Aarresaari (Treasure Island)

Translator workshop

Aarresaari, the Treasure Island residency, brings together eight well-established Finnish translators in a workshop of dreams: each of us has chosen a work, in most cases a classic, that we would particularly like to translate. A couple of our choices are also to be published in the near future. The idea of our Saari Residence is to immerse ourselves in passages we have translated into Finnish of these books and discuss each of them in turn, no doubt receiving tougher criticism than we would from any other source. A translator who has accumulated years of experience and maybe various awards, too, very seldom gets any real feedback. With Treasure Island, we will be able to provide ourselves and each other with this much-needed commodity.

Treasure Island participants and their chosen books: 

Kristiina Drews, Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology, 1915

Outi Järvinen, Stella Benson: Living Alone, 1919

Jaakko Kankaanpää, Sheridan Le Fanu: The House by the Churchyard, 1863

Arto Kivimäki, Propertius: the first book of poetry, so-called Monobiblos, Latin

Alice Martin, George Eliot: Middlemarch, 1871-1872

Outi Menna, Tarjei Vesaas: Kimen, 1940, Norwegian

Sirkka-Liisa Sjöblom, Lina Wolff: Många människor dör som du, 2009, Swedish

Riina Vuokko, Li Yu: Rouputuan, 17th Century, Chinese

 

(English translation by Alice Martin)