Translation

You can't see the tiny print in that brochure image, but at the bottom left is an excerpt from the novel--the first paragraph, in fact, which in English reads:

Walk for a moment with Pentti Saarikoski, twenty and restless, down wintry Helsinki streets, his bootsoles barking narsk narsk on the dirty hardpacked sandstrewn snow, his nose hairs crackling in the subzero air, the cold like enhanced gravity in the predawn dark. If he hears the beating of my wings, he gives no sign. He has been out walking since six, it must be seven-thirty or eight by now, still no sign of morning. The three- and four-story buildings on either side of him seem to lean inward at the top, reaching across the gap with wiry hands to hold streetlamps over the middle of the street, the light casting yellow waterfall shapes on the plastered gray and brown walls and brown-flecked granite footings and steps, shadows like subversives plotting revolution. He favors the side streets over the main thoroughfares: lights on in the upper-story windows and the display windows of the shops closed below, a few cars bumping down over snowy cobblestones, here and there a Sisu or Scania truck pulled half onto the sidewalk to unload.

Anna-Riikka couldn't get ahold of Kimmo Lilja, the Finnish translator, and the brochure had to go to the printer, so she asked if I could do a rough translation of the passage for her, so that she and Anne could revise it for the brochure. Here's what I wrote:

Kävele kappaleen matkaa Pentti Saarikosken kanssa lumisia Helsingin katuja, hän on kaksikymppinen, levoton, hänen saappaansa narskuvat nokisessa hiekoitetussa kovaksitallatussa lumessa, nenäkarvat ratisevat pakkasessa, aamun pimeässä pakkanen on kuin tehostettua painovoimaa. Jos hän kuulee siipieni rapinan hän on kuin ei kuulisikaan. Hän on kävellyt jo kuudesta saakka, kello käy jo puolta kahdeksaa, ei vieläkään merkkiä päivästä. Molemmin puolin katua olevat kolme- ja nelikerroksiset rakennukset näyttävät nojaavan latvasta sisäänpäin, kurottavat langanohuita käsiään pitelemään katulamppuja keskellä katua, valo heittää keltaisia vesiputouksen muotoisia hahmoja ruskeanharmaaseen seinälaastiin ja kivisokkeliin, varjoja kuin salaliittolaisia hautomassa vallankumousta. Hän karttaa pääkatuja, suosii takareittejä: lamppuja palaa yläkerran ikkunoissa ja suljettujen kauppojen näyteikkunoissa, autoja pomppii lumisilla katukivillä, siellä täällä joku Sisun tai Scanian kuorma-auto on kaartanut puoliksi jalkakäytävälle purkamaan kuormaansa.

And this is Anne's version of that:

Kulje hetki Pentti Saarikosken kanssa lumisia Helsingin katuja. Hän on kaksikymppinen, levoton. Hänen saappaansa narskuvat kovaksi tallatussa lumessa, nenäkarvat ratisevat pakkasessa. Aamun pimeässä kylmyys on kuin tehostettua painovoimaa. Jos hän kuuleekin siipieni rapinan, hän on kuin ei huomaisikaan. Pentti on kävellyt kuudesta saakka. Kello käy jo puolta kahdeksaa, ei vieläkään merkkiä päivästä. Molemmin puolin katua kolme- ja nelikerroksiset rakennukset näyttävät nojaavan latvasta sisäänpäin, kurottavat langanohuita käsiään pitelemää katulamppuja keskellä tietä. Valo heittää keltaisia vesiputouksen muotoisia hahmoja ruskeanharmaaseen seinälaastiin ja kivisokkeliin, varjoja kuin salaliittolaisia hautomassa vallankumousta. Hän karttaa pääkatuja, suosii sivukujia. Lamppuja palaa yläkerran ikkunoissa ja suljettujen kauppojen näyteikkunoissa, autoja pomppii lumisilla katukivillä, siellä täällä joku Sisun tai Scanian kuorma-auto on kaartanut puoliksi jalkakäytävälle purkamaan lastiaan.

The big difference there, obviously, is that the long sentences were too awkward in Finnish, so Anne broke them up into shorter ones. Finnish can't do the long paratactic lists of gerunds that work so niftily in English (bootsoles barking, nose hairs crackling), so I had to go to full sentences, which gummed up the works, syntactically speaking, when strung together in long parataxes.

Brochure

The page for my novel in Avain's fall brochure

First Novel

So my first novel is being published: Saarikoski's Spirits in English, Pentinpeijaat in Finnish, by Avain.

What happened was this: I finished the novel in 2000, and spent several years (rather desultorily) looking for a publisher in English. No interest. The editors that had a look at it liked it well enough but didn't see a market for it--a fictionalized biography of a Finnish poet and translator who died two decades ago! An editor at Grove Press suggested I try the Finnish-American press, and North Star Press of St. Cloud, who had published my translation of Aleksis Kivi's Heath Cobblers, said they'd be happy to have a look at it. So I sent them a proposal and a sample chapter, and never heard back from them.

So finally, when Anna-Riikka Carlson of Avain asked me to translate the first seven chapters of Elina Hirvonen's Että hän muistaisi saman ("That He'd Remember the Same," literally, but the novel is now being published by Portobello Books in my translation under the English title When I Forgot, 2008 release date), so she could market the translation rights at the London Book Fair in the late winter of 2006, I was so impressed with the way she was running her relatively young publishing house that I offered her my Saarikoski. She took a few months to look it over, and when I was in Helsinki in June of 2006, visiting my daughter Laura, I met with Anna-Riikka and her summer intern Anne Rutanen, and we all more or less agreed that they'd do the book.

Since then, we've been working on it, editing it long-distance, spending hours on Skype chatting about it; about a month ago, it was finally pronounced ready for translation, and was sent to the Finnish translator, Kimmo Lilja.

When Anna-Riikka said she wanted to publish it in September, 2007, I had an idea: why not launch it on September 2, 2007--Pentti Saarikoski's 70th birthday?

My plans now are to fly to Finland in late October to promote the book at the Helsinki Book Fair.

The book's title:

My original idea in English was that the "spirits" in Saarikoski's Spirits would be both the booze that killed him and the tutelary spirits of the dead authors he's translating, who appear in the novel. When it was finally settled that the book would appear first in Finnish translation, I realized of course that the English pun on "spirits" wouldn't work in Finnish, and for several months wracked my brain for an alternative.

What I finally came up with was a variation on the Finnish concept of the karhunpeijaiset, the ancient Finnish bear-kill feast that was intended to guide the dead bear to Manala, the land of the dead. So instead of the bear (karhu), the dead spirit that would be guided to Manala would be Pentti: thus, pentinpeijaiset. But I didn't like the rhythm of that, so I suggested an older form of the word instead, -peijaat.