Owen Witesman

On translating Tatu and Patu

Owen Witesman on the complexities of putting the world of two small Finnish boys across in English

I don’t know to what extent someone who hasn’t lived in Finland will realise it, but Aino and Sami have packed more Finnishness into 47 pages than I would have believed possible. Imagine 56 clowns piling in a VW Beetle. Conveying even a portion of the textual nuances was a real challenge.

The thing most often misunderstood about translation is that it isn’t about one word or grammatical structure in one language equalling one word or grammatical structure in another language. That’s machine translation, and it just doesn’t work. The connections between the source and target are complex, debatable, and subjective, even with most technical texts. If I translate the words — i.e. according to a bilingual dictionary — is the same mood created or does the dialogue sound authentic? For some people, a translation should always sound like a translation; for others, you should never be able to tell that it wasn’t written in the target language.

In This is Finland there were parts that had excellent correlates, whereas some others just didn’t. The most extreme example was a poem:

Leivonnainen niin kuin kansa,

marjaherkku väen mukainen,

juuret metsän perukoilla,

pellon pielessä perijuuret,

vaatimaton, nöyrä muoto,

silkkaa suloa sisältä!

Oh Finland, now I taste thy baked goods,

I find they match thy lovely laked woods.

To what shall I compare this pie,

Save thy rolling fields of rye?

Ever humble, Finland mine,

There is no pie on earth like thine.

I have to thank the Bard — and my thespian wife — for helping me get anywhere but frustrated with this (see Sonnet 18). As to the ‘accuracy’ of the translation, well, it stinks. The words just are not the same. And where is the rhyme in the original? And let’s not even talk about the metre. But, even so, is it faithful? Censeat lector.