Meritxell lives a deep and loving relationship with Finnish and Finland that leads her to face the challenge of translating books from Finnish into Spanish. “Untu y el secreto de las luces del invierno” is her latest published translation. Read her reflections on Finland and the study and translation of Finnish in this interview.
By Hannu Arvio
I wanted to start with your relationship with Finland. You just translated a book from Finnish into Spanish, so one would assume that your relationship with Finland has some depth.
A little bit, yes.
So, how did it all start?
How it all started… Well, things happen in life that you didn’t expect. I studied translation, and in my third year, I went to Italy for Erasmus. There I met my ex. We started a relationship, and when I finished my degree, I moved to Finland. I was living in Finland for almost 5 years, and then we came back to Spain. While we were together, we went at least once a year to Finland. The relationship ended, but my relationship with Finnish and Finland continues, so I keep going when I can and I keep translating.
Your story begins as a love story, then.
It started as a love story for a person and has ended up being love for a language and also for a country. That would be a bit of a transition.
You were living in Finland for five years. Where?
First, before I finished my degree, I spent four months doing an internship in Helsinki. It was like an “Erasmus internship” and I worked in a publishing house. I went back to Spain to finish my degree, and when I finished that same year, I returned to Finland to settle in Tampere, where I lived from 2010 to 2014.
About five years. What is the best thing about Tampere?
I wouldn’t know what to tell you… But I think the atmosphere, that’s what I like the most. There are a lot of university students, a lot of culture, a lot of concerts, exhibitions, museums… The city is beautiful, with the rivers and the two lakes. But what I like most is the people and the atmosphere.
It’s the complete opposite of what you often hear about the Nordic countries: that the people are a bit dull, that there’s no atmosphere, that nothing happens….
Let’s see, it’s not like here in Barcelona, you go out in the street and the atmosphere is already there. In Tampere, you have to look for that atmosphere, but when you find it, it’s very cool.
With the Finns, you ended up interacting in Finnish.
Yes, curiously enough, I started to interact in Finnish a few months before returning to Barcelona. And now, when I go there, I speak Finnish. It was difficult, to be honest. Being a linguist, I am very perfectionist when I speak in other languages. I don’t like to make mistakes, and it wasn’t until I felt very confident that I started speaking it. People would speak to me in Finnish, and I would answer them in English.
You have now reached quite a good level, since you translate books. You say you have been a perfectionist with Finnish, to the point where there are several years of difference between when you started studying and when you started speaking. If you could start from scratch, what would you do?
Speak up from the beginning, obviously. Not being embarrassed. I guess being younger (I was 23 when I moved to Finland), I was very embarrassed about everything. Now that I’m about to turn 35, the embarrassment is much less than it was; I’m a little bit more unashamed. If I were to talk to my “me” from the past, I would say, “speak (Finnish), because if you speak it, you will learn it much, much faster.”
You could say that studying Finnish is for adults.
Yes (laughs), or at least for people who are not ashamed to make mistakes, because it’s difficult. I still make mistakes when I speak it, obviously, and when I write it, just like I can make them when I speak English, but now I feel more comfortable with the mistakes I make and they are no longer so big that I can’t be understood or that they can lead to big misunderstandings. That was what put me off a bit at the time, some things I said that meant something completely different and made people laugh; I thought it was better not to speak to avoid those reactions.
What would you say to someone who is thinking about studying Finnish or who has just started? What would you tell them that could help them face that challenge?
That I had a lot of patience (laughs). In the end, it depends a lot on the desire that each person puts into it. Each person’s brain is different. For me, who likes music very much, listening to music in Finnish helps me a lot. I learn new words by memorising the songs. Actually, I would tell them to use Finnish whenever they have the chance. If you talk to Finns, they really appreciate that you are learning it. In the end, there are few people, especially outside of Finland, who learn Finnish. If you meet a Finn and you speak Finnish to him/her, he/she will appreciate it and will help you, although it is true that they are not very good at correcting you if you make a mistake. In Spain, I know many people who, if they talk to someone from abroad and they make a mistake, they correct it immediately. In Finland, that doesn’t happen, almost never. You can say something wrong for months, and nobody corrects you; you have to realise it yourself.
You have been living in Finland with a Finn, and there is a lot of praise for the functioning and living conditions of Finnish society. Did you notice that in your life there, did you have that same perception?
I think so. I actually like Finland very much, and my family and friends tell me that I am very Nordic. I really like having my space and people respecting my private life (even if I end up sharing it), I like that people don’t think you have to explain everything. You go your own way and that’s it, even if it can generate a feeling of loneliness. For example, I am a woman, and here (in Spain), when you get to a certain age, you usually get comments like “and you are not getting married? I have never been asked these questions in Finland. They don’t get into your life like that, they don’t ask you such personal questions. And apart from that, in my circles of friends in both countries, there are both men and women. In Finland, we relate much more to each other, whereas when I meet my group in Spain, in the end, we always end up with the women talking on one side and the men on the other. And in Finland, I have the feeling that we mix more, which is my perception, although it may also be something of my group of friends.
In fact, being Finnish myself, I quite share what you have said.
It’s like I don’t see the gender divide there as clearly as I do in Spain, for example, and I think that’s a very positive thing.
We’ll come back later to this question of genre, but now I wanted to ask you about the book you translated. It’s a children’s story about Untu, a character who is in southern Finland and sets out on a journey north in search of the winter lights because they catch his eye. Is there something distinctly Finnish about that story, in your opinion?
I think the story itself is not Finnish, but it does have very Finnish elements. The story is like any adventure in general, for example, “The Lord of the Rings”. It’s the story of a journey, but there might be things here that you don’t quite understand or that clash a bit. For example, you mention Finland, and many people say, “Oh yes, Finland, how beautiful the northern lights are”, but there are Finns who have never seen the northern lights in their lives. And this is exactly what the book is about. The character, who is in the south, has probably never seen the northern lights, and that is why they attract his attention. But many people in Spain may think that auroras are something very normal there. The book is 100% Finnish in terms of the stories and traditions it recounts, but not in terms of its history.
The story is a “road story.”
Yes, the “I’ll walk around and see what I find” type.
In any case, there are many Finnish elements: snow, sauna, Lapland, forests, northern lights, certain characters… In Finnish, there are approximately 40 different words for “snow”. How do you, as a translator, face the challenge of translating so many different words and expressions for which “snow” would be used in English?
In this case, I didn’t want to complicate the story too much, and I used the word “snow” on every occasion. For a simple reason: I believe that Finnish children’s books contain a higher language and vocabulary than the Spanish ones. I was translating the book and hallucinating. It is supposed to be a book for children from 7 or 8 years old, but there were vocabulary and descriptive words that I can’t imagine a child from here using such poetic words. And I didn’t want to complicate it, so I used “snow” unless it was something very specific, for which I added adjectives. For example, white snow, powder snow, melted snow… In the end, it’s trying to do what you can with the resources you have.
Finnish has a specific word for each type of snow; there is even a different word depending on how the snow is piled up.
Exactly, and in this case, the solution was to use the word “snow” and add the adjective that corresponded to it according to the context.
In addition, there are other things. For example, in Finnish, each type of snowfall has a specific name and an associated verb. The verb “to snow” as such does not exist. More examples: the book uses words related to sauna and others that are, shall we say, untranslatable.
Yes, I had a bit of a hard time translating that particular chapter. When doing a translation, a proofreader always reviews it and suggests changes or touch-ups, and when I received the proofreading of this one, I saw things that I thought didn’t make sense. For example, I don’t remember the specific passage, but I do remember that it was a moment when a character was in a sauna and climbed onto the benches. The proofreader suggested I change that and have the character climb up the stones inside the sauna, but that wouldn’t make any sense because those stones are hot, they burn. And at this point, I realised that not everyone has to know that those stones that are in the saunas are on a stove and are the ones that make it hot. In Spain, if you go to a Finnish sauna, those stones are not there. I had to think about how to do it so that it would be well understood. Kiuas, löyly… are concepts that have no translation. In the end, I ended up translating löyly as steam because it made the most sense in that context. Kiuas translates to oven or sauna chimney.
In the sauna, kiuas is where the fire with the stones is, let’s say the “furniture” that heats the sauna.
Exactly. In the end, I translated it as oven or chimney, I don’t remember exactly. But you have to translate it into things that can be understood here. Although luckily, it’s a picture book and you can see it, so you also have to take into account what’s drawn, so it can be understood. But I did spend time on that chapter, sometimes I even asked my boyfriend’s opinion to check if the translation was understood. It was fun (laughs).
Another thing about translating from Finnish to English. Finnish has no gender, so, for example, if you talk about meeting a friend and you don’t specify, you might be referring to a friend or a female friend. Finnish is perhaps one of the most egalitarian languages in the world, in that sense. And in Spanish, every word has its gender. How do you deal with that aspect when translating?
With this book, I only had problems with a few characters. Untu, who is the main character, has a beard, and it is implied that he is a man, although he could also be a woman, why not? Although in this case I used “he.” But there are other characters that are animals, and I chose the gender of the animal in Spanish. There is a seagull, and I used “she.” There is a bear, and I used “he.”
In Finnish, the word “bear” can refer to both “male bear” and “female bear”, so if you don’t specify, you don’t know exactly.
Sure, but in Spanish, there are animals whose word already has a gender. There are male seagulls, but we call them gulls anyway. Towards the end of the book, a village appears, and it was easier because of the illustrations: if it had a beard, I assigned “he”, if it wore a dress, I assigned “she”…. Or at some point, the word “emäntä” (woman) was used. But invented characters also appear. For example, at the end of the book, the piles of snow appear as characters. In this case, I used the generic plural “they” because they were entities. I think I used that, but I would have to check. There are other characters, the ones with names. There was one in particular named Sinervo, which in Finnish is used more as a surname than a first name. But on researching, I saw that it could be a woman’s name used in the old days.
Sounded like a man to me.
I saw that it could be a woman’s name. I didn’t know what to do. If you followed heteronormativity, it had to be a man, because he was married to a woman, to a character who wore a dress in the illustrations.
But it doesn’t have to be either.
Exactly, it doesn’t have to be. This case was very difficult for me. I didn’t know what to do, whether to include two female characters, one of each… In the end, I let the publisher decide. I gave them options for both male and female names, and they decided on a male-female couple. But I think it would have been interesting to have a different kind of couple, although that might have added a nuance to the story that isn’t there in the original Finnish text. Ideally, when you have time, you can talk directly to the author and discuss your doubts with them. But in this case, the publisher decided.
Do you plan to translate anything else in the future?
I just delivered another translation right now, but it’s adult literature. I think the book will be out in May. Also difficult to translate, but for other reasons.
