In a published extract from her diary, my illustrious predecessor Anna Makkonen described a day in the life of the editor of Books from Finland. Pekka Tarkka, then as now a member of our editorial board, had been checking over a David Barrett's translation of a short story by Joel Lehtonen (Books from Finland 4/1981). 'David and I breathed down his neck as we followed his reading,' she wrote; 'Pekka said he could hear Lehtonen's rhythm in David's text.' A toast (sherry, perhaps; or could it have been champagne?) was drunk – to literature, I imagine, and translation. 'Ideas flowed.'      How greatly, dear reader, would I like to be able to assure you that this civilised tradition of literary editing is alive and well at Books from Finland. That the silence that prevails in our book-lined, lamp-lit office is broken only by gasps of admiration as we read aloud particularly fine passages from the books we are considering for publication, or by cultured discussion of art and politics. Sadly, however, such a way of working life is one we can only aspire to; the current editorial team represents a decidedly more low-life approach to office culture.      Books from Finland inhabits a small room off a back yard in Kruununhaka, the area of central Helsinki that lies behind the cathedral. No one could find us if they didn't know we were here; and that's probably just as well. A typical day when I'm in residence – I visit Helsinki four times a year for about a week, to see the magazine to press and attend the meeting of the editorial board, which determines overall policies and discusses the content of the following issue – will find myself and Soila Lehtonen, my opposite number here in Helsinki, slumped over our desks. We'll be reading, yes, but we'll also be avidly discussing our other preoccupations – where we should go for lunch, how much (or little) we go to the gym, whether Lapland is really any good for downhill skiers, the usefulness of mobile phones (me) or their ghastly intrusiveness (Soila).      There are moments of high inspiration, of course, but there are also the slow afternoons when nothing will keep us going but the endless cups of coffee that form our staple diet. Soila has developed an extensive and inventive metaphorical lexicon of exclamations to keep us amused on those days when nothing seems to go right: common invectives include paise! ('abscess' or, the translation I favour, 'buboe'), kyttyrä! ('hump'; as, I suppose, in 'he gives me the – ') and pönttö! ('can', as in toilet, I've always thought, although Soila assures me that the derivation is actually from a bird's nesting box. I feel this is unlikely). Then there are the darker streams of invective, my favourite of which is the prophetic threat, hänelle tulee suru puseroon – a real challenge to the translator, this one: literally 'she (or he) will have grief in his (her) blouse', which possibly relates to a northern English cognate, the insulting appellation, 'yer great girl's blouse'.      Beyond keeping my knowledge of colloquial Finnish up to the mark, of course, our hamming up of a thank-God-it's-Friday office culture fulfils a practical, and even essential, role. For the rest of the year, when I'm not in Finland, we are tele-workers. I firmly believe that if a magazine isn't based on real conversations in the real world, it is difficult for it to claim a right to existence; and so Books from Finland's office life, much of which might so easily, to the untrained eye, look like little more than idle banter, lays down the foundation for our conversations during the long periods when our communications are mostly by e-mail. If those were 'purely' about literature, and not about the life around us too, I think I'd become rather nervous about Books from Finland's capacity to involve or interest you, our readers.      Ours is only one way of editing a magazine, of course, and I am sure its informality reflects the growing speed and informality of the technology we use. In Anna's day, most correspondence was conducted by letter, backed up by the occasional (enormously expensive) international phone call, and that both allowed a certain leisure and bred a certain formality.      We gain from our advancement in time and technology; but we also lose, of course. I'm an enormous fan of Joel Lehtonen's lyrical evocations of artistically aspirational lives around the eastern Finnish town of Savonlinna in the nineteen teens, and the way in which they were shattered forever by the Finnish civil war of 1918. What puts me off attempting a translation of his collection of short stories Kuolleet omenapuut ('Dead appletrees') is that – I agree with Anna and Pekka – it's difficult to imagine a better translation than David Barrett's. Whether it was a matter of gender, temperament or historical sensibility (he was born in 1914), David had an empathy for Lehtonen's writing that I can only envy. David died in 1998. And Books from Finland's conversation lost a voice, and part of its living connection with history and the fabric of Finnish literature.      It is enough to make you stop for a moment, and take out the office half-bottle of cognac from its hiding place in the coffee cupboard. And drink a toast; to literature, and translation. Top of page