Kielen energiaa

The Energy of Language – On the Translations of Moreeni by Lauri Viita and Their Reception During his short life, the Finnish poet and novelist Lauri Viita (1916–1965) published four collections of poems and two novels. His most famous work Moreeni (”Moraine”) published in 1950 belongs to the most central novels in Finnish realism. In the context of Finnish literature, Viita is known, for example, for his dynamic language and power of expression. However, Moreeni has been translated only into few languages: German in 1964, Swedish in 1965, Polish in 1970, Hungarian in 1977 and Russian in 1981. e aim of this article is to examine the translation history of Moreeni and the reception of the translations by focusing on the German translation Ein einzelner Weiser ist immer ein Narr by Carl-August von Willebrand (1923–1999) and the Swedish translation Morän by Nils-Börje Stormbom (1925–). e translators’ strategies are analysed by means of the concepts domestication and foreignization introduced by Lawrence Venuti in 1995. e reception is analysed with regard to the concept of paratext coined by Gérard Genette in 1987. e results indicate that it is problematic to place the translators unambiguously in regard to the domestication/foreignization dichotomy; they make use of both strategies. e reception of the German and Swedish translations has in general been positive, although the material is relatively scarce. Due to lack of translations, Viita is not as well-known abroad as, for example, his contemporaries Mika Waltari (1908–1979) and Väinö Linna (1920–1992).