Author: The Editors
A thankless task?
24 November 2011 | Letter from the Editors
Translator at work: St Jerome, translator of the Latin Bible in the late 4th century, is the patron saint of translators and librarians. Leonello Spada's 1610s painting, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Picture: Wikimedia
Why translate, asked the late Herbert Lomas thirty years ago in an issue of Books from Finland (1/82) – the pay’s absurd, one’s own writing suffers from lack of time, it’s very hard to please people. And public demand for translation from minor languages into English was almost non-existent.
But he also admitted that translating is generally a pleasurable experience: ‘You have the pleasure of writing without the agony of primary invention. It’s like reading, only more so. It’s like writing, only less so.’ More…
Make or break?
17 November 2011 | This 'n' that
Two tax collectors: anonymous painter, after Marinus van Reymerswaele (ca. 1575–1600). Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy. Wikimedia
In Finland, tax returns are public information. So, every November the media publish lists of the top earners in Finland, dividing them into the categories of earned and investment income. Every November it is revealed who are millionaires and who are just plain rich.
The Taloussanomat (‘The economic news’) newspaper offers a list (Finnish only) of the 5,000 people who earned most last year (in terms of both earned and investment income, together with the proportion of income they have paid in tax). You can also search lists of various status and professions: rock/pop stars, media, sports, MPs, celebrities, politicians of various political parties…
So let’s take a look at Taloussanomat’s selected list of authors: number one is the celebrity author Jari Tervo (309,971 euros, tax percentage 45); number two, the internationally famous Sofi Oksanen (302,634 euros, 46 per cent); the next two are Sinikka Nopola, writer of children’s books, (264,000) and Arto Paasilinna (262,300; now after an illness, retired as a writer), translated into more than 30 languages since the 1970s. (The film critic and author Peter von Bagh made almost 900,000 euros – not by writing books, but by selling his share of a music company to an international enterprise.)
As tax data are public in Finland, there’s vigorous and decidedly informed public debate on how much money, for example, directors of public pension institutions and government offices or ministers and other top politicians are paid, and how much they should be paid: what is equitable, what is reasonable? A million dollar question indeed…
Among the European Union countries, it is only in Finland, Sweden and Denmark that there is no universal minimum wage. Here, wages are determined in trade wage negotiations. The average monthly salary in the private sector in 2010 was approximately 3,200 euros. In contrast to that, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, the Nokia CEO and President, who tops the 2010 tax list, earned a salary of 8 million last year, because – and precisely because – he was sacked (and replaced by the Irishman Steven Elop).
The CIA’s Gini index measures the degree of inequality in the distribution of family income in a country. The more unequal a country’s income distribution, the higher is its Gini index. The country with the highest number is Sweden, 23; the lowest, South Africa, 65 (data from both, 2005). Finland’s figure is 26.8 (2008), Germany 27 (2006), the European Union’s 34. The United Kingdom stands at 34 (2005), and the USA at 45 (2007). The figure in Finland seems to be on the rise though, as the figure back in 1991 was 25.6.
There’s been plenty of research and debate on economic inequality and the ways it harms societies. This link takes you to a fascinating video lecture (July 2011 – now seen by almost half a million people) by Richard Wilkinson, British author, Profefssor Emeritus of social epidemiology.
Finlandia Prize candidates 2011
17 November 2011 | In the news
The candidates for the Finlandia Prize for Fiction 2011 are Eeva-Kaarina Aronen, Kristina Carlson, Laura Gustafsson, Laila Hirvisaari, Rosa Liksom and Jenni Linturi.
Their novels, respectively, are Kallorumpu (‘Skull drum’, Teos), William N. Päiväkirja (‘William N. Diary’, Otava), Huorasatu (‘Whore tale’, Into), Minä, Katariina (‘I, Catherine’, Otava), Hytti no 6 (‘Compartment number 6’, WSOY) and Isänmaan tähden (‘For fatherland’s sake’, Teos).
Kallorumpu takes place in 1935 in Marshal Mannerheim’s house in Helsinki and in the present time. Laila Hirvisaari is a popular writer of mostly historical fiction: Minä, Katariina, a portrait of Russia’s Catherine the Great, is her 39th novel. Gustafsson’s and Linturi’s novels are first works; the former is a bold farce based on women’s mythology, the latter is about guilt born of the Second World War.
The jury – journalist and critic Hannu Marttila, journalist Tuula Ketonen and translator Kristiina Rikman – made their choice out of 130 novels. The winner, chosen by the theatre manager of the KOM Theatre Pekka Milonoff, will be announced on the first of December. The prize is worth 30,000 euros. It has been awarded since 1984, to novels only from 1993.
The fact that this time all the candidates are women has naturally been the object of criticism: why are the popular male writers’ books of 2011 missing from the list?
Another thing that these novels share is history: five of them are totally or partially set in the past – Finland in 1935, Paris in the 1890s, Russia/Soviet Union in the 18th century and in the 1980s, and 1940s Finland during the Second World War. Even the sixth, Huorasatu, bases its depiction of the present day in women’s prehistory, patriarchy and the ancient myths.
The jury’s chair, Hannu Marttila, commented: ‘This book year is sure to be remembered for a generational and gender change among those who write literature about the Second World War in Finland. Young woman writers describe the war with probably greater diversity than before. From the non-fiction writing of recent years it is clear that the struggles and difficulties of the home front are increasingly being recognised as part of the general struggle for survival, and on the other hand the less heroic aspects of war, the shameful and criminal elements, have also become acceptable as objects of study.’
Marttila concluded his speech: ‘When picking mushrooms in the forest, I have learned that it is often worth humbly peeking under the grass, and that the most glaring cap is not necessarily the best…. Perhaps it is time to forget the old saying that there is literature, and then there is women’s literature.’
Warmer climes
10 November 2011 | This 'n' that
Up and away: Jukka is about to leave for the south. Photo: Hannu Vainiopekka /Finnish Museum of Natural History
Jukka spent the night of 9 October by the river Sana in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He then crossed the Croatian border, at times reaching a speed of 96 kilometres per hour.
By 15 October Jukka had crossed the border between Libya and Niger; 350 kilometres later he settled in the desert for the night. After entering Cameroon on the 21st, Jukka completed his journey of 34 days and 6,600 kilometres by landing on the bank of River Benoue and taking a well-earned break. In March it will be time to head homewards again, to Lake Pälkäne in Finland.
Jukka is a Finnish osprey.
Earlier, another osprey, Lasse, surprised the zoologists by spending his winter in Israel, instead of Africa. But Harri decided to wing his way as far as to South Africa, almost 12,000 kilometres from home, a distance he covered in some 57 days!
The Finnish Museum of Natural History / University of Helsinki and the Finnish Osprey Foundation track ospreys with the help of satellite tracking.
Long-distance travelling is dangerous, though: Eikka perished on his way to the south in Ukraine this autumn, and in 2008 Pete was probably eaten by a local eagle in Morocco: some of his feathers, as well as the transmitter were found beside a river by two officials of the Emirates Center for Wildlife Propagation, Eric Le Nuz and Rachid Khain.
Gone fishing: Jukka the satellite osprey having lunch. Photo: Hannu Vainiopekka/Finnish Museum of Natural History
And why this interest in wildlife, you might wonder? Oh, as we sit here and edit Books from Finland in the semi-darkness of a November afternoon, creatures that migrate just seem to come to mind. Not to mention hibernation, but that’s another matter….
Helsinki Book Fair 2011
2 November 2011 | In the news
President Toomas Hendrik Ilves at the Book Fair: Viro is Estonia in Finnish. Photo: Kimmo Brandt/The Finnish Fair Corporation
The Helsinki Book Fair, held from 27 to 30 October, attracted more visitors than ever before: 81,000 people came to browse and buy books at the stands of nearly 300 exhibitors and to meet more than a thousand writers and performers at almost 700 events.
The Music Fair, the Wine, Food and Good Living event and the sales exhibition of contemporary art, ArtForum, held at the same time at Helsinki’s Exhibition and Convention Centre, expanded the selection of events and – a significant synergetic advantage, of course – shopping facilities. Twenty-eight per cent of the visitors thought this Book Fair was better than the previous one held in 2010.
According to a poll conducted among three hundred visitors, 21 per cent had read an electronic book while only 6 per cent had an e-book reader of their own. Twenty-five per cent did not believe that e-books will exceed the popularity of printed books, and only three per cent believed that e-books would win the competition.
Estonia was the theme country this time. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of the Republic of Estonia noted in his speech at the opening ceremony: ‘As we know well from the fate of many of our kindred Finno-Ugric languages, not writing could truly mean a slow national demise. So publish or perish has special meaning here. Without a literary culture, we would simply not exist and we have known this for many generations, since the Finnish and Estonian national epics Kalevala and Kalevipoeg. – During the last decade, more original literature and translations have been published in Estonia than ever before. And we need only access the Internet to glimpse the volume of text that is not printed – it is even larger than the printed corpus. We live in an era of flood, not drought, and thus it is no wonder that as a discerning people, we do not want to keep our ideas and wisdom to ourselves but try to share and distribute them more widely. The idea is not to try to conquer the world but simply, with our own words, to be a full participant in global literary culture, and in the intellectual history and future of humankind.’
Finland meets Estonia: authors Sofi Oksanen and Viivi Luik in discussion. Photo: Kimmo Brandt/The Finnish Fair Corporation
Snowbirds
2 November 2011 | Extracts, Non-fiction
The short winter days of the northerly latitudes are made brighter by snow cover, which almost doubles the amount of available light. Reflection from the snow is an aid for photographers working outdoors in winter conditions. A new book, entitled Linnut lumen valossa (‘Birds in the light of snow’), presents the best shots by four professionals, Arto Juvonen, Tomi Muukkonen, Jari Peltomäki and Markus Varesvuo, who specialise in patiently stalking the feathered survivors in the cold
The photographs and texts are from the book Linnut lumen valossa (‘Birds in the light of snow’, edited by Arno Rautavaara. Design and layout by Jukka Aalto/Armadillo Graphics. Tammi, 2011)
Snowy owl. Photo: Markus Varesvuo, 2010
Publisher: sold!
14 October 2011 | In the news
WSOY trademark: design by Akseli Gallen-Kallela
The Swedish media company Bonnier (est. 1804) has bought the Finnish WSOY (Werner Söderström Corporation, est. 1878) publishing company, formerly owned by the now multinational Sanoma Corporation. Bonniers’s learning materials in Finland and Sweden were simultaneously bought by Sanoma.
Leena Majander-Reenpää, former managing director of Otava Publishing Company (est. 1890; she resigned from her job last year), is the new vice CEO responsible for the publishing programme and foreign rights at WSOY.
Anne Valsta, CEO of the Tammi Publishers, (est. 1943, also owned by Bonnier since 1996) is also the CEO of the new WSOY.
The president of the Swedish Bonnierförlagen AB, Jacob Dalborg, will be the Chairman of the Boards of both Tammi and WSOY; he says both will continue as independent companies.
Bonnier operates in 17 countries and employs more than 10,000 people. WSOY last year shed 40 jobs and now employs some 100 people.
Where’s life best for women?
14 October 2011 | This 'n' that
Ice, lava & quality life for women: Iceland. Photo: Soila Lehtonen
In Iceland.
The Daily Beast – the online home of Newsweek Magazine – has compiled the rankings of the best and worst countries for women to live in. 165 countries were analysed by using five factors – justice, health, education, economics and politics – and awarding scores of 0 to 100.
Each category included between four and ten data points, depending on the reliable data points available. The results, published last month, show that for a woman Iceland is the best place: overall score was 100.0. Second was Sweden (99.2), third Canada (96.6), fourth Denmark (95.3) and fifth Finland (92.8). The next five were Switzerland, Norway, USA, Australia and the Netherlands.
The final ranking is based on how much better or worse a country is for women when measured against the average level of women’s rights for all 165 countries – of which the worst three are Yemen, Afghanistan and Chad.
Some progress seems to have been going on in the world lately; in politics women have become more visible. They will now even be allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia. (But there women are still not able to leave the country or work without a permission from a male relative – or drive a car.)
Iceland’s current prime minister is Johanna Sigurdardottir; the country’s score points for politics is 92.8, whereas Finland’s is 100.0.
However, justice and economics do not score as high in Finland as in Iceland. ‘Prevalence of intimate partner physical and sexual violence’ may cause the loss of points in the former case, and ‘women’s wages as a percentage of men’s’ in the latter.
Finland is the only country on the list with 100.0 points in politics: currently the president, 84 of the 200 members of the parliament and nine ministers out of 19 are women. So, it might be quite possible that women will make Finland climb up towards the top of the mountain – or rather, volcano?
Your heart on your sleeve
7 October 2011 | This 'n' that
Street cred of Hel Looks: Josua and Julius. Photo: Sampo Karjalainen
The founder of Hel Looks, which charts clothing styles of Helsinki denizens (which we featured here on the Books from Finland website), has been talking to Finnish television (programme in Finnish) about her website.
Established in 2005, the site – which has an eye for the weird and wonderful rather than the classically stylish – attracts an average of 10,000 visitors a day, two thirds of them from outside Finland.
Fashion editor Liisa Jokinen says she got the idea for the site while on holiday in Sweden. ‘I think a lot of Finns admire the Swedes’ fashion sense and in particular their stylishness. But in fact the range of styles is greater in Helsinki, and Finns have the courage to be different,’ she says.
Recent images from the site bear her comments out, and chart the sheer range of costume that she and the photographer Sampo Karjalainen set out to document. Take the 13-year-old fashionistas Josua and Julius (left), snapped on Bulevardi in central Helsinki on 1 October, for example: ‘We dance hip hop and house. It inspires our style. We try not to dress up like all other boys’; or Noel Coward fan Janne, 51, seen on 3 September: ‘I’m wearing an English tweed suit tailor-made in London. I live in Mexico, where I normally wear a white linen suit.’
Best of all, says Jokinen, is when she comes across someone for a second time without realising that she took their picture a year or so back. The image of Helsinki reflected by Hel Looks is made up of people, not buildings. ‘I believe people and their clothes contribute much more to a city than its buildings do,’ Jokinen says.
The photos on the Hel Looks site, currently numbering some 1,200, offer us visions of how people want to be seen; in this selection, few dress to play a role. People wear what they think is fun or/and stylish, and we, the onlookers, enjoy being the judges of this city catwalk.
Thrills ‘n’ spills
3 October 2011 | In the news
Thrillers occupied half the top ten spaces on August’s list of best-selling fiction titles in Finland, compiled by the Finnish Booksellers’ Association. Top place was taken by Leena Lehtolainen’s latest crime thriller, Oikeuden jalopeura (‘The lion of justice’, Tammi).
At number two was Kaari Utrio’s new historical novel, Oppinut neiti (‘Learned Miss’, Amanita), followed by Kari Hotakainen’s Jumalan sana (‘God’s word’, Siltala).
The non-fiction list reflected Finns’ passion for mushrooming. Since August, rain and warmth have worked wonders for friends of fungi: zillions of ceps, boletuses, chanterelles as well as poisonous specimens are abundant everywhere, so you’d better know which are safe to put into your pan. The top 20 list includes four guidebooks/cookbooks for those who love roaming in the forests and fields in pursuit of mycotic delicacies. The list was topped by Sienestäjän opas (‘Mushroom hunter’s guide’, Gummerus), which even beat the Finnish version of Harry Potter Film Wizardy.
Nature boy
15 September 2011 | In the news
Seal signed: Saimaa ringed seal by Erik Bruun
The graphic artist Professor Erik Bruun has been awarded the Luonnotar / National Spirit of Nature Award for 2011.
The prize, established by the Puu kulttuurissa / Wood in Culture Association in 2001 and now worth € 12,000, is awarded bi-annually to Finnish professionals of any field of culture whose work has helped to make the public in Finland and abroad more aware of Finnish culture, heritage and environment.
Erik Bruun (born 1926) – who was the Art Editor of Books from Finland from 1976 to 1989 – is perhaps best known to the public for his numerous posters and advertisements, in particular his nature posters for the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation: the Saimaa ringed seal, the bear, eagles, owls, seagulls and other birds.
Bruun’s interest in nature photography, drawing, etching and lithography have long combined in his work for the Finnish wood processing industry as well as in his illustrative work for magazines and books and in designing postage stamps and banknotes.
A book on his life’s work, Sulka ja kynä. Erik Bruunin julisteita ja käyttögrafiikkaa (‘The quill and the pen. Posters and graphics by Erik Bruun’) by Ulla Aartomaa was published in 2007 (and reviewed in Books from Finland 3/2007). Take a look at his work on his home page.
The sound of music
2 September 2011 | This 'n' that
Helsinki Music Centre: the main hall. Photo: Arno Chapelle
The long-awaited new concert hall, Musiikkitalo (’Music house’, in English Helsinki Music Centre), in front of the Parliament house in the very heart of the city, was opened with a concert (this concert is available at YLE Areena until 30 September) featuring Sibelius and Stravinsky on 31 August.
Musiikkitalo finally provides a new home for two orchestras, the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, as well as for the only Finnish university of music, the Sibelius Academy. It is owned by the Finnish government, the City of Helsinki and Finnish Broadcasting Company. The costs of the building rose from an original estimate of 98 million € in 2005 to 190 million €.
The acoustics designer is the renowned Japanese specialist Yasuhisa Toyota. The building, containing seven halls of various sizes, will provide specialised surroundings for different kinds of music and musicians, acoustics in the existing Finlandia Hall (designed by Alvar Aalto) and other local venues long having proved inadequate or faulty.
The site has remained misused for decades: the brick warehouses, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were finally abandoned by the national railway company in the 1980s and subsequently occupied by various artists’ and civil organisations, housing popular restaurants and flea markets. Many protests took place when the warehouses were doomed to demolition – and then the buildings were finally destroyed in 2006 in a fire.
The brand new concert hall in Reykjavik, Iceland, is called Harpa (‘Harp’). Wouldn’t it have been nice to give also Musiikkitalo a more exciting name to go by – maybe conduct a straw poll among listeners? Some of the rows of seats (1,704 in all) in the main hall resemble logs floating down in a river, so what about Log jam? Or does that have unfortunate connotations for a project that’s meant to provide Finnish music with a new dynamism?
Slow down!
26 August 2011 | Letter from the Editors
Books for a desert island? Photo: Patrick Verdier (Wikimedia)
Might Tolstoy’s War and Peace be the epitome of a novel that qualifies for reading on a desert island? (Maybe along with Tristram Shandy or Finnegan’s Wake, and possibly The Gateless Gate (the Zen Buddhist kōans). After all, who’s got time or energy for some 1,500 pages of a wartime story from the Napoleonic era with too many characters (580, and so many of them called Pierre)?
We do tend to consume everything quickly: busy busy! We eat fast, we talk fast, we exercise fast, we fast-forward through movies. We devour books like fast food. Hurry hurry! On to the next one, whatever it is, don’t hang about! More…
Under the August moon
26 August 2011 | In the news
The Night of the Arts, 2009. Photo: Sasa Tkalcan
Helsinki becomes a busy cultural city in every August: Helsinki Festival, Stage Theatre Festival and Poetry Moon festival, for example, have a great variety of happenings on offer.
Also the seventh annual Helsinki Poetics Conference – an international and interdisciplinary conference for poets, writers and literary scholars – takes place on 27 and 28 August.
The organisers are the poetry organisation Nihil Interit (the publisher of the journal Tuli&Savu, ‘Fire&Smoke’) in collaboration with the Finnish Literary Research Society, and it is a part of the Runokuu / Poetry Moon international poetry festival.
And The Night of the Arts, of Helsinki Festival, takes over the city – for the 23rd time, tonight.
Summer in the bookshop
11 August 2011 | In the news
Not a surprise: in June and July Finns liked to read thrillers, both Finnish and foreign, as the Bookseller’s Association of Finland’s list of the best-selling Finnish fiction shows. Three out of top five on the Finnish fiction list were crime stories; number one was Mustasiipi (‘Blackwing‘, Otava), a thriller by Reijo Mäki.
Tuomas Kyrö’s book of short prose about a grumpy old man resisting all sorts of contemporary fads, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offence’, WSOY), was stubborn enough to stick to number four (as in May).
Sofi Oksanen’s hugely successful novel about women and Estonian history, Puhdistus (2008), English version: Purge, keeps going strong: it is still number six on the list.
On the non-fiction list there were books, among others, on cooking, gardening and birds – in summer Finns like to grill barbecues while listening to birdsong and reading about diets, trekking and handicrafts…