A sudden feeling of alienation overcomes me as I wander the streets of a strange city. Not because the city is a strange one. Nor because I am abroad, in a foreign-language environment.      But because the street-names are written in only one language. It is as if reality has been flattened, the street-signs censored, or as if some part of my body were missing.      It is not easy to understand the experience if one has lived in a single-language environment, whether in Madrid, Stockholm or Tampere.      But the gaze of a Finnish-speaker in Helsinki has grown used to seeing the city as two. In Helsinki, even many advertisements are bilingual: for example, a bank may advertise prosperity in its display windows in both Finnish and Swedish. The gaze always seeks the mother-tongue, but encounters another language. There is always a different way of saying the same thing. A strange way one doesn't quite understand. My father spoke only Finnish; my mother was Finland-Swedish. I could well belong among the group of bilingual citizens which are counted as Finland-Swedish. But this is not the case. I speak only school Swedish, which is, for Finns, a compulsory basic skill, because Finland remains a bilingual country.      Education, civil services and overdue notices are provided in Swedish for a minority of about 300,000 people. What has, on the other hand, been scandalous is that, because of a lack of language skills on the part of lawyers, it is today difficult to guarantee legal services in their own language.      Can there, then, be said to be equality before the law?      In principle, however, everything is nevertheless well. The position of the Finland-Swedish minority is strong, even though its proportion of the population is now only 6 per cent. The reasons for the strong position are mainly historical: Finland formed part of the kingdom of Sweden from 1521 right up to 1809, when the official language was, naturally, Swedish.      Even afterwards, the Swedish-speaking population has been so influential in terms of culture and prosperity that the Swedish-speaking 'better folk' are still cursed in the city.      The workers and farmers are easily forgotten. Because of its bilinguality, two separate literary histories are also written in Finland. Of these, the Finnish-language version is a slower sequence of changes, and as such original. The Finland-Swedish version, on the other hand, has been more avant garde - and as such highly original.      Sometimes it seems as if Finland-Swedish writers write their works on the cruise-ships that ply between Finland and Sweden, between two literatures, in no-man's-land. The setting is often Finnish, but literary influences have arrived in Finland-Swedish literature rapidly from continental Europe, flowed from Stockholm to Helsinki, but also from Helsinki to Stockholm.      In recent years, however, Sweden has turned its back on Finland-Swedish literature, and it is no longer distributed in Sweden as much as a matter of course as before. At the Finnish end, of course, there is the language barrier, which is overcome from time to time.      The poet Peter Mickwitz and the translator Tarja Roinila have overcome the language barrier. At this moment, they are working on a criss-crossing pair of anthologies: contemporary Finland-Swedish poetry in Finnish, and Finnish poetry in Swedish.      When these books are ready to read and the different traditions flow into one another, new variations may be born in Finnish, in which conviction will encounter lightness, the sharpness of the image the accuracy of rhythm, intellectuality corporeality.      As if, once more, one were to see the street-signs of one's home town in two languages.      Jyrki Kiiskinen      Editor-in-chief Top of page