Editorial

Of men and dogs

With 405 translations of his works in 35 languages (that we officially know of), Mika Waltari (1908—1979), is the most translated Finnish writer of all time. Waltari’s historical novel Ihmiskunnan viholliset (1964) appeared in England in 1966 as The Roman, in a translation by Joan Tate, then in the US and Canada. Last July Helsingin Sanomat newspaper reported that The Roman had been found to have transmigrated. A novel entitled Lindum Colonia, published by Virtualbookworm in Texas and written by one Colin Slater, is actually The Roman almost verbatim, all 600 pages of it.

One of the customers on the Internet bookstore Amazon’s pages comments: ‘Slater.... [mentions] about 18 months’ research work in England. I suppose you don’t need that much to change the title. You might have got away with this in the sixties, but Colin really, you did it in 2003. But hey, you made me and at least a few others smile and Waltari might even get a few more readers.’

According to LinkedIn.com, Colin Slater is currently head archivist at Wolftracer Studios Archive, an online which sells posters and pictures from cinema history. One of his ‘specialities’, we learn, is copyright law.

Some cinema history, then: Mika Waltari sold the rights to his most famous novel, Sinuhe, egyptiläinen / The Egyptian, (1945) for a screenplay in Hollywood in 1954. He received a modest fee — but never a cent of the film’s profits.

The five-million-dollar budget allowed for lavish sets and costumes; the film, directed by Michael Curtiz, got an Oscar nomination for best cinematography. But it wasn’t a huge economic success nor is it one of the great Hollywood movie classics. The original Sinuhe, Marlon Brando, quit, and he was replaced by a somewhat wooden Edmund Purdom. Apparently Waltari wasn’t greatly delighted with the rendering of his philosophical postwar portrayal of people in the throes of dangerous ideologies into a large-scale cinematic cavalcade of pseudo-Egyptian paraphernalia.

To commemorate Mika Waltari’s 100th anniversary, we publish his deliciously melancholy story The mistake in this issue. It takes place in post-war Naples where the host of a small restaurant, his old dog and a customer sit down to a late supper. They share a few bottles of wine and memories of war with each other, and the remains of a steak with the dog.

According to an article in the Daily Express, published in August, psychologists at the University of London now consider it ‘possible that dogs possess the capacity for a rudimentary form of empathy’; this they have proved by yawning tests. Dogs yawn, too, if a human yawns first.

Tell me about it... rudimentary! There’s more empathy on four legs than that, as anyone with canine acquaintances knows. Mika Waltari knew for one, he had a Scottish terrier and a dachshund as family pets, and he always portrays animals with insight and humour.

There’s another canine portrait in this issue: Kaarina Valoaalto’s elderly reindeer shepherd, from her new book Avantgarderob ja muuta irtaimistoa (‘Avantgarderobe and other moveables’), is very much her own dog.

Good new books are cropping up fast now; in this issue there are, among other things, extracts from Petri Tamminen’s new novel Mitä onni on (‘What happiness is’). In pursuit of that knowledge, his middle-aged male writer protagonist wanders off to Denmark.

Finland is revisited in Suomen kuvat / Homework, where Arno Rafael Minkkinen, the Finnish-born American photographer and professor in several universities, now reminisces about his childhood; his famous self-portraits are taken amidst Finnish nature where he feels most at home.

We hope you will enjoy reading this issue of Books from Finland, coming out in the literary harvest time!

Soila Lehtonen
Editor-in-Chief