I’ve been labouring away with this Kalevala project for weeks now, using up all my limited free time and am still only roughly halfway through with it. The waves of desperation casually roll in too deep onto my beach of ataraxia but I’m soldiering on. It’s rewarding to have so many different sources to draw from but it can (and will) also cause me to sidetrack pretty easily. I have the original, actual text that looks at the Kalevala storylines from an slightly different angle, then I have a Kalevala in Finnish, as well as three different English translations. Leafing through the translations I often see a sidetrack presenting itself and I can’t help sinking into the well of endless comparisons of how this person has seen and described this particular situation and how it differs from this other persons’ view of it. When I snap back from these comparisons, I sometimes find myself having thrown the entire evening away on folly with no actual work done and bedtime looming just around the corner. It’s fun, though. Here’s an example:

In chapter 10 Ilmarinen is treacherously tricked into climbing a tree, despite his eternal smithness and other gallant qualities, and the tree expresses its’ sentiments about the nature of Ilmarinen’s stunt like this: "Voipa miestä mieletöintä, äkkioutoa urosta!” This caused some amusement to arise and lighten my otherwise hefty burden of translational aspirations, “äkkiouto uros” being such an entertaining previously unheard-of expression, literally translating as “steeply strange male”. The amount of amusement gradually increased as I dug out different translations for the sentence. The oldest one seems to be "O thou senseless, thoughtless hero, thou hast neither wit nor instinct” which is a kind of an so-so effort, not really catching the mood of what’s happening. The next one, from the year 1963, was “Woe is a foolish man, a quite inexperienced person!”, a much more accurate and apt take on the subject and my amusement deepened considerably. It reminded me of “You son of a silly person!”, a classic Monty Python insult. Now we’re talking, I thought; National Epic infused with occasional Monty Pythonisms predating Monty Python.

The newest one from 1989 is "Alas for a mindless man, an utterly strange fellow!” and this really hits the nail on the head in my opinion, being a very good translation, as well as having been a complete and royal waste of time with no practical advantages to me or to the text I’m trying to churn out. This Keith Bosley version, where the quote comes from, seems to be the best one of the translations. Unfortunately my copy of it is a smallish sized paperback version with almost 700 pages so it’s very irritating and impractical to deal with. Because of this, and to decrease the amount of frustration caused by having to wrestle with a book that’s too small for its’ content, I’m mostly relying on the much more comfortable-sized version by Francis Peabody Magoun. Which also is quite good, but in a different way. And it opens neatly, and stays open neatly without cracking its’ spine. So, if the lyrics on the next Amorphis album fail to live up to the expectations of an casual, ardent Amorphis fan, it’s not my fault at all, it’s because the best available book for source material was an Oxford World’s Classics version and therefore way too hard to read through properly.

THIS WEEKS’ SOURCE OF DELIGHT:
Well actually not the actual delight of the whole actual week as such. I chanced upon the lyrics for an Irish folk song “Three Drunken Maidens” some time ago, appreciated them quite a bit, what with all the pushing about of jugs by a trio of jolly wenches who clearly enjoy their states of inebriation very much, and just now stumbled onto this here video:




THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Cono Sur Pinot Noir is a red wine from Chile that got rave reviews in a Finnish wine magazine. I found nothing extraordinary in it. It was flat and one dimensional on the first try, probably because I served it cool as it says on the label, got better after having gasped for air overnight but still failed to reach any kind of magnificence. Substantially ok and helped in fortifying my resolution to look more towards the reds of the old world.

Grüner Veltliner Lössterassen is a white wine from Austria with a horribly cheap-looking label that promises a lot less than it actually delivers. This was my first take on this grape and a much more successful one than the recent disaster with gewürztraminer. However, it seems to have failed in making a significant mark on me, since I had it only a week ago and can’t now recall any kind of distinctive qualities anymore. Could be there wasn’t any to start with. Could also have something to do with my overall capability of not really remembering that well what has happened recently. Nice, but not remarkable at all and won’t be purchased again.