Kaarlo Sarkia

I've been looking again at my Kaarlo Sarkia translations. They are not very many as yet, but I want to do some more, as Sarkia's poems demand to be read and heard beyond their native Finnish. There is a certain sense of connection when translating them, as Sarkia was himself a translator of verse -- particularly French and Italian poetry -- and here and there in his poems there are echoes of sources like Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire and D'Annunzio. These echoes sometimes make the task of translation a little easier, though the spare yet sensuous forms of the poems - this is authentic 1930s Finnish design - are hard to render in English.