Swedish books online

As a side note on the accessibility of Swedish texts, I have found that it's possible to download Swedish ebooks from Adlibris via Google Books/ My Library. For example, both of the titles mentioned in my previous post (Drabbad av renhet and Blandade kort) can be purchased this way for a very reasonable price in GBP. 

And of course, there is always the excellent Litteraturbanken. 

Bestsellers

Nordic Bookblog has a list of the Top 20 Bestselling Scandinavian Books at Amazon US.

As the NB post points out, the list is a somewhat idiosyncratic one, with notable and questionable omissions. There are also problems of geography (where is Scandinavia?). And there's an interesting feature:

to the extent the list can be assumed to tell anything – old Nordic sagas and writers like especially Sigrid Undset, but also Rolvaag, Hamsun and Ibsen seem to be selling quite well in the US.

Reading and Realism

From a Retired Publisher, in the Bookseller:

When I was a young rep in the mid 70's my sales manager told me that only 4% of the population of the UK ever went into a bookshop.

Crime Does Pay, At Least for Nordic Authors

I was recently browsing the bookshelves of my local Waterstone's. Let me add that my local bookstore is on a university campus, so I had heightened expectations. I thought that perhaps students in particular would be interested in a wide variety, in terms of both international voices and genre.

So I strolled the store, looking for Nordic authors. What I found was unsurprising, but disappointing nonetheless. I saw books by Swedish authors such as Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser, and Norwegians such as Jo Nesbø. In other words, crime novelists.

Where, I wondered, were the more literary authors? Even an old Nobel Prize-winner or two would have satisfied me. But alas. The only Nordic voices to be found were those of detectives.

Now, some people have said that the popularity of Nordic crime fiction is an excellent thing, since it might get readers interested in the Nordic cultures and languages, and thus, by extension, in other kinds of literatures. But I'm not seeing evidence of that. I don't see bookshelves at libraries or bookstores devoted to Nordic literature and I don't see Nordic authors highlighted in newspapers or book reviews. If Nordic writing is mentioned at all, it is in the context of crime fiction, and crime fiction only.

So what will it take to get people to people to want to learn more about Nordic literature and authors? I don't have an answer, but I long for the day when crime doesn't pay.

The face of the book

In his HS blog, Hannu Marttila asks: "can one love literature, but be indifferent to books? Literature doesn't have a face, but a book does. The jacket."

London Book Fair - subjective comments by a visitor

As David mentioned in an earlier posting here, the London Book Fair has been, and has now gone. I was there for varying lengths of time on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, so I had a good look around, and not only at things Nordic.

The book fair is principally a market: buying and selling. It is hugely bustling and crowded. So it is good to book appointments ahead with specific individuals. Translators are always in a curious position, in that they are neither authors, nor publishers, nor literary agents. They fall between three stools (if that is physically possible). But with a little judicious planning, you can get an "audience" with publishers. Authors often speak at various events, often inconveniently held at some stand in the middle of the book fair, so people listening and people trying to get past have conflicting aims. The publishers lurk spider-like at the stands while the literary agents are a more ephemeral presence. And translators?

My goals this year were specific. First, I wanted to tell the Finns that I am improving my reading knowledge of Finnish and moving in the direction of seriously being able to translate from that language. Also that my re-integration with the Finland-Swedes at a literary level is advancing apace. And I want to expand into Norwegian, specifically nynorsk (aka New Norwegian, a written version of an amalgamation of various dialect traits). So I had a chat there with a friendly person from NORLA (the Norwegian literary promotional agency) and an equally friendly and helpful nynorsk publisher. A Norwegian literary agent was, alas, much more stand-offish. And I had a little business at the Estonian stand, as most of my recently published book-length translations are from that language. Plus appointments with British and American publishers.

The Nordic stands varied in size and scope, but both the Norwegians and Finns had substantial ones. (I never actually discovered the Danish one, I'm afraid!) The Norwegians and Finns did their business right there at the stand. The Swedes were in this strange, exclusive cordoned off area called the International Rights Centre. So their own stand in the open area was of minimal scope. This segregation hardly makes for joined up promotion, because if you have the display books, publishers and promotional organisations all together you have more joined up activity. There is a risk that you may get nuisances disturbing you, but most people attending book fairs are decent people who have the intuition to know when people are talking business, so as not to interfere.

The books on display are very useful for the browsing translator who is not absolutely up to date with the very latest authors and books. I also had a look at the German, Polish and other stands, to see what's going on there. When you can read several languages, you can even browse through the originals.

The drinkies dimension (termed: reception) can help people make new acquaintances. But I am not a dab hand at the ritual courtesies of gliding in and out of little huddles. You are expected to interrupt, but my upbringing makes me feel this is infradig. I attended three such gatherings, two Nordic, one Estonian.

The first of these was the annual Nordic reception near the stands. I did make a good contact with someone from a Finland-Swedish publishing house but in the main this event was rather exhausting. Badge-peering becomes a ritual, as sometimes the most innocuous-looking person turns out to be someone you've wanted to meet for years.

The second was the annual book presentation at the Estonian Embassy. This is a fairly informal gathering, and always interesting because the Estonian Ambassador himself is a historian and reads Robert Creeley. This year an Estonian publisher (who has herself translated Harry Potter, along with her daughter!) interviewed the publisher from the Norvik Press (London) and one from the Dalkey Archive Press (Illinois) about recently published books in English translation by Tammsaare, Unt, Ehin, and so on.

The third was a more formal reception at the Swedish Ambassador's residence in Portland Place, an elegant building on the inside, with much turquoise plasterwork, stucco, 18th century atmosphere, and old or reproduction furniture. Gustaf III would have felt at home there. To my surprise, I met an old university friend from about 30 years ago. In those days she was a student of English & American literature, but had recently taken up Norwegian. Both the Swedish Ambassador and the Swedish Cultural Attaché were friendly and humorous people, something of a pleasant surprise.

So, all in all, I had a good book fair. But I thank my lucky stars that I am not obliged to attend several such fairs every year, as publishers are doomed to do.

Olli Jalonen: 14 Knots to Greenwich - 6

[pp. 311-314]
We would have passed through Zvezda anyway, not because of Petr, but because it had already been planned, the whole of the route through Chukotka had already been prepared on the coast at Meinepilgyno. Graham had done his share, carried the plan through and thus paid off a bit of the cost.

We were in the distant Arctic, after all. There had not been much snow yet, but the whole of the Orphan Factory’s yard was covered in white, not so much as a tree nor a stunted bush rose higher than the rest of the landscape. It was even colder now, 20 degrees below zero.

It was Graham’s wish that while we were waiting for transportation we should try to procure a coffin or even just a crate, so that we didn’t need to move Petr in the sleeping bag. We roamed around the sheds and looked for some sort of base platform or large ready crate.

At last we found a crate that had been used for transporting Gasum gas cylinders. When the internal separators were removed and its height was increased with a few boards, the space was sufficient to make a narrow coffin into which we put Petr with his sleeping bag arranged around him. Graham hammered the lid shut with nails. The hospital’s caretaker who was helping us watched from the side, looking as though he were uncertain of the rights and wrongs of transporting a body in this way. When the lid with its grating had been firmly fastened, he made the sign of the cross from forehead to chest and shoulder to shoulder, but did not say anything.

Und sagte kein einziges Wort, do you remember that, Maaria? Have you read it?

I cannot lie, and claim that I mourned long and deeply. Instead, I was numb, weary from the journey and simply told myself that that was how it was bound to be. Several times I noticed that for a moment I forgot that Petr was dead. I would think about something that had happened in the past and turn to ask him about it, but he wasn’t in the vehicle.
The crate was fixed to the roof-rack with rubber fasteners and netting.

We made the final journey to the hangars of the airport in a single trip, near the coast there were settlements nearly all the way. The dashboard thermometer showed that the outside temperature had fallen to minus 28, but there was no longer any wind.

During a short stop we boiled some water by connecting an electric kettle to the spark plugs of the engine, and mixed some coffee powder and fructose granules in it. When I stepped outside, I could see the veils of the northern lights rising on the rim of the sky. The gauzy, greenish-yellow vortices swept and fluctuated upwards from one side of the sky to the other. In Finland I have never seen them as big and as suddenly moving, not even in Lapland. At home we saw them sometimes but they stayed low and shimmered above the horizon like a mere echo or reflection of the real ones.

In the swaying of the four-point seatbelts and the seats themselves it was easy just to sit and be. Outside the northern lights were sweeping as though watercolour paint had flowed down on both sides and downwards from an illuminated globe. Now and then there were moments like the ones that had followed the death of my father, when I had tried to forget the earlier days, left the arrangements and inquiries and just gone skiing to the bright lake so that there would be something else.

Memory and reflection must be constituted in such a way that parts of them must rest at times so that there isn’t an overload. Thus it is possible to even leave difficult and awkward matters for a few moments and fall into something else.

Petr was dead, but at times I merely had the same confused feeling I remembered from January, of being free from something that had existed before. I tried to explain to myself that one must be inwardly ready for all kinds of things to emerge to the surface, like bubbles and mud from a hot spring. All people are a one, as a person is a one, and even if he’s in the midst of others, he is separate, and for that reason he is not obliged to explain himself to anyone. An act is not yet more than a choice made from a store, and a bad word to someone is moving bad moments out of oneself, or attempts at moving, because they don’t move but grow and stiffen into a sort of sediment that starts to be visible on the outside and draws around one something which to others is an aura.

In January, when my father had died, after my bright and exhausting ski trips I had always gone to take a sauna and as I sat there I began, perhaps for the first time, to give longer reflection to such basic human concerns. Although at the juvenile home there had also been much talk about good and evil and choice, the others had spoken of them more when it was a question of dealing with the rows and stealing and fighting of the pupils and temporary residents, I had not gone into those concerns myself before, though they were ready within me, and all the choices for my actions awaiting suitable time.

I don’t know whether it was right that we decided to keep Petr with us to the end. It felt right at the time, and also that Petr would have wanted it that way. Who can know such a thing? One sets out to believe and make other believe as well, everyone thinks the same for a while.

The electronics in Graham’s, and also Petr’s, neckbands kept a split-second accurate record of their movements and the places they visited. The Memorial Society was not informed, it did not necessarily need to know, because the control devices carried on with the communication and the journey was continuing, the contest was continuing. Graham continued the log as though nothing had happened, but when I later read those pages very carefully, Petr was no longer really in them, Graham had not been able to do much more than what was necessary, or had felt that he had to see to it that the cover-up was not exposed later on.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

Olli Jalonen - 14 Knots to Greenwich

Olli Jalonen - 14 Knots to Greenwich - 2

Olli Jalonen - 14 Knots to Greenwich - 3

Olli Jalonen - 14 Knots to Greenwich - 4

Olli Jalonen - 14 Knots to Greenwich - 5

Akateeminen

If you're looking for a source of books in Finnish, Finland-Swedish or Swedish, Helsinki's Academic Bookstore (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa/Akademiska Bokhandeln) is hard to beat. Since 1969 the store, which was founded in 1893, has been housed in one of the most highly regarded interiors by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, next door to the Stockmann department store on the corner of Keskuskatu and Aleksanterinkatu, of which it now forms part. There is also a large English-language section. The sales and display area is constructed in the form of a three-level piazza, lit by geometric crystalline glass skylights and surrounded by white marble, and a visit is also an architectural experience. There are two cafés, including the famous Café Aalto, which makes its own sandwiches and cakes, and has table service.

The Academic Bookstore has an efficient mail order department, and will ship books overseas. However, the website's mail order facility is intended for use within Finland only -- ordering from abroad needs to be done by email, which should be sent to tilaukset@akateeminen.com.

Old Masters

If you're in the mood for reading older translations of classical Nordic literature, the online Open Library project is a useful port of call. Here it's possible to browse scanned facsimile editions of -the collected works of Ibsen in the translations of William Archer and Edmund Gosse (Scribner's, 1907), John Martin Crawford's 1888 translation of the Kalevala, or the plays of August Strindberg in the versions by Edwin Björkman -- to take just three examples from a voluminous store that's accessible free of charge.

The Open Library differs from the by now widely familiar Project Gutenberg in that it offers a listing of every book, not just text files of out-of-print and out-of-copyright titles. Older books, like the one above, are often scanned in their entirety, while those that are still in copyright are simply listed, usually with a photo of the cover, and the bibliographical details. There are at present 22,845,290 titles, 1,064,822 of which are full-text.

Cornering the Market

Here in the U.K., with the arrival of spring the London Book Fair is once again in the offing. Ever since it moved to the Barbican Centre in 1982 (which was the first year I attended it), and from there to the Olympia exhibition centre in Earls Court, this annual gathering has become a steady fixture in the diaries of publishers, agents and translators. It is really a trading opportunity for publishers and agents - translators occupy a peripheral status, but are none the less present, as the event is an international one, and rights representatives with publishing houses from many countries visit it.

It's a crowded, exhausting, at times even frantic get-together: there is usually nowhere to sit down, snack and refreshment facilities are minimal, if they exist at all, and the stands are often confusingly arranged and numbered, making it hard to find the location and/or people one is looking for. So what's in it for a translator of Nordic literature? Well, on April 20 there's a Nordic Reception at Stand W335/W335/407/W425/Y345 hosted by the Swedish Arts Council, Bok & Bilbiotek (Gothenburg Book Fair, Sweden), FILI (Finnish Literature Centre), Kunstrådet (Denmark), The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (Sweden), Bókmenntasjóður (Iceland) and NORLA (Norway). Although members of SELTA (the Swedish-English Literary Translators' Association) receive an invitation to the reception in advance, in order to attend it at all they have to register for the entire Fair, at a price of 40 UKP. However, since most or all of the organizations mentioned send one or two representatives, it's a chance for translators to meet the potential providers of funding for their various projects. They can also meet publishers, of whom there are many in attendance, if not at the reception itself, then hidden away in the clusters of booths and stands that stretch to the horizon.

Most of the serious buying and selling of Nordic books at the Fair is concentrated on the now all-pervasive field of the detective novel, which over the past few years has become the hallmark of Scandinavian literary endeavour. PanMacmillan, Vintage, Harvill Press are the names to look for here. Translators whose interests lie outside this sphere may find it slightly more difficult to find takers, or even listeners, for their proposals and will, with a few exceptions, usually end up in the hands of one or two specialist publishers, not all of whom are even fully represented at the Fair. For poetry, Bloodaxe Books is probably still the most likely home for new translations of Nordic collections, or anthologies. Since its inception in 1979, Bloodaxe has published work by Finnish, Finland-Swedish, Swedish and Danish poets as part of its embrace of poetry from around the world -- a noble aim which more recently seemed to become at least partially obscured by a growing emphasis on Anglo-American poetry of a certain narrative and personal kind that tends to replace the internationalism of the former Bloodaxe with a new, issue-centred focus that is driven at least in part by concerns that have less to do with literature as such, and are connected rather with concerns of a sociological or even left-wing political kind. Nearly all of the Nordic titles published by Bloodaxe have been funded by Nordic arts council-type agencies like the ones referred to earlier.

For prose fiction, there is Dalkey Archive Press, a U.S.-based house that relies heavily on funding from foreign cultural foundations and government-sourced grants. Given the active presence of so many Nordic publishers, rights representatives and state cultural agencies at the Fair, it's not hard to see why Dalkey keeps up its visits each year. Although so far Dalkey's impressive list includes only a few Nordic writers, there are signs that the publisher intends to expand in this direction.

And there's Norvik Press, which Eric covered in an earlier post and which remains the UK's principal publisher of translated Nordic writing, both new and classical.

In a way it's too bad that translations of remarkable, original and unusual literary texts from Scandinavia still tend to fall into the hands of the specialist houses, both here and in the United States, My hope is that one day, with the rise of English as a second language in many or most of the Nordic countries (many younger Nordic writers and poets have a good though not perfect grasp of spoken and written English), translation of these texts will become less of a traditional "author/translator" process, and more a question of Nordic writers preparing "international" English-language versions of their work in collaboration with English-speaking advisers and consultants - perhaps the very same people whom today we know as "literary translators". Then the novels and poems can join their peers in the English-speaking world, and take their chance not as "translations" but as original works in English.

With a Nordic poet I recently embarked on a project of this kind: she prepared some English translations of her own poems, and I worked with her to make them into something that reads like English poetry. When the author has a decent grasp of English, this becomes possible, and it opens up a new line of approach - instead of aiming for "recreation" (or gjendiktning!), one works at the details and fabric of the writing itself, so that eventually the poem emerges as it would have done had the poet written it in English. I see this as a way forward not only for poetry, but also for prose. And some day, when English is universally spoken all over the world, it will seem the most natural way to work. The distinction between "original" and "translation" will become blurred and even effaced, for this is what writing is really all about in the end - the erasure of barriers, with the aim of reaching readers wherever they live, on a basis of universality.

As you can probably tell from my opening paragraphs, I won't be hot-footing it to Olympia in April. But I'll be keeping my eyes and ears open for new developments, new names and new departures. Eric says that he will be attending the 3-day event, and on this blog we'll try to keep up with what's new, as usual.

See also in this blog: Books and Publishers
Detective Story

Northern Lights - conference papers in book form

Translation is a practical activity but sometimes needs some theoretical underpinning. There is a whole continuum from descriptive to prescriptive, when aspects of translation are discussed. The papers from the Nordic Translation Conference, held at University College London in 2008, have been collected together to form chapters of a book entitled Northern Lights - Translation in the Nordic Countries, editor B.J. Epstein, published by Peter Lang, Oxford, Bern & New York, 2009. While the accent is on description, the thoughtful translator can glean tips and modi operandi from the various chapters here.

For a brief description of the conference itself, where these papers were first read, I can do no better than quote from the introduction:

The Nordic Translation Conference took place in London on 6-8 March 2008, and it was exciting for two considerable reasons. First, a major international conference had never before been convened to address translating from, and between the Nordic languages. And second, the variety of topics discussed spanned a fascinating range of studies, ideas, practical advice, and inspiration, encompassing seven languages Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Old Norse; unfortunately there were no papers discussing Greenlandic or Sami) and issues about children's literature, poetry, linguistics, subtitling, interpretation, legal and political translation, among others.

The resulting book is divided into six parts. The first deals with the differences between related languages; the second, translations to and from English; the third, challenges created by specific styles; the fourth, children's literature; the fifth, the position and role of the translator; and lastly, political issues. There are nineteen chapters altogether.

The majority of papers, now chapters, focus on the linguistic examination of literary texts, but also deal with everything from subtitling crime films to tag questions in translations between English and Swedish. Style in skaldic verse is examined, but so is the contextualisation of Nordic literature when finding a British audience. Children's literature is used as the basis for three chapters, and the Finnish language for a further three.

One paper, not included on account of the author's computer problems at the time, deserves a mention, and that is Martin Murrell's paper "Cultural Competence and Literary Licence", which dealt with translations of work by Eino Leino, Eva Ström, and others.

The Nordic focus was heartening. To quote again from the introduction:

Though the Nordic countries, by virtue of their small populations and their traditionally externally focused outlook, have long recognized the importance of translation, the study of Nordic languages has never played much of a role in the field of translation studies. At translation studies conferences, the more widely spoken languages, quite naturally, have taken the centre stage, and the few attending Nordic specialists often comprise the audience for each others's talks, gathering together to eagerly share research or just to sympathize over being so alone in the field.

Well, Nordic specialists were certainly not alone last March! The hall was filled to bursting point at the plenary sessions. And it is to be hoped that when the next Nordic Translation Conference comes along, scheduled for 2011, a similar book of papers will be compiled, again covering the Nordic languages.

Different Russias

Writing in the Finnish newspaper Iltalehti, its editor-in-chief Tuomas Keskinen comments that Russian occupation has meant different things for Finland and Estonia. Sweden's defeat by Russia in 1809 and the subsequent treaty that transformed Finland into a Grand Duchy turned out to be a relative blessing for the country after 400 years of Swedish rule. On the other hand, Russia's occupation of Estonia, which Stalin began in the autumn of 1939, was of a wholly different order, and represented an illegal takeover analogous to the land-grabs practiced by the Nazis in Europe earlier in the decade. Keskinen says that the publication of Sofi Oksanen and Imbi Paju's new book, Kaiken takana oli pelko (Fear was behind everything, WSOY, 2009), will help Finns to understand the horrors that were experienced by the people of their smaller neighbour to the south.

Detective Story

The story of how Scandinavian crime novels became the leading literary export of the Nordic countries, and the mainstay of Anglo-American Nordic literary translators, is a fairly lengthy one. In some ways it's rather a sad story - as though modern English literature had suddenly become known to the world not through the books of D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Graham Greene and the rest, but rather through the novels of Agatha Christie.

In the 1960s and 70s, Scandinavian crime fiction was mainly familiar to the world's reading public in the form of the Martin Beck novels of the Swedish husband and wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. In the late 1970s, some Nordic countries, notably Norway, began to make a serious push for recogition and acceptance of their literature and culture in the outside world. The push was government-subsidized, and in Norway, at any rate, considerable effort was invested in drawing the attention of overseas translators and publishers to the extremely active, though somewhat introverted, Norwegian literary scene. Elaborate seminars and conferences were held, and although these involved representatives from several European countries, it was contacts with British and American publishers and translators that were given special priority. In the early 1980s, much of the Norwegian fiction published in English translation was of the "serious" kind, with a special focus on contemporary women's writing: the work of Herbjørg Wassmo,Cecilie Løveid and Bjørg Vik began to be translated and published in Britain and the U.S. at this time. In particular, the smaller U.K. publishers, like Virago, the Women's Press and Quartet Books played a central role in this process, and it was thought that books which focused on women's issues stood the greatest chance of being sold.

In the mid-1980s the attention of some British publishers, including Allison & Busby, Quartet and the newly formed Serpent's Tail, began to drift towards the possibility that Scandinavian crime fiction might offer a saleable alternative or adjunct to Nordic women's writing. In 1986 I translated for the Quartet Qrime series Gunnar Staalesen's bleak Varg Veum thriller I mørket er alle ulver grå (1983), which is set in Bergen and is built around the ramifications of the post-Nazi era in Norway. As At Night All Wolves Are Grey (1986) it was favourably reviewed, and began to sell a reasonable number of copies. Word of this got out onto the grapevine, and other UK publishers began to show an interest in Nordic crime writing. It was, however, the advent of the Danish writer Peter Høeg's Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne (1992), published in the US by Farrar Straus as Smilla's Sense of Snow (1993) and in the UK by Harvill Press as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1993), which really projected Nordic crime fiction into the realm of international bestsellers.

From then on, the world's English-language publishers began to view Scandinavia as the home of crime fiction, in the sense that Britain once was. Interest in the work of Nordic writers who did not adopt the genre began to fall, and among writers of fiction in the Nordic countries themselves there was a growing tendency to to employ the techniques of crime writing in novels and narratives that were not really detective stories at all, in the hope that this might increase the likelihood that their books would receive attention abroad.

It's in contemporary Swedish fiction that the results of this trend have been most marked. In the crime novels of authors like Henning Mankell - whose Wallander series is now a BBC television show - "serious" concerns are blended with entertainment in a formula that is now almost standard for Swedish authors who want to be taken seriously at an international level. As John Crace noted recently about the novels of Mankell and others,

Their leading characters tend to be depressed melancholics with or without a drinking problem, while having a strong sense of Guardianista political correctness.

This combination of crime plots and "leftish" sermonizing appears to be the new orthodoxy on the Nordic literary scene. And it's the one that translators are liable to become involved in, willingly or not, as - to put it crudely - that is where the jobs are. It seems a pity that so much interesting and experimental writing from Sweden and the other Nordic countries is going relatively unnoticed as a result (the work of the iconoclastic Swedish novelist Sara Stridsberg is one prominent example). Meanwhile, as Håkan Nesser prepares to address the spring meeting of SELTA in London next week, one must hope that the present developments are merely a passing fad or fashion, and that in time the balance in translated Nordic fiction between entertainment and the vital concerns of new writing will be restored to something of the status it enjoyed in the early 1980s once again.

The New Books from Finland

The new Web-based version of Books from Finland, the magazine of translated Finnish fiction, poetry, sociology and criticism which has appeared more or less continuously since 1966, is now online. This reincarnation of the journal replaces the paper version, which will no longer be published.

First impressions are mixed - the selection of material is good and varied, but the visual aspect of the site still looks to be in need of some attention. On my screen, at any rate, the orange lettering of the smaller headings is practically invisible, though I guess it may vary from one graphics card to another.

A note on the site does point out that the new operation is still in beta and won't be fully up and running until April, so perhaps it's better not to be too critical. One major useful innovation is a page that allows the reader to browse the magazine's already existing online archive alphabetically by author. I'm told that this feature is due for expansion, and that when it's completed it will provide links to work by hundreds of Finnish writers.

Dark Paradise

From: Dark Paradise, by Rosa Liksom

I was thirty-six when I went to serve my sentence up there in Hämenlinna. I stuffed my Yankee bag full of thick flannel underwear, so I wouldn’t freeze to death. I’d more or less prepared myself for the fact that the bedrooms there are incredibly damp, cold and horrible, but it wasn’t cold there. The rooms are okay, better than I had at home at that time. I’d really imagined it would be a damned labour camp with guards that whipped you while shouting horribly. But they weren’t like that, they were all quiet types who kept themselves to themselves. The work was just a bit of this and that, and nobody threatened you with a rifle if you sat on the john a bit longer than usual, the way people do in a factory. Actually, I’d say now looking back on it that it was better working there than in a factory. There you had a damned bourgeois pig hanging over your ass all the time, and if you took a breather once too often the pig would soon be giving you your notice. Up there in Hämenlinna you could have a cigarette, and even two, and the guards just yawned. I also had some very lazy guards or guardesses or whatever they’re called. There was one of them had this great round belly, and when she had to climb a few stairs she puffed and panted like a walrus. The other one had dropped out of college and gone to work in the prison instead. My god she looked depressed, as if she was going to call it quits any day now. The other women explained that this woman had said she wanted to finish her studies, get her degree and all that. But I don’t believe it. She was there when I arrived, and she’ll be there until she dies, mark my words. She’d probably never opened a book, was just putting a smart one over on us. I was there for nine years. You could get leave, but I never took any. Where would I have gone. There was hot food on the table every day. and on Sundays we were allowed to lie in until eight. I didn’t go on leave, though they tried to throw me out by force. I told them I’m not going anywhere and they couldn’t force me to go. They didn’t understand, but I was too shy to tell them that it was a question of principle for me. I’d decided long before anything happened that I was going to serve out the sentence I got, every single day of it, and even if they tried to chuck me out only halfway through, I wouldn’t go. And I stuck to my guns. I was there for exactly nine years, that makes 3,285 days plus two leap year days , and I was so precise that I waited at the door for exactly one hour and five minutes before I would agree to go out of it. I remember that the guy who was guarding that door looked at me as though I was a complete idiot, but just sat there and let the guy stare. So the matter was cleared up and I have never given it a moment’s thought since. I have made restitution to the state and my conscience and since the day they closed the door after me I have walked with a clear conscience and lived a new life. I began everything all over again from scratch. I was forty-five then, and in good shape. I was given a rail ticket to my home village and I took the first train early in the morning. Nothing much had changed there in nine years, it was all just the same. I trudged up to my old cottage, but it was hellishly cold and the windows were broken. It was early spring when I was released, and I thought, well, the house will manage over the summer. I nailed up planks over the windows, and lit the kitchen range. I’m one of those ladies who knows how to cope with life. I tore down the outside loo and used it as firewood, and then all I had to do was light the stove. It’s true that the villagers were a bit surprised. But nobody came to see who it was who’d lit the stove, they knew enough to be wary of me. The kitchen had gone to pot, everything upside down. The kids had been into it and made a mess, they’d tried to burn the rocking chair and smashed the crockery. I cleared it all up. I heated the place, chopped firewood and cleaned, and it wasn’t so bad. The first night I slept in the hay shed, there was just enough hay in it so I could manage. From time to time I went in and put more planks in the stove. Next morning the kitchen was warm. I could undo the zip on my thermal underwear a bit and sit down for a while. Then gradually the spring arrived and by then I’d moved the windows of the cowshed to the kitchen and my cottage was just like any other house. It was just that the villagers didn’t come to visit me. I didn’t get any help, and I only just managed to get food from the store. I got food money from the social security office when they wouldn’t take me back at the damned factory. Then when the summer was over and I’d sold the berries I’d picked I thought there’s no way in hell this is going to work out. I’d go crazy unless I was able to talk to someone. Up there in Hämenlinna there were always people around you chatting, but in my home village no one even said hello to me on the bus or spoke to me at all. So I thought that this way of life was just not going to work out for me. I went to the social security office and told the woman there to write me a ticket to the south and she did. I set the cottage on fire and left. It felt damn good to let it burn, and now I’d never need to go there again. I hopped off the train in Tampere and marched into a cleaning firm. I told the guy in a suit, he was probably the boss, to give a good woman a job. And he did. I went to a night hostel for women and stayed there for several months, cleaning. Cleaning was something I was good at before, and I’ve always been used to working. I’m not afraid of hard work. Then when winter came along I got a little cubby-hole of a place behind the railway station, and I lived there for nearly three years. I cleaned and saved and put my own house in order. I have always got long really well here in Tampere. Here I’ve always been treated like a human being and by workmates and neighbours talk to me normally and they don’t know anything about me. They don’t know and they don’t need to know that things were once so bad for me that I killed a man, even though I’m a just a slender little female. I went on cleaning for that firm for such a long time that last year I retired on a pension. For twenty years I cleaned, and lived like a human being. The I was turned out of that cubby-hole, and I got one of those one-roomed flats from the council, they really had to give me it. After all, I couldn’t live in a snowdrift and go to work as well. It was probably my boss who pulled a string or two there. I was the best cleaner in the whole firm, and he wasn’t exactly unaware of that. He probably called the city fathers on the phone and told them to give this woman a flat, or maybe he didn’t, who the hell knows. I got this flat, and I’ve made it really nice. I really liked being here on a pension, and now that I’ve brought the cat here as well, the time just flies by. I have a sofa and armchairs, a portable TV and a radio. I have everything and more. Plastic flowers and glass horses and god knows how many lace tablecloths. And no one even remembers that I was once in Hämenlinna prison and that I once stabbed that pig in the belly with a knife. Who wants to remember things like that when you have a flat like this and time to make yourself look nice and go out dancing.

Translated from Finnish by David McDuff