Translators' meeting

An interesting afternoon at a Zoom meeting of FELT, the Finnish-English literary translators association or cooperative. There was much detailed discussion of issues involving contracts, fees, and the like. I am still slightly concerned about the suepicion with which some evidently continue to regard those who choose to specialise in less well remunerated, less commercial areas like poetry. While it's true that everyone needs to put food on the table, it's a fact that many writers and translators, particularly in the early years of their career, manage to get by on very little. And there should be no moral stigma in that.

SELTA

This is just another of our occasional brief reviews of SELTA, the Swedish-English Literary Translators Association. Actually, there isn't much to report this time: the group seems to be fairly stable as regards membership numbers, though its practical work and activity seem to be dominated by a rather small and tightly-knit network of members who know one another and are colleagues. There's also a noticeable age factor: again the small network appears to be composed of younger members, while the wider membership is rather older and takes little part in the group activity - this is noticeable with regard to meetings, where many of the older members no longer attend.

It's good that there is an organisation like SELTA, bringing some order to the potential chaos of publishers, editors, agents, agencies, translators and contracts - but it doesn't seem quite the same as it was in the 1980s and 90s, when it was more than a network, functioning as a forum for ideas and reflections on contemporary and classical Swedish-language literature. In fact, it feels as though the literary element may have receded quite a bit in recent times. Perhaps, however, the role is still fulfilled by Swedish Book Review, though again there's a sense of a rather restricted network in charge of its editorial functions.

It's to be hoped that SELTA will continue to evolve. The founding of a sister organisation DELT is an interesting development: this blog has always advocated the forming of a pan-Nordic translators' association, and will go on doing so. Perhaps at some point SELTA and DELT will merge!

Lists

Chad Post, writing at Three Percent about selection bias in lists of 'best translations' (“It’s like record shop employees telling you what’s cool.” [Tom Roberge]):

So, as a list-maker, you have the non-genre specific, gigantic works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, even Nabokov and Camus on one hand, and the mostly contemporary crime-fiction writing by women on the other. This is not a good mixture.

Hat tip: Ian Giles

New Events

Among new and recent events: An Estonian Literature Festival is being held in London as part of the centenary celebrations of the Republic of Estonia. Participants include Mihkel Mutt, Andrei Ivanov, Kristiina Ehin,  Veronika Kivisilla, and a group of translators: Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov, Christopher Moseley and Adam Cullen.

Also, the inaugural meeting of DELT, the Association of Danish-English Literary Translators, was held on April 12. Hopefully this new organisation will extend and complement the work of SELTA as another forum for translators in the field of Nordic literature. Joining the association is at present done via Google Plus - here.

Aino Kallas

There's a distinct gap in the translated classics publishing catalogue when it comes to the work of the great Finnish-Estonian author Aino Kallas (1878-1956). Amazon UK advertises for the most part only grossly overpriced collector's editions of the Mattson/Galsworthy White Ship from back in the 1920s, and the U.S. Amazon site has even less to offer.

The contemporary Finnish author Sofi Oksanen recently published an interesting piece about Aino Kallas and her remarkable short novel Sudenmorsian (The Wolf's Bride) as part of an article for the Literary Hub. An extract:

The story is written in archaic Finnish, and the character Aalo’s own voice is not represented, which is true to the time. Through use of this literary technique, Kallas found a clever way to demonstrate the way female perspectives were excluded in that era. Her method is unique in Finnish literature and she is a unique author: her main body of work is based on Estonian folklore and its focus is on women’s position in the world of men.

 An Oksanen-Kallas linkup would be most welcome.

Tove Jansson: Work and Love

I now have an advance copy of my translation of Tuula Karjalainen's biography of Tove Jansson, which will be published by Penguin's Particular Books imprint on November 27. Am pleased with the production of the book, and the clarity of the illustrations and artwork.

Out in the Field

A small group of Finnish-English translators who hail from both sides of the Atlantic has recently set itself up as a literary "translation cooperative" - FELT.  At present the aims of the new body are somewhat unclear: apparently it's not an association along the lines of SELTA, the long-established association of Swedish-English literary translators, but rather "a community where translators can exchange news, ideas, and working methods with each other and share their work with the public", to quote the official statement on the FELT website. It seems that it also exists, in the words of one member, "to unabashedly promote our own work to general readers, publishers, and agents."

So far so good, and one wishes the cooperative all the best for the future. It's still not clear, however, whether the new community is an open one which all Finnish-English translators may join - in the way that Swedish-English translators have joined SELTA over the past few decades as full or associate members - or whether it's a closed professional club with a fixed and restricted membership and a Facebook window on the wider world. It might perhaps be helpful if the organizers would make this less ambiguous, though one appreciates that the planning of the new organization may still be in the early stages.

Finnish State Prize for translation

This year's Finnish State Prize for translation has been awarded to Hebrew translator Rami Saari.

Finnish as she is spoke

The Finnish publishing house Gummerus has issued the 500+-page Oikeeta suomee - Suomen puhekielen sanakirja. Dictionary of Spoken Finnish, which contains some 7,000 words and phrases. Books from Finland's editor Soila Lehtonen writes in a note to the magazine's translators: "you probably already know what for example säväri, terkkari, opo, arska or perseet olalla means (and perhaps the Internet provides the translations easily)..."

Detective Story - 4

Continuing the discussion of this thorny subject, I've raised two contributions from the comments to this post:

Larissa Kyzer said...

I wrote the article responding to Nathaniel Rich’s piece about Scandinavian crime fiction, and have followed the discussion here and in other blogs surrounding these pieces with interest. The debate over what country or region produces the ‘best’ of any type of literature is bound to be limited (I said as much in my article), but I find myself a bit at odds with the polarization here: those who are for Scandinavian crime fiction and those who are against it. I am deeply interested in Scandinavian literature--including crime fiction--and aspire to translate Danish literature myself one day. I’d hope that one can be a ‘committed’ translator and also foster an appreciation for genre fiction at the same time. (It’s seemed to me that many Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian fiction translators have translated both ‘literary’ and genre fiction.)

While many of the points made by David McDuff regarding crime fiction have raised some important and interesting points—particularly that current Scandinavian crime fiction marks a “continuation of the "radical" movement that produced the socially-committed novels and poetry of the 1970s,”—I wonder at the assessment that the prevalence of this genre within Scandinavian literature is “a tragedy whose consequences it will take several generations to overcome.”

It’s a common enough opinion that genre fiction of any stripe is inherently sub-literary, which is a debate that is perhaps larger than needs be argued here. Suffice to say that I do think that genre fiction merits serious literary consideration for its content, structure, and yes, even prose style. There are certainly many, many poorly written and conceived crime novels, but surely enough there are terrible ‘literary’ novels as well. However, I don't believe that the existence of crime novels can, with any credibility, be faulted with ‘diverting’ Nordic writing talent. Rather, I tend to hope that translation begets translation—that every new Henning Mankell or Karin Fossum novel that is published in English opens the door a little wider for more ‘literary’ Scandinavian authors to be translated as well.

David McDuff said...

Thank you for this contribution to the discussion. While I also don't think there should be a "polarization" of the kind you mention, I do believe that it's important to set some sort of markers as to what constitutes literary culture and what is basically just "reading entertainment". I'm certainly not against the latter, and have translated at least one Scandinavian crime novel myself - but when crime novels become the flagship of a nation's literary production, I think it's a danger signal.

In a later post to this blog, I've been more specific. There I argue (together with the author of the article quoted by the anonymous blogger at Scandinavian Crime Fiction), that of all the Nordic countries it's primarily Sweden where the problem is most acute - in Sweden there is virtually no middle ground between the marginalized avant-garde literary scene and the huge space that's occupied by bestsellerdom, led primarily by trend-following crime novels of various kinds and tendencies. The situation in Denmark is different, as is evidenced by the popularity of the traditional historical novel genre there, for example. Finland presents a similar picture.

So while the problem isn't yet universal, what I have tried to make clear is that it has the potential for a disaster, a tragedy - please read what I wrote in my original post a little more carefully. My caveats are just that: a warning of what may happen, rather than a statement of accomplished fact. The developments that have taken place in Swedish publishing could affect the rest of the Nordic publishing world, too - let's hope that doesn't happen, and as translators let's make some efforts to make sure that it doesn't.

See also:
Cornering the market
Detective Story
Detective Story - 2
Detective Story - 3
The missing midfield

Detective Story - 3

Our analysis of the present situation surrounding the over-large representation of crime fiction among published English translations of new Nordic writing appears to have ruffled some feathers over at Scandinavian Crime Fiction. An anonymous blogger there, who confesses to "not reading any Nordic languages", says that it's "taking me a while to figure out how to respond," and after attempting one or two objections, more or less concedes that the translation of crime writing may not be the ideal field of work for professionally committed translators:

Luckily, I have a day job doing something I love, so I don’t have to read or write anything I don’t want to because my life depends upon it.I imagine full-time translators feel a bit more at the mercy of the marketplace, and it must be dispiriting to find the work on offer trending toward a type of book you don’t like much. But is this really a tragedy? And is genre fiction to blame? I don’t buy it.

The argument sounds a tad cynical, no?

No doubt there will be further responses of this kind in SCF's comments section - but I'd recommend anyone who wants to argue the toss to come over here and continue the debate.

Detective Story
Detective Story - 2

Detective Story - 2

Some more reflections on the vexed issue of Scandinavian crime novels (See Crime Does Pay, At Least for Nordic Authors, Detective Story ):

At Three Percent, Chad Post recently published a useful roundup of attitudes to the genre found among fiction critics in the U.S. online media. In particular, he highlighted the interesting debate between novelist Nathaniel Rich (writing in Slate) and Larissa Kyzer (in L Magazine), which exposed the author-reader dynamic that underlies the whole question. Wondering about the reasons for the extensive adoption of the crime genre by contemporary Nordic writers, Rich saw some fairly predictable factors at work:

the best explanation is the most mundane: Crime novels sell. Most of the Scandinavian crime novelists began their careers in other genres. Mankell, for instance, wrote seven well-received but unlucrative novels, and more than a dozen plays, before turning to a life of crime; Karin Fossum was a prize-winning poet; Maj Sjöwall was an editor and translator. Before the current explosion of crime novels, the only contemporary Scandinavian novelist to enjoy major international success was Peter Høeg. Høeg may be a "literary" novelist, but his breakout Smilla's Sense of Snow is about the investigation of a suspected homicide. The lesson is clear: If you want your novel to be read abroad, particularly in the English-speaking world, you'd better include a murder. Even if you've never heard of a murder actually being committed in your country.

Wondering again why readers across the world have found the Scandinavian books written in this genre so compelling - they are not particularly innovative, after all, and are for the most part "straightforward whodunnits"- Rich suggested that

What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. There is a good reason why Mankell's corpses tend to turn up in serene, bucolic settings—on a country farm, on a bobbing raft, in a secluded meadow, or in the middle of a snow-covered field: A dark bloodstain in a field of pure, white snow is far creepier than a body ditched in a trash-littered alley.

Kyzer challenged this view, seeing it as patronizing and playing to stereotypes:

One need only skim recent headlines from mainland Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) to ascertain that the famed tranquility of the Nordic welfare state has begun to face some dramatic challenges. For instance: each of these countries has seen a marked increase in immigration in the last few decades, an influx which has challenged the homogeneity of the local populations, and more often than not, created quite an existential crisis for societies which have for so long been able to claim a fundamental sameness in traditions, language, and cultural outlook.

The most striking feature of the whole debate, however, is that it reveals an essential characteristic of the kind of writing that's involved: ultimately the main concern of the Nordic authors who produce these books is not with writing itself, with the creation of literary art, but is focused instead on a form of fictionalized sociology. It's really a continuation of the "radical" movement that produced the socially-committed novels and poetry of the 1970s, and it shows that this tendency has not died out in Nordic fiction, but is being reinforced and re-tuned to suit the trends and exigencies of the new century.

This is a pity, for it seemed for a time during the 1980s and 1990s that writers in Scandinavia were once again, as they did in the 1940s and early 1950s, beginning to question the society-based values and assumptions that had dominated fiction during the two earlier decades, and were finding their way towards a renewal of the universalist, formally innovative and metaphysical tradition that had characterized the writing of the immediate post-war period, with its roots in the writing of authors like Joyce, Kafka, Borges and Camus, the long legacy of Kierkegaard and the myth-oriented humanism of Karen Blixen. While authors and critics like Jan Kjærstad and Mikael Enckell continued in their different ways to uphold those values, and Inger Christensen, Tomas Tranströmer and Pia Tafdrup wrote their poems in a conscious emergence from the traditions of pre-and postwar modernism, there was a sense that in the Nordic literary world as a whole another kind of value was gaining ascendancy, in just the way that Nathaniel Rich describes above, and for the same translation-related "reasons".

I see the increasing dominance of crime fiction and its related genres in Scandinavian writing today as a problem that has the potential to become a tragedy whose consequences it will take several generations to overcome. For some of the best Nordic writing talent is being diverted into these sub- and semi-literary channels, from which it may never return.

Note: although this and other related posts are now being discussed on FriendFeed and elsewhere, I'd like to repeat my invitation to those who want to debate the issue to come here and write in the comments boxes. David McDuff.

See also: Detective Story

Detective Story - 3

The missing midfield

More on Kierkegaard

In the last post, I mentioned the unclear situation that still exists with regard to the English translation of Kierkegaard's writings. There appear to be two concurrent projects, one of which, by now virtually complete, is the 26-volume Princeton University Press series of translations by Howard and Edna Hong. The other, which is advertised as a complete edition of all the philosopher's writings, to be completed (published?) this year initially in the Danish original only by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre (SKC) at the University of Copenhagen, will comprise 55 volumes: 28 text volumes and 27 commentary volumes. The Centre's website states that

With its 55 volumes, to be completed by 2009, this is the largest comprehensive edition of Danish literature in a century, if not in all of Danish history.

This Danish edition will subsequently be translated into English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese.

An electronic version will also be established, containing not only the full printed version, but also the collected drafts for published and unpublished works, as well as the second edition of works, which were published by Kierkegaard himself. The first electronic version was published on the web in 2007.

The site does not give a list of translators, however, and although there is copious information on scholars, researchers and other academic Kierkegaard specialists, there does not appear to be much regarding the principles underlying the translations themselves, or on how these new versions differ from those of the Hongs and earlier Kierkegaard translators.

Call for Papers

Swansea University put out a Call for Papers (see below) for a translation conference next summer. I wonder if any of you would be interested in putting together a proposal on Nordic author-translators. If so, contact me privately via my website (see http://awaywithwords.se/).

--BJ

Call for Papers

The Author-Translator in the European Literary Tradition
Swansea University, 28 June – 1 July 2010

Confirmed keynote speakers include:

Susan Bassnett, David Constantine, Lawrence Venuti

The recent ‘creative turn’ in translation studies has challenged notions of translation as a derivative and uncreative activity which is inferior to ‘original’ writing. Commentators have drawn attention to the creative processes involved in the translation of texts, and suggested a rethinking of translation as a form of creative writing. Hence there is growing critical and theoretical interest in translations undertaken by literary authors.

This conference focuses on acts of translation by creative writers. Literary scholarship has tended to overlook this aspect of an author’s output, yet since the time of Cicero, authors across Europe have been engaged not only in composing their own works but in rendering texts from one language into another. Indeed, many of Europe’s greatest writers have devoted time to translation – from Chaucer to Heaney, from Diderot and Goethe to Seferis and Pasternak – and have produced some remarkable texts. Others (Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov) have translated their own work from one language into another. As attentive readers and skilful word­smiths, writers may be particularly well equipped to meet the creative demands of literary translation; many trans­lations of poetry are, after all, undertaken by poets themselves. Moreover, translation can have a major impact on an author’s own writing and on the development of native literary traditions.

The conference seeks to reassess the importance of translation for European writers – both well-known and less familiar – from antiquity to the present day. It will explore why authors translate, what they translate, and how they translate, as well as the links between an author’s translation work and his or her own writing. It will bring together scholars in English studies and modern languages, classics and medieval studies, comparative literature and translation studies. Possible topics include:

· individual author-translators: motivations, career trajectories, comparative thematics and stylistics

· the author-translator in context: literary societies, movements, national traditions

· the problematic creativity of the author-translator

· self-reflective pronouncements and manifestos

· the author-translator as critic of others’ translations

· self-translation: strengths and weaknesses

· authors, adaptations, re-translation and relay translation

· the reception and influence of the work of author-translators

· theoretical interfaces

Proposals are invited for individual papers (max. 20 minutes) or panels (of 3 speakers). The conference language is English. It is anticipated that selected papers from the conference will be published. Please send a 250-word abstract by 30 September 2009 to the organisers, Hilary Brown and Duncan Large (author-translator@swan.ac.uk):

Author-Translator Conference
Department of Modern Languages
Swansea University
GB-Swansea SA2 8PP

http://www.author-translator.net/

Translatology

As this is a translation blog, I'm wondering if someone who has actually studied the theory of translation - as distinct from the practice of it - as an academic subject (B.J., others?) would be prepared to come on here and explain just what the subject involves and entails. Most of us here are practicing translators or readers of translation rather than theorists, and I thought it might be interesting to hear from someone who has delved into the sociological and non-linguistic aspects of the activity that keeps us so busy. Also, if it could be put into a Nordic context, and given a literary angle, that would be additionally relevant.

In Wikipedia, for example, I read of the science of Cultural Translation, which "is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture. The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analysing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture."

I would be fascinated to know more about this, if anyone can explain it further. If not now, then later...

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.

WhyTranslator

I've added Lev Hrytsyuk's interesting and varied blog of literature in English, Ukrainian and Swedish to our Blog List. Although readers of Nordic Voices may not be familiar with Ukrainian, Lev's blog is sufficiently multilingual for many of his posts to be generally accessible. Of particular note are the translations of Ukrainian poetry into Swedish - see these examples of poems by Yaroslav Dovhan, translated by Sanna Witt, and Lev Hrytsyuk's own Swedish translation of a text by Nazar Honchar, with commentary.

Salongen interviews translator Jyrki Kiiskinen

The Swedish literary blog Salongen is run by Bodil Zalesky and Jelena Selin from Berlin. They have written articles on a large number of authors, both Scandinavian and other.

Recently, they interviewed the Helsinki author, journalist and poetry translator Jyrki Kiiskinen, who translates into Finnish. He has previously been editor of the literary magazines Nuori Voima and Books From Finland. Here are a few excerpts from the interview:

Question: Which language(s) do you translate from (and to)? How did you pick these specifically?

I only translate into Finnish, but from Swedish, English, French and Spanish. And I have joined various projects and translators' groups as a poet without knowing the original language involved. I have worked with someone who knew the language. In this way I have also translated from Latvian and Lithuanian.

Question: How do you receive your assignments? Do publishers contact you or what is the procedure?

Normally speaking, publishers are not too thrilled with my projects, they don't really want to publish poetry at all, so I only translate texts I really want to. And I also translate for the sake of my own poetry, I want to expand my own poetic style and learn new techniques. So I translate texts that are lacking within me. And once I've started working on a text, I fight to get it published somewhere.

Question: Is it important to be able to ask the author whose work you are translating questions?

Of course, as it is a natural way of diving into the universe of someone else and get to know the work you are working on. Discussions with the author can becoome very exciting. Asking questions of an author can be a good excuse to come into contact with another human being who has interesting things to say and knows what he is talking about. You can often obtain information more quickly than by consulting encyclopædias back home. And the latter activity is more boring.

Question: Which experiences and qualities is it important for a literary translator to have?

If we are talking about translating poetry, you have to be completely obsessed with language, look for pleasure as with a sweet in your mouth. But you must always return to the original text, once you start enjoying your own language. You should also have a passion about the differences between various languages and be interested in the boundaries between them, i.e. pursue various ways of structuring and viewing the world in these languages, the world which always stands beyond, in silence. You must also be systematic, methodical and yet be prepared to conduct wild experiments at the same time. And then return to the original text. So you have to be faithful and unfaithful, pedantic and wild, search for a precise meaning and be prepared to describe it on the terms of your own language.

Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

The rest of the interview can be read in Swedish, here. Kiiskinen has translated, for instance, Octavio Paz, Peter Mickwitz and Göran Sonnevi. Salongen has previously interviewed literary translators Margareta Zetterström, Kristina Rotkirch, Janina Orlov, Katarina Warfinge, Lev Hrytsyuk and Hans Blomqvist. All these interviews can be found on the Salongen website.

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

A few minutes ago I switched on Radio Four, and by serendipity it was Woman's Hour, presented by Jane Garvey, and she was just about to interview the Icelandic novelist Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, whose book "Last Rituals" I am currently reading.

At one point Garvey asked her, in rather incredulous tones, "You write in Icelandic, don't you?" to which the answer was of course "yes".  Sigurðardóttir, who spoke fairly fluent English with a strong Icelandic accent and occasionally had to search for the right word, went on to admit that she wished she could write in English as she would thereby reach a wider audience.

"So why don't you?" asked Garvey in what sounded like genuine bewilderment.

I was reminded of the legions of people who think that translation is a glorified form of typing.

Harry

Far Out

Not long before her death in 2006 at the age of 56, the Norwegian-Sami literary critic and translator Nøste Kendzior wrote an essay about the translator's profession. Kendzior, who translated a large amount of fiction into Norwegian from other Nordic languages, especially Finnish, had an acute sense for the spirit of Nordic literature, and sought with dedication, hard work and dry humour to transcend the local rivalries that sometimes prevent Nordic writers from making a unified contribution to European literature as a whole. Translation into English may be important for authors who write in the relatively little-known languages of Scandinavia. But as Kendzior points out, the translation of Nordic literature into Nordic languages may have even more significance.

FAR OUT

Being a translator is not a status profession. Translation, that art of the invisible, is carried out by persons whose name the reader never even notices. Most people apparently believe that literature – the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, the Donald Duck comics – just falls from heaven, ready-translated into their mother tongue. Few readers ever reflect that someone, someone or other, has taken the trouble to translate the books they read. And even fewer people ever consider that this anonymous someone-or-other has translated the book in a certain way, a way of his or her own, and that the book would have been quite different if it had been translated by someone else, or by the same translator at a different point in time. Not even literary critics consider this. The work of the translator is seldom mentioned in book reviews. If the translated book has an elegant style, it is the author who receives all the credit for it.
If there is any status connected with the translator’s profession, it must be found among those who translate from Greek, Italian, French – in short: those who translate literature from a refined culture.

Seen with Norwegian eyes, Finnish culture is not a refined one. Finland is one of Norway’s neighbours. Norway shares seven hundred kilometres of border with Finland. In spite of this, there is scarcely a country in Europe that Norwegians know less of than Finland. A journey to Finland is a journey in the wrong direction. Finland is a country for those with a special interest.
For on the one hand, while Finland is a little too exotic for Norwegians, on the other it is not exotic enough. Too exotic, because the language is considered incomprehensible and impossible to learn, and because the Finns are thought to obscure and unpredictable. And not exotic enough, because Finland is situated too close, too far to the north, and too far out.

Finland is associated with wilderness, hard life, wild conditions, isolation, primitive emotions and inexplicable actions (such as, for example, whipping oneself with a birch rod while sitting in a room that has the temperature of boiling water). One might be tempted to believe that most Norwegians view Finland and Finnish culture as something frightening that is best kept at a reassuring distance. What is more, until recently Finland belonged to a different world from the other countries of Scandinavia; Finland has been involved in things that were part of life behind the Iron Curtain. The fact that Finland today is famed for its pioneering work in technology and design, is a member of the EU (unlike Norway), and also uses the euro in such a sophisticated way as a means of payment, is not enough to eliminate Norwegians’ prejudices about Finland as an out-of-the-way, inaccessible and undeveloped country.

So the translation of Finnish literature has no status. For it is in no way connected with refinement.

Most people I come into contact with think I translate from Finnish because I have spoken the language since the cradle. I am from Finnmark, or Sameland, the most northerly part of Norway, and we who come from up here are descendants of Finnish migrants crossed with Norwegians, Sami, Russians and anyone else who came along.

But I never learned Finnish at home. Finnish and Sami were spoken behind closed doors; we children had to learn Norwegian, the only ‘real’ language. I probably started to learn Finnish because I was attracted by the mysterious and impenetrable, by what was different. It could have been Sami. But Sami was spoken in Norway, and Finnish was more strange and special; a language that belonged to another country and another world.

So I studied Finnish at the universities of Copenhagen, Helsinki and Oslo. In Oslo I majored in Finnish and specialized in the work of Marja-Liisa Vartio. For the past seven years I have made my living as a freelance journalist: I am primarily a translator, of Finnish, Danish, Finland-Swedish and Swedish literaure. But I am also an essayist, literary critic and commentator. In Norway I would never have been able to make a living solely as a translator of Finnish literature, even though I have very little competition.

Today I have translated about fifty works in all. One of them is Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä. As far I have been able to ascertain, that book (Seven Brothers) got one review. A Finnish bestseller in Norway is something I am still looking forward to, but authors like Annika Idström, Leena Lander and Rosa Liksom have had a fairly decent reception. Anja Snellman has also now been launched in Norway, and soon some books by Pirjo Hassinen will appear. My favourite author is Marja-Liisa Vartio, who wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. I have translated her novel Hänen olivat linnut into Norwegian, and am now working on a translation of her poetry.
Not even my fellow translators associate my knowledge of Finnish with refinement. A Norwegian translator from Italian would roll his eyes in vexation if I were to betray a zero knowledge of Italian literature, film and history. The same rolling eyes would acquire a glassy blankness were I to mention Väinämöinen, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, or Pentti Saarikoski, and the word ‘Kalevala’ would be a cry in the wilderness.

I was looking for a different landscape. And of course I found it, just around the corner! That discovery has not given me high status in the world, but it has given me a couple of prizes, and also a state artist’s pension, at the minimum level. And sometimes I detect a small gleam of respectful curiosity in other people’s eyes: I translate peculiar literature written in an extremely complicated language by a barbaric people in a distant land beyond all civilization. Ergo, though I may not be refined, I am fearless, indeed – heroic.

translated from Norwegian by David McDuff