#281:  KALEVALA.  Reading the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, is like visiting an utterly strange and foreign country.  You don’t know the cities, and can’t quite make out the street signs; you don’t speak the language, have never read their poems, and know nothing of the local gods or cults.  The landscape is beautiful, in a northern way that denotes a demanding lifestyle; but the roads take turns you don’t expect, the fauna are unfamiliar, the people keep their distance. The whole experience of the visit required a great deal of patience, and has left you baffled, fascinated and exhilarated in roughly equal parts.

       A good deal of this, of course, has to do with what the work is.  It is a gathering of very early myths and tales, long pre-Christian—“a world more archaic than that of Beowulf,” in translator Keith Bosley’s words—but the texts were only gathered together in the mid-nineteenth century, when the passions for folkloric study and nationalism were at sudden full tide; so it is neither entirely ancient or completely modern.  Elias Lönnrot, who edited the pieces together, sought to make a literary whole of the very disparate bits, and hoped to give a focus to the new hopes of Finnish independence from both Sweden and Russia.  In the first intention, the success was very hit-and-miss; the Kalevala to modern taste is fragmentary and dreamlike, with great chunks of plot soldered together and veering unpredictably along.  Its progress is more lingual than dramatic, and a good deal of it resembles nothing so much as the Scots border ballads in their distinctive mode of storytelling.  It is not at all a work of realism: when people speak to trees, they speak back; bird eggs grow to be humans, including Väinämöinen, the story’s Adam.  An abominable young girl, Tuoni, gives birth, and her offspring are colic, gout, cancer, plague and other horrors.  People die and are returned to life by rites and charms.  There are shamans and spells and curses, a ritual bear hunt and an important charmed object called the Sampo, as mysterious in its way as the gae bolga, the lethal whatsit of the Irish Táin Bó Cúailinge, a work the Kalevala resembles in more ways than one.

        But inn his hopes for the work’s political impact and cultural importance, few writers in any country or language have had Elias Lönnrot’s success in providing a central, unifying work of literature: the Kalevala sits at the exact center of the Finnish spirit, successful in its day and successful still.  Its fame was extended by its influence both in the visual arts and music, in a way that must remind us of Wagner’s hope of producing, in the Ring cycle, a work that would fuse all of the arts into a whole.  Finland’s most famous painter, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, spent a chunk of his career illustrating the Kalevala, in a sort of art nouveau manner superbly toned to the story’s imaginative sweep; it’s his work you’re likely to see on the covers of recent editions.  And Finland’s most famous composer, Jean Sibelius, was taken hold of by the Kalevala early in his career and it found its way into his compositions for the rest of his life.  References to the work surface everywhere: ice cream brands, progressive rock groups, and businesses dealing in everything from health insurance to asphalt. 

        One of the main difficulties in reading the Kalevala in English translation is the work’s trochaic tertrameter, measured in quantities rather than stress counts—a form natural to Finnish and, by all reports, handled with great mastery in the original (you can hear recitations in Finnish online).  But the meter is not natural to English, to put it gently.  The one serious experimentation with it in English is Longfellow’s Hiawatha, a work he composed on the model of the Kalevala, and with something of the same intent—allowing the white settler population of America access to native stories.  What has a natural swing in Finnish in Longfellow quickly becomes merely repetitive, even comical, in English—try to remember the last time you heard anyone reciting “On the shores of Gitchee Gumee” without giggling. In earlier translations of the Kalevala that mimic the trochaic meter, monotony sets in almost immediately; F. P. Magoun’s later version, is prose and, I’m afraid, prosaic.  I think both Keith Bosley’s translation in the Oxford World Classics series and Eino Friberg’s version for Penguin Classics represent real advances in getting the work into the reach of English readers: both are conscious of the original’s metrical movement but not trapped by it and the language in both, if obviously a translation of an extremely foreign model, is not painful.  Both Bosley and Friberg do their determined and ingenious best to coax into English the great strangeness of the Kalevala—so ancient and dreamlike in feeling, like the Mahabharata or the Tain Bo Cuailnge, and yet in some ways so plain, so matter of fact.  A. K. Ramanujan once said that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata stories for the first time; I suspect for Finns, the Kalevala has that same local familiarity.  It’s a distant and foreign country; but coming back from it, you feel, as Pico Iyer said of the transformations of travel, that the person who returns from it is not the person who went.

Elias Lönnrot:

The Kalevala, translated by Keith Bosley.  Oxford World’s Classics, 1989.

Kalevala: The Epic of the Finnish People, translated by Eino Friberg.  Penguin, 2021.

     Bosley works with a syllabic metre, and has a good ear for alliteration, and uses many of the formal devices of the Finnish—alliteration, formulaic construction—with considerable skill.  Friberg stays closer to the original trochaics, but with a variety that keeps them from becoming monotonous or ludicrous.  The translations by John Martin Crawford and W.F. Kirby, in verse, and by Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., in prose, are still in print and available online for free.