Linton apology

The Suecophile British Labour MP Martin Linton, who hosted the opening dinner of the 2008 Nordic Translation Conference which spotlighted the work of many literary translators from Scandinavian languages, has publicly apologized for saying that “There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends.” Melanie Phillips, writing in the Spectator, has some commentary.

The irresistible call of Scandiwegian crime

London's Mayor Boris Johnson explains in his Telegraph column why the British are so fond of Nordic crime novels:

It's like our joy in the Iris Robinson story. We wouldn't be so thrilled to discover her in bed with a 19 year-old if she hadn't spent all those years ranting drearily on about family values. Nordic crime writers profit from the fact that the blood is all the more vivid on the snow, the corpse more horrifying on the swish hygienic IKEA furniture. Scandinavia is still a mental landscape where crime is shocking, and that is a great compliment to Scandinavia.

War and Peace

Veteran Labour politician and ex-Cod Warrior Roy Hattersley reflects in the Times on the bloody minded Icelanders:

Reykjavik’s innumerable newspapers denounced me as the oppressor of small nations. If any of them still remember me, they will still not believe that I feel ( perhaps perverse) admiration for their concentrated bloody-mindedness. There are Viking tombstones in the Great Wall of China. Reasonable men would not have sailed open boats to the other side of the world.

Karin Petherick

Svenska Dagbladet has published an obituary (pdf) of Karin Petherick, the distinguished British Scandinavianist who died recently at the age of 80. Sarah Death has published an English-language appreciation of Dr. Petherick's life and work here. I remember Karin Petherick from the mid-1980s, when she showed kind and supportive interest in my translations of Edith Södergran's Complete Poems.

Hat tip: Peter Linton

Missing from the list?

The Times newspaper has published a list of what it calls the best 60 books of the past 60 years. No Nordic titles there, predictably enough. One commenter calls the list "relentlessly low brow and Anglo-American". However, the compilers ask readers if they agree with their choice, and it's possible to vote for one's favourite novel, and even write a short review of it...

Translation competition

The Finnish Institute in London, U.K. is running a translation competition

to source new talent in translating fiction from Finnish to English. You do not have to be a language professional; eligible participants include everyone from novices to experienced translators. What you do need is a passion for language, a good understanding of Finnish and a talent for writing in English.

Entrants must translate a 2,000 word short story by Maritta Lintunen (the text is posted on the Institute's website, together with an entry form), and the final date for submissions is August 31.

At present the rules don't make it clear whether entrants need to be resident in the U.K., and this is a point to which the organizers might possibly want to give some attention.

Update: Sara Rauma of the Finnish Institute writes:

We have a line in the Competition Rules and Submission Guidelines (Entry Form) that says: "There are no restrictions on entrants with respect to age, nationality, or professional status". Although not specifically stated in that connection, there are no restrictions on entrants' country of residence, either. We welcome any and all entries. The competition announcement itself, however, has been circulated mainly in the UK and Ireland.

"Short stories don't sell"

The rubric of this post is an old prejudice that British publishers have never quite abandoned. Once upon a time, every respectable magazine in Britain and the USA would have its weekly short story, a piece of fiction intended to bring contrast to the mundanity of the news.

But in Britain today, as far as I can see, there is little appetite for new, contemporary short stories of a literary type in publications that are sold in mainstream bookshops. Even for stories written in English. And publishers tend to shy away from collections of stories by one author, unless this author already has a monumental reputation.

When you look at webpages such as this one, you can be impressed by the number of publications listed. But you should beware of long lists where apples, pears, plums and doughnuts are all lumped together with little discrimination. So translations, already at a disadvantage, are bound to suffer. On that list there are serious publications such as London Magazine, Chapman and Stand. But some publications have a drum to beat or axe to grind, and if you subtract those, you are left with far fewer. When you read that Your Cat Magazine and Your Dog Magazine publish stories, you begin to wonder what the level of literary sophistication is. I get the feeling that the Story Website is keener to get on board as many people as possible, as opposed to fostering the short story as a subtle literary genre, in the footsteps of Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, and so on.

And Nordic translations. The Norwegian author Frode Grytten (whose work I will be discussing in another post) is one Nordic author whose translations into English reflect this rather depressing trend. Grytten has published many short stories (collected in one volume) in Norway, plus one crime novel. His novel was snapped up immediately in the current British crime wave; but only one of his 103 stories has appeared in English, and this was, curiously, from a book of interconnected stories, rather than a self-standing one.

Do contemporary Nordic short story authors have a "valid entry visa" to the UK? Are they not kept away from our shores by a vicious circle: never heard of him, therefore not interested.

Until the fad of publishing short stories in general magazines, or ones devoted exclusively to short stories, returns to Britain, will all the Nordic authors writing short stories, in effect, be shut out of Britain? What is the solution? How can short stories from Europe as a whole be popularised in Britain, so that they are regarded as normal works of literature, not things exclusively for the Readers' Digest or for sci-fi aficionados? Should the Arts Council do more in this area?

Surely, our age of haste and short attention spans means that commuters could read short stories just as happily as thick novels. Not everyone wants to have to carry around electronic equipment to read a book on the train or bus, when you could buy a book of stories that does not rely on the presence of electricity. You may be able to cram a hundred books into a reading device, but you can't read a hundred books at once, and a book of 25 short stories would also give the same pleasure as it did to people in previous epochs.

Poetry - Britain and Scandinavia

Poetry features quite frequently on this blog, in translation of course. And most of what we translate here is contemporary poetry, i.e. what Nordic and Estonian poets are writing now, this century.

However, in mainstream cultural British discourse poetry appears to be an insecure recital of the names of Daffodil Wordsworth, Bi Shakespeare, Papist Donne and other poets who wrote centuries ago. Or they glide effortlessly over to a few contemporary bigshots like Bowell Motion, his mentor Parental Fuckup Larkin, Deathly Leamington Betjeman, Wife-Beater Hughes, and a few other terribly British names, regurgitated and -cycled ad nauseam. Plus a few Yanks, because they write in the same language as we do, to pad out the anthologies.

As well as the recital of names, there is the recital of poetry. Poetry appears to only come alive for Brits if read in a pub while hoi polloi are pushing past for drinks, chattering loudly about things banal and venal, while the poor versifier is straining to make herself heard.

I saw Griff Rhys Jones waxing wonderful about poesy the other night on TV, and now see in the Daily MP Exposograph an article by Simon Schama, also on poetry, linked in with the appearance of this latter guru next Tuesday, also on TV. But judging by what these two gents are spouting, you could not imagine that poetry exists beyond the saintlinesse of the English language, from Anglo-Saxon to rap. Nowhere would you even get an inkling that there is verse beyond Blighty, in the bowels of Europe.

Another nuttiness is when Brits oooh and aaah about the exotic species: the Woman Poet. Now we've got a Poet Laureate who is not only a woman, but also wants to swig the free port, and as a cunning linguist is maybe even prepared to tip the velvet. And Brits, who seem to have lost their compass regarding poetry, regard this as an-ever-so exotic-vibrant-exciting-novelatory mega-event.

What is so sad about the introversion of oh-so-many British readers is that they could discover perhaps hundreds of competent women poets if only they would cross the great water, as the I-Ching would have it, and look to the shores of Scandinavia and the Low Countries, plus Germany and France.

Many of the poets translated on this blog are women; some are even lesbian, or bi, or whatever. In Scandinavia, poetry is no longer the province of cigar-smoking bachelors in student clubs, as it may have been over there in the 19th century. In fact much good poetry is indeed written by women. Why are British publishers and readers so reluctant to have translated some of these women poets from Europe and beyond?

Why must English-only poets be tediously-endlessly promoted, as if poets are a home-grown species threatened with extinction, when there are already so many more in the many countries of Europe? It would do British poetry a world of good to have some cross-fertilisation with the Continentals. Cross-fertilisation implies two directions, not just for foreigners to copy great British models.

[Note: comments on this post are temporarily disabled]

ACE Cuts

Included in UK chancellor Alistair Darling's recent budget was a £4 million cut in its funding to Arts Council England for 2010/2011. The ACE has said that

we will not reduce our planned investment in the arts organisations we fund on a regular basis - many of whom have already planned against expected income in 2010/11. Instead we will reconsider our existing and planned new projects and look to find savings there.

Whether this will have an effect on the publication of new literary translations is anyone's guess, but since translation seems to occupy a low place on the list of the Council's priorities, it's not unlikely.

LBF - 2

The Bookseller notes a fact about the flow of visitors to this year's London Book Fair:

Many publishers and agents have noticed an absence of Americans and Australians at this year's LBF. Peter Straus of Rogers, Coleridge & White: "It's in a different key. Fewer people are taking longer journeys: Text and Allen & Unwin are coming from Australia, but other Australian publishers are not. With some of the bigger US companies, fewer editors are coming. I also haven't heard of many people auctioning huge books at the fair."

Despite absences from further afield, European presence in London appears to be booming with exchange rates named as a prime reason. Carole Blake of Blake Friedman said: "It's going crazy. We have completely full schedules with four of us taking appointments every 30 minutes."

It will be interesting to see how this is reflected in rights sales of Nordic books to UK publishers - though the true effect is likely to be felt in the other direction, one supposes.

Changes at Harvill Secker

In news that may be of interest to translators of Nordic fiction, The Bookseller reports the announcement of  a new editorial team at Harvill Secker. The team will be led by Liz Foley, who will take the post of publishing director:

Foley joins Harvill Secker from Vintage, an imprint she joined in 2002 and where she has been editorial director since 2006. She will report to publisher Dan Franklin. 

More details here.

Excerpt from a translator's memoirs

If you look at the labels at the bottom of the page on this blog, you will see that the name Thomas Warburton already appears a couple of times in March 2009 postings. He is, if you remember, a Finland-Swedish translator of Finnish and English-language literature into Swedish, and estimates that during his long career he must have translated some 30,000 pages of book text.

One of the Finnish authors he has translated is the historical novelist Mika Waltari, and he translated seven novels and plays by this author. Here's what Warburton has to say, in a short excerpt from my translation in progress, i.e. a translation of a work where someone is himself writing about what it's like to translate:

At the time, Waltari was translated by two brilliant stylists, Lorenz von Numers and Örnulf Tigerstedt, with one book each, before I took on his later novels from Johannes Angelos. – By the 1950s and 1960s, Waltari had become an experienced author, with the perhaps unusual capacity of being able to look at his own work almost with the eye of a stranger, once he had finished the work and taken a few steps back from it. It was a joy to work with him, because he
was generous in conversation. – I tend not to go to funerals if I can avoid it, but I went to his with deep respect and wished him farewell when he his time came in July 1979.

Waltari used to claim that he had a tendency to write too much and be unable to excise things from the text. He said that he was therefore grateful for any suggestions for abridgements from his translators and editors, and would nearly always accept them completely. All his later voluminous novels have thus been abridged by about five, six or an even higher percent each.

This kind of editing is, no doubt, more common than you would believe, and there are many foreign authors who are not even aware that something has happened to their books in translation. Similar, if not worse, things have happened with our books when published abroad, when we have managed to check up.

Obviously, such a practice is completely unacceptable and comes quite close to an arrogation of the rights of the author. But the law is vague on that score and tends to allow changes that do not alter the artistic merit or aim of a work.

When such things happen, you cannot always blame the translator. Another literary professional that could come under suspicion is the editor at the publishing house. There is an inevitable and latent dividing line between translators and editors. I myself have stood on both sides of this line, or even on occasions with one foot on each side, so I know how it feels.

These publisher’s assistants come in a number of varieties, and I think that most are near to the ideal. There are people with a good ear for language and the eye of a hawk, who detect every careless inconsistency in the translator’s text, check up ever factual item, whether it be the author or translator that has made the mistake, listens carefully to what the translator has to say in defence of any differences of opinion, and will argue in favour of their own sensible opinions, before doing exactly what they want. I have met quite a few of these. But their also aberrations.

One of these is – or was, as the variant has surely vanished by now – what you could term the normaliser. He was a proponent of the theory that all books should sound as if they had been written in the target language, Swedish in this case, and why not make it the Swedish of Stockholm, just for good measure. That’s his problem. But such an editor will then go on to think that it becomes pretty unpleasant for the reader to come across rare or difficult words and expressions, however Swedish they may be. These words have to be simplified and aligned. Here, the fact that the original author may have wanted to express himself in an unusual way, even in a convoluted or stilted manner, is no excuse. You have to explain what he really means. – This problem area is adjacent to another: have you the right to improve the text, however tempting this may be, without consulting the author? No, you haven’t.

I suspect that the normalisers, who were prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, had brought with them a tradition originating with journalism, or maybe from that unfortunate school of children’s writers which laid emphasis on pedagogically simple and moralising material, all for the best of innocent little children.

Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

See also in this blog: Nykarleby - town of poets
Thomas Warburton

Norvik Press

Norvik Press, which moved in August 2008 from the University of East Anglia in Norwich to University College London, must surely be the only publishing house of its kind in the UK. It publishes a variety of literature from the Nordic countries.

Looking at the list of authors on the website, you can see that there are ones from different countries, genres and epochs. The press also published two periodicals: the more scholarly Scandinavica, and the magazine that is the shop window for what books are available and being published in the Swedish language, Swedish Book Review.

The website sections entitled Authors, Special Offers and Out of Print give you an overview of what is, and has been, published by the press. Even the Baltic countries are represented:

In 1994, a book of several short-stories from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, edited and translated by Christopher Moseley was published: From Baltic Shores. Authors include Arvo Valton, Romualdas Lankauskas, Alberts Bels, Bo Carpelan and Suzanne Brøgger.

A more recent Baltic addition is the poetic Estonian novel by Viivi Luik, The Beauty of History (translator: Hildi Hawkins; 2007). This novel has been translated widely, and this translation was launched at the Estonian Embassy in London. It deals with an Estonian country girl who goes to Riga to visit her boyfriend during the Prague Spring in 1968, when the boyfriend risks being called up to go to Czechoslovakia as part of the Soviet troop contingent. He goes off to Moscow to get his exemption certificate, and the Estonian girl is left behind with his mother in the flat in Riga, where this atmospheric novel, full of observation and mood, is set.

But Scandinavia forms the trunk of the tree, including such names as Victoria Benedictsson, August Strindberg, Gunnar Ekelöf, Hjalmar Söderberg, Johan Borgen, Knut Hamsun, Jens Bjørneboe, Suzanne Brøgger, Svend Åge Madsen, Edith Södergran, and Runar Schildt.

The press was started by James McFarlane and Janet Garton, and is now run by Neil Smith.

The Changes at SELTA - 3

Continuing my serial post on the recent changes and developments at SELTA (at least one member has now resigned, and several have unsubscribed from the Google Group), I would like to draw attention to the response of one of SELTA's most senior members - the association's former Honorary Secretary. A marked feature of the attempt to hold a discussion within the framework of the recently-opened SELTA Google Group was the apparent unwillingness of committee members to come forward and state their positions. Indeed, some of them seemed reluctant to make any contribution to the debate at all, and to view the expression of criticism and dissenting viewpoints as a kind of irritant, or even a betrayal.

However, Tom Geddes, who until his recent retirement from the post had served as SELTA's Hon. Sec. for virtually all of its more than 25 years of existence, did respond to my letter which was published both on the Google Group and in this blog. He did so by email, but indicated that he would have no objection to my making his contribution public. I'm therefore reproducing it now, both for the sake of informing blog readers (especially those in North America) about what is apparently SELTA's current position, and in order, hopefully, to stimulate further debate on the issues concerned. The text of Tom's letter is as follows:

David McDuff sent me on 20 February a copy of a note he had written to the Google group headed “SELTA’s Changing Identity”. Let me just say that I haven’t seen any of the other material on the Google group site, but I’m not sure that that’s the best forum for discussing SELTA policy. I must also say that what SELTA does in the future is a matter for the current and future membership and committee. But I will offer some comments on the past.

Becoming Scandinavian rather than just Swedish has been mooted several times before. As David says, a number of us are involved with more than one of the languages and countries and there are indeed areas of common interest that could be represented under one umbrella. The idea was rejected for two main reasons: the Hon Sec (me), who was doing all the work of running SELTA, was unwilling to increase his workload further, and we had quickly expanded from a dozen members to the average of 50 we have maintained. Not only would a pan-Scandinavian coverage increase the membership, it would also entail liaison with all 5 Scandinavian/Nordic countries. That would also involve a substantial increase in workload, in effect multiplying that aspect by more than 5, because one would also be drawn into the delicate balancing acts of inter-Scandinavian rivalries.

I will mention a few examples of that experience already: One of the early attempts to create a Nordic group of translators was made by Terry Carlbom, Swedish cultural attaché, at the British university teachers of Scandinavian Studies conference at the University of Hull in 1981. It was a one-day session, billed as a Scandinavian Translators’ Conference. During the proceedings a number of participants with non-Swedish interests ostentatiously walked out and complained of being misled (instead of contributing from their interest-areas). We did however continue the concept, and I was involved over a number of years in the organisation of a Scandinavian Translators Day at these subsequent biennial university conferences: each one entailed a difficult balancing act of 5 embassies and almost as many arts bodies in the home countries. I’ll mention just two negative results: a talk on Norwegian book clubs that was primarily on the schedule to ensure parity, and the accusation by a Danish cultural representative that I had invited her under false pretences because she had not been allocated enough time on the programme. It required careful diplomacy to ensure there weren’t more such examples. I should also mention that even within SELTA, one member resigned because he thought (to my mind incorrectly) that we weren’t positive enough towards Finland. Yet all along we had made it clear that we were dealing with Swedish-language literature wherever published and had from the start liaised with both Swedish and Finland-Swedish publishers and the relevant cultural bodies in both countries. The Shaw Prize has been awarded to a Finland-Swedish book (indeed David McDuff was the winner), the judges of which included two SELTA members, and a celebratory event was provided and funded by the Finns. We have had a lot of support from the Finnish Literature Information Centre (FILI) in Helsinki, though admittedly the Finnish Embassy in London has not been as active with us as the Swedes.

We should also bear in mind the important aspect of financial support. Without financial backing from the Swedish Embassy we would never have continued to exist in the form we have, with a couple of meetings a year where people can actually meet. To try to get such backing from several or all of the Nordic countries together would probably prove impossible. Similarly Swedish Book Review would never had started if we had tried to get pan-Scandinavian financial backing: funds would simply not have been forthcoming. (My own minor involvement with Chris Moseley’s ill-fated attempt to start Amber, a Baltic-region cultural journal, gave me an insight on how impossible the task was from outside Scandinavia to attempt to co-ordinate the unco-ordinated.) If SELTA were to become Scandinavian, would it still publish just a Swedish Book Review, and if not, who would fund a Scandinavian Book Review?

Perhaps I should add that some of the points above also informed our decision to exclude American translators from SELTA, although we several times encouraged individuals there to form a parallel group. This eventually bore fruit when Laura Wideburg started STiNA (Swedish Translators in North America), and we provided her with a lot of background information on our own activities. Significantly, the Americans have gone for a specifically Swedish-language interest group too.

David mentions the groupings of Norwegian and Danish translators brought together by their respective cultural bodies. Rather than opening up a new dimension in SELTA, one could say that this demonstrated that SELTA did not need to exist: in many ways translators from Swedish could have continued to be gathered together at intervals by the Swedish Embassy or Swedish Institute and we could have been spared all this work! (That said, I do nevertheless feel we have achieved more by following the then Swedish cultural attaché’s encouragement to form ourselves into an association.) No Norwegian cultural representative was at SELTA meetings in 1982, but the Norwegian and Finnish cultural counsellors were at the November 1983 meeting, 2 staff from FLIC (now FILI) at November 1987. Kristin Brudevoll from NORLA attended the SELTA meeting in November 1992 (like David, I would have remembered it as being earlier than that - and I haven’t looked through later minutes). Kristin didn’t exactly “pop up”: she was invited because she was interested in what we were doing and to share experience and ideas. Throughout my secretaryship I sent copies of all SELTA minutes and newsletters to all the embassies and relevant cultural bodies of all the Scandinavian countries, to keep them informed of our activities. It goes without saying that we have a common interest. Beyond our central contacts with Sweden and Finland, NORLA was the only one to show an active interest in us, as far as I remember.

FILI of course has also arranged gatherings of translators from Swedish in Finland (from which, as with Norway, David and I have both benefited), but has chosen to do so through direct individual invitation rather than through SELTA. Nowadays application forms for visits to Finland are available to all SELTA members and others through the FILI website.

In brief, I think David’s idea is culturally sound from our perspective, but pragmatically unrealistic. And certainly not all Scandinavians would agree with our lumping them together, not least because in any joint activities there is a substantial danger that the others would regard Sweden as an overbearing big brother! Even though (after many years of nagging from us!) the Nordic countries now have neighbouring stands and joint events at book fairs, I cannot see their cultural activities integrating further in the near future.

I also disagree with David’s analysis of SELTA’s “changing identity” in the past. Our relative emphases on Sweden and Finland never changed. Only one of SELTA’s early meetings was held at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, in April 1984. The first meeting venues were: 1. Sw Emb; 2. UCL; 3. Univ Surrey; 4.Mostyn Hotel, London; 5. SSEES; 6. Sw Emb; 7. Lampeter Univ; 8. Sw Emb; 9. Sw Emb; 10. Poetry Soc, Ldn. After that, primarily at the Swedish Embassy, but a further 3 at UCL.

We have never been under the supervision of Michael Branch, then lecturer in and later professor of Finnish and Director of SSEES: he was an associate member of SELTA, invited to join in the “Committee discretion” category because he did not qualify for membership but had studied Swedish, had obvious connections with and interest in Finland and wanted to join as a gesture of support for our activities. We were very pleased to have him (and I will say personally that he gave me some very good advice when I drew up the SELTA constitution - and he taught me Finnish!). He left amicably after several years when he thought we were well established and in recognition that his own interests lay outside the Swedish language and literature sphere.

I have just agreed with the SELTA Committee and the Editor of SBR to write a brief history of “SELTA - the first 25 years”, for publication in SBR next year. The length of this response of mine to David’s proposal makes me wonder if I can be succinct enough! One thing I should perhaps do, also next year, is to scan all the past SELTA minutes and newsletters and ask Peter Linton to put them on the members’ section of the website.

Tom Geddes 4 March 2009

See also in this blog:
The Changes at SELTA
SELTA, and the need to move on
The Changes at SELTA - 2

The Changes at SELTA - 2

I'm rescuing a couple of comments from an earlier post because I think they raise some issues that could do with further discussion, and if they are lost back in an earlier thread there's less likelihood of that happening. Also, in view of the fact that SELTA holds its spring meeting next week on 18th March, it may be that some members would like to give their feedback here.

I wrote...

What I have always wondered is whether at some stage (probably fairly early on) in SELTA's history it was actually taken over as a sort of cultural arm of the Swedish authorities,although this has never been officially acknowledged by any of the parties involved. The insistence on the use of the Swedish Embassy premises for the association's meetings always looked to me a bit suspect, and there seemed to be a very cosy relationship between the various Swedish cultural counsellors and the top SELTA membership.

Also, SELTA has traditionally been a place where various rivals in a rather restricted field meet one another, not always with positive results, and I'm wondering too whether this may be one of the factors underlying the present troubles in the group. The online forum seems to have brought some of that latent disharmony out into the open at last.

And Rod Bradbury replied...

The Swedish authorities obviously pay to keep the Swedish Book Review going. And although that is called SELTA's journal, it feels more like a shopfront (and a very useful one too) for Swedish publishers, with the Swedish Arts Council (formerly it was the Swedish Institute)in the background. In a sense, that arrangement is beneficial to both. Sweden gets a magazine on the cheap and SELTA gets a forum for members' translations/articles etc that it would otherwise not have access to. There might be a clash of interests somewhere, of course, as translators also need to earn a living, and there is a limited amount of literary translation work available. But SBR seems to be open to translators to present their work / new authors and so on, so perhaps one should be satisfied with the system as it is.

One of the original reasons for establishing SELTA was to have an organisation for the Swedes to do business with, a 'motpart'. That is how things are done in Sweden.

See also in this blog: The Changes at SELTA

Interland

In 2006, an interesting poetry anthology involving people living in Yorkshire, UK, and Ostrobothnia, Finland, was published. The title was Interland, rather appropriate, given Yorkshire people's propensity for dropping their aitches.

This 160-page anthology was supported financially by The Arts Council of England, Österbottens Konstkommission, and Kirklees Culture and Leisure Services. (Kirklees is the borough that includes Dewsbury, Batley, and a few other smaller West Riding towns.) It was published by Smith / Doorstop Books in Huddersfield.

The six poets featured are Steve Dearden, Kath McKay, Adam Strickson (Yorkshire) and Ralf Andtbacka, Carita Nyström and Marko Hautala (Ostrobothnia, aka Österbotten and Pohjanmaa). The aim was that the poets from the two regions of the two countries would spark ideas off one another.

The Finnish- and Swedish-language poems are translated on the opposite page into English, and the English poems into Swedish or Finnish. The poems are modernist in tone, mostly unrhymed.

The blurb adds: "Images of water permeate the writing. The book explores deep emotions: grief, estrangement, longing. Themes and quotations from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, are threaded throughout.

This is a true example of Nordic-British literary cooperation.

The full title of the anthology reads:

Interland - Six Steps Underwater; Interland - Kuusi askelta veden alla; Interland - Sex steg under vatten