomas (published also in Black and Red. Ilpo Tiihonen: Selected Poems; Making Waves, 1993)
More poems here, and here

Two of us have been involved with Books from Finland for long enough to remember the days when galley proofs made their stately way from Helsinki to London, New York, etc. and back by express airmail. That was in the days when Books from Finland had a physical existence, and a physical location. It’s hard to describe the feeling of liberation now that Books from Finland is anywhere you – or we – want it to be, and that the old big issue deadlines are a thing of the past. We publish what we want, when we want – usually, something new at least once a week.

And the trepidation of opening up the new issue when it arrives from the printer is also gone: if we notice a little mistake (or even a big one) we can just go right in and correct it. As the Editor-in-Chief’s new, pink T-shirt puts it: ‘Deadlines are over – if you want it!’

The core of Books from Finland, however, remains reading – the same imaginative interaction with a universally agreed symbol system that characterised our relationship with the printed word. We’ve worked very hard to try to make our website a place to go to read. Quiet as well as exciting, somewhere to meditate as well as make discoveries.

For that reason, although we’ll be offering as many useful links to other websites as we possibly can, you’ll generally find them at the end of a piece, not in it. Except where the subject matter demands, as in Teemu Manninen’s recent post, Re-inventing the book: on the papernet, pod and the unbook.

In fact, as Teemu suggests, not far behind our arrival on the internet there follows the possibility to step right off it again – the opportunity, through a print-on-demand service, for you, dear reader, to print your own choice of articles to make your unique, personalised issue of Books from Finland. Watch this space.

So, on the eve of midsummer, what might your own summer issue of Books from Finland look like? Coming up over the next couple of months is Jyrki Lehtola’s Journalists’ tales, where this time he takes a sideways glance at the media infatuation with the Finnish foreign minister (and the unfortunate results for the object of its affection); some fascinating pairings of snapshots of Helsinki from 1909 and a century later; an entertaining essay on evolution with a philosophical twist by two young scientists; and of course, more of the fresh new fiction and poetry of 2009.

Plenty of food for thought, in other words as, metaphorically speaking, we retreat to our lakeside cabins to spend the brief summer months nourishing body and soul before the darkening, busy autumn to come. We wish you an excellent summer – and some very good reading*!

The Editors

* And for anyone who fancies a trip down memory lane, here’s a lucky dip of summer reading from Books from Finland’s archives. Enjoy (a poem, a short story, an extract from a novel and another short story)!

Our idea of what it is to read, and to read literature, has always been – and for many of us remains – bound up with the invention that made the development of western literature possible, the Gutenberg printing press and its successors.

In making this website, we have tried hard to fashion it as a place of repose as well as excitement, a location where the spirit and the imagination, as well as the intellect, can engage with what in the old days was called the printed word.

But of course, we are part of the excitement of the internet, too. We appreciate that websites exist, definitively, in three dimensions – two of space, and one of time. In abandoning the old, printed format of Books from Finland, we regretfully relinquish its seasonality – the natural cycle of our four yearly issues appearing with the spring melt, the white nights of midsummer, the darkness of autumn and the snows of winter. But we quickly realised that our rhythm could easily be rearranged; Books from Finland can be, if not a daily companion, at least a weekly one, with new posts at least every seven or so days.

A journal stands or falls by its capacity to echo, prompt or stimulate conversations in the real world (or, which comes to the same thing, the imaginations of its readers). The internet offers us the opportunity, it seems to us, of connecting with you, our readers, naturally. Instead of a gaggle of writers, all struggling to make themselves heard, arriving through your letter-box every quarter, we can give each writer his or her own space to speak, one by one, as is customary when people really want to hear clearly – and, what’s more, you have the opportunity to join the debate.

So, just for example, our latest addition, in the third week of April: Moscow television correspondent Anna-Lena Laurén recounts her experience of learning how to give and receive in the Russian way. The following week, it is Jyrki Lehtola’s turn to be heard: he uses it to expose the myth of tolerance on the internet. Then, Claes Andersson’s tenderly engaged poetic observations about life at home and abroad will appear, and after them the poet Teemu Manninen’s meditations on the new internet and its most electrifying possibility – the return to paper. Meanwhile, too, our Reviews section features critical readings of the best of what’s currently being published in Finland, while In Brief offers a wider reflection of cultural news. And the continuing project of the digitisation of our own vast database: more than 40 years of the very best of Finnish literature in translation, most of it completely unavailable elsewhere. Everything, of course, remains on the site for future reference, reading and reflection. All in good time.

It feels as if we have come a long way since we published our last printed issue in December, but of course we have only just reached the starting point: Books from Finland’s life on line is only just beginning. You can keep in touch by making ours your start page, adding it to your bookmarks, subscribing to our RSS feed, signing up for e-mail updates, or just by visiting us regularly.

Stay with us – Books from Finland‘s new life is an adventure, and one that belongs to us all!

We operate on the internet, but the books we present you with still exist, for the most part, in print and paper.  Yet, as we all know, literature is not the same thing as books; neither, says the writer Leena Krohn in her article Digital dreams, are all books literature.  ‘Literature consists of aggregates of meanings called works,’ she writes;  these ‘meanings are common to all humanity’.

She goes on to muse on the effortless online ‘cloud’ computing of the immediate future, where we we will be free to share anything online with anyone, supported by software that we will not have to understand or even be conscious we are using our new website: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, reviews and news.

The two soul sisters in Sisters beneath the skin are the poet Edith Södergran and her friend, the critic and writer Hagar Olsson, who began sharing their dreams of a new world and a new art 90 years ago. Södergran’s courageously avant-garde poems from the second decade of the last century beautifully retain their sensuous beauty in the present age of shareable digital literature.

Dear fellow cybernauts, welcome on board our new literary spaceship! The journey is just beginning. We will be adding articles to our website constantly; please stay with us, and check our website often for what’s new – you can sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feeds, or simply make ours the opening page on your browser. And remember, keeping in touch is easier than ever before; please let us have your comments – brickbats or bouquets!

The editors