North and South

An insightful passage from an early chapter of Professor Dr. Susanne Popp's wonderful new biography of the German composer Max Reger:

Ganz von Riemann auf die deutsche Tradition eingeschworen, lehnte er das Fremde und Andersartige — in seinen Augen die Trivialität und Melodiösität „zweifelhaften Charakters" — der als apostrophierten Oper ab und prognostizierte ihr ein baldiges Verschwinden. Wie eingeschränkt „deutsch" sein Verständnis war, zeigt ein Vergleich mit dem gleichzeitigen Urteil von Jean Sibelius, das Toni Mäkelä überliefert: „Cavalleria rusticana ist auch sehr stark national, und viele Passagen kann nur ein Sizilianer verstehen. Wie Du weißt, hat das Naive eine wichtige Funktion in ihrer Musik. Wir Nordländer neigen mehr zum ,Kontemplativen'. Aber wenn wir es schaffen, unser Philosophieren loszuwerden, können auch wir Begabungen produzieren."

Mandel'shtam

For the time being I've put my 1973 Mandel'shtam translations here.

Like Annensky, Mandel'shtam was spiritually and psychologically rooted in St Petersburg -- the city named Pietari in Finnish, and at one time in many respects a cultural and economic region of Finland.

The Ride Towards Now

Schildts & Söderströms of Helsinki have published Ritten mot nuet (The Ride Towards Now) the 26th volume of poetry by the Finland-Swedish Ostrobothnian poet Gösta Ågren (b. 1936).

 Och

Poesin är berättelsen om
meningen med vårt liv:
tillvaron, inte händelserna;
rösterna, inte orden.

Och rytmen, inte sorgen,
fastän varje rad så tydligt
döljer den, och varje dikt
utgör ett avsked.


And

Poetry is the story of 
the meaning of our lives: 
the being, not the events; 
the voices, not the words.

And the rhythm, not the sorrow, 
although every line so clearly
hides it, and every poem
constitutes a farewell.

translated from Finland-Swedish by David McDuff

Ruskeat Tytöt

In the new Press Freedom Blog of The Finnish Foundation for Media and Development (Viestintä ja Kehitys-säätiö - Vikes for short), the editor, author and campaigner Koko Hubara writes and talks about her experience with social media, in particular her Ruskeat Tytöt (Brown Girls) blog:

Within a couple of weeks the Ruskeat Tytöt blog had attracted plenty of attention. It was picked up by other media and started to be cited in the major newspapers and magazines in Finland, both in good and bad tones.

Ruskeat Tytöt won various blog awards and received a lot of praise, but at the same time every other reader and/or (white) cultural correspondent, writer, theatre person, and artist had an opinion on how I should talk about racism and what should be considered “inoffensive”. For instance, when people at work touched my hair without asking and compared it to animal fur – that was simply friendly curiosity about difference, which I should understand and allow.

Of course I also got, and get, anonymous and signed hate mail and people hoping I would be raped or killed. There are still a lot of readers who are in the business of publicly belittling our experience and who change the subject when we raise the problems we face.

But for the most part the debate has been positive since the start, with an enthusiasm to learn and listen, and it has involved racialised people themselves as well as their white nearest and dearest whom the discussions undoubtedly address.

FILI Newsletter

The FILI Newsletter for the month of May is out, and can be accessed here. From the letter:

FILI moves to new offices

			FILI is moving to a new office suite in the House of Nobility (Ritarihuone) building on 15 May 2017. Our new offices will be upstairs from our previous location, and our street address will change: the entrance will be at Hallituskatu 2 B. To enter, ring the doorbell. Our new offices are on the second floor.

Items of special interest include the following:

Funding received by FILI

FILI's core funding comes from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, but we always need to seek additional funding from other sources to support our operations.

The Finnish Cultural Foundation awarded FILI a €50,000 grant to hold translator training courses for two years.

We have also received €8,000 from the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland for our work to promote Finland-Swedish literature abroad.

And the Otava Book Foundation awarded us €6,000 to update our translators' forum (known as ‘Kääntöpiiri’).

Our sincerest thanks to these funders – our work will continue!

Finns: strong, calm and silent

Janice Turner in the Times, writing about her recent trip to Finland: 

Leaving Finland, I wondered how this country ranks so high in the international happiness ratings, a testament to the forbearance of its people. A stallholder who sold me cinnamon buns told me her bipolar husband struggles desperately through the dark winters. I couldn’t be cheerful in a country where lakes are still frozen in May, there’s little to do but skiing and saunas, where the landscape is unremittingly flat and empty and the architecture (thanks to the retreating Nazis burning every old building) is grim and utilitarian.

But they are strong, calm and silent. Studies show Finns utter the fewest words of any western nation, particularly the men. Which must be maddening in a husband, but in a taxi driver, when you’re tired and empty of small talk, is blessed thing.

 I must say I agree about the silence -- it's been a while since I heard anything from Finland. Hope all the people at FILI are well and busy as usual.

Finland-Swedish dictionary online

The Institute for the Languages of Finland has made freely available an online dictionary of Finland-Swedish. The dictionary's compilers are Charlotta af Hällström-Reijonen and Mikael Reuter. Editing is by Bianca Holmberg, and the publisher is Schildts & Söderströms Ab.

And now I am here

»Och nu är jag här.

I ett land som i fyra decennier haft en socialdemokratisk regering.

I ett samhälle där opinioner,  debatt, skolväsen – hela samhällsklimatet formats av detta socialdemokratiska etablissemang.

Och jag grips av samma förlamande depression, samma kvävningskänslor som i 1930-talets monolitiska Finland.»

Marianne Alopaeus, Drabbad av Sverige (1983) 

Pakko paha?

"If there is no requirement to choose another language in place of Swedish, the fear is that a lot of people will no longer study a language," said Kari Jukarainen of the Finnish Language teachers association. "We would have a large group of pupils whose only foreign language is English."

http://yle.fi/uutiset/teachers_fear_for_language_skills_without_compulsory_swedish/7021451

Acceptance Speech

Here's my acceptance speech.

The Finnish State International Translator's Prize is an award that I never expected to receive, and it means a great deal to me. I would like to thank everyone who recommended me for it.

Many years ago I visited Finland for the first time, as a young Edinburgh University student of Russian: it was July 1966, and I was travelling along the Baltic by ship, with some friends, on the way to the Soviet Union. Disembarking in Finland for a few all-too brief hours, my first impressions were of the city of Helsinki, but what I remember most of all were the light, stillness and calm of the late summer evening that greeted me as I walked up from the harbour. It was a calm that I hadn't experienced in any other city I'd been to, and I remember wondering where all the people were, for at that particular time of the evening there was almost no one about. I didn’t know it then, but in the years to come I would make many more visits to Finland and meet many people there, both in life and in books.

I've spent a large part of my life studying and translating, for the most part, the literature of three languages: Russian, Swedish and Finnish (I’ve translated poetry and fiction from other Northern languages, including Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic, but the three languages I mention are the ones that have held the most significance for me). The choice may at first sight seem strange, yet if one looks at the map it does makes sense, as Russia, Sweden and Finland are close neighbours, and have a common, if not always harmonious, history – and that is the context in which I discovered them.

Although the three languages – Russian, Swedish and Finnish – are structurally and lexically quite different from one another, my university study of Russian and Russian literature (which I pursued to doctorate level) was accompanied by a study of German. This led me to learn the Nordic languages, including Icelandic at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, and then some years later, with the encouragement of the Finnish Literature Information Centre – which is now called FILI – Finnish, first under Hannele Branch at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and later at the University of Helsinki.

In the late nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century it was not uncommon for educated people in North-Eastern Europe to speak, read and understand all three of my chosen languages, although nowadays the unlikeness of Russian, Swedish and Finnish is thought to make them mutually exclusive. That was not the case in the past, and the change of attitude may be due at least in part to political and socio-historical factors.

I put the emphasis here on “languages” rather than “countries”, for in my experience literature only rarely coincides with frontiers on maps: it exists not behind national boundaries but in language, and in a psychic and emotional space that is governed by the laws of reading and common fellowship. The novels of Dostoyevsky and the poetry of Baratynsky and Blok may tell us something unique about the Russian soul, but they also speak in universal terms. Likewise, the verses of the Kalevala and the plays of Strindberg tell us much about the psyche of Northern Europe, but they also draw inner maps of human consciousness, and of the unconscious. And indeed, in my years of work as a literary translator I have become aware that in literary terms the three linguistic cultures I mentioned tend to overlap with one another. The work of Edith Södergran, the first of the poets of Finland whom I endeavoured to translate, is one of the living confirmations of that.

My first translations of Finland's literature were nearly all of Swedish-language poets and authors, of whom there are almost more than in Sweden itself. Then I began to study Finnish, first at London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and later at the University of Helsinki. Through my own reading and my many years of contact with members of the Finnish Literature Centre and the editors of Books from Finland magazine, I developed a knowledge of both Finland-Swedish and Finnish literature. This was further helped by meetings and friendships with contemporary authors – especially the poets Gösta Ågren, Bo Carpelan and Tua Forsström, with whom I worked on translations of their poetry, learning an enormous amount in the process – and with their editors and publishers in Finland. My British publishers Penguin and Bloodaxe also gave me encouragement in my work as a literary translator.

In recent years I have been reading the Finnish poetry of the early twentieth century, and am surprised to learn how few of the poets who lived in that period are translated into English. So that is one of my projects both for the present and for the future: to try to make the voices of Saima Harmaja, Kaarlo Sarkia, Katri Vala, Uuno Kailas and other poets from that long-ago time heard in English, for they still have many things to tell us.

Again, I would like to say thank you for this award, which I’m honoured to receive: for me it’s a landmark in my continuing discovery of Finland, its people, and its extraordinarily rich and diverse literature.

Translator's Prize

News from Helsinki that I've been awarded the Finnish State Prize for Foreign Translators.

It's a great honour.

Putin oligarchs buy Hartwall Arena

Via Bloomberg:

Gennady Timchenko and two other billionaire acquaintances of President Vladimir Putin bought a stake in Jokerit ice hockey team, moving the club from Finland’s top league to Russia’s answer to the NHL.

Timchenko, Arkady Rotenberg and Boris Rotenberg will also buy Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, Jokerit’s home rink and Finland’s largest event venue, with a seating capacity of about 13,500, according to an e-mailed statement from the business partners’ Arena Events Oy venture. The price wasn’t disclosed.

Pussy Riot in Finland

Via Yle: 

Two members of the Russian political performance group Pussy Riot are in Helsinki for this weekend's World Village Festival.

The women are in Finland to talk about the status of political prisoners in Russia and to plug their new book on human rights. It’s a manifesto entitled A Punk Prayer for Freedom of Speech.

They are to appear onstage at the free festival in Kaisaniemi Park at 11am Saturday with the popular Finnish female duo PMMP, who recently said they will end their career this year.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/pussy_riot_members_to_appear_at_helsinki_multicultural_fest/6658092

Update:

Weekend performances in Helsinki by two members of the Russian political performance group Riot Pussy, as well as scheduled interviews, have been cancelled. Concerns for their safety seem to have led to the cancellations.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/pussy_riot_members_cancel_appearances_whereabouts_unknown/6658931

Update: According to Yekaterina Samutsevich, interviewed by Hbl  in Moscow, a performance by the two Pussy Riot members at  the Maailma kylässä festival in Helsinki was never planned, as Pussy Riot does not perform outside Russia, and doesn't announce its performances in advance:

– Det stämmer att två av våra medlemmar har åkt till Finland. De skulle träffa stödtrupper och delta i utgivningen av en bok. Men det var aldrig meningen att de skulle stå på scen. Det måste vara ett missförstånd, säger Jekaterina Samtusevitj i en Hbl-intervju i Moskva.

Hon är mycket förvånad över att de finländska arrangörerna över huvud taget har tänkt sig att de båda Pussy Riot-medlemmarna skulle delta i ett evenemang som offentliggörs i förväg.

– Pussy Riot fungerar enligt helt andra regler. Vi meddelar aldrig i förväg var vi är och vad vi gör. Dessutom står vi enbart på scen i Ryssland för det är det här landet vi vill påverka och förändra. Jag förstår inte alls hur det här missförståndet kunde ha uppstått, säger Samutsevitj.

http://hbl.fi/nyheter/2013-05-25/454376/pussy-riot-upptrader-inte-utomlands

Christer Kihlman reassessed

Hufvudstadsbladet’s Pia Ingström has been rereading the novels of Christer Kihlman (b. 1930), Finland’s doyen and former enfant terrible of “confessional literature” who was at his most productive in the 1960s and 70s, but whose literary activity subsequently became more sporadic.  Kihlman’s breakthrough novel Se upp, Salige! (1960) has  been reissued in a new edition by Söderströms, though readers of English will have to wait.  Four of his novels are, however, available in English versions, and one wonders whether the renewed interest in his work may also extend to the English-speaking world. Certainly, as Pia Ingström points out in her column, Kihlman’s work is not short on interesting, contemporary and universally human themes, whether it be marital conflict, family breakdown, homosexual prostitution, alcoholism or drug addiction – “Frågan är om inte Kihlman är bättre ju värre han är” (The question is whether Kihlman is not better the worse he is), she writes, and there may well be something in that, for he was probably at his best as a writer when exploring what Gunnar Ekelöf called the “bottom” (botten) of human nature and  experience. At all events, one looks forward to seeing the republication in Swedish of more of Kihlman’s controversial but surely not superannuated output, much of which has been out of print for a long time. After all, in the intervening years since the 1970s confessional literature has never entirely gone out of fashion in the global literary market, and may even be on the way back to prominence again.

Russian land sales ban upsets Finland

On January 9, Russia’s President Medvedev signed a new decree which specifies border areas where foreign citizens are not allowed to purchase land. The areas include nearly all the regions of the Russian Federation bordering on Finland and Norway, all the way from Pechenga in northern Russia to the Gulf of Finland in the south (near Helsinki).

Finland has asked for an explanation of the new law, according to the Barents Observer, with foreign minister Alexander Stubb making an official representation to the Russian authorities, as quite a few Finns have already bought land in the areas that are now banned:

What will happen to those foreigners that already own land in this areas is highly uncertain. The Finnish Embassy in Moscow is examining the significance of the decree, reports Helsingin Sanomat.

- We stick to the principle of reciprocity as long as it is realistic and possible, says Alexander Stubb, interviewed by YLE.

- We’ll talk with Russian authorities about how this can be realised. If one can buy land here, then of course one should be able to buy land on the other side of the border as well, says Stubb.

The background to the language situation

In the latest issue of the Finland-Swedish journal Nya Argus (nr. 11-12, 2010) linguistics professor Fred Karlsson considers the present uneasy situation surrounding the status of the Swedish language in Finland above all through the prism of the past. In doing so he raises some interesting points that are sometimes forgotten: the men who in the 19th century worked to establish Finnish as Finland’s national language were, after all, Finnish Swedes. Snellman, Forsman and other representatives of the country’s Swedish-speaking intelligentsia helped to bring about a peaceful linguistic revolution, but were soon regarded as traitors by their own Swedish-speaking compatriots. Karlsson also examines the nowadays neglected role of the Finnish linguist and politician Emil Nestor Setälä (1864-1936) who single-handedly drafted Finland’s declaration of independence in 1917 and also wrote an important work on the language law of 1922, in which he emphasized that although Finland had two languages, this did not mean that Finland had two nationalities: “Finland’s people are one.”

The essay also traces the history of pakkoruotsi (tvångsvenskan or “compulsory Swedish” – the preferred translation “mandatory Swedish”  seems like a bit of a euphemism) – in Finland’s schools, pointing out, somewhat drily by reference to online discussions, that compulsion is not usually the way to make friends. There are, however, difficult decisions to be made. An education minister of the Kekkonen era is quoted as saying that if compulsory Swedish is abolished, it will be replaced by another language, “and that language is not Spanish”. Karlsson believes that it’s incumbent on Finland-Swedes to keep a low profile in the current language debate, and to leave it up to the Finnish-speaking majority and their political leaders to draw up guidelines as to their situation in Finland, Europe and the constantly changing modern world.

Identities

Swedish author and translator Ulf Peter Hallberg recently visited Helsinki and wrote about what he perceived to be a "slightly alarming" social and cultural uniformity (entydighet) in the place and its citizens. When the piece was reviewed in Hbl (with an accent on Hallberg's pessimistic take on the future of Finland-Swedishness), some commenters took the opportunity of pointing out that because of its unique history, Finland and the Finns play a special role in today's Europe, preserving the concept and practice of national identity in an era when it has been less than fashionable to do so. Hallberg's reactions to Finland are particularly interesting in the light of German chancellor Angela Merkel's recent remarks about the failure of multiculturalism in her country.

Bending the knee

At Absinthe Minded blog, Rita Dahl considers the Finnish case involving the Mohammed cartoons [excerpt]:

The cultural magazine Kaltio, based in Oulu, was the first magazine to republish the Mohammed cartoons in Finland. The 6-page-long comic appeared on the internet in September 2006 and was drawn by the Finnish comic artist, Ville Ranta. The prophet Mohammed was presented in the comic as a very furious, fundamentalist figure, who was wearing a mask and criticizing the Western world for the bad deeds it had done in the past to Arab countries and at the same time imposing the demand for freedom of speech in Arab countries. At the end of the comic the Finnish prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, and president, Tarja Halonen, burn the Danish flag in the hope that the Islamists would not get angry with them. (This burning of a flag refers to the apologies already made by Vanhanen and Halonen in February 2006, after the Finnish magazine, Suomen Sisu, had published the Mohammed cartoons for the first time in Finland.)

We call this heritage of bending the knee to other countries Finlandization. I will shortly explain what this way of reacting (still common among Finnish politicians) means. Finland has a long history of being suppressed, first by Sweden, then by the Soviet Union, until our independence in 1917. Even after that our political leaders continued to bend the knee to Russia whenever it was considered to be politically wise. Our country became famous for its unique foreign policy-- Kekkonen´s and Paasikivi´s line. That meant precisely that--bending the knee. Finlandization became another term for that foreign policy.

In my opinion, Ranta criticizes in his comic both Western and Islamist countries for their own kind of fundamentalisms. His starting point is that it is never good in the long term for anything--be it religion or politics—to be presented and heard only by its most fundamentalist representatives. His argument is that it is especially not good for anything--be it a religion like Islam, or western politics—to be represented by its most fundamental figures, be they fundamentalist Islamists, or Finnish politicians, who in their fear of losing good relations with other neighbouring countries, bend in every possible direction.

Read it all.

The Pact and the Poet

I've found the remaining part of volume 2 of Peter Weiss's novel The Aesthetics of Resistance something of a mixed bag, as it deliberately avoids settling down into one main stream of narrative. The sections on Engelbrekt seem a little contrived, as though the author were spinning material to fill out space, especially when one learns that Brecht himself has lost track of the project and the narrator is left alone with his research on the subject. Of more interest are the extensive deliberations on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which is now providing all sorts of headaches for the various radicals, including Rosner, who continues to try to find some justification for the nefarious agreement, engaging in a Kafkaesque series of arguments in which the Pact becomes the basis for an "understanding" between the working classes of Germany and Russia. Weiss makes it perfectly clear that he regards the situation as patently absurd, and the characters of the novel appear trapped and helpless in the face of a historical conundrum that goes against all they have worked and fought for.

Brecht's preparations to leave for Finland, and the dismantling, disposal and transporting of his vast private library of world literature (the authors and titles are listed over several pages, take up most of the narrative. There is a nice concluding scene in which Brecht leans out as the Swedish secret police depart after searching the contents of the library for "subversive" literature. "You've forgotten the thrillers!" he shouts to them, and then throws his copies of books by Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Sayers, etc. out of the window down to the garden below.

Soul support

In another recent Hbl feature the paper notes that it's becoming more and more common for Finland's authors to derive all or most of their income from state arts subsidies of various kinds, with such support increasingly being perceived as the measure of a writer's success and the quality of his/her work. According to researcher Elina Jokinen, who is quoted in the article, the subsidies are far from regular or reliable, with grants being made on a one-off basis, and there's a need for a more stable and long-term solution to the problem.