Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s painting Symposium (1894). From left: Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the composer Oskar Merikanto, the conductor Robert Kajanus and Jean Sibelius. Aino Sibelius was not pleased with this depiction of her husband depicted during a drinking session with his buddies

It is 150 years since the birth of Finland’s ‘national’ composer, Jean Sibelius. Much has been written about his life; Jenni Kirves’s new book casts light on his wife, Aino (1871–1969), and through her on the composer’s emotional and family life.

Aino, Kirves remarks in her introduction, has often been viewed as an almost saintly muse who sacrificed her life for her husband. But she was flesh and blood, and the book charts the difficulties of life with her brilliant husband from the very beginning – his unfaithfulness during their engagement, how to deal with a sexually transmitted infection he had contracted, his alcohol problem, the death of a child. It was Aino’s choice, time and again, to stand by her man; she felt it was her privilege to support her husband in his work in every possible way. ‘For me it is as if we two are not alone in our union,’ she wrote, far-sightedly, as a young bride. ‘There is also an equally rightful third: music.’

Aino’s own family, the Järnefelts, were a considerable cultural force in Finland, supporters of Finnish-language education and the growing independence movement. Her brothers included the writer Arvid Järnefelt, the artist Erik Järnefelt and the composer Armas Järnefelt. It was Armas who introduced her to his friend Jean Sibelius.

Aino bore Sibelius – known in family circles as Janne – six daughters, and offered her husband her unfailing support through 65 years of married life. ‘I must have you,’ Sibelius wrote, ‘in order for my innermost being to be complete; without you I am nothing… For this reason you are as much an artist as I am – if not more.’

As an old lady, Aino remarked of her own life that it had been ‘like a long, sunny day.’

Aino Sibelius, 1891. Photo: National Board of Antiquities – Musketti.

An excerpt from Aino Sibelius: Ihmeellinen olento (‘Aino Sibelius: wondrous creature’, Johnny Kniga, 2015). We join the young couple in 1892 as they prepare for their long-awaited wedding.

At last, the wedding!

In the spring of 1892 the wedding really began to seem possible, as Janne’s symphonic poem Kullervo was very favourably received and Janne finally began to believe that he could support Aino. His financial situation was still, however, far from brilliant, and there were only two weeks to the wedding, as Janne wrote on 27 May 1892: ‘All the same, we must really be very careful about money. You will keep the cashbox and we will decide on everything together.’ The wedding grew closer and three days later Janne wrote triumphantly:

Do you understand, Aino, that we shall be man and wife in 1 ½ weeks – that we shall be able to kiss each other however we like and wherever we like (!) – and live together and have a household together – eat and make coffee together – it’s just so lovely.

A couple of weeks before the wedding, however, Janne wrote to Aino about some wishes for Aino in the future:

A skill with which a married artist can be protected from regressing is that the ‘wife’ understands to make him as little as possible into a model citizen. The man must not be allowed to be a paterfamilias with a pipe in his mouth, drowsy and docile; he must continually seek as many impressions as before, that’s clear, isn’t it? The kind of marriage whose main goal is the bringing of children into the world is repugnant to me – there are most certainly other things to do for those who work in the arts.

On 10 June 1892 the couple were finally married at the Tottesund manor house in Maksamaa parish, the Järnefelt family’s summer house. Only close family were present. There were lilies of the valley in Aino’s bouquet. Among Janne’s relatives, only his big sister Linda and little brother Christian were present, because is mother, Maria, was ill and Janne’s father, Christian Gustaf, had died of typhoid fever in the summer of 1868 while Janne was still a boy, and had left large debts as a result of his irresponsible life-style. The groom had forgotten to bring his wedding gift with him from Loviisa. It was a gold chain which had earlier been warn by Janne’s mother Maria and his paternal grandmother, Katarina. The chain was sent later to Aino by post. Inspired by Karelianism funded by Janne’s scholarship, they spent their honeymoon in Karelia, Lieksa and Koli. Not yet having exhausted his funding, Janne then continued alone to Ilomantsi and Korpiselkä to listen to Kalevala rune-singers. Aino wrote to her husband immediately after the honeymoon, having returned via Savonlinna to Kuopio on 20 July 1892: ‘Oh my dear angel and beloved, I am so wild for you. You cannot believe how strongly the moment of parting affected me. Oh, if only you were with me! My own dear little boy and bunny and a thousand times beloved.’

The newly-weds were happy, even though they did not have much in the way of money. As Aino wrote to her oldest brother Kasper about the couple’s first apartment, at Wladimirinkatu street 45, Helsinki, now Kalevankatu street: ‘We have such a pretty home and we are so very happy here at home.’ Aino’s other brother, Armas, wrote to his sister in the autumn of 1892:

… I envy you, but especially Spouse. I wonder if he understands how to value his position? Does he grasp that it is enviable for a person to have work, and the enthusiasm and energy to complete it? And finally: he has a wife who loves him and whom he loves. Nowhere does he have to stand alone. Preserve your relations, dearest children, as you have begun! Be open, do not hide anything from one another and you shall see how much sunshine life has to offer!

Armas was right. Janne really was extremely lucky to have a wife like Aino.

A husband ‘comes gradually’ home

To Aino, Janne may have written about his struggle against bad habits, but to [the conductor] Robert Kajanus he told the ugly truth. On 30 July 1902 he wrote to Kajanus: ‘I have come round from a five-day drinking bout with quite devilish after-effects.’ At Christmas 1902 Christian was very concerned about about his brother’s use of alcohol and was of the opinion that he must immediately become a total abstainer. Even though Sibelious was a tender and considerate father, he would still disappear for days on end to his favourite Helsinki restaurants. One one of his drinking trips he sent his wife a note: ‘Dear Aino! I wonder how you all are? Nipsu (the littlest one) and the rest of you. Send me word – I am in a very interesting conversation. Your Janne. I’m coming gradually.’

‘Gradually’ was a concept that could stretch to many days. Aino kept up appearances, and if she decided to go and look for her husband, she did it herself. One time she was forced to seek Kajanus’s help, as Janne had left the finale of his violin concerto unwritten. Kajanus was reluctant to intervene, but Aino asked: ‘Are you his friend or not?’ So they took a driver together and Aino waited in the carriage while Kajanus fetched Janne from the König. Aino did not utter a word of reproach to her husband.

Aino did not like it that Janne was present in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s painting Symposium; her husband is seen there in an unflattering light, and this not only hurt Aino, but endangered Janne’s reputation in the eyes of possible financial supporters and creditors. In fact, it later prevented Janne from buying the plot of land on which he had planned to build their house, Ainola. Before Christmas in 1891 Aino had read [the Swedish writer] Adolf Paul’s novel En bok om en människa (‘A book about a man’). Paul described his liquor-sodden adventures in the company of an artistic figure, and his drinking companion was easily recognisable as Sibelius. Aino conceded that the novel’s depictions of partying were lively, but despite Janne’s pleas she did not agree to translate the work into Finnish. It was a wise decision, as that work, too, affected Janne’s reputation in his patrons’ eyes.

During 1903, Janne had began to enjoy spending time with the groups of writers and artists that gathered around the magazine Euterpe. They met at the König restaurant and in the Kämp hotel. Aino was heavily pregnant, and sent her husband a message to the restaurant. She did not mince her words.

Do you think I would have you fetched from the bar, whatever happens? Do you think that, at such an important moment in our lives, I long for a man who is not sober? Far from it! But I am astonished that you, you, who consider yourself to live this life of yours in the service of art, that you can be so without any kind of respect. Consider that you should be a man, since you were created a man. Or are you a man? – You are not! I do not know what will happen in our lives. I suffer so badly from all of this. It will surely all soon be over. Then you can live in peace with your chosen friends. But Janne, as long as you have a wife, you will not be at peace if you merely insist on your rights and as soon as you encounter the earnestness of life, you leave everything, you support your ‘family’ financially, true enough, but in no other way. I accuse you because I am not now free to do what I wish to do. Otherwise I should not say a single word. Of my better feelings towards you I do not speak at present; they are precious and, to you, gratuitous, and moreover we no longer hold them in common. For so much I have experienced, so much have I gazed into your soul. But nevertheless, as I write this, I cannot hold back my tears. – this is all so wretched! – I cannot even hope that I will die, even though it would be best for you and me, for I love our children!

Soon after this Katarina was born, the fourth child in the family. At that time Aino’s restlessness about her husband continued to grow, and she unburdened herself to Janne’s good friend and supporter, Axel Carpelan. Carpelan was also concerned about the Euterpe group, and he in fact demanded that the composer should move out of Helsinki. The idea to move to Järvenpää, then still Tuusula, was born. Aino demanded Janne to stick resolutely to the truth, even if it she knew it would hurt. On 22 September 1903 she wrote to her husband: ‘Write very often and remember: be open. Never conceal anything. Directness is the condition of our happiness. Try always to remember this. If only you know how much suffering you cause me when you do otherwise. Let us care for the one thing that is the greatest that is to be found.’

It was 3 December 1903, and Aino was much concerned with the building process of [their new house,] Ainola, which was left largely to her as Janne concentrated on composing and, very clearly, boozing. Once Janne telephoned his wife, apparently drunk, and asked after his coat, which Aino herself had sought in various restaurants. Aino was cast once more into the depths of despair.

Do you know, the telephoning between us, when you were in Helsinki, was something quite terrible to me, as if I had been whipped. Because I always believe in something better and just as my belief was about to be strengthened – to receive a blow like that. I cannot bear many more of those. ­– Janne, do you not see the high, great thing? Why do you stifle in yourself that which has not been granted to other people? Are you never afraid? Genie oblige [genius brings responsibilities]. It is written as if in letters of fire wherever I look. Don’t scorn anything that is right. –– It is as if I am in a fire, I am so unhappy that I cannot do anything to help you. – It is just as if I had lived my life in vain. And that is exactly what I have done. Farewell my love, my only love. Keep well, kisses from us all.

The following day Aino continued to scourge her husband in the words of [the Norwegian playwright] Henrik Ibsen: ‘One must have faith in oneself, one must never betray one’s inner voice, one’s vocation, one’s task in life.’ And: ‘Talent is not a right but an obligation, and it is accompanied by great responsibility.’ In her own words, she wrote: ‘I fear and feel that something is about to be broken. –– Now I do not mean myself, but you! Dear, dear Janne, you are still young, do not let your life and your gifts be shipwrecked. –– Awake, Janne, awake and see what you are!’

Janne answered optimistically: ‘Morning will come for us.’ At the top of the page he wrote the couple’s watchword, me (‘us’). Aino, however, was still downcast and on 7 December 1904, on the eve of Janne’s birthday, she sent her greetings in a melancholy vein:

I am so, so distressed. Life is one great teardrop. –– Otherwise I have been perhaps doing a little better, although it is as if I were in touch with the spirit world. It is as if trolls visited me and told me what is happening far from me. –– Remember that one’s gaze must be clear before God. Every wrinkle in life is lit as if by electricity. – one can hide nothing, everything will be revealed.

On the following day, his birthday, Janne replied with the promise: ‘Build up for the last time, I shall change.’

To Aino, Janne might sometimes embellish the truth, but in a letter to Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s brother-in-law, Mikko Slöör, he revealed the true state of affairs in 1907: ‘This drinking – in itself a marvellously cheerful business – has gone too far –– Aino is at her wits’ end. I must address her concerns properly. It is very stressful for me to pinpoint and recognise all of this. After all, I am a spoiled, arrogant individual of no character.’

On 3 April 1907 Aino was so tense about the situation and so tired that she was sent to the Hyvinkää sanatorium to rest. The cause of her anxiety is easy to guess when one glances at the receipts: bills for Janne’s lobsters, brandy and champagne. Almost as many receipts have been preserved from that period as from the wet years of 1903-4. When, in late spring, Aino returned home, she was forced to note that her husband’s drinking went on and on. Her message to her husband was stark:

Do you have so terribly little respect for me that you care nothing for the extreme grief you cause me. I really do suffer from it so badly that it feels as if I am consumed by flame. Is life, in your opinion, really so cheap that you cannot even be bothered to show that you can stay where you want to. For you, what has happened is a little thing. For me, it is big. It makes such a tear in the slow and fine fabric that you and I, I at least have believed, have made together. All my strength goes into things like this. I have no other life. For I place all my belief in some tiny virtue or sign of effort from you. I suffer from everything that is bad or ugly with you. This is a great disillusion, for I was so sure of you already. Now you are, in my opinion, once more a sluggard. If only you know how ashamed I am that you have taken a gift that was meant for another. If you were energetic, then even now, upside-down as we are, we would be at our goal and my conscience could rest. My love suffers from these great wounds. It breaks my heart, and I am revolted when I hear your speech stumble and know what spirits are loose in your brain. Oh Janne, Janne, – you, who have the heart for all that is beautiful and noble that is ‘written’, do you not understand what it is that is so hurtful in a person when you show yourself in such an unlovable state. You lose more than you suppose. If only I could explain it to you.

Janne’s alcohol problem was serious, and his wife’s return apparently did nothing to improve the situation. In January 1908 Janne spent more than a week drinking in the Hotel Fennia in Helsinki and found himself in detox in the Deaconess Institute in Helsinki once again.

A great change in his habits, however, was on its way. When a growth in Janne’s throat was found in 1908, Janne and Aino, who was again expecting a baby, set off for Helsinki, where they wandered from bank to bank asking for a loan which would allow Janne to be operated on in Berlin. Aino waited in the street and Janne went to present himself to the bank manager. He received one negative answer after another, until an exhausted Aino sank down onto a bench. The next time he stepped out onto the street, Janne exclaimed, ‘I got it!’ The director of an insurance company had, without a word, emptied the day’s takings into Janne’s pockets.

At the end of May, Janne travelled to Berlin to visit a famous throat specialist. The doctor forbade him to drink alcohol for the rest of his life. Janne was terrified of the growth. He was so frightened of its return that he was prepared to follow the doctor’s advice. In a letter to his brother Christian he wrote, ‘In the case of tobacco he wasn’t against “just a little”. But I will probably have to give that up too. I have now gone a month without. Life is completely different without these stimulants. I would never have been able to imagine anything like it.’

For seven years he did not drink or smoke at all. And it became clear that he was able to compose without ‘these stimulants’, for many of his master works were born during this period. Those years were for Aino, she said, the happiest of her life.

I lightheartedly promised to explain the foundations of my aesthetics without thinking at any great length about what is my very own that could be called aesthetics. Now I am forced to think about it. The foundations of my possible aesthetics – like those of all aesthetics – lie of course somewhere quite different from aesthetics itself. They lie in human consciousnesses and language, with all the associated indefiniteness.

It is my belief that we do not live in reality, but in metareality. The first virtual world, the simulated Pretend-land is inherent in us.

It is the human consciousness, spun by our own brains, which is shared by everyone belonging to this species. Thus it can be called a shared dream, as indeed I have done.

The social metareality of Homo sapiens does not have much to do with objective, let alone absolute, truth; the former is the subject of study, but we know nothing of the latter. But those shared dreams form the foundation of all the elements of society – religions, law, science, the arts and even market economics.

Civilisations are not based on the intellect and rational thought to nearly the extent we wish to believe. In fact, the opposite is the case. The human world is built up of strange connections, logically impossible constructions: conjoined facts and fancies, double helices of the concrete and the illusory.

I have sometimes used this idea to illustrate the concept of ‘tribar’. (This was originally the name given by the physicist Roger Penrose for a kind of triangle which can be drawn, although it cannot be constructed in three-dimensional reality.) For me, this ambivalence is one of the most important observations about the world: that our reality is never a matter of either–or, but always one of both–and.

Money is an excellent example of such a tribar. In Tribar (1993) I wrote: ‘The new electronic economy has made money into an increasingly spectral phenomenon. Exchange rates and share prices are no more than digital states that jump in time to imagined futures. But how concretely these poltergeists are able to rattle our lives.’

Decades have passed, and money has increasingly little to do with the real economy. Money, which does not really exist, turns the wheels of the global economy. Money borrowed from the future has already been spent. A temporary currency supported forcibly by means of immense sacrifice, the euro, has begun to be described with the absurd concept of ‘irreversible’.

In my youth I wasn’t in the least interested in financial matters or economic systems and I could not even imagine that such distant and incomprehensible things could ever influence my own work. I have subsequently been forced to abandon this ignorance, as I have so many others. Writers are not bystanders; they live as prisoners of the same delirious institutions as other citizens. They, too, live in the House of Usher.

Literature and mathematics appear to be poles apart, as if they were not only on different sides of culture, but completely different cultures. But they are not. Both language and mathematics are their own form of maps, without which human society cannot function. Does writing not originate from the same kind of need for reckoning as mathematics: lines and crosses drawn in the sand on the beach with a finger?

In writing, we are also concerned with causality and the arrow of time, but there is no time in mathematics. (One can certainly talk, however, about causality in mathematics.) Writing is always the writing of history. That is how our central nervous system works. Even when we dream, we see stories. This results from language and the distinctive quality of our own central nervous system.

But language is also an eye. I once wrote that it is, for human beings, a third eye. What we perceive, after we have acquired language, we perceive through language. What we see, we name, and we see only that which we can name. We can never again return to a fresh, wordless world of perception, but through art and poetry we can nevertheless seek a return.

The most peculiar property of language is its symbolic function. The writer exchanges meanings for marks, while the reader performs the opposite task. There are no meanings outside us, or if there are, we do not know them. Personal meanings are made with our own hands. Their preparation is a kind of alchemy. Everything that we call rationality demands imagination, and if we did not have the capacity to imagine, we could not even speak morality or conscience.

Literature, too, is a virtual cosmos within a larger cosmos, our consciousness. It is a mode of interaction between people (even between the living and the dead), but literature is at base a matter of messages to the unknown (belles lettres). No answers are received. Even the writer who sent messages from Tainaron never received an answer.

I began as a children’s writer, although when I was young that was not in the least my intention. Writing for children or adolescents is a difficult genre, and therefore one of the most fascinating. Such texts must be ‘short, clear, rich’, as H.C. Andersen described the muse of the new century.

During my last years at school I underwent an awakening, which was not pleasant, as awakenings often are not. I realised that humankind was, through its own actions, destroying both its own living conditions and other species. This understanding was influenced by both the alarming news from the world and by such writers as Pentti Linkola and Rachel Carson. I realised that there was a permanent and painful conflict between human civilisation and the environment. It was this pain I tried to depict in my fairytale-novel Ihmisen vaatteissa (‘In human clothing’, ditto).

A phrase that I used in this book has stayed with me since my youth: Under the paving stones is sand. This sentence was written on the wall of a Paris building in the crazy year of 1968. Who wrote it is unknown. That was the year I came of age. In its brevity, the sentence says something about the conditions necessary for human survival and of their fragility. What we forget and no longer see supports our civilisation and our entire existence.

Civilisations are born and disappear; beneath them is the original, the untouched, the not-made. But paving stones are the same material too, merely worked by man. But what is original is not unchanging.

Sand moves, it is labile. We build on sand, and beneath it is the changing planet. What is it we call solid ground? Moving plates, which drift on the churning mantle…. Our cities, with their skyscrapers, sushi bars, cathedrals, supermarkets, are as temporary as the nests of animals.

My first book intended for adults, a collection of short stories whose dryish name is Kertomuksia (‘Stories’, 1976), includes the same motifs to which I have found myself returning again and again. Ever since I was a child, I have wondered at the world of the creatures that are the most foreign to human beings, almost like aliens: insects. The first story in the book, ‘Ranatra’, views the fauna of a pond through a child’s eyes.

Just as every heart has its landscape, whether it be open water, a flowering meadow or a room in a childhood home, so the landscape of Janne’s heart was the kind of calm pond in which Ranatra lived.

The collection’s last short story, ‘Puhdas omatunto’ (‘A clean conscience’), on the other hand, describes a young man, Joel Jäävi, who could no longer eat. He was not anorexic, like the little girl in my story-book Tyttö, joka kasvoi (‘The girl who grew’). That girl did not wish to eat because she did not wish to grow. Because the world of adults frightened him, and for good reason. Joel Jäävi, on the other hand, stopped eating purely through the sensitivity of his conscience, after reading an article on the feelings and suffering of plants.

In my early youth, I approached moral questions with the same indifference as economics. Now I am steadfastly of the opinion that no work of art can be significant or lasting if it propagates hatred, injustice and violence. In other words: for me, there is no philosophy of art without moral philosophy.

What does conscience mean, and is there any such thing as universal morals? Can people distinguish between right and wrong, and how does it happen? I have touched on these issues both in my essays and in many of my stories, such as Umbra, Matemaattisia olioita (‘Mathematical beings’, 1992) and Valeikkuna (‘The false mirror’, 2009).

The eponymous character of Umbra, a doctor, works at Aid for the Overstrained among rape victims, but also in the Institute for Negative Influences, where he has to ‘treat’ violent offenders themselves. Umbra is also putting together an archive of paradoxes. ‘The minotaur who lived at the heart of the labyrinth was the paradox, an irreconcilable contradiction.’ The most difficult of Umbra’s paradoxes, however, is infinity: ‘It was a disturbing background murmur which he could hear through his stethoscope at the heart of life itself. A problem in whose understanding he had not taken even the first step.’

I think, like Umbra: Our lives are based on a true paradox which human intelligence can never (or will never be allowed, to) solve.

When I began to read about artificial intelligence and artificial life, I realised how technology will change even the definition of life, how the borders of biology and synthetic evolution will be redrawn and how the same laws of complexity function in all systems.

Collective intelligence can be examined in the worlds of insects and mathematical beings as well as humans. We belong to various smaller and larger collectives, but each one of them is contained with the main collective, humankind. What will happen to us, how will we change, when synthetic evolution continues to progress, but ethical evolution has perhaps not even begun? Or is the situation still more shocking? Will the decline of morality and the deepening of inhumanity spread still further?

The idea of a certain Mr Tortshiner, a character in one of Isaac Singer’s novels, has long terrified me. For he thought that the last human being would be both a lunatic and a criminal. But a contemporary European might ask: will that last person be both a lunatic and a terrorist?

One of the products of synthetic evolution is Pereat mundus’ son of the Chimera and the artilect Arthur B4. I do not quite believe, with Maurice Blanchot, that we always write about catastrophe, disaster. Pereat mundus (1998), however, is a novel about the last catastrophe, about the countless ways in which the world could end.

The nuns of Hotel Sapiens (2013), only half biological carers, and the Restored, great men conjured up from history, are also new species brought about by synthetic evolution. Hotel Sapiens describes the period after two singularities, when computers (or, more accurately, data networks) have overtaken Homo sapiens in both intellect and ethical intuition. Hotel Sapiens is just one of the possible last shores on which mankind will perhaps one day tread.

In Tainaron (1985), the world of insects lives in its own city and time, in which the traveller finds herself and in which she finally overwinters in her cocoon-cradle, like the other citizens. I took as the motto for Tainaron a line from Angelus Silesius’s hymn: ‘You are not in place; place is in you.’ This is one of these phrases that have changed my entire world-view. It means the same as I referred to before: reality is inherent in us.

As we know, aesthetics the study of beauty as well as the philosophy of art. I see beauty as one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the universe. When the viewer disappears, beauty remains, and it is not only in his or her eyes.

My short novel Erehdys (‘The mistake’, 2015), has an inner story in which the old photographer Viktor says: ‘Believe me, Beeda dear, it was not the German aestheticians who invented beauty. Beauty, Beeda, is a basic principle of nature. It is a truth that penetrates all existence. That is why everyone on earth is parched by the thirst for beauty. Beauty is the universe’s most enduring quality, it is repeated in atoms and galaxies, numbers and relations and the way a tree grows.’

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

This essay is published by kind permission of Parnasso magazine

Graphic novels are a combination of image and word in which both carry the story. Their importance can vary very freely. Sometimes the narrative may progress through the force of words alone, sometimes through pictures. The image can be used in very different ways, and that is exactly what Finnish artists do.

In many countries graphic novels share some common style or mainstream in which artists aim to place themselves. In recent years an autobiographical approach has been popular all over the worlds in graphic novels as well as many other art forms. This may sometimes have led to a narrowing of content as the perspective concentrates on one person’s experience. Often the visual form has been felt to be less important, and clearly subservient to the text. This, in turn, has sometimes even led to deliberately clumsy graphic expression.

This is not the case in Finland: graphic diversity lies at the heart of Finnish graphic novels. Appreciation of a fluent line and competent drawing is high. The content of the work embraces everything possible between earth and sky.

Finnish graphic novels are indeed surprisingly well-known and respected internationally precisely for the diversity of their content and their visual mastery.

Life on the block

‘Shall we go and look at our new house? / Yeah. / Did you move house? / Yeah, to one without a floor. / At least you have head-space! / This is where the mould was. / Oh dear!’. Tiitu Takalo, Minä, Mikko ja Annikki (‘Me, Mikko and Annikki’, Suuri kurpitsa).

Minä, Mikko ja Annikki (‘Me, Mikko and Annikki’) interleaves the past and present of a block of wooden buildings in Tampere. The stories by Tiitu Takalo (born 1976) are wound round the Annikki block, left standing after the demolition of the traditional factory town.

The main thrust of the plot is autobiographical. The artist dreams of moving, with her partner, into the Annikki block, and her dream comes true. The story is an hommage to perseverance, work and collective action on behalf of the block.

At the same time the book tells of the history, reality and life of the working people of Tampere. The city grows and life changes, but progressive steps are still taken together through collective struggle.

Although the book deals with themes of the progress of history, the changing city and factors that affect it, the main focus remains on people and everyday life. The images are full of people and their speech, their hopes and their desires.

Tiitu Takalo is one of the most gifted graphic novel artists of her generation. Her line is vivid and supple, tender but expressive. It has power but no bluster. The broken colours make reading a pleasant experience.

Most of Takalo’s earlier words have been sympathetic descriptions of the situations of young women. One must clear a space for oneself, particularly if one wishes to diverge from the mainstream. Takalo has something to say, and she says it.

The same is true of this book. The story proceeds in sections, and in some of them the desire to communicate is particularly strong, as in the critique of consumerism. The result is a little fragmented, but the entire narrative rises from the same world-view and creates a coherent work.

Minä, Mikko ja Annikki pays tribute in its title to a 1967 novel by Hannu Salama – Minä, Olli ja Orvokki (‘Me, Olli and Orvokki’), and thereby to the literary tradition of the city of Tampere. In addition, the book is made, published and even printed in Tampere.

Nevertheless it is universal in its content: human relationships, the diversity of life, the meaning of collaborative work, the changing world and those small, personal, human-sized hopes and wishes.

Controlled self-indulgence

‘… Is this going to last long? … I have to destroy Leningrad?’. Heikki Paakkanen, Saksa-Suomi im Bunde (‘Germany-Finland as allies’, Zum Teufel)

Heikki Paakkanen (born 1949) seems very much at home in the dustbin of history. Saksa-Suomi im Bunde (‘Germany-Finland as allies’) continues a series of works, Sissi ja siviilipalvelushenkilö (‘The commando and the conscientious objector’) in which he turns his gaze on different countries in turn. In earlier albums he has considered France, Sweden and Russia. His subject this time is Finland’s alliance with Germany during the Second World War.

Paakkanen’s work combines a controlled coarseness with a carnivalism that never slips into tastelessness. This is achieved by Paakkanen’s anachronistic and anarchic conservatism and his all-pervading humour. He delights in the memories, objects and customs of past times, but is at the same time deeply suspicious of all authority.

All of this is combined with careful background studies. Saksa-Suomi im Bunde presents us with a torrent of the most astonishing details about the alliance between the two countries or the activities of the Nazis, but they all turn out to be valid.

The reader’s sense of history is aided by an unusual feature: box features by the historian Markku Jokisipilä are interleaved with the graphic narrative. This strategy is surprisingly readable.

The book’s central theme emerges as the control of the past, the Vergangenheitsbewältigung much discussed in Germany. Encountering the past with open eyes aids survival in the present. The same vision is repeated in many of Paakkanen’s work; he enjoys the ability to dive into different periods or places to challenge our deep-rooted modes of thought.

Paakanen’s visual thinking is dominated by horror vacui, the fear of empty spaces. His strong line creates a baroque graphic novel style. He specialises particularly in drawing details, machines and equipment.

Midsummer smiling

‘A wide selection of teas. / Well let’s go there then. / Isn’t that the warm aroma of jasmine? / And juicy fillings in the rolls. / Even the background jazz flows pleasantly. / But? / Is your mug already empty? / It was certainly a relief to take a turn around the open-plan office of those young urban innovators!’. Pauli Kallio & Christer Nuutinen, Ihan pienet juhlat (‘A really small party’, Hans Nissen)

Ihan pienet juhlat (‘A really small party’) is a story about young adults: they begin to makes their lives, buy apartments, children are born. The narrow opinions of youth ease even if world-views stay the same.

The Kramppeja ja nyrjähdyksiä (‘Cramps and sprains’) series, which began in 1991, depicts a permanent cast of characters who grow older with time. The narrative proceeds one page at a time, as the series is published weekly in Suomen Kuvalehti (‘The Finnish illustrated magazine’).

There have been many illustrators along the way. The current artist, Christer Nuutinen (born 1971), was also the first. Ihan pienet juhlat is the eleventh published album of the series.

Kramppeja ja nyrjähdyksiä is above all the creation of its writer, Pauli Kallio (born 1960). His interpretations of the way of the world, music, football, human relationships or the wonders of everyday life support the narrative and link it into a long-running whole.

There is no great drama about the series; its events fit within our experience of everyday life. Kallio writes a modest story seasoned with suitably modest dreams. This is the root of the charm of the narrative: life can be beautiful if you are able to see it that way. The narrative is loosely linked to current events. It comments on the way of the world, but not in the manner of a newspaper. The comics are autobiographical in the sense that they could have happened, if not to Kallio himself, then at any rate to people like him.

In his images, Christer Nuutinen is a builder of dream worlds and a believer in the delicate beauty of humanity. It is possible to linger in the curved lines of his drawings, picking out cotton-wool city scenes with birds and clouds. This makes the series light, like a midsummer smile.

A man’s way

Köyhän miehen Jerusalem (‘A poor man’s Jerusalem’) is a return by Ville Ranta (born 1978) to autobiographical graphic novels after his ambitious depictions of great men, Kajaani (2008) and Kyllä eikä ei (‘Yes, not no’, 2013). Here Ranta ponders parenthood, the durability of the creative talent and growing older. A new child is on the way with a new partner, and work is not going well.

The artist’s musings are bleak: the move of his children from an earlier relationship is hard, but on the other hand he felt he was often unable to be fully present for them. A new child brings new responsibilities, which are frightening. Exhaustion and the flagging of the will to work overwhelm him. His thoughts and observations are searing. The narrative is merciless, not flinching at even the gloomiest of thoughts. The experience of birth, for example, is compared to slaughtering a lamb. The clearing of thought in an Italian bar at the end of the book, however, opens a possibility.

The swift drawing line of the work may seem sloppy. It is not: this is the result of a mastery of simplification and choice developed over hundreds of kilometres of drawn line. The drawings do not operate according to any simple code: it has tenderness, a sketch-like quality or weight, according to the situation. Köyhän miehen Jerusalem is an interesting and skillfully made interim report on the questions and fears of the creative mind and the balance between family and work from the male perspective.

‘Dad! / I’m not your dad – yet! / But you will be soon! You’re going to be a socially respected person, the responsible parent of a young child… / … and did you know, I’ve developed… / Not bullshit, but commitment! Again!’ Ville Ranta, Köyhän miehen Jerusalem (‘A poor man’s Jerusalem’, Asema.

The importance of the story

Although the autobiographical approach has been strongly evident in many art forms, graphic novels included, in recent years, it now seems to have made space for other forms of narrative: satire, high drama and social criticism are all strongly present.

This diversity appears to be particularly attractive to foreign publishers. In the past decade, more than one hundred translations of Finnish graphic novels have been published – which, for a small genre in a small language, is not a bad result.

Heading the translation list in graphic novels, as well as literature as a whole, is Tove Jansson. (1914-2001) The Moomintroll comic strip she created in 1954 experienced a second coming in 2006 when the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly published its stylish compendium albums in 2006 for the North American market. The series had been previously unknown there, but received positive reviews and achieved good sales. These publications spawned new editions in many different languages, including the promised land of graphic novels, France, where the Moomin comics were also almost unheard-of.

But the popularity of Finnish graphic novels abroad is not limited to the Moomins. There are dozens of translated graphic novel artists. This demonstrates the good reputation of Finnish graphic novels abroad, and there is a constant appetite for new authors too. Interest is centred around artistically ambitious but often small-circulation works.

This is changing. The monumental Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’) by Ville Tietäväinen (born 1970) appeared in 2014 in Germany, attracting extensive and serious reviews and the attention of the mass media. Its story of the tough fate of a north African immigrant in prosperous Europe is universal. The book’s rights have been sold to Egypt and it has also been published in France.

Another work resting on skilful drawing is Perkeros (2013) by J.P. Ahonen and K.P. Alare (both born in 1981). It has either been published or is imminent in French, English, Italian, Spanish and German, from important publishers. The complex story, about the founding of a heavy metal band, moves between everyday reality and fantasy. The drawing is technically skilful and painstakingly detailed.

Ahonen’s Villimpi pohjola (‘The wilder north’), on the other hand, depicts students in the stressful days of finals. Lapsus (‘Lapse’) is the fifth album of the series. Here Ahonen’s attention to finish is fully realised. He knows the visual grammar of graphic novels and is able to use it effectively; even the details form an important part of the narrative, bringing it a new level.

‘There’s certainly a burning smell coming off that! / We’d better stop before we’re caught. / Our neighbour’s already been wondering why the sauna smells of sausage after we’ve used it. / I said fat was my man’s characteristic smell. / Our neighbour gave us a doubtful look. Or then a pitying one, it’s hard to say. / Old man? / Haa… Haa…/ Haah! A terrible thought! I need to write it down! / Wh-what? What’s it about? / My dissertation! / Now! Now! / Quick, give me a pen and paper! / Yeah, just a minute, let me get it out of my breast pocket! / Damndamndamn / Old man! / You can explain that one to our neighbour yourself. / Ssshhh! I’m making science!’.
J.P. Ahonen, Lapsus (‘Lapse’, Arktinen Banaani)

On the tracks of identity

‘Hulva… do you miss your mum? / Do you? / I asked first. / But I’m not going to answer first. / Well, go on, answer! You’re silly if you don’t! / You’re silly if you ask a question like that!’. Kati Kovács, Deltan kaksoset (‘The delta twins’, WSOY)

The Rome-based Finnish artist Kati Kovács (born 1963) is known for her carnival-like, surrealist images and stories. Her female characters are strong, seeking their own way, but at the same time honestly contradictory. Kovács’s line is unpredictable, plaful and, where appropriate, erotically carnal.

Deltan kaksoset (‘The delta twins’) turns a new page in Kovács’s work. The twins Hylva and Sylfa are seeking their father, but realism is far form the story: it is an immense mix of the fantastic, the grotesque, the absurd and the fairy tale. The theme is a familiar one: the search for one’s own identity and the attempt to reach a whole sense of self.

In their new works, three men born in the 1970s – Mika Lietzén (born 1974), Petteri Tikkanen (born 1975) and Marko Turunen (born 1973) continue to plough their furrows. Mika Lietzén’s comics are generally like plays, even chamber plays. Their rhythm is steady and the images those of everyday realism, with a minimalism evident only in the human figures. He does not underline his stories; he demands that his readers understand for themselves.

Mika Lietzén, 1986 (Asema).

1986 plumbs the world of young people. The boys of a small town indulge in role-play games and read horror stories. Reality, however, turns out to be more incredible than the supernatural worlds they long for. 1986 is not as minimal with respect to its characters as Lietzén’s earlier work. Its layout follows that of traditional comic magazines, as if as a reminder of the reading habits of the time it depicts.

‘You didn’t exactly last a long time.’ Petteri Tikkanen, Armeija (‘Army’, Like).

Armeija (‘Army’) is Petteri Tikkanen’s seventh book about the childhood and youth of friends Eero and Kanerva. Tikkanen depicts the pain of growing up tenderly and skillfully: the death of grandparents, awakening sexuality, peer pressure and the search for oneself.

Change continues: Eero is going into the army. There are pressures from all sides as friends and relatives have clear ideas as to what the young man should do with his life.

Tikkanen’s brush paints a rounded, steady picture. His expression is restrained, but strongly atmospheric. Alternation between close-ups and panoramas brings a certain filmic quality to the narrative.

‘We’re there.’ Marko Turunen & Mika Jurva, Hanhenmarssia e-mollissa (‘Goose-step in E minor’, Daada).

Hanhenmarssia e-mollissa (‘Goose-step in E minor’) is based on a manuscript written in his teens on which Marko Turunen recently decided to base a graphic novel. Strongly influenced by the French comic artist Moebius (1938-2912), the story does not dazzle, but the work demonstrates once more Turunen’s extraordinary skill as a maker of images. His graphic novels have indeed been translated into many languages.

Turunen is able to combine many disparate elements into a picture, nevertheless achieving a strong emotional charge and atmosphere. When the images are combined with a proper story, the result is at its best magnificent, as in the touching book Marko Turusen elämä (‘The life of Marko Turunen’, 2013).

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

J.P. Ahonen, Lapsus (‘Lapse’, Arktinen Banaani), 96p.
Pauli Kallio & Christer Nuutinen, Ihan pienet juhlat (‘A really small party’, Hans Nissen), 112p.
Kati Kovács, Deltan kaksoset (‘The delta twins’, WSOY), 78p.
Mika Lietzén, 1986 (Asema), 32p.
Heikki Paakkanen, Saksa-Suomi im Bunde (‘Germany-Finland as allies’, Zum Teufel), 57p.
Ville Ranta, Köyhän miehen Jerusalem (‘A poor man’s Jerusalem’, Asema, 225p.
Tiitu Takalo, Minä, Mikko ja Annikki (‘Me, Mikko and Annikki’, Suuri kurpitsa), 247p.
Petteri Tikkanen, Armeija (‘Army’, Like), 48p.
Marko Turunen & Mika Jurva, Hanhenmarssia e-mollissa (‘Goose-step in E minor’, Daada), 160p.

After initially qualifying as an analytical chemist, Brotherus was then at the beginning of her career as a photographer. Everything lay before her, and she charted her French experience in a series of characteristically melancholy, subjective images.

Twelve years on, she revisited the same places, photographing them, and herself, again. The images in the resulting book, 12 ans après / 12 vuotta myöhemmin / 12 years later (Sémiosquare, 2015) are accompanied by a short story by the writer Riikka Ala-Harja, who moved to France a little later than Brotherus.

In the event, neither woman’s life took root in France. The book represents a personal coming-to-terms with the evaporation of youthful dreams, a mourning for lost time and broken relationships, a level and unselfpitying gaze at the passage of time: ‘Life has not been what I hoped for. Soon it will be time to accept it and mourn for the dreams that will never come true. Mourn for the lost time, my young self, who no longer exists.’

1999 Mr Cheval’s nose

10 years later

When I am seven I get a head.

I sit as a model for many weeks. The sculptor lives at school; I sit for my portrait at her house. Sometimes I am allowed to fetch books from the school library and leaf through them. The sculptor has a big, light-filled home. She does not have a husband or children; she has time for my head.

I sit opposite the sculptor, swinging my legs.

Three hours later my dad picks me up in our rust-red Saab 96. We sit alongside each other; we don’t talk.

Dad never locks his car.

A month later, the sculptor says the head is ready.

We go to see it, the whole family.

The concrete sculpture is exactly the size of my head.

The expression is serious but not sorrowful.

The sculptor wraps the head in towels. She says we can keep the towels.

Dad puts the head carefully into the Saab’s boot.

I am grey. I am seven.

At home, the head is placed on top of the dresser.

When I tell her I am moving to France, my mother gives the sculpture to me.

The concrete head weighs ten kilos. I am thirty-seven years old; my head is thirty.

I recline the back seat of my Saab 900 and stuff the luggage space full of clothes and dishes. I shove books and plates under the front seat. I wrap the concrete head in a towel and put it in a basket my mother has given me. I pack the Saab I have inherited from my dead father full of all the stuff that will fit into it. I fill the last spaces with knickers and socks.

I transport the concrete head across Europe. My right foot goes dead on the gas pedal, every now and then I have to wiggle it. Fields and intersections flash by. I have stockpiled nuts in the glove compartment, it is the beginning of September, schoolchildren have been kidnapped in Beslan, Europe is hot. I gulp water from a bottle. I stop at petrol stations for the toilet and to fill up. I wolf down the kilometres, push through the dark. I do not want to leave the Saab outside a -hotel. If someone were to steal the car now, I would lose all of my carefully chosen possessions.

In the dark, I cross the French border and by midnight I am in Normandy.

The streets are deserted.

My man meets me in front of a high cedar hedge.

We unload the car straight away. We laugh.

I lift the concrete head from its basket and place it in an empty space on the bookshelf.

GAME

I try to hit the shuttlecock so that the other player can’t return it. Some can’t. I have become a member of the badminton society and am permitted to play with any of its members. I know my numbers from the Eurovision Song Contest. My feet move swiftly over the hall floor, I am in rhythm. I leap high, hitting to the very left of the court. The city police chief tries to return the ball, but he can’t reach. The point is mine. I smile. We don’t need to speak.

I bump into the police chief on the town hall hill. I greet him. A chance badminton club’s opponent has given me the first person I can say hello to. I am delighted. I have come to the town hall to apply for a social security card. I need it. I am expecting a child.

STRAWBERRY

I am standing among people. I have been invited to a party, even though the only guest I know is my husband. I understand nothing of the rapid talk. I try to nod in the right places.
During the night, strange words circulate in my head. I get up and write them down on a piece of paper. I go to the bathroom to drink water. I knock a cough medicine bottle off the shelf under the mirror and into the toilet. The glass bottle shatters and a brown liquid spreads on the white porcelain. I do not have the energy to clear it up; I will deal with the mess in the morning. I lie on my bed. My head weighs a ton.

In the morning I look at the words I have written down on the piece of paper. There are not many of them. I need more words, I need them badly, only then can I open my mouth.

How can I learn to pronounce the words right?

How can I learn to speak fast enough for anyone to want to listen to me?

I tidy up the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror. I pronounce words with exaggerated expression. No one hears how superbly I can speak a foreign language.

Some mornings speaking is more difficult, sometimes it is easier.

The strawberries rot in the bowl. In the morning I cycle over to the market. I tell the stall-holder that she has sold me strawberries that only lasted two hours before they rotted. I say that I am not a tourist. Maybe the woman will understand that after this it is not worth selling me old strawberries or give me the wrong change as she does to those she suspects are English, the ones who will leave the harbour by ship the same evening.

I live here.

2012 Room Nr 10 (yellow door)

CHILD

As soon as I take the baby in my arms, my mother tongue shoots out of my mouth like a bullet. I begin to speak my own language to my child.
The child cries a lot, she is red and wrinkly and I do not know how to look after a baby. I stay awake. The concrete head gazes down from the bookshelf. With the child in my arms, I walk in the living room, beside the cedar hedge, on the sandy beach.

TOILET

The toilet gets blocked. I ring the handyman. He says that the roots of the cedar hedge have penetrated the pipes and blocked them. I know the handyman. A month earlier I asked him to change the bathroom mirror. I had thrown my sneaker at the mirror. I was aiming at my husband. The fragments clinked to the floor.

The handyman suggests I claim the toilet repairs on the insurance.

The handyman says that insurance is for crises.

A month later we get the money from the insurance.

But the crisis goes on. The child speaks and walks, you can already explain a lot of things to her, but not this. I can’t explain it even to myself, not in any language.

The mirror is unbroken and the pipes unblocked.

I stand in front of the mirror.

For the first time I notice that I have some grey hairs.

1999 Reflection

RETURN

I wrap the concrete head in two towels and set it -carefully in its basket. Dad’s old Saab is full to the gunwales. I stuff naked Barbies into the last spaces. The bottom of the car has rusted in the rain and the damp wind. I fear that the Saab will not make it to Finland. The man from the garage next door inspects the car, but does not promise anything.
The pear tree I received as a fortieth birthday present stays in the green fields of Normandy.

On Whitsunday I set off, driving to the north-east.

I fetch the child later, most precious of all.

I drive the same route back, but the road looks different, as if it had changed in seven years. From time to time there is fog on the road, but I only take a wrong turning once. I sleep in a motel, I don’t care any more if someone breaks into the car.

Just before the German harbour I take a turning into the forest and drive to a sandy beach. I unwrap one of the towels from the concrete head and go for a swim. The towel is soft, it wipes the salty sea water from my skin.

In the car-ferry cabin I look at my temples.

I decide to start colouring the grey away.

When I drive off the ferry at Vuosaari, a mangy fox runs along the hard shoulder.

CEDAR HEDGE

I walk toward my former home. The linden trees of the Boulevard de France have not grown since I last saw them. They have been well disciplined, branches have been trimmed every year so that they will not block the car-drivers’ line of vision.
I have not been to the house for three years. I have not been invited.

Now I have been.

I have reached the cedar hedge.

I ring the doorbell.

The door opens.

My child stands, smiling, between her father and her grandfather.

I kiss grandfather on the cheeks. He fought in Algeria. At our last Christmas, he showed me his army cap. He still has a soldier’s bearing. He is smiling. He was smiling ten years ago when we were introduced.

Grandmother comes from the kitchen, her apron round her waist, and greets me.

She is just as beautiful as before.

The living-room rugs look the same as they did, as if no one had walked on them since the child and I left.

The painting I nailed to the wall still hangs behind the sofa.

Everything looks the same as before.

I sit next to grandmother and eagerly tuck in to scallops fried in butter. We talk about the rainy weather and the unusual cold. The scallops are excellent. Grandmother has two ways of frying scallops; today she has chosen the one I like better.

The pear tree has grown at least half a metre.

We laugh about it together.

We laugh when the child says she supports France in football and Finland in ice hockey.

Outside, the wind blows.

We talk about pleasant things. The apple cake is soft.

It is time to go. Grandfather helps me on with my coat. The child waves from the door between her father and her grandmother. She will sleep one more night in her French home and return to Finland with me tomorrow.

We have got used to travelling.

I walk. The pavement’s asphalt is completely fractured; it’s bumpier than it was. The linden trees’ roots push at the surface and break the asphalt, and a new layer of asphalt lasts no more than a moment.

It begins to rain.

The rain washes the road clean.

This is my path, this is the way I go.

Before bedtime I brush my teeth in front of the hotel mirror.

My expression is serious, but it is not sorrowful.

I am grey, I am concrete, I am forty-seven.

2012 Emotional exercises V

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Down by the sea: Herbert Lomas in Aldeburgh. – Photo: Soila Lehtonen

‘People do not read translations to encourage minor literatures but to rediscover themselves in new imaginative adventures‚’ says the poet and translator Herbert Lomas in this essay on translation (first published in Books from Finland 1/1982). ‘Translation is a thankless activity,’ he concludes – and yet ‘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.’ And how do Finnish and English differ from each other, actually?

Any writer’s likely to feel – unless he’s a star, a celebrity, a very popular and different beast – that the writer is a necessary evil in the publisher’s world, but not very necessary. How much more, then, the translator from a ‘small’ country’s language.

Why do it? The pay’s absurd, you need the time for your own writing, it’s very hard to please people, and translation is, after all, the complacent argument goes, impossible. I’m convinced by all these arguments, and really I can’t afford to go on; but I don’t regret what I’ve done and, looking back, I can find two reasons for translating Finnish writing, one personal, the other cultural.

The personal first. Poetry is also what is found in translation, or perhaps I should say in translating. I never truly feel I’ve understood a Finnish poem till I’ve made a version of it. Then I’ve discovered the poem. Moreover, in inventing a language – what I think the poet might have said if he’d been working in English himself – I’m extending my own range: I’m being led not only to think and feel things I shouldn’t otherwise think and feel, I’m articulating thoughts and feelings for myself in words I shouldn’t otherwise command. I’d like to think that a reader, in the creative act of reading, taking the words off the page into his imaginative life, experiences something of this too.

Yeats thought people should put on masks. They should dramatise themselves in roles that are not ‘natural’ to them. If a man is a dreamer, say, he should try to impersonate a man of action (a publisher, for instance).

That is why Yeats became an Irish Senator for a painful while. Far from being ‘untrue to himself’ – whatever his ‘self’ may be (the self becomes more and more elusive the more you look for it) – he will be discovering potential selves that might otherwise simply lie asleep, never able to wake up into human existence.

This is surely one of the main pleasures of reading – as well as of writing.

To translate is to put on a mask and to find a self you did not know you might have. It’s 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.

I first began to translate in a purely amateur way, for pleasure. I was intuitively reaching for the experiences I’ve just been describing – wanting to find my own Finnish personality, wanting to see what the Finnish author would be like if he were an Englishman or woman. Well – up to a point: what kind of a personality emerges in this exercise? Actually something quite new something that would otherwise not exist. 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.

Crucial decisions are being made with every word. English has a much larger vocabulary than Finnish (the Oxford English Dictionary has 500,000 words, the Nykysuomen Sanakirja 180,000) though I suspect Finns use a larger vocabulary in ordinary speech. If you look up a word in a Finnish-English dictionary, there are several choices given, but probably none of these will do. Translations made out of a dictionary would be sheer banality. Moreover, your Finnish poet, confronted with the larger English word-hoard, would have made a very individual choice of nuances. You have to develop a strong feel for his creative tendency to be able to intuit which particular flavours and tints would tickle his fancy, above all which particular combinations and juxtapositions of words he would relish.

There are many differences between Finnish and English. Leaving aside for the moment the extraordinary disparity between Teutonic syntax and Finno-Ugrian syntax, the vocabulary alone puts you into a different climate and weather. Vowels are musical notes and Finnish is full of vowels.

Consonants are noises – and English is full of consonants. Finnish words are all stressed on the first syllable. English words simply alternate stressed and unstressed syllables – and the word may begin with unstress or stress. Finnish lends itself to dactyls. Dactyls have never been much at home in English. Most English poetry is written in iambs, with trochees coming second, a few anapaestic poems, usually not very good; and not even Hiawatha, imitating the Kalevala, resorted to the dactyl. But Finnish words are all Finnish – either invented from existing roots or naturalised beyond recognition.

Most languages have a word like gramofon or telefon: Finnish has levysoitin (‘plate-sounder’) and puhelin (from puhua meaning to speak and an ending that implies an implement). Even words like kaupunki (which comes from a Scandinavian word for ‘market town’, köping) have become so Fennicised that their origin seems amazing. There are exceptions: the word pankki bears an obvious relation to ‘bank’; but ‘pankki’ sounds like something you might play with; ‘bank’ sounds like something that might stop you dead or run you over like a tank. English is a hybrid language that revels in its hybridness: blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables rub shoulders with 
polysyllabic Greek conglomerates, reeking of ancient Athens, Frenchified loan-words from over the Channel, and senatorial or ecclesiastical Roman naturalised citizens.

All this is embedded in a syntax where the subject comes first, or you don’t know it’s the subject, and the object comes after the verb, or you don’t know it’s the object. Whereas Finnish loathes to put things in such a stereotyped order and employs fifteen cases in order to confuse not only foreigners but the tongues of its own native speakers. I think Finns speak slowly, not only because their words are long and mellifluous, and because they have been taught never to speak without thinking, but because getting their teeth round their Ciceronian sentence-structure is no joke.

So the problem is: if you’re going to translate faithfully, you must get as far away as possible from the original syntax. Take a deep breath and produce a new poem. What you actually produce always has an element of luck in it. At another time and in another place you would almost certainly produce something different. All this sounds very unprofessional because unsystematic. Nevertheless it’s an awareness that’s essential to professionalism. Like any writer, you’re always in a new context and never satisfied with what you do.

I’d like to illustrate some of the interesting questions by comparing two versions I did of a poem by Eeva-Liisa Manner. Let me say I’m not satisfied with either. It’s a poem about an unusual state of consciousness, tragic in feeling, but not without humour, even a touch of quaintness. Tone then – and tone and atmosphere are enormously important components sometimes not sufficiently considered in translation, or even in original writing – is a very delicate and essential ingredient in the poem: something, of course, you can’t get out of a dictionary or a grammar book. This poem is about an out-of-the-body experience, and anticipation and preparation for death; the lightness of touch seems to me remarkable: the wit is metaphysical.

One day I passed out of my body
              and went into the other room to look at the clock.
It was going like a mechanical heart.

Back there my body was still
 breathing and the heart was still
 pulsing
like a clock that would tick for a
 certain time.

I went back into my body and gave my mind to the experience.
This heart too's getting tired, all
 clocks get tired,
now it's throbbing still in my wrist
knocking on my ribs, that ark-shaped
 coffin.

I want to be away, on another journey, into other boats

whose curved ribs I haven't carved myself
in life's bowl of blood.

I must have thought this was all right, as I did put it forward for publication in Books from Finland in 1978; but when I wanted to include it in my book Territorial Song I wasn’t satisfied. So I produced this.

One day I passed out of my body 
              and went into the next room to check the clock.
It was going like a pacemaker.
Back there my body was breathing still, the heart still pulsing

like a clock wound to tick for a fixed time.

I re-entered my body and studied the experience.
This heart too's tiring, all clocks tire,

it's throbbing now, still, in my wrist,

knocking on my rib-cage, that
 ship-shaped coffin.

I want to be off, on another trip, aboard other boats

whose curved rib-cages I haven't carved myself

in life's bumper of blood.

This is much more matter-of-fact. Both versions are possible developments from the original: the problems are no longer in the original but in the possibilities of choice in English. In the first I got a slight jingle of sound with ‘look’ and ‘clock’; in the second I replaced this with ‘next’, ‘check’ and ‘clock’ – an intensification of sound, therefore slightly more ‘poetic’ but not losing, I hoped, that touch of prosiness that authenticated the experience. In the next line ‘mechanical heart’ becomes ‘pacemaker’ – a more technical term; again, I hoped, authenticating; but losing, too, some of the emphasis on the paradox of the flesh and machinery, both like and unlike. In the next line I cut out the words ‘and’ and ‘was’, two small changes that completely alter the rhythm of the line – and thus of the whole poem: each tiny change alters the whole structure. Later a repetition of ‘gets’ is cut out, altering the rhythm, and the complete absence of the word ‘get’ makes the poem less colloquial: ‘getting tired, all clocks get tired’ becomes ‘tiring, all clocks tire’. Later on I introduced more colloquialism to compensate: ‘I want to be away on another journey’ became ‘I want to be off, on another trip’.

The rib-cage, in the first version, is described as an ‘ark-shaped coffin’; the second version has ‘ship-shaped coffin’. Neither will quite do: it probably should be the duller ‘boat-shaped coffin’, after all. I suspect Eeva-Liisa Manner was thinking of a ferry-boat like Charon’s. I was probably being a bit self-indulgent with ‘ark-shaped’ – I did think Miss Manner might have been similarly tempted. The Finnish word arkku, meaning a coffin, was sufficiently like, for me, the word arkki, meaning an ark like Noah’s and I didn’t want to lose the imaginative association.

‘Ship-shaped’ has overtones of something too neat for the needs of the soul: when I was doing my second version, that seemed relevant – I liked the idea; now I don’t. Another indulgence: ‘bumper’ does mean something you drink out of – it also can suggest the bumping of the heart. It’s touch of wit not in the original – but one in line, I feel, with Manner’s art. I think it’s fair. Weil, this is a translation I’m still not satisfied with – though I don’t wish to disown either version.

All this is very interesting for the translator. What a marvellous hobby! But what has this got to do with the reading public? Not much, one is inclined to think. The reader tends to be innocent. This is what the original is – and either he likes it or he doesn’t. What he thinks he likes or doesn’t like is the original author – although in fact it may be the translator. People in England believe they like or dislike Dostoyevsky, not Constance Garnett. Of course, when we compare translations from different ages – Chapman’s Homer, Pope’s Homer and the Penguin Homer – we realise how much of what we are responding to may be E.V. Rieu, or Pope, rather than Homer.

Without translation there wouldn’t be any English literature. The Elizabethans consciously began by translating – or ‘imitating’, as they called it then – meaning rather free translation, often a new and original poem paradoxically taken almost word-for-word from another language. The Tudor poets Wyatt and Surrey and the Elizabethans Sidney and Spenser wanted to have a poetry as good as that of the Italians.They wanted Ovid and Horace to speak like Englishmen and thus give us a longer tradition of gentility and civilisation. North’s translation of Plutarch was put onto the stage by Shakespeare, with surprisingly few changes, often, as in Antony and Cleopatra, in the very words of North.

Indeed, Shakespeare could conceivably be considered a translator himself, certainly an adapter – taking works in Latin or Italian and Englishing them into something new,
 but not all that new. Marlow’s Ovid helped to create Donne. This is how the language was not so much enriched as brought into being – and continued, as by Pope’s ‘Imitations’ of Horace in the eighteenth century. Don Quixote is not only a great figure in English literature, he practically begot the eighteenth century picaresque novel.

Translation, often so free as to be something new, has been an important, even central element in our literature right up to the twentieth century. It’s no longer so. Asked what is the place or opportunity for translation of minor languages into English at the present time, I’m tempted to say: almost none. There’ll always be people who want to translate because they find it an extension or an excitement to do so. There’ll always be minorities who want to explore, are keen and curious for new experiences – anxious to read what some translator of an exotic tongue can turn up for them.

But after a translator has performed a great labour of love and time, for a financial return that is ludicrous, considering the time and effort, what is the reward? Hardly a review or comment. A great silence proceeds, not only from the great British public, but from the small literary world. It’s very discouraging and makes the writer anxious to hurry back to his own work, which he has been perilously abandoning for so long.

Why this lack of interest? I think it’s because we’re late on in our culture, not at the beginning, like Wyatt and Shakespeare. There’s a surfeit of good work in English for people to read. What they want to read about – and what Shakespeare provided them with, even when he was translating – is themselves. The great adapters from foreign languages have always managed to make the works seem to be about Englishmen and their current problems. Horace seemed to be on the whole like a very intelligent and cultivated English gentleman, in spite of a few local pagan peculiarities. Julius Caesar and Hamlet on the stage were great English aristocrats, like Queen Elizabeth and Essex, give or take an occasional change of sex. Even the characters in Dostoyevsky were not too remote, in their conflicts, from the English people of Constance Garnett’s day. Dostoyevsky learned a great deal from Dickens – and there is still something very Dickensian about Dostoyevsky. (You might compare Marmeladov with Micawber.) The atmosphere’s Victorian, at least in Constance Garnett, and the religious anxieties are not too remote from those of a Ruskin or a George Eliot.

What I’m suggesting is that people read to experience themselves imaginatively: they want a new perspective on their own lives. People do not read translations to encourage minor literatures but to rediscover themselves in new imaginative adventures and revealing extensions of experience. If books from other cultures are to succeed in translation, it will not so much be because of their local colour, but because the problems and anxieties that the readers are experiencing in their own lives are illuminatingly developed in these translations too.

This article is based on a presentation given at the Finnish and Dutch Symposium in Holland in November 1981.

The editors (Hildi Hawkins and Soila Lehtonen) at the screen: we begun publishing material on our website in 1998. Photo: Jorma Hinkka, 2001

Longevity may not generally be a virtue of literary magazines – they tend to come and go – but Books from Finland, which began publication in 1967, has stuck around for a rather impressively long time. Literary life, as well as the means of production, has changed dramatically in the almost half-century we have been in existence. So where do we stand now? And what does the future look like?
This is the farewell letter from the current Editor-in-Chief, Soila Lehtonen – who began working for the journal in 1983

‘The literature of Finland suffers the handicap of being written in a so-called “minor” language, not a “world” language…. Finland has not entirely been omitted from the world-map of culture, but a more complete and detailed picture of our literature should be made available to those interested in it.’

Thus spake the Finnish Minister of Education, R.H. Oittinen, in early 1967, in the very first little issue of Books from Finland, then published by the Publishers’ Association of Finland, financed by the Education Ministry.

Forty-seven years, almost 10,000 printed pages (1967–2008) and (from 2009) 1,400 website posts later, we might claim that the modest publication entitled Books from Finland, has accomplished the task of creating ‘a more complete and detailed picture’ of Finnish literature for anyone interested in it.

The literary field in the 1960s certainly was different from now: just a few Finnish authors translated, by a couple of translators, into English; no training for literary translators, no literary agents, modest interest among Finnish publishers to engage in ‘exporting’ their authors. And what about the communication during those antediluvian times: hand-written (in the 1970s some lucky devils managed to get their fingers on electric typewriters) letters exchanged, at best, by air-mail, international phone calls far too expensive – the occasional telefax, lines permitting. (No internet, no e-mail. How it was even possible to produce a quarterly literary journal mostly regularly – even those of us who were there, and did it, marvel at it today.)

Now, almost half a century later, books do get translated. The exchange of literatures in numerous languages has multiplied in terms of titles translated, authors introduced and books sold and read. Publishers are keen on marketing their authors; there is a growing number of professional translators all over the world. Communication is effortless, access to information is boundless. And Finland has indeed not been ‘omitted from the world-map of culture’. It does have plenty of literary matter of good quality to send out into the world.

FILI – the Finnish Literary Exchange – has for years organised training seminars for translators; many of them with English as their mother tongue have then also worked on linguistically and even culturally difficult texts for Books from Finland (Finnish and English are two languages that are really a long way from each other). Occasionally these works are not perhaps among the most easily ‘sellable’ internationally, but what we, as a literary journal, believe in is the artistic challenge. After all, literature has the dimension of written art.

The number of Finnish authors of fiction (classic and contemporary), featured over the decades in Books from Finland, approaches the figure of four hundred – and counting. So far there has been no time to try to calculate the number of non-fiction writers, of which there are also hundreds. The total number of copies of the printed journal, distributed all over the world, must have been close to a quarter of a million.

In these changing, or changed, times, what is the position of the journal?

We now have some 4,000 visits to our website monthly – since 2009, from no less than 189 countries. Approximately half our readers speak English as their mother tongue. We still choose, translate and edit our material on the basis of what we think is interesting literature, irrespective of whether it is prized, praised, sellable or avant-garde. We still believe in presenting the widest scope of Finnish literature to the world, even though we know Finland has long since secured its permanent place on the multi-faceted world-map of culture.

After 31-plus years at Books from Finland, it’s now time for me to leave. Looking back, it has been wonderful to read the best books, to work with a large number of true professionals – former editors-in-chief, co-editors, graphic designers, contributors and translators – and to try to figure out what will next interest the wide and varied crowd that is our readers.

Photo: Heli Sorjonen (2014)

It has been a demanding job – and one must never feel completely satisfied with what has been achieved – but what has saved me from becoming over-stressed is the fact that never have I had to despair of not finding enough of translatable good literature to feature in Books from Finland.

So, among all those hundreds of people involved in my editorial work, the Finnish authors, of fiction and non-fiction (both classic and contemporary!) are naturally those whom I also wish to thank.

And a big thank you, our readers: it’s been a pleasure!
 

We are redesigning the Books from Finland website, and as we do so, until March, we will be publishing a reduced number of posts. Books from Finland will continue its journey – with our London Editor Hildi Hawkins and Web Editor Leena Lahti on board – in the company of you, dear readers!

The tin soldier and the Blue Cat. Illustration: Usko Laukkanen

A tribute to Oiva Paloheimo’s children’s novel Tinaseppä ja seitsemän (‘The Tinsmith and the Seven’, illustrated by Usko Laukkanen, WSOY, 1956)

I’ve happened upon this (Christmassy) text of mine – first published in Books from Finland back in 1995 – when sorting through my papers as I begin to contemplate my retirement. With it I would like to offer my goodbyes, and many thanks, to you – to our readers, for whom I have been commissioning, editing and writing texts for the past thirty-one years – it’s time to do other things; time to read the books that still remain unread…

A dusky winter’s afternoon. Outside, soft and grey, a little snow is falling. I am sitting in our living-room, in an armchair covered in a pale yellow boucle fabric, my legs curled up, eating a carrot. In my lap is a book which I have fetched from the library after school. Conversation, the faint clattering of crockery, a singing kettle, the smell of food: grandmother and mother are cooking supper in the kitchen. My little sister is asleep.

But these sounds and the room around me do not really exist: there is only the world of make-believe in which Tiina sets off on her adventures with the Blue Cat, the Tinsmith, the St Bernard dog, the star and the spider: that world is a magic box which is able to contain all of childhood.

In his fascinating book of memoirs, Laterna Magica, the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman presents an astonishingly exact visual memory of a time when he was less than two years old: the appearance and colour of the kitchen tablecloth and of his porridge bowl (the moment before he was sick into it).

To tell the truth, I do not really remember a scene described above, even though at that time I must have been about nine. But the reconstruction is easy, and historically reasonably believable, too: a glance at Oiva Paloheimo’s children’s book Tinaseppä ja seitsemän (‘The Tinsmith and the Seven’) immediately takes me back to ca. 1960. I used to spen hours on end in that fashionably teak-legged boucle chair in our new, one-bedroom rented apartment in a Helsinki suburb – and I could have been reading exactly that book, for it made an indelible impression upon me.

I never owned the book, but some years ago it began to come to mind with a strange insistence, so I began to look for it in Helsinki’s second-hand bookshops. Time passed, but the book was nowhere to be found. Then, one day, I found it in a second-hand bookshop next door – and the owner gave it to me for free, because the spine was missing!

And the magic box opened at once. I remembered all Usko Laukkanen’s warmly humorous, succulent black-and-white line drawings. I had forgotten the details of the plot, but I remembered the story: just before Christmas, a poor tinsmith uses the last of his supplies of tin to cast Christmas bells in order to buy food, but because, sadly, his bells do not ring, no one buys them. But because of the miracle of Christmas, out of the tin seven creatures are born: a little girl, Tiina; a St Bernard, Duke (for whom the most important thing in life is food); a prince and a princess (who bring romance and adventure to the story); a tin soldier, Gustavus Inch; a star, which looks after lighting and various tasks of guidance, and Mr S. Spider, a real 1950s information engineer. Its job is to create radio contact, through a net it constructs in a corner of the ceiling, with wherever the plot of the story demands – and even transmit people from one place to another electronically.

Paloheimo writes mischievously and humorously, and for adult readers as well as children. The Blue Cat, which is discovered in a snowdrift on Christmas Eve and becomes the story’s prime mover, its deus ex machina, resourcefully arranges everyone else’s affairs and succeeds in securing for the impoverished Tinsmith an amazing, frightening fortune.

But what to do with the money, after a bone has been bought for Duke the dog, and a new school satchel for Tiina? ‘The Tinsmith suggested that a thousand million should be given to the state. The state could then distribute the money to sick and poor citizens. The idea was considered worth mulling over, and it was resolved to find out the state’s address. For it was necessary first to ask whether the state was at all prepared to go to the trouble of helping citizens who were in need of assistance.’

Gustavus Inch, the tin soldier, comments that there is no point in giving money for the cause of peace, for it would immediately be used to buy guns. ‘War cannot be held in check without guns. And peace cannot be financed in any way, for peace is the result of goodwill.’ Not shrinking from the naïvely innocent racism of the day, Paloheimo has Gustavus Inch suggest that all the negroes of Africa should be bought mouth-organs to amuse them and thus stop them boiling ‘honest Finnish soldiers’ alive in their pots: ‘negroes have such good lips for mouth-organs^’.

Oiva Paloheimo (1910–1973) is best-known as a writer for a completely different children’s book. Tirlittan (1953) is a slightly sombre story of an orphan girl who loses her home in a fire; Tirlittan plays her ocarina and wanders the world alone. Tinaseppä has long since been sold out and forgotten.

Paloheimo, according to the biography written by his son, the poet Matti Paloheimo, was the grasshopper figure from the fable of the ant and the grasshopper: a lovable, kind-hearted hedonist who had children and wives and women friends and alcohol problems, but less often money or the energy to shoulder life’s responsibilities. He wrote prolifically and rapidly, novels, short stories, poems, articles, children’s books. Today, most people associate his name only with Tirlittan, and perhaps with his autobiographical novel Levoton lapsuus (‘A restless childhood’, 1942).

At the end of the Tinsmith adventure, the prince and princess are united and all ends in a wedding and general rejoicing: ‘S. Spider became so excited that it left its web and its antennae and its microphone and leaped into the centre of the room. It began to dance like a maniac, with all its legs; it danced all the wedding dances, which it had learned over millions of years.’ Tiina and the Tinsmith go on living in their idyll, but Gustavus Inch is attracted by war as if by a magnet, while the Blue Cat is driven by longing, so that both of them set out to wander through the world.

The Blue Cat says to Tiina: ‘Life is a fairytale, my dear, if only you know how to create it in the right way, with innocence and love. And the story of life is as long as longing, longing from happiness to happiness, from day to day, until the last sunset.’

Enchanted: a young reader. Photo: Kalervo Lehtonen (ca 1956)

Tinaseppä ja seitsemän is, for me, as an object, more than a 1950s fairytale: it is the magic box of childhood. Perhaps all those who have, as children, had a close relationship with books and their illustrations remember their favourite books as symbols that are deeply impressed on their minds.

A familiar picture is not just Seamus the sailor dog’s grass-lined bunk, in which Seamus sleeps happily, his white belly hairs as soft-looking as the green grass, but something more – the green of the grass is a room, decades ago, the patterns on the carpet, the smoothness of the arms of a rocking chair, a bird-cage on top of a kitchen cupboard, the smell of a plantain in the yard, the music played by an itinerant accordionist; it is always a sunny afternoon in a street that is paved with diagonal yellow stones, decorated with the cool shadows of lime trees.

It is something that cannot be apprehended, because it flees, something that cannot be completely described, because it is not whole, and something that cannot be shared with anyone else, because it is only your own.

When you open the book, you open the box and look inside: even if there is nothing definite there, it is full of experience without form, it is the after-image of enchanting moments of childhood – and it is always a delightful experience, always.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

This is a slightly edited version of the text published in Books from Finland 4/1995

Black as ebony: volume three of the ‘Snow White’ trilogy for young adults by Salla Simukka

This year has been an eventful for Finnish literature in many ways, not least in terms of young adults’ and children’s books. The full ramifications of Finland’s turn as the theme country at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair will only be known with the passage of time, but more mega-success stories to stand alongside Salla Simukka’s Lumikki (Snow White, Tammi) trilogy for young adults – now sold to almost 50 countries – are eagerly awaited. Visitors to the Frankfurt Book Fair also got a look at Finland-Swedish illustration at the By/Kylä (‘Village’) stand, which presented varied works by nine illustrators and animators in a memorable exhibit.

Book sales continue to fall in Finland. The major general-interest publishers – WSOY, Tammi, and Otava – have cut back on Finnish titles and are concentrating on high-sellers and proven authors.

Books in series are now a dominant phenomenon in literature for children and young adults, aiming to win readers’ loyalty with their continuing stories and characters. Many longtime authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults have had to look for new contacts, and publishers are increasingly hesitant to launch debut artists.

Alternative forms of publishing have become more important in the quest to champion experimental and innovative children’s literature. Etana (‘Snail’) Editions, a new publishing house dedicated to books for small children, has used crowd funding to release two picture books, Yksi vielä (‘One more’) by Réka Király, and Värejä meressä (‘The colours in the sea’) by Jenni Erkintalo.

Building markets and professional networks is the greatest challenge for smaller publishers. Books North, formed in conjunction with Agency North, which specialises in drama, invested considerable resources in publicity for two picture books by Iiro Küttner and Ville Tietäväinen, an effort which resulted in ample media attention.

The Finlandia Junior, Finland’s largest prize for children’s literature, created a stir when one of the six nominees chosen was Min egen lilla liten (‘My own tiny little thing’, Schildts & Söderströms), a picture book by Linda Bondestam based on a text by Swedish author Ulf Stark. Helsingin Sanomat newspaper and the Lastenkirjahylly (‘Children’s bookshelf’) book blog criticised the selection for promoting a Swedish author when so many Finnish children’s authors receive little pay and less media attention.

Maria Turtschaninoff, this year’s Finlandia Junior Prize winner, has written five novels since 2006, and all have opened up new and captivating worlds for readers. Turtschaninoff treats her target audience with respect: ‘Writing for young people is special. When you’re young, literature affects you more powerfully than it does adults,’ the author said in an interview in Helsingin Sanomat.

On a visit to Finland in the autumn of 2014, the American author William G. Brozo sparked discussion of the need for better reading instruction for boys. Another author who is himself quite young, Aleksi Delikouras (born 1990), known for his Nörtti (‘Nerd’, Otava) trilogy, has campaigned on behalf of increased reading practice for boys in schools and libraries, pointing out that boys hooked on computer games from a young age need to experience the same success and reinforcement in reading that they get from game play.

Lukuinto (‘Passion to read’), a project funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, will end in spring of 2015. Its objectives are to create practical models for developing the reading and writing skills of primary and secondary-school pupils and strengthening the media training, knowledge and methods used by teachers and librarians to support varied reading and writing skills and interests. The programme also emphasises the importance of media literacy.

Worries over the reduction in leisure time spent reading among children and youth also call for broad research on reading with an emphasis on providing literature education beginning in early childhood.

Translated by Lola Rogers

We will publish a selection of short reviews of particularly original and interesting books for children and young adults in 2014 in January after our winter break.

Mistranslation: illustration by Sminthopsis84/Wikimedia

Mother tongue: not Finnish. How do people become interested enough in the Finnish language in order to become translators? In the olden days some might have been greatly inspired by the music Sibelius (as were the eminent British translators of Finnish, David Barrett or Herbert Lomas, for example, back in the 1950s and 1960s). We asked contemporary translators to reminisce on how they in turn have become infatuated enough with Finnish to start studying and translating this small, somewhat eccentric northern language. Three translators into English, one into French, German and Latvian tell us why

Only temporary?

David Hackston, English

I ended up studying Finnish by accident. I spent a year on exchange at Åbo Akademi in the city of Turku, my aim to study Swedish and Nordic literature. My Swedish teacher in London assured me that I would have no problem speaking Swedish in Turku – after all, there’s a Swedish-speaking university there and Turku is a Swedish-speaking area.

At the tender age of 19, I didn’t know any better. But when I tried chatting with the stall keepers at Turku Market in my beautiful sing-song Swedish, the reaction was so abrupt that I had no choice but to start studying Finnish too.

Finnish was new and strange, fascinating and frustrating. After returning to London my interest grew further and I continued studying hard. Eventually Finnish won out, and when in 2001 I was invited to Finland for 6 months as an intern at FILI, I didn’t really need to think twice.

After my internship, I decided to stay in Finland ‘for a while’ to see whether I could scrape together a living as a translator. During the past 13 years Finnish literature has experienced quite an international breakthrough, and my colleagues and I now have more work than we have time to undertake, a pleasing situation indeed. New, challenging, exciting projects are already in the pipeline, bringing more Finnish titles to English-language readers.

Among David’s translations of Finnish fiction are Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain (Linnunaivot) and Kati Hiekkapelto’s thriller The Hummingbird (Kolibri). He lives and translates in Helsinki – except that until summer 2015 he will be studying baroque music in Porto, Portugal.

Weird, beautiful

Nicole Herbst, German

Like so many others my first conscious encounter with Finland and the Finnish language happened through music. Unlike many other stories mine is not connected to heavy metal rockers in troll costumes.

Back then I was living in Cologne and a friend who was organising monthly drum’n bass parties (that hectic electronic music that seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth) had invited two Finnish dudes to play some records. What enchanted me oh so sweetly was however neither of the guys but the very unusual language they appeared to be able to make sense of. This rough but gentle, weird but beautiful language gave me goosebumps. I was intrigued.

Three months later I visited Helsinki for the first time and it felt like coming home. This was the beginning of my love story with the Finnish language. A slightly frustrating stor at times, but we are both determined to make this work.

A bookseller by profession, Nicole, who majored in Finnish and Nordic studies, has just spent six months as a trainee at FILI, having helped to prepare and run the arrangements for the Frankfurt Book Fair. Currently she keeps herself busy in Finland by translating all sorts of texts from Finnish and Swedish into German.

It’s HIM

Anete Kona, Latvian

I developed an interest in Finland in my teens, when my world revolved around a certain gloomy band. The band’s name was HIM, and the lead singer’s enchanting voice and the guitarist’s dreadlocks persuaded me that it was undoubtedly necessary to learn Finnish in order to make the right impression on my dream men when I came to meet them. This hasn’t actually happened yet, but a couple of other Finns have helped me to learn their language.

I began to study Finnish in Riga, in my sixth-form college and later at university, too. I became more closely acquainted with Finland and Finns as an exchange student in wonderful Turku, as a volunteer at the atmospheric Sodankylä Film Festival and as a summer worker in Kuhmo, surrounded by nature and music.

I love the different dialects of Finnish and am always amazed that people consider Finns quiet and reserved… My first translation of a Finnish book was published in November and I really hope it will not be my last!

Anete’s first translation has just appeared in Latvian: it is the first part of the Snow White trilogy – with a 17-year-old girl named Lumikki (Snow White) as the protagonist – by Salla Simukka, Punainen kuin veri (‘Red as blood’, 2013). Anete lives in Riga.

Different coffee

Lola Rogers, English

It all started in high school in 1982, when I asked a Finnish exchange student to teach me how to say ‘coffee’ in Finnish (we were at a coffee shop at the time). Imagine my surprise when she answered ‘It depends what you want to say about it.’

When I eventually majored in linguistics, I happily chose Finnish as my mandatory one year of non-Indo-European language. Of course, after studying Finnish for one year I could barely order a cup of kahvi, so I studied for another year, and another, and I’m not sure when I’ll be done.

Anyway, in the late 1990s I became a fanatical Ultra Bra fan and started making copies of their albums for my friends, complete with my (no doubt terrible) translations of the lyrics. This was so fun that I decided to become a translator. I talked some soft-hearted Finnish lecturers at the University of Washington (where I was an office worker) into providing independent study in translation, then put together an MA degree, worked as an intern at FILI, and here I am.

Lola lives in Seattle, WA. Among her latest translations are the new novels by Sofi Oksanen, Johanna Sinisalo and Rosa Liksom.

Lovestruck

Claire Saint-Germain, French

I lived my wonderful and hard student years – majoring in philosophy – between the hills of the Quartier Latin and the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One melancholy evening I was dancing the valse triste in the darkness of a damp cellar lit by a couple of candles. The feeling of frustration chimed well with the existential atmosphere of youth, but I thirsted for a new, exciting life.

Kebang! Some guy came from upstairs and ordered me up by the sleeve. As we walked through the crowd, my guide stopped at a table to announce that this was the woman of your life. Quite: side by side sat three blonde high-cheekboned beauties – who would be the right one for me? I offered a glass of wine: Miss Right consented to share with me a glass of the cheap elixir of love.

My cupid had hit the spot: soon I was visiting Helsinki for the first time and beginning to study Finnish in Paris at the Finnish Institute and at INALCO. I admit it: without the Erasmus programme and the Finns’ love of travel this ten-year story (of which five have been spent in Finland) would never have begun. Mon histoire est une histoire d’amour*, in Finnish.

A student of Finnish, Claire will graduate shortly from Helsinki University. For the past four years she has translated Finnish fiction – by, for example, Riikka Pulkkinen, Laura Gustafsson and Roope Lipasti – and her forthcoming translations include the first novels by Tommi Kinnunen and Pajtim Statovci.

*(Historia de un Amor by Carlos Almaran is in Finland a popular bolero sung by Reijo Taipale: Rakkauden satu)

Walking on thin ice

Owen Witesman, English

I came to Finland because a letter showed up in my mailbox telling me to. Being an LDS (‘Mormon’) missionary in Finland was equal parts Kaurismäki, Dudesons, and Sibelius. Long days with nothing happening punctuated by run-ins with pistol-wielding drunks, getting to know pistol-wielding drunks, naked sauna hijinks, naked avanto hijinks, not naked napakelkka hijinks, walking on thin ice (not figurative), genuine spiritual communion and anything else you can imagine happening when you send earnest young people out two-by-two to chat up strangers about religion all day every day in a paradise of natural extremes.

Byproducts of this included seeing more Finnish living rooms than any Finns who aren’t interior designers, learning the proper conjugation and declination of all the finest curses in several dialects, and making the best friends of one’s life out of people from every stratum of society. Don’t believe the press – Finns make the greatest friends by far.

After those two years, the happy accidents of graduate degrees and internships and networking and generous patrons that all conspired together to lead to a career in translation feel almost like an effect of a pine-tar and salmiakki-scented gravity. Or perhaps a better word would be siunaus.

Owen’s recent and forthcoming translations from Finnish include the thrillers Cold Courage and Black Noise by Pekka Hiltunen, Snow Woman and Copper Heart from the Maria Kallio series by Leena Lehtolainen, and Salla Simukka’s Snow White Trilogy. He lives in Springville, Utah with his wife and three daughters.

Beware! Illustration: NicolasMartinFontana, Wikimedia

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

The Finnish media never pass up an opportunity to post articles on our favourite miseries, says columnist Jyrki Lehtola: Finns are great at wallowing in self-denigration, so it sells well. And life is always better somewhere else, isn’t it? At least in ‘Europe’ it is

They should never have let us Finns into Europe. Or North America, South America, Australia, Africa, Asia.

Another Nordic country might perhaps suit us, or Albania or Russia. We could visit them.

Europe doesn’t suit us. Europe makes us even more stupid than we already are. Europe makes us think less of ourselves and more of other people.

All us Finns have some version of the European experience. You wake up around six in the morning in a bad temper. It’s dark; it’s raining sleet. Half-dazed, you step into the taxi you ordered yesterday. The taxi takes you to the airport, where you take off your shoes and your belt and check repeatedly that your passport is where it should be.

Then things begin to feel better. After security, you’re already nearly in Europe. Bubbly and beer are delicious even this early in the morning. Things are more relaxed here in Europe, go Europe.

Everything gets better still, becomes more European, when you sit down in a restaurant, preferably by the Mediterranean. You eat a heap of oily scallops which you would never dream of ordering in Finland, but here, in Europe, they’re the world’s best food, because this is Europe. The wine is pleasantly warming, and the restaurateur, Fabio, clearly loves us, Fabio, a big personality speaking his bad English, touching you and laughing, Fabio, even though you’re struck dumb and can’t even say a thing.

Europe is free, freedom is Europe; prison is where I return from Europe.

When you come back to Finland after a trip, you get nervous. We are a country whose citizens love to denigrate themselves. We Finns, we are jealous, silent, negative, grey, slow, unflexible and joyless. We drag ourselves through life, queue on commuter roads to get back in the dark to our dreary homes to alcoholise ourselves.

They don’t do things like that in Europe, in Europe they dance and rejoice in the streets. And since we have such a negative attitude to ourselves, our self-deprecation becomes, perversely, a kind of pride, particularly in relation to Europe.

The media are beside themselves with enthusiasm in our self-deprecation, because it sells: it’s commercially viable to be horrified about how horrible it is in Finland.

Every year we have slightly different reasons to denigrate ourselves. Sometimes it’s something as simple as the weather, sometimes it’s the national character, from time to time it’s our food culture and often all of the above, and a lot more.

This year we’ve been flagellating ourselves because we’re the world’s only nation with rules enforced by civil servants. Often those rules are of a kind that doesn’t exist in Europe: small-minded, ridiculous, bureaucratic, pointless.

And rules, it’s only us that have them. There are dozens of different offices in Finland, with hundreds of officials, who are all trying to do what their job descriptions say. To make up rules and boundaries and police them, to keep some kind of order. Cruel and uncaring, these official of the devil told an innocent grocery-store keeper that his foods should have an ingredients list. They forced their own, probably fascist, hygiene standards on a pure-minded street-café owner who only wanted the best for us.

Sometimes that invention of rules takes on comic dimensions: for the tiniest and most inseconsequential error a shopkeeper may have to pay tens of thousands of euros, and the media can then run the story of a merchant who is driven on to hard times by rules, who is always the good person crushed by bureaucracy, not a person who did not know what he was doing.

And then we compare this misery of ours to the Europe of our imagination. There are no bureucrats in Europe, no rules, no laws, just freedom, and everything works, although I did have to wait two hours for my food and I didn’t get what I ordered, but it didn’t matter, because I was in Europe.

Education is an important thing. If you educate yourself you don’t live so deep in your own misconceptions that you fall in love with them.

Travel is important, but so is reading. You learn about the world through reading. Even the fact that everywhere, believe it or not, has rules, civil servants, bureaucracy, which sometimes approaches the ridiculous.

But we don’t see these in Europe. we prefer to see the lie, a free Europe and a harried Finland, because we want to rejoice in something, even if it has to be our unusual misery. It makes us just that little bit more special and individual.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Pleasant interface still? Old book bindings (Merton College library, Oxford, UK). Photo: Wikipedia

Writing is arguably brain-control technology, notes our columnist Teemu Manninen. Writing might not be on its way out, at least not quite yet, he thinks, but the printed book might not stay with us for ever. And would that be a happier world?

When the future of literature is discussed, either here in Finland and elsewhere, topics usually revolve around changes in the economics and practicalities of reading, writing, and publishing: how will writers and publishers get paid, and how can readers find more books to read.

What is taken for granted in these instances is that literature itself will continue to be something that exists in a recognisable way – which itself of course implies that writing itself will remain a viable mass medium for the transmission of information over the transcendent, enormous, unfathomable gulfs of space and time, as it has been for thousands of years.

Will it, though? Who’s to say that in those far future times, when even simple human tasks would appear to us then-ancestors (were we to inhabit the bodies of those grand+n-children of ours) as the stuff of pure fantasy, that writing will not have been replaced by something more efficient: telepathy, say, or perhaps highly-developed data visualisation techniques far beyond our present understanding of how human minds work.

Even if such fantasies never come true, the way in which writing functions in the world is already changing – if you only stop to think about it for a while.

If human culture has been a culture of the book, a culture of writing, for the last few millenia, it might be because writing has exerted such a strong influence on the way in which we understand the world and ourselves – this not only because of what we say when we write, but because of what writing also is: brain-control technology.

Writing is, after all, a curious invention. It is not natural to the human brain: we need to develop skills for coding and deciphering, when we learn to read and write – and by learning those skills, we change our brains.

For instance, Vilém Flusser, the influential Czech-Brasilian media philosopher, was wont to say that writing is the chief begetter of historical consciousness: that because we have learned to write, we have gained an idea of history as an ordered, sequential progression of events.

Myth moves in cycles, Flusser said, like speech – it doubles back on itself, repeats, stammers, walks in circles. Writing gifts us with the ability to order our thoughts, to arrange them in a logical sequence, and also allows us to review our thinking objectively. When we write, we take pauses, lift ourselves from the page, go back and read what we have said and then revise it.

This is the model for critical thought. It is not an abstract process hidden inside our minds, some kind of thought-yoga people learn in the university: it is an inevitable form of behaviour that occurs when we write.

Another central emblem of our culture of writing is the book as a material object, and the way in which it functions as an interface, a point of access to the ideas it holds. Humans are tool-making animals. We think with our hands. Concepts relating to understanding, scientists have noticed, are deep down almost always metaphors of touching, holding, and grasping.

The book is a tool you hold in your hand. It gives information about itself by touch: you move materially through its pages, opening it at different places. Recently, studies of digital reading have shown that touch-screen reading changes how we remember things: people who read from digital devices do not retain details of plots as well as people who read printed books.

This might be because the physicality of the book itself conveys information: it allows us to feel the location of a book’s beginning, middle, and end with our fingers. Could these three unities of Western dramatic art be, in fact, products of the Book? Imagine it: the Bible, our Book par excellence, not only divides time and existence to beginnings, middles and ends, but also eras (chapters, books, parts), and what’s more, gives history as a whole a structure that is either comic (for those who are saved in the end) or tragic (for the other guys).

What is the internet compared to the Book? Where is its beginning, middle or end? The archive of Big Data is vast and meaningless, undecipherable. But, we forget, so was the Book. For ages, reading and writing were skills only the rich could afford to train, and when the Bible provided the model for learning, the shape of history and the fate of men, for a long time only priests learned in Latin were allowed to decipher the word of God.

In some ways, we are living through a new Dark Age. Most of us are illiterate in computer code, the contemporary Latin our modern clergy uses to write the programs that run our lives. The churches of Apple, Amazon and Google make it possible for their congregations to use it for their own good, but access is granted only if you buy in to their interpretation of how the world of information ought to be revealed.

Categorised, monetised, functionalised, the stuff of our informatic lives, the laws of modern culture, are pushed onto our tablets, and we touch them, thinking that we give the commands, believing things are within our grasp – but the glass is always there between us and those who stand on the other side.

Vilém Flusser believed that writing was on its way out, that it would be replaced by images and code. I don’t entirely agree. I believe text, in some form, will be with us for a long time to come, but I’m not so sure about the printed book.

All I know is that when we no longer leaf through pages, when there are no more bookmarks and no more stacked paragraphs progressing from beginning to end, when we cannot be on the same page anymore, flush with the edges or not; when we are unable to read between the lines, or throw our books against the wall, or open them haphazardly to find serendipitous wisdom; when we can’t write on the margins or rip pages out of the book of life, then the world, along with us, will be different.

When I was younger I thought that writing a novel began with the moment when I sat down at my desk and pressed a key for the first time. A. Hmmm…no, H. No, let’s make that S. No no no, I need a more original beginning…Z!

That’s not the case. The writing of a novel begins between two and twenty years before the choice of the first letter and the first word. Sometimes longer.

In the case of my novel Särkyvää (‘Fragile’, 2014), I know the exact moment of its birth.

Before I began to make a career as an author, I spent a year as a teacher at Hamari school in Porvoo. It was the beginning of the 1990s. Hamari was an old sawmill community on the sea, full of wooden houses more than a century old and motor boats put-putting toward the horizon. The headmaster looked more like a sea dog than a teacher; one morning he announced that it was his fortieth birthday. After that he sat down on the staff-room sofa, fell into deep thought and suddenly ejaculated, ‘Why the hell does a person have to gather so much junk in their life?!’

The headmaster lived on the other side of a playground in a wooden house; I had been there. Long attic corridors filled with things were, according to him, archaeological strata. The further you excavated, according to him, the earlier the phases of his life you would uncover.

On the staff-room sofa, after his outburst, the headmaster remembered how he had moved in with his future wife for the first time. All the things he then owned fitted on the back of a bicycle, into one cardboard box. ‘What a happy thought. There’s no going back, no…,’he muttered.

I wrote that sofa moment down in my notebook. Such notebooks have followed me throughout my life, although they have grown smaller. Nowadays I use notebooks the size of my palm; I always carry one in my pocket. My notebooks are full of conversations I have overheard, jottings, drawings. Ninety per cent of the things I write down remain unused. I don’t know in advance what will have a new life.

The cardboard-box remark did. In the coming years I moved house, and when I did the moment in Hamari always came to mind. What if all the things of my life could fit into a cardboard box, what would that be like? A couple of decades went by before the thought and a cardboard box full of junk ripened into a story and a novel whose name was Särkyvää.

The period of time between the idea for Särkyvää and its realisation was long, but not exceptional. Between the original idea and the act of writing there is, for every book, a delay struggle whose name is the gathering of source material. That, too, varies in length.

A writing person tends to fall in love with their sources, deeply and headlong. That is the case with me. It is unavoidable. When you begin to write a new book, you have to have found an idea that is so interesting that you can work with it for one, two or even three years of writing, sometimes longer. The idea is the heart of the matter and of the book, and when you have a good idea or subject, you have time and license to dive headfirst into all kinds of sources. You have time and license to sift, interview, study old photos and texts and books.

At this point you still have no idea of the plot. For me, this gathering and sifting of sources is an enjoyable phase, like a rising intoxication. You could stay in this state almost indefinitely. I have written about graffiti artists, chimney sweeps and loggers, and each time I have had to start my information-gathering from scratch. It is an explorer’s work, the charting of a new, unknown continent.

Finally all sorts of interesting background information and little stories sway in towers of different height on my work desk and shelves. There are also five miscellaneous bags of sources around my desk; the sixth bag is half-full.

At this point I awake suddenly one night, walk into my study in the moonlight and realise, amid the paper towers that I will never be able to use more than a fraction of my sources in my book. It is time to wrench myself into the real work of writing. My rising intoxication turns in the same moment into a falling one.

I rarely go back to my sources at this point. I trust that I will remember what is essential for the book.

My mood changes, as I begin to write, from enthusiastic to unsure. In the early weeks it feels as if I were groping from dawn to dusk in a dark, dense forest without a torch. Or, like Särkyvää’s Teemu: as if I were driving an old Lada jalopy across Europe without a map. Teemu’s intention is to kill himself on a bull’s horns in the Pamplona bull-run, and that’s what I feel like too, sometimes, at this stage.

I must trust that when, in writing, I have bumped into enough tree trunks and protruding branches, I will find my way out of the forest. After walking accidentally in circles, getting lost and falling into minefields.The book will find its language, the characters will gradually develop from mere names into flesh and blood. At some point I begin to have the feeling that they talk and squabble behind me without my having any influence. Then I know I am going in the right direction.

I am generally a good deal more than halfway through the manuscript before I fall into a state of the outrageous joyousness of writing. The pieces begin to click together, and the last weeks of writing, after a year or two of struggle, are generally like drinking champagne. Afterwards the journey through the dark forest seems extremely logical. The path was always visible, after all!

But books are not written with the power of hindsight. They are written in a long, blind moment, when you must feel your way forward.

The writer must love that long, blind moment more than his sources or his idea. He must have the energy to slosh through the dense forest as he writes and enjoy his uncertainty. It is only thus that fresh writing is born, at the same time fragile and powerful.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Early days: Tove Jansson went to Stockholm to study art when she was just 16. A letter to her friend Elisabeth Wolff, from November 1932

Artist and author Tove Jansson (1914–2001) is known abroad for her Moomin books for children and fiction for adults. A large selection of her letters – to family, friends and lovers – was published for the first time in September. In these extracts she writes to her best friend Eva Konikoff who moved to the US in 1941, to her lover, Atos Wirtanen, journalist and politician, and to her life companion of 45 years, artist Tuulikki Pietilä.
Brev från Tove Jansson (selected and commented by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson; Schildts & Söderströms, 2014; illustrations from the book) introduced by Pia Ingström

7.10.44. H:fors. [Helsinki]

exp. Tove Jansson. Ulrikaborgg. A Tornet. Helsingfors. Finland. Written in swedish.
to: Miss Eva Konikoff. Mr. Saletan. 70 Fifty Aveny. New York City. U.S.A.

Dearest Eva!

Now I can’t help writing to you again – the war [Finnish Continuation War, from 1941 to 19 September 1944] is over, and perhaps gradually it will be possible to send letters to America. Next year, maybe. But this letter will have to wait until then – even so, it will show that I was thinking of you. Curiously enough, Konikova, all these years you have been more alive for me than any of my other friends. I have talked to you, often. And your smiling Polyfoto has cheered me up and comforted me and has also taken part in the fortunate and wonderful things that have happened. I remembered your warmth, your vitality and your friendship and felt happy! At first I wrote frequently, every week – but after about a year most of it was returned to me. I wrote more after that, but the letters were often so gloomy that I didn’t feel like saving them. Now there are so absurdly many things I have to talk to you about that I don’t know where to begin. Koni, if only I’d had you here in my grand new studio and could have hugged you. After these recent years there is no human being I have longed for more than you.

It’s magnificent here [Jansson’s studio in Helsinki, now preserved as the artist’s home], is it not? A turret room, with a high ceiling like a church, nearly eight metres square with six arched windows and above them little rectangular windows like eyebrows on top under the ceiling. Cracks here and there, and piles of masonry, because the repairs to the bomb damage aren’t finished yet, and in the midst of the rubble an easel. A colossal, ornate Art Nouveau stove, and a funny old door with green and red glass windows.

A studio one could spend one’s whole life beautifying if one wanted to. And next to it an asymmetrical whitewashed room – where I can keep all my feminine odds and ends, all my gentle, playful, ostentatious and personal stuff – with two windows under the ceiling. Ulrikasborgsgatan Street 1. The Turret. Hageli’s old studio [Hageli: the artist Hjalmar Hagelstam who died in the war 1941]. Some of his cheerful, adventurous spirit is still here, I think. A bit melancholy. – I am happy and grateful that my great Studio Utopia has come true. And I have the urge to paint again. I wake up in the mornings and remember – first, that the boys [her two brothers] are alive – and then that I have the studio. (and then Atos!) [Wirtanen, her lover and friend]
….

16.12.47 [Helsingfors]

Dearest Eva,

… Except for last week, when I devoted myself to family parcels, tidying and Christmas presents in Lallukka [the artists’ home in Helsinki where TJ:s parents lived], I have been trying to rustle up paintings in the studio. The early part of the autumn was simply hopeless: I did things that were far inferior to the canvases of a year ago, and I had neither the desire nor the ability to concentrate. At the end of November things started to ‘gel’. A blotch here and there that looked like painting. I now have one or two items that might have a future, but somehow can’t manage to assess their quality – it’s rather as if my will had got out of control. Sometimes I think they are worse than ever, sometimes that I’m working in a completely new way, didn’t notice when I crossed the old latitude, and just voyaged on. The worst of it has been that absolute lack of desire for anything. I suppose it’s a result of spending the whole spring playing the part of someone I am not in order to win another human being. Swallowing it down and lying and pretending to be teasing and carefree. Then pretending to be happy for the family’s sake and the Swedish guest, and systematically trying to kill my feelings for the very person I was fighting for. It’s hard to remain suspended in the air between woman and man, and when one finally realises that one must be honest, and nothing but that – one no longer knows what is real.

It has all gradually turned into something that has no connection with either ‘happiness’ or ‘love’ – oh, all those words – but only with work and calm. When Vivica [Bandler: theatre director with whom TJ had fallen in love] returned from France and phoned me I was immensely happy.

Now we have only met each other once or twice, and her arrival was a long time ago. Nothing has happened, nothing is settled. Sometimes there is small talk or a flare-up of the old bitter misunderstandings, a prelude to a conversation, an attempt at warmth. I was ready for anything, to carry on, to let it become a friendship, only meet occasionally to talk and laugh. But I had to have someone to help me shape it all into something other than tormented brokenness and uncertainty.

She said, I don’t know. I don’t feel up to it. I have no desire to do anything. So I understood that there isn’t and never will be anyone to help one. And no matter how much I want to help her in her coldness, her vulnerability and distrust, her unproductiveness, I can’t help her, any more than she can me. We have become a sort of ‘relationship people’ to each other, but we don’t even have the energy to try to make a mutual impression – or care about each other. It all breathes nothing but deadly dullness, though violent reactions are liable to break out at any time. For example, I mentioned that I was drawing a Moomin comic strip for the children’s corner of Atos’s newspaper. She was furious at the betrayal and accused me violently. I shouldn’t have defended myself, but I did – and the result was an endless quarrel of vast proportions that ended in tears on both sides. You see, that is the unsustainable, unnatural side of a lesbian relationship. Not morality, not the anatomical problem, not the social problem. But the fact that a controversy, a trust, a joint venture, yes, all the things one tries to shape together, can never be capable of maintaining the balance. In, for example, an agreement between a [following line of text illegible] her gentleness, perhaps due to his calm. Between two women the complements are lacking; in their reactions they float out into the same excesses. I suppose it’s the same for two men. A hellish depression and helplessness afterwards. It’s like building a house of cards: when it collapses for the nineteenth time one has an urge to throw the pack out of the window.

Now I have done something about which (like everything else) I’m uncertain and don’t know whether it is brave or, on the contrary, exceptionally cowardly. I wrote to Atos and asked if he thought it was a good idea for us to marry. If he didn’t want to we could just talk about other things when he came home. He will get the letter in Stockholm on his way back.

After I sent it something very pleasant happened. The dialogue with Vivica I’d had in my head since early spring ceased. That terrible grinding of all that was said, could have been said, should have been said, had not been said. Stored up and chewed over night and day. Now she was here I hoped to be able to tell her everything that was weighing me down, and so become free from it. But she would not let me say anything. It served me right for being so self-absorbed, but I thought it the only thing that could save me. That I would understand something important, and that then we could truly be friends.

I think I am hoping that Atos wants to marry me. We would go on living as we are now, and not change our way of life in any respect. Probably not even his attitude to me would change – unless perhaps he lost his vague sense of guilt [following line of text illegible] But I imagine that the ‘symbol’ would mean a lot to me. Why – I don’t know. Really know less and less. But perhaps I would calm down and be able to work. And no longer yearn to be over on ‘la rive gauche’.

So much for that. Could tell you about the monkey and bits of trivia from Lallukka – no. I’ve written about all that in a lot of ‘Merry Christmas letters’. But when I write Happy New Year to you, I mean it with all my heart, and it is my dearest wish. Say hello to Ramon!

Tove

21.06.48 St Pierre [France]

[to Atos Wirtanen]

Paradise: Tove Jansson and Atos Wirtanen planned to set up an artists’ colony in Morocco: in this illustration, Jansson has placed Wirtanen in the hanging garden on top of the tower, her studio is on the left. The dream never came true

Kenavo! which is Breton, and means: hello, sof.
[TJ occasionally called Wirtanen ‘solofif’, ‘sofen’ or ‘sof’: ‘filosof’ in Swedish means ‘philosopher’]

Right now your still faithful Tofsla is sitting in Bar de l’Océan near the fishing harbour and drinking absinthe, reflecting that midsummer and pandemonium are coming, and around me seamen and fishermen are running riot in blue and pink pants with this hilarious, half-Gallic-Celtic language; now and then they ask me if I’ve taken any photographies today and why on earth don’t the Finns like the Russians. It’s a seriously communist part of the world, this, as I discovered at the lobster festival in Le Guilvinec. The main attraction was trying to knock the hat off a gentleman by the use of cloth balls – and it was a Stars and Stripes hat, too. After that one could amuse oneself by running ten laps round a pole and balancing over a rope to reach for a packet of cigarettes which of course one never reached, or by drinking red wine in green tents packed like tins of sardines – then there was a bit of propaganda, and then there was dancing in the youth centre, and I missed the bus and walked eight kilometres over the salt flats all the way to my friendly lighthouse. The sky full, full of stars and the breakers ever closer, and the enormous cross of light sweeping over, towards one, then past and far out to sea.

There is something immensely peaceful about this flat, treeless landscape, the huddled row of   houses by the sea, the long beach at low tide with glints of blue in the distance. A landscape of horizontal lines, sparse in colour, but highly nuanced. A wonderful cadmium-yellow moss on the low stone walls, seaweed of every hue between blackish purple and honey-yellow, grey-white sand, the sun-bleached grass – and constant wind. The waves of the whole Atlantic that stop right here, on this very low beach – but there are sharks and whales further out – here Tofslan and others go gathering seashells in the safe low tidewater.

Talk of shells and shore-winds must seem very distant from what you are working on, which occupies all your time and all your thoughts. But those things are on the island too, the one where we stay. The seaweed and the horizon, all of it. Perhaps some time at the end of the summer you will be tired of talk and people and will feel like going out there. So I send words of enticement from this coast where the days go by without much talk or the sight of many people. Right now lilies are blooming in the potato patches inside the walls. Wind-tossed shrubs with glossy leaves, and two low apple trees in front of the gate.

At the fishing harbour and the pier the boats lie red and blue on the seabed at low tide amidst screaming clouds of seagulls, the vessels jut out in the inlet and heavy brown nets are spread in the sand. The women sit in decent black, crocheting in the shadows of the walls. And in all this I wander around – the most ‘genuine’ landscape I have found in all my travels, and the one that bestows the most calm. If one were not at peace with oneself the monotonous desolation might drive one crazy – but as it is it merely cancels all the expectations of desire, and one lets the days pass as quietly as the falling rain.

Unfortunately the banknotes wander too, so some time in July I shall have to pad off home to my home turf. Eva [Wichman, the writer and artist who was using the studio as her study] will stay quietly in the studio, as I’m only going to give myself the time to get some work materials, cement and food together, and then I can go out to the Island and stay there until the winter storms begin. If you have a spare week you are welcome to visit – I am sure you will need to blow away all the nonsense you have had to listen to, from bourgeois folk and others.

Spread greetings to the old kolkhoz system, and be greeted yourself, through this Whale by

Tove.

28 Feb 1952 [Helsinki]

Dearest Eva,

Self-portrait of an artist? Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll

….These last few years have, from an emotional point of view, been very unsteady and uncertain. Constant preambles to infatuation, a great deal of invented feeling or disappointment, casual relationships, the re- establishing of old ones – and all the time I have had an unpleasant feeling of being suspended in the air, seeking where nothing is to be found.

Now I think I finally know what I want, and since my friendship with you is very important to me and is largely founded on sincerity, I want to talk about it with you. I have not decided, but I am convinced that the most real and the happiest thing for me is to go over to the ghost side. It would be foolish of you to be sad about it. I myself am very cheerful and feel a strong sense of liberation and peace. – During these last weeks I have almost exclusively been with the one whom I only found, alas, shortly before her trip to France. We are both equally happy. At the same time I am working like a lunatic – among other things, on a few portraits and nudes of her. She is not coming back here any more, but I decided that this time I would not bury myself in any grieving.

One fine day it will no doubt be possible to start looking for someone else of whom I can be fond. It will not be easy. And slightly ridiculous, I’m afraid. Can you imagine me carefully interrogating all those tie-wearing ladies, or inserting pathetic adverts in Hufvudstadsbladet? ‘Who will lead me to Lesbos’ distant shores?’ There’s a risk they will think it’s Esbo one is talking about… [Esbo, Espoo in Finnish, is the neighbouring city of Helsingfors/Helsinki]

But that will be later. The main thing is that one is at peace with oneself and knows what one wants.

All spring I am going to paint my walls. In a few days’ time the two five and a half metre canvases will be dry and ready for painting. I had two youngsters from Ateneum [art museum in Helsinki] here, and they prepared them and stretched them for me in return for an hourly wage. (‘Old naturalist exploits poor young geniuses for labour of Mammon…’) The 1:1 drawing is ready. And the sketch for the wall in Kotka delivered.

With regard to the Daily Mail I am still in correspondence with them about a Moomin strip. Would be a good thing for the publicity of my books. Bobbs-Merrill writes about the possibility of toys, perhaps solid, perhaps balloons, based on my Moomins. But it is no more than an idea, I believe.

The picture book from the summer is going to press now, and [Thomas] Warburton is taking forever with the translation of the Moomin memoirs. And tomorrow I deliver a collection of 6-7 oils to the Konsthall [Kunsthalle Helsinki] public exhibition. It’s a lot to have going at the same time. But it’s fun to be working – at last, after so many hellish years of failure or improductivity. Now I’m going to do a bit of cooking. So long until tomorrow!
….

26.6.56 [Bredskär]

[To Tuulikki Pietilä]

Beloved,

I miss you so dreadfully. Not in despair or melancholy, for I know that we shall soon be with each other again, I am simply taken aback, and cannot absorb the fact that you are not around any more.

This morning, half awake, I groped around for you, then remembered you were gone, and got up quickly to escape the emptiness. And worked all day….

Yesterday I woke the social conscience of the whole of the Bay and wrote an application to the chief of police for seven penitent people without a fishing permit. Then I went to Odden and admired all Anna-Lisa’s plant arrangements and cement rings and other peculiar contraptions and received a whole basket full of small plants which I’ve planted here and there on the Island.

The Island looked very grave without you when I arrived here at sunset. It had closed itself up in itself, and I almost felt like a stranger.

Not until I came up to the cabin did it grow friendly and alive again. The wagtails were screaming at the top of their voices with indignation, complaining horribly because the copper pot with our midsummer leaves had fallen down and probably frightened the wits out of their children. Very possibly they got a shower as well. Now the idyll is restored and the mother so tame that she stays on the top of the flagpole when I go in and out of the cabin. For the swallows I brought clay from Anna-Lisa’s bay – but they continue with their secretive visits and are reluctant to take family life seriously.

Late at night I brewed kilju [moonshine] in the ‘best’ water bucket and augmented the recipe with all our raisins.

It was a wonderful night, calm and breathless, and I still could not believe you were gone, I kept constantly half turning round to see what you were doing, to say something to you.

Today a strong south-westerly is blowing, and we would have found it hard to get into the Bay. You are probably far better off deep in the city’s universal hub and rushing about in heat and irritation to get everything organised before you set off.

That first day in town is usually such a nasty contrast to the island life out here. Everything that has been lying in wait comes crashing down on one like a shock, and in the evening one misses the sound of the sea and feels quite disoriented.

Wherever I go on the island you are with me like a reassurance and a stimulus, your joy and vitality remain everywhere. And I if I went away from here you would come with me. You see, I love you simultaneously enchanted and with great calm, and I am not afraid of anything that may be in store for us. This evening I filled the tub with water from the big vat and tried to pick out that dreadful Sea Eagle Waltz on the accordion. You will hear! Now I’m going to read Karin Boye and then go to sleep – goodnight, beloved.

27th.
Today I swept and washed the vat since it was empty and sprinkled sand in it as you told me to.

And wrote Svenska Dagbladet’s dreadful article about ‘what it’s like to write for children’, that has been making me uneasy for a long time. I tried to spice it up with the children’s own refreshing sense of the macabre, the obvious and the impetuous in the healthy meanings of the words, and to write as little as possible about me and my blessed old troll….

I am so unused to being happy that I have not yet really grasped what it means. One has simply received an armful of new opportunities, new calm, new expectations. I feel like a garden that has finally got water so that my flowers have the energy to bloom….

Translated by David McDuff

Brev från Tove Jansson

Nothing could be more mistaken than to describe Tove Jansson as ‘Moominmamma’. In her statements she was both cutting and complex – conflict-ridden and full of paradoxes. And she was nobody’s mamma.

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) became world famous (especially ‘big’ in Japan) with her Moomins – the characters of her illustrated books for children (1945–1970) – and her books for adults are a part of her work that is at least as interesting. Her training, ambition and artistic passion were, however, focused on painting.

Anyone who has read Boel Westin’s excellent biography –  now available in English, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words – ‘knows’ all this, but to experience it through Jansson’s own letters, in an alternating process of reflection and recreation, brings the problems close to the reader in quite a different way: one that is shocking, but also deeply human.

This comprehensive edition of Tove Jansson’s letters to her friends, lovers and relatives is the nicest way I can imagine to celebrate her centenary. Jansson describes her work, her many travels, her loves and her stays on her beloved summer islands Bredskär and Klovharun, on the south coast of Finland. Jansson’s parents were both artists: Viktor Jansson, a sculptor, and Signe Hammarsten (‘Ham’) Jansson, a graphic artist. Her brother Lars (1926–2000) illustrated her Moomin comics for many years, and Per-Olov (born 1920) is a photographer and writer.

Jansson writes early on of her attempts to be free of her ‘terribly misguided consideration for everyone and everything.’ On growing acquainted with her erotic life, infatuation with a succession of self-centred men one realises that in this she was not particularly successful. During his spells of leave in wartime the artist Tapio Tapiovaara wants Tove, but also ‘that husky painted blonde from Roobertinkatu Street’. The left-wing parliamentarian and journalist Atos Wirtanen takes shelter behind a philosophical indifference to ‘conventions’ – such as marriage – which makes him an emotional monster, but a cheerful and good-natured one. He is believed to have been the model for Snufkin of the Moomin world, the vagabond with commitment issues.

Through the dead war years of fear, depression and cold Jansson fights bravely and independently, and conquers the world for herself. After the war she at times feels ‘a strong desire for those dark, dangerous years’ – with the ambivalent attitude to formative experiences, both idyllic and horrific, I imagine to be part of her great artistry.

As a piece of Finnish LGBT history Jansson’s descriptions of the ‘ghost side’ – homosexuality, criminalised in Finland until 1971 –- have a unique value. The forbidden love was also found in artistic circles: dangerous, secret and unspoken, but familiar to many. Sometimes, because of necessity the circles had to be kept relatively small, it bore a hysterical, hothouse-like character in a network where there was ‘mymbling’– the Janssonian word for having sex – in all directions.

When the painter Tuulikki Pietilä (1917–2009) finally makes her entrance it comes to the reader as a great relief – here is a woman who knows what she wants, without devouring her partner. Jansson remains who she is, with her at times difficult family as part of the deal, but the deal works. The two women live together for forty-five years.

The letters to Tove’s (heterosexual) girlfriends Eva Konikoff (who moved to America) and Maya Vanni are marked by soul-searching introspection and brusque humour, as in the case of the inevitable ‘Ham friction’ that occurs when, on a small islet, love for mother must coexist with love for Pietilä.

The editors, Boel Westin and Helen Svensson (Jansson’s former literary editor), deserve credit for an extremely well-produced work. The arrangement of the letters is dynamic, the notes and clarifications exact and illuminating in their dry succinctness.

Throughout the whole book, alongside the passions and disappointments, the bread-and-butter jobs and the material hardship, there is a strong current of grim joy in work.

Tove Jansson writes about travel, painting, love, war, friendship, family, comic strip, theatre, money, and house-building. About her own writing, however, there is very little – as if being an author were as natural as breathing and the beating of one’s heart, nothing worth discussing at all. Could she have regarded it as a compensatory sideline, a substitute for her painting, the great, exalted art that never really came to be? Or was it a refuge, and a deeply private joy?

Translated by David McDuff

Finnland. Cool. pavilion in Frankfurt, designed by Natalia Baczynska Kimberley, Nina Kosonen and Matti Mikkilä from Aalto University

It starts next week: Finland is Guest of Honour at the Book Fair in the German and global city of Frankfurt. This link will take you to it all.

Approximately 170,000 professionals from the literary world are expected to visit the exhibition halls from Wednesday to Friday; the weekend is reserved for the general public, c.100,000 visitors. Since 1980s different countries have been in focus each year.

This enterprise – massive for Finland – began to take shape in 2009 when the Finnish Literature Society signed an agreement with Frankfurt Book Fair, and FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange took on the task of coordinating the project. President Sauli Niinistö will speak at the opening ceremony on Tuesday, Minister of Culture and Housing Pia Viitanen will open the Finnland. Cool. pavilion.

The Finnish authors attending the Fair will be those who have had a new German translation of their work published this year by a German publisher or those who have their own funding and local parthers. More than 180 books (including new editions) by Finnish, Finland-Swedish and Sámi authors – contemporary and classic, fiction and non-fiction – will be published in Germany in 2014.

The literature programme – click ‘fair programme publication’ – has been produced in collaboration with German publishers who will have their own events with Finnish authors. Almost 60 authors will attend the Book Fair. There will be readings, interviews, discussions, poetry and other installations as well as exhibitions (and events taking place outside the fair halls, in participating venues, such as Finnish tango dancing on 6 October at the Literaturhaus).

This link – search term: Finland – shows the Calendar of Events at the Fair.

The focal point for Finland’s presence at the fair will be a pavilion (2,300 square metres) designed by graduate studens at Aalto University (the university consists of six schools, among them the school of arts, design and architecture).

Almost 300 Finnish books are published yearly, into 40 languages. As part of the programme FILI organises a seminar for translators: 60 of them, working in 16 languages, will discuss their profession and learn more about the role of translation in cultural exchange.

The 2014 Finnish Government Prize for the Translation of Finnish Literature – now awarded for the 50th time, worth € 15,000 – will be awarded at the Fair.

A special (limited edition) English-language issue of Finnish Granta (Granta Finland 3), published in Finnish in September, subtitled ‘Best of young Finnish Novelists’, featuring the work of 20 Finnish novelists (under the age of 40), will also be introduced at the Fair.

One of the happy results of this massive selling and buying event – the Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s largest book trade enterprise – will be that exposure here will enable a growing number of Finnish authors to find readers in other languages.

An even wider range of literature – poetry, essays and classics, in addition to the contemporary prose that is on show in Frankfurt – will hopefully also find a larger readership: that really has to be cool.