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  • Dickinsonian Idiom in Finnish, on a Par
  • Sirkka Heiskanen-Mäkelä (bio)
P258/Helvi Juvonen Rückübersetzung
Va/lo viis/toon lan/ke/aa Light falls slant
tal/ven päi/vi/en. of winter's days.
Se ah/dis/taa kuin pai/na/vuus It oppresses like the preponderance
ka/ted/raa/li/en. of cathedrals.
Taivas viiltää haavansa. Heaven slits its wound.
Ei näy arpi sen. No scar appears thereof.
On vain muutos sisäinen /There/ is but a change
merkityksien. of meanings within.
Sitä ei voi opettaa. It cannot be taught.
Se on toivoton. It is beyond hope.
Sinetti, kipu ylhäinen A seal, a pain celestial
meille suotu on. upon us is conferred.
Sen tulo pidättämään saa Its coming makes
henkeään maiseman. the landscape hold its breath.
Sen meno on kuin etäisyys Its going is like the distance
katseessa kuoleman. on the look of death.

Back in 1982 I wrote:

One big problem, though not unsurmountable, in translating Dickinson into Finnish is her metrics. The natural rhythms [End Page 44] of Finnish are falling—trochaic or dactylic—and even if Dickinson herself sometimes uses trochaic meters, they rhythmically very little resemble e. g. the four-beat trochaic line so typical of native Finnish poetry. Besides, the excessive length of Finnish words (with the main word-stress always falling on the first syllable) makes it almost impossible to imitate phonologically the quick—or clipped—beat of Dickinson's verse, and her most usual meter—iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter lines—is (to say the least)—clumsy in Finnish. Even her own fondness of polysyllabic words does not help much, as these "big"—often Latinate—words very seldom have literal equivalents in Finnish, for which they have to be "explained" in some way or other. While Dickinson's own abstractive—or elliptic—diction calls for only a few words, the Finnish tongue—by nature very concrete and descriptive—demands a great many of them to translate the same idea. That means, among other things, that if the translator wants to keep to the meter, he or she has to leave out at least some of the literal content of the original poem. Dickinson's grammatical—syntactical or other—experimentations with the English language also tend to lose their flavor when one tries to render them into a language morphologically and syntactically so different from English.1

All these observations are, of course, valid even today. I also still believe, as "firmly" as I did then, that Dickinson's prosodic devices have to be imitated, as far as possible, in the translation and that even her metrical schemes have to be retained, however difficult they may be to render in Finnish. Dickinson's prosody is largely of her own making and as such surpasses the claims of a mere cultural norm. She used, for instance, her very simple stanza forms as a means of cutting her wording "to the meager essential," and the translator has to adopt the same manner, whatever resistance his or her own language may offer in this respect. Certain thematic and cultural—or even geographical and climatic—peculiarities always demand special attention in translating Dickinson's verse, but final success therein lies not in just interpreting her "Meanings" but in interpreting—or rather recreating in the target language—also the means by which she fixed on paper the "truths" she divined. It is also, in the end, the only way of "naturalizing" the poet's voice. [End Page 45]

Owing to all these difficulties, Dickinson translators in Finland have been but few—mostly anthologists and critics.2 The largest single selection of Dickinson's verse published in Finnish so far, Valitsee sielu seuransa (Jyväskylä 1992), contains sixty five translations, eleven of them by a notable Finnish modernist poet Helvi Juvonen (1919-59). As editor, and one of the two other translators, of this selection I have the pleasure of presenting here her Finnish version of P258. In an admirable way Juvonen's rendering attains both to the substance and the prosodic restraint of the original, and is, accordingly, one of the finest Dickinson translations ever made...

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