Frans Eemil Sillanpää: Meek Heritage

[Mirabell]

I put the Finnish title, because I read it in German translation and don't know the English translation title. The German title is (don't know Finnish so I can't say whether it's close) Sterben und Auferstehen. Translator is Edzard Schaper. Can't say I heard of him before that.

And wow what a great novel this is. It's a novel that is, as I tend to say, bigger inside than outside. There's a whole world, with its history and psychology etc in there and its only 220 pages. Finishing it it felt as if I had read over 500 densely written pages.

And it's not even dense, as far as I can see through the usual haze of translation. Very easy to read, an engrossing read, with an incredibly weak protagonist, who still manages to carry the story. That works because Sillanpää never descends into simple-minded psychology. He shows how the country and events shape the main character as much as his actions do.

Where am I going with this? Dunno. Recommendation. Excellent novel.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

I put the Finnish title, because I read it in German translation and don't know the English translation title. The German title is (don't know Finnish so I can't say whether it's close) Sterben und Auferstehen

We have a Frans Eemil Sillanpää thread, and I just checked the bibliography: it's one of only two titles of which the English title is there: Meek Heritage. I've changed the thread to this.

I do wish some publisher would pick up the rights from wherever they are rotting, get some translations done, and get him back in print. I'd love to read his work.

[Mirabell]

Yah the German translation is out of print as well, I ordered it used on amazon. Get Sillanpää in print, guys. He's worth it.

[Eric]

Mirabell, he say:

Get Sillanpää in print, guys. He's worth it.

So, how would you set about familiarising a British or American publisher with a Nobel prizewinner that could be re-translated or, at the very least, re-printed in English and German?

Have you any idea how difficult it is to get British and American publishing houses (with a few honourable exceptions) to take on anything in translation?

You need a willing publisher, a willing translator (such as, maybe, David Hackston, Hildi Hawkins, David McDuff, or me in five years' time), funds to pay for the translation (usually coming from, in this case, FILI). And then, when the book comes out, you need reviewers on tap to review it in visible, mainstream publications. Otherwise the book will have a shelf life of two months, get remaindered, and sink without trace. The Pushkin Press, with its history of classics, is a likely press, or maybe Norvik.

Like the translation itself, getting the book into the shops is a practical problem. Planning, strategy and execution, not just good ideas.

[Eric]

In #1, Mirabell says he has given the Finnish title. That is not true: he has given the English title, whether he read it in German or not. But thanks for giving a quick review, anyway.

The Finnish title of this novel is Hurskas kurjuus which translates roughly as pious, or devout misery, or wretchedness. This is not really the same as a meek heritage.

Sterben und Aufstehen is, likewise, quite another take on the contents of the novel, as far as I know, as I haven't read it.

From one Finnish article, I understand that Sillanpää describes the two sides in the bitter Finnish Civil War that took place between the Reds and Whites at the time Finland was breaking away from Russia in 1917-1920. But the author evidently avoids taking sides. And from what I gather, the novel is a panoramic one starting as far back as the 1860s, about what the Swedes call torpare, the Finns torpparit, poor farmers scraping a living in the countryside. Nevertheless, Sillanpää evidently makes the novel lyrical.

*

Edzard Schaper (1908-1984) was a German living in, yes, you guessed, Estonia from 1930-1940, whereafter he crossed over to Finland, then on the side of Germany, as a war correspondent. He evidently had close contacts with the Nazi author Hans Johst, which he kept quiet about, cf Grass and Strittmatter and was quite a Nazi during the War, a member of the Reichsschifttumskammer, run by Johst after being founded by Goebbels.

In 1944, however, Schaper obtained Finnish citizenship. He thern fled to Sweden, then to Switzerland, where he converted from Russian Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism.

The only book of Schaper's that I have is Der Gouverneur oder der glückselige Schuldner from 1954, set in Estonia in the early 18th century, from what I can gather, when that country was still a Swedish province.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Eric

In #1, Mirabell says he has given the Finnish title. That is not true: he has given the English title, whether he read it in German or not. But thanks for giving a quick review, anyway.

Actually, he did give the Finnish title. But, as I said in #2, I changed it.

[Eric]

OK, Mirabell gave the Finnish title, and Stewart changed it. I have now explained what it means and shown how neither the English nor German titles are quite the same. This is something we have looked at in the Literary Translation section. Title changes from language to language are interesting.

Anyway, here's a bit directly translated from the Finnish by me about that civil war they had in Finland, in 1918 specifically (I was a bit vague before). The statistics are not in dispute.

Finnish-language source:

Kiiltomato.net - Kesäklassikko: Kurja mikroskoopissa

F. E. Sillanpää's fourth novel was published immediately after the Civil War (1918), in 1919. The reception varied. In Sweden it was praised, but in Sillanpää's home country [i.e. Finland] the reception fell into two groups: the Reds felt that they had been belittled, while the Whites thought the book was too understanding when it came to the Reds.

The Civil War is a controversial topic. Finns fought Finns, although both sides wanted an independent Finland [i.e. independent of Russia]. In the war, about 3,500 Whites and 5,500 Reds were killed. In other acts of violence, linked to the war, the Reds killed around 1,650 Whites, while the Whites executed some 8,380 Reds. The Whites imprisoned some 80,000 people of whom around 12,000 died.

I'm not sure how much the average European is aware of this very bloody civil war, that has affected Finland to this day. Finland only had a population of about 4 million at the time of the Civil War, so it was pretty traumatic for everyone.

[Mirabell]

I have a shortish essay in the making but I'll say this, it is similar in topic to "The Guest", but the treatment is different. It is remarkably uninterested in the atrocities and barbary brought about by the civil war, although it does mention them quite a lot. I would say the fact that Jussi/Juha is the focus of the story, a deeply apolitical man, who joins the Reds in his old age and is shot by the reaction after the Reds retreated (this is said in the firs pages of the book, so I am not spoiling the end for you) shows how a people can get involved in this. I can well see how the Reds felt belittled, because Jussa/JUha is not yr typical revolutionary. He is a brute, with a rough understanding of power who, almost instinctively, seized the opportunity to be part of something big, something that will harm those who have lorded it over him for most of his life.

[Eric]

Thank-you Mirabell for that last information. Now we're getting down to brass tacks. Looking forward to your essaylet. I was thinking of you when I had a look to see what is available in German translation by Sillanpää and found this webpage:

Amazon.de: frans eemil sillanpää - Bücher: Bücher

While browsing there, I also came across the Wikipedia article of a forgotten translator, who also did Sillanpää, namely Rita Öhquist:

Rita Öhquist ? Wikipedia

So between them, Öhquist and Schaper gave German-speakers the opportunity to read Sillanpää (and others) in German.

To pick up on Mirabell's comments on the fact the the Finnish Civil War is the background rather than chief focus of Hurskas kurjuus / Meek Heritage / Sterben und Aufstehen, in that same review article that I mentioned earlier we read Sillanpää's own words from the prologue:

Two matters are left out of the book. The first is the Jägers' orgy of executions and the second ends at a piece of agit-prop: "The Finnish working man and woman, can you ever forget and forgive the Russian oppressors for this terrible murder? Do you not ball your fists and swear eternal revenge and feel hatred towards that race of barbarians for pushing their way into our Finnish territory and causing all the fear and atrocities, that have been vcarried out here? Do you not feel that your blood instinctively dreads that whole land of horror and the vile level of people there, who have never brought Finland anything else but suffering after suffering...?"

This is how many more right-wing Finns felt at the time of the Civil War, as Finland had been part of the Russian Empire from 1809-1918, and the Whites hated everything that Russia stood for. This put the Reds in an awkward position, as they would like to have used the help of their Russian brothers and sisters to smite the Whites and the class society, but they knew that would run the risk of turning Finland, once again, into a vassal state of Russia. So the Reds were caught between a rock and a hard place in their struggle.

By focusing on the more personal side of poverty and oppression, Sillanpää no doubt sought to show a real human life in the protagonist Juha Toivola, rather than get himself tangled in siding with the Reds or the Whites.

But the Finns, who had some help from Germany during the Civil War, were to encounter Russia again during the Winter War and the Continuation War, which formed part of the Second World War, which broke out just after Sillanpää had received his Nobel Prize. After WWII, Sillanpää published little. Curious for someone who had won the Nobel.

For details of the Finnish Civil War, see:

Finnish Civil War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an exceptionally good and thorough article for the Wikipedia, and shows the background to the war, rather than limiting itself to naming a series of skirmishes, battles and atrocities. With such an enormously long land border with Russia, Finland always was, and always will be, in a weak geo-political position.

[Mirabell]

The Finnish title of this novel is Hurskas kurjuus which translates roughly as pious, or devout misery, or wretchedness.

Is that an idiomatic expression in Finnish? How is "wretchedness" evaluated? Is this the somewhat positive usual christian bdsm "wretchedness" (not German christians tho. Germans just love to make other people suffer while pretending they aren't suffering. Oh, I'm digressing) or is this true misery? Intriguing.

[Eric]

The short answer, Mirabell, is that I don't know. I am the one-eyed man becoming king in the country of the blind. The only person who could, with much justification, usurp my throne on this website, as far as I can see, is Iiris, who was actually schooled in Finland, and will therefore know the Finnish language vastly better than I do.

So I do not know whether Hurskas kurjuus has any Biblical or other literary connotations or references (e.g. Leino, Kivi, etc.). The only thing I can say is that the word hurskas has a whiff of hypocrisy or naïveté, according to the dictionary.

This whole debate over one word is typical of the work of a literary translator who should, in an ideal world, get everything right.