The abessive

Finnish is weird. It's not related to very many other languages, and it's relatively highly inflected — 15 noun cases and moods that include optative, potential, and eventive — making it pretty interesting linguistically speaking.

New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani, is only indirectly about grammar. You need have no knowledge of Finnish in order to appreciate the novel. In fact, the reader makes discoveries about the Finnish language through its protagonist, an amnesiac who has lost the ability to communicate and who, when it's assumed that he's Finnish, sets about learning the language.

The thing he likes most about Finnish is the abessive, "a declension for things we haven't got: koskenkorvsatta, toivatta, no koskenkorva, no hope, both are declined in the abessive. It's beautiful, it's like poetry! And also very useful, because there are more things we haven't got than that we have."

For the man who assumes the name Sampo Karjalainen, because that's what the label in his jacket says, learning Finnish and roaming around Helsinki are the only possible way to stir up some memories, reclaim an identity. Oh, and it's 1943 — war is raging outside.

I don't know much about Finland, so it was a bit of an eye-opener to read about Finland's involvement in World War II, its warring history with Russia in particular, its relationship with Slavic peoples, and its epic tradition.

The Kalevala is Finland's national epic, with a creation myth, magic, and romance. The Sampo is a magical talisman said to bring luck to its holder and consequences on those who come into contact with it.

"When you read the Kalevala you will be a real Finn; when you can feel the rhythm of its songs, your hair will stand on end and you will truly be one of us! Look!" he added, opening the black leatherbound volume on the table. "These are not just words! This is a revealed cosmogony, the mathematics that holds the created world in place! Ours is a logarithmic grammar; the more you chase after it, the more it escapes you down endless corridors of numbers, all alike yet subtly different, like the fugues of Bach! Finnish syntax is thorny but delicate; instead of starting from the centre of things, it surrounds and envelops them from without. As a result, the Finnish sentence is like a cocoon, impenetrable, closed in upon itself; her meaning ripens slowly and then, when ripe, flies off, bright and elusive, leaving those who are not familiar with our language with the feeling that they have failed to understand what has been sad. For this reason, when foreigners listen to a Finn speaking, they always have the sense that something is flying out of his mouth the words fan out and lightly close in again; they hover in the air and then dissolve. It is pointless to try and capture them, because their meaning is in their flight: it is this that you must catch, using your eyes and ears. Hands are no help. This is one of the loveliest things about the Finnish language!"

New Finnish Grammar is a sad book, and quietly beautiful, but not the astoundingly original novel many reviews would have me believe. It's sad, but at a distance.

What Marani captures brilliantly is the experience of living in a foreign language. While my experience of choosing to move to a bilingual city in no way compares to Sampo's sense of isolation and his desperation to claim an identity, I do know what it is to be a linguistic outsider: no matter how well you conjugate your verbs, there will always be people who speak too fast or with a peculiar accent, that you will asking to repeat themselves or reconcile yourself to missing half of what they say; there will always be words whose meaning you have to piece together from context, semantic nuances you won't detect, cultural references that fly right past you. It is near impossible to be fully fluent in a language you learned the hard way.

In 1943 Finland, the present is bleak and the future uncertain; as time goes, it becomes harder to feel sympathetic toward Sampo. This book could have been about its other characters: the doctor who first found Sampo, the pastor who tutors him, the nurse who falls for him. Each of them has their own struggle with the past and their place in the world. I think it might have been a better book if these characters' stories were fuller, to balance Sampo's lack of a story.

A learnt language is just a mask

A learnt language is just a mask, a form of borrowed identity; it should be approached with appropriate aloofness, and its speaker should never yield to the lure of mimicry, renouncing the sounds of his own language to imitate those of another. Anyone who gives in to this temptation is in danger of losing their memory, their past, without receiving another in exchange.

— from New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani.

Translated books

The winners of this year's Best Translated Book Award were announced last Friday, with the fiction award going to Wiesław Myśliwski's Stone Upon Stone, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston.

Not having read any of the shortlisted titles, I was faintly rooting for New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani and translated from the Italian by Judith Landry, because I actually had a copy of it and was planning to read it soon (in fact, I'm reading it now). My second choice would've been In Red, by Magdalena Tulli and translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, because I've had it on my shopping list since last September.

So now I'm looking for a copy of Stone Upon Stone, only in Polish (Kamień na kamieniu), cuz it strikes me as something my mother might be interested in reading. (Only it's not so easy to find and it will not be done in time for Mother's Day.)

Here's something to chew on: it's not a new book. The novel was published in Polish in 1984. There was a movie in 1995. The English translation was published December 2010. That's a long time for a book to find an audience beyond the speakers of its original language.

I'll add a word of general praise for Bill Johnston, translator of the winning book and one of the other finalists (see above). This winter I listened to his translation of Stanisław Lem's Solaris — "the definitive edition" — and it was unputdownable (something I never thought I'd say about an audiobook). The credit for this is in part owing to the stunning source material, as well as to the impeccable narration (Allessandro Juliani). This audio experience was vastly superior to that of reading the book (and that's another thing I never thought I'd say with regard to an audiobook) — some time ago I read an English version that was translated via French. All this to say: you're doing a great job, Mr Johnston.

Note, however, that the above-mentioned award is for the best translated book. This is not synonymous with "best translation." It might help to think of it as the best book newly brought to the attention of English readers, which is a collaboration between publisher and translator and dependant on the quality of the source material. Maybe?

I read a healthy amount of translated fiction. Over the last year or so, the predominant source languages have been French and Polish — ironically languages that I am capable of reading in the original (given time, patience, and a dictionary, and acknowledging that they will be read at the expense of any subtlety and nuance in the language).

I detect occasional hiccups in phrasing. These can generally be chalked up to the fact that the books were written in another era (for example, Simenon books of the 30s), or they are "historical fiction" and describing another era (for example, contemporary Krajewski noirs, set in the 30s and prior)— they are not of this millennium.

The very best translators are, of course, absolutely invisible. I don't notice them, and they generally go unheralded.

How about you: do you pay any heed to who translates the foreign fiction you read? (Really, barring novels by the Tolstoys of the world, how often do you get to choose whose translation you're going to read?) Are you concerned about what's lost in translation?