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Kalevala reaction post
14 Dec 2012 02:52 pmFor my birthday I requested an English translation of a lavishly-illustrated children's retelling of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic which influenced Tolkien in the writing of LOTR. The book is beautiful! And hardbound and coffee table sized, but as long as you have the leisure to sit still in one place for long enough to read it that's okay.
I had bought an academic's modern literary translation a few years ago, but I just couldn't get through it. The translation doesn't seem to work. It's frequently the case with everything from advertising slogans and aphorisms to simple ordinary sentences that things sound cooler in Finnish - it's like it was designed for wordplay, and wordplays never translate well. (My Finnish is not up to tackling it in Finnish yet, however. I need a few more years' vocabulary at least, I think.) Anyway, the translator kept very close to the meaning of the text, and he labored mightily to render it in the same sort of register and to give it some meter, which I can see he did quite a good job of. But it doesn't change the fact that the Finnish is smooth and flowing, sharp and sprightly and light, and the English is clumsy, clunky, flat, and oafish in comparison. (I don't say that English has to be clumsy and clunky, just that that translation is.)
Anyway, I was able to see in a quick glance-through at the bookshop that this prose retelling is much more readable. The writer, Kirsti Mäkinen, did an excellent job, and the translator, Kaarina Brooks, was obviously very skillful as well; although, like every other English translation I've picked up that was published in Finland, this one didn't come out error-free. At least there were no line-editing errors, but there were definitely a couple of semantic problems (of the 'I see what you mean but that word doesn't exactly mean that in English, and if you're going to be Humpty-Dumptying it up you need to go enough over the top to make it clear that it was on purpose' type) which I would have gotten into it with her for, had I been employed at her publishers in an editorial capacity.
I entertained my wife and her Finnish friends on Twitter over the several days when I was reading bits of it. Living in Finland and being acquainted with artworks and everything-names (buildings, streets, cities, icecreams, people, construction equipment) named after the Kalevala, I sort of felt that I knew most of the main people already. Reading the actual stories was a bit shocking, then. It wasn't quite what I expected! Seeing the echoes of Gandalf in Väinämöinen and Aragorn in Ilmarinen is rendered surreal by the fact that Tolkien worked hard to render his characters with a dignity and solemnity that makes the Kalevala look like a comedy in comparison. The folk legends of the Kalevala don't have comic relief characters; everybody is made to look ridiculous in turn, and sometimes simultaneously with their moments of greatest coolness. And also there's the fact that almost everybody in it is an asshole1, but especially Joukahainen and Lemminkainen. The two of them could give lessons in How to be a Turd to Prince Joffrey. I kept looking up to shout "X is a COMPLETE DICK!"
The Kalevala almost reminds me more of a collection of individual folktales than of the Odyssey or the Edda. (Which isn't a complaint: I like both forms.) Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it was collected/compiled/written so much more recently.
One of the things I noticed most keenly while reading was how extremely clumsily Christianity had been pastede on yey. I mean, the original basic stuff of the Kalevala is obviously an actual pantheic mythology. It literally starts with the creation of the world, including plants, animals, and people, and explicit reference is made to many different gods who are actually referred to as gods. But then every now and then, usually after the resolution (by god or magic) of some problem, somebody has just tacked on a couple of sentences that are like "but of course, while this was awesome, it wasn't NEARLY as awesome as the magic that the supreme creator God could've done. If he was there," or, "After all these several pages of spells calling on tons of different nature dieties by name, still nothing worked, and Väinämöinen was like 'Oh shit, no magic is even possible without God, even though earlier in this epic tale it was! God, I've gotta give you props, now would you please help a man out', so God fixed him up." Also there's a thinly-veiled Jesus allegory tacked on as the last chapter of the whole thing, with a weirdish explanation about how a holy infant is even more powerful than Väinämöinen and has thus rendered him obsolete, which is why he fucks off in a magical copper boat.
Another thing that made it a little surreal was having first read Finnish celebrity historian Matti Klinge's seminal Ancient Powers of the Baltic Sea a year or so ago. I kept trying to think back to it and wondering about the historical context without really remembering the details. (That book kept me on the edge of my seat. Maybe I should just get my own copy.)
And unrelatedly to any of my other reactions, there's a myth about Väinämöinen's descent to the Underworld, where he goes to demand the secret creation runes of the oak tree from Tuoni, the god of death, because he has a whim to go sailing but is too lazy to build a boat the old-fashioned way, and wants to sing it into being but lacks only three magic words. The mistress of the Underworld captures and nearly kills him, but he escapes by turning himself into a snake, and instead goes to the millenia-old gravesite of the world's greatest giant-wizard of yore, and annoys him into waking up and disgorging the words in question. (Shades of Odin and his giant head in the basement, right?) It's definitely the most absolutely charming descent myth I've ever read. My second favorite episode is the one where he kills the leviathan and makes an enchanted lute from its jawbone, a musical instrument so powerful as to render him practically omnipotent. But then he drops it into the ocean, the end. XD
1. EXCEPTIONS: a) Ilmatar the sky goddess who appears only to give birth to Väinämöinen; b) Aino the maiden who gets sold into slavery by her asshole brother Joukahainen to save his own hide, then raped, then drowns herself; c) Lemminkäinen's mother, who doesn't merit a name; d) Ilmarinen the heavenly smith, who eventually wins the heart and hand of the maiden he courted, but then gets his heart broken when she's murdered shortly thereafter, and who then tries to build a robot wife (it doesn't work); e) Ilmarinen's sister Annikki, who in this edition appears just once, in the introduction to the story of his courtship, but who gets some really great lines.
I had bought an academic's modern literary translation a few years ago, but I just couldn't get through it. The translation doesn't seem to work. It's frequently the case with everything from advertising slogans and aphorisms to simple ordinary sentences that things sound cooler in Finnish - it's like it was designed for wordplay, and wordplays never translate well. (My Finnish is not up to tackling it in Finnish yet, however. I need a few more years' vocabulary at least, I think.) Anyway, the translator kept very close to the meaning of the text, and he labored mightily to render it in the same sort of register and to give it some meter, which I can see he did quite a good job of. But it doesn't change the fact that the Finnish is smooth and flowing, sharp and sprightly and light, and the English is clumsy, clunky, flat, and oafish in comparison. (I don't say that English has to be clumsy and clunky, just that that translation is.)
Anyway, I was able to see in a quick glance-through at the bookshop that this prose retelling is much more readable. The writer, Kirsti Mäkinen, did an excellent job, and the translator, Kaarina Brooks, was obviously very skillful as well; although, like every other English translation I've picked up that was published in Finland, this one didn't come out error-free. At least there were no line-editing errors, but there were definitely a couple of semantic problems (of the 'I see what you mean but that word doesn't exactly mean that in English, and if you're going to be Humpty-Dumptying it up you need to go enough over the top to make it clear that it was on purpose' type) which I would have gotten into it with her for, had I been employed at her publishers in an editorial capacity.
I entertained my wife and her Finnish friends on Twitter over the several days when I was reading bits of it. Living in Finland and being acquainted with artworks and everything-names (buildings, streets, cities, icecreams, people, construction equipment) named after the Kalevala, I sort of felt that I knew most of the main people already. Reading the actual stories was a bit shocking, then. It wasn't quite what I expected! Seeing the echoes of Gandalf in Väinämöinen and Aragorn in Ilmarinen is rendered surreal by the fact that Tolkien worked hard to render his characters with a dignity and solemnity that makes the Kalevala look like a comedy in comparison. The folk legends of the Kalevala don't have comic relief characters; everybody is made to look ridiculous in turn, and sometimes simultaneously with their moments of greatest coolness. And also there's the fact that almost everybody in it is an asshole1, but especially Joukahainen and Lemminkainen. The two of them could give lessons in How to be a Turd to Prince Joffrey. I kept looking up to shout "X is a COMPLETE DICK!"
The Kalevala almost reminds me more of a collection of individual folktales than of the Odyssey or the Edda. (Which isn't a complaint: I like both forms.) Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that it was collected/compiled/written so much more recently.
One of the things I noticed most keenly while reading was how extremely clumsily Christianity had been pastede on yey. I mean, the original basic stuff of the Kalevala is obviously an actual pantheic mythology. It literally starts with the creation of the world, including plants, animals, and people, and explicit reference is made to many different gods who are actually referred to as gods. But then every now and then, usually after the resolution (by god or magic) of some problem, somebody has just tacked on a couple of sentences that are like "but of course, while this was awesome, it wasn't NEARLY as awesome as the magic that the supreme creator God could've done. If he was there," or, "After all these several pages of spells calling on tons of different nature dieties by name, still nothing worked, and Väinämöinen was like 'Oh shit, no magic is even possible without God, even though earlier in this epic tale it was! God, I've gotta give you props, now would you please help a man out', so God fixed him up." Also there's a thinly-veiled Jesus allegory tacked on as the last chapter of the whole thing, with a weirdish explanation about how a holy infant is even more powerful than Väinämöinen and has thus rendered him obsolete, which is why he fucks off in a magical copper boat.
Another thing that made it a little surreal was having first read Finnish celebrity historian Matti Klinge's seminal Ancient Powers of the Baltic Sea a year or so ago. I kept trying to think back to it and wondering about the historical context without really remembering the details. (That book kept me on the edge of my seat. Maybe I should just get my own copy.)
And unrelatedly to any of my other reactions, there's a myth about Väinämöinen's descent to the Underworld, where he goes to demand the secret creation runes of the oak tree from Tuoni, the god of death, because he has a whim to go sailing but is too lazy to build a boat the old-fashioned way, and wants to sing it into being but lacks only three magic words. The mistress of the Underworld captures and nearly kills him, but he escapes by turning himself into a snake, and instead goes to the millenia-old gravesite of the world's greatest giant-wizard of yore, and annoys him into waking up and disgorging the words in question. (Shades of Odin and his giant head in the basement, right?) It's definitely the most absolutely charming descent myth I've ever read. My second favorite episode is the one where he kills the leviathan and makes an enchanted lute from its jawbone, a musical instrument so powerful as to render him practically omnipotent. But then he drops it into the ocean, the end. XD
1. EXCEPTIONS: a) Ilmatar the sky goddess who appears only to give birth to Väinämöinen; b) Aino the maiden who gets sold into slavery by her asshole brother Joukahainen to save his own hide, then raped, then drowns herself; c) Lemminkäinen's mother, who doesn't merit a name; d) Ilmarinen the heavenly smith, who eventually wins the heart and hand of the maiden he courted, but then gets his heart broken when she's murdered shortly thereafter, and who then tries to build a robot wife (it doesn't work); e) Ilmarinen's sister Annikki, who in this edition appears just once, in the introduction to the story of his courtship, but who gets some really great lines.
