Word for Word Exchange: Finnish

Columbia University School of the Arts & University of the Arts Helsinki, 2017

In July 2017, two School of the Arts graduate students were hosted by the University of the Arts Helsinki to participate in a ten-day collaborative residency. They attended intensive Finnish language and literature courses, and began to work with their Finnish counterparts on translations of each other’s writing. This work was continued two months later, when School of the Arts invited the students back to New York for workshops and seminars in creative writing. The culmination of this exchange was a reading of the final translations, followed by a panel discussion on the translation process, and a reception, graciously presented and hosted by Scandinavia House of the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Columbia University School of the Arts Participants:

LIZA ST. JAMES is a writer and translator from San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Tunica, Vitriol, Guernica, Gesture, BOMB, and other publications. She is an editor-at-large for Transit Books and associate editor of the literary annual NOON.

SARAH TIMMER HARVEY is a writer and translator currently based in New York, where she is completing an MFA in writing and translation at Columbia. Excerpts of her latest work, a translation of Calf's Caul by the Dutch poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, were recently featured in Asymptote, and were a finalist for the Gulf Coast Translation Prize.

University of the Arts Helsinki Participants:

FANNY EHNVALL:
I am the sound [ˈfɑnːi eˈliːsabetː ˈeːnvalː].
I live and work.
I think.
Out of nowhere one evening when I was nine, my parents gave me Nordstedts Svenska Ordbok + Uppslagsbok. It had consequences. I find all my projects by deliberately misunderstanding dictionaries and following words
Fine art is called free art in Swedish and Finnish.
I prefer to practice the latter.

ELLI SALO is a Finnish playwright, dramaturg, and translator. She received her MA in Russian literature from the University of Helsinki in 2011. She is currently enrolled in the MA program in Dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy (University of the Arts Helsinki). Her play Elk hunt is a contemporary wilderness story that investigates our relationship to nature in an era of environmental crisis. The play was premiered at The Theatre Academy of Finland in 2016 and adapted for Radio Yle, Finnish public broadcasting in 2017.

Institutional Partners:

UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS HELSINKI (Uniarts Helsinki) fosters Finnish artistic heritage and renews art. The university was launched in 2013 upon the merging of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Sibelius Academy, and Theatre Academy Helsinki. Uniarts Helsinki’s Theatre Academy is a reformer of the performing arts. It provides the highest education in the performing arts in Finland, training actors, directors, dramaturges, lighting and sound designers, professionals in dance (choreographers and dancers), performance artists, dance and theatre educators and artist-researchers.

Established in 1911 by Danish-American industrialist Niels Poulson and a group of other forward-thinking leaders from business and education, THE AMERICAN-SCANDINATIVAN FOUNDATION (ASF) was the first international non-governmental society to have as its sole purpose the development of goodwill through educational and cultural exchange. It was designed to meet the needs of its time through fellowships, scholarly exchange, exhibitions, and publications. These programs have grown over the years, and along with the cultural programs at Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America, have provided a comprehensive platform for ongoing international exchange between the United States and the Nordic countries.

Workshop Instructors:

SUSAN BERNOFSKY directs the translation program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her translations include works by Robert Walser, Yoko Tawada, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka, and Hermann Hesse. The recipient of numerous awards (most recently the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize), she blogs about translation at www.translationista.com and is currently writing a biography of Walser.

JUSA PELTONIEMI is a professor of theater and dramaturgy at University of the Arts Helsinki. His poems, novels, plays, and translations have been published widely. He is the recipient of The Runeberg Prize, The Spike Award, and was a finalist for the Finlandia Literary Prize.

ALYSON WATERS has translated works by Vassilis Alexakis, Louis Aragon, Emmanuel Bove, Albert Cossery, and Jean Giono, among many others. Her translation of the novel Préhistoire (Prehistoric Times), by Eric Chevillard, published by Archipelago Books in 2012, won the Florence Gould/French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund Grant, and two residency grants from both the Centre national du livre and from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (Canada). She was named a “chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres” by the French Ministry of Culture for her work as a translator. She teaches literary translation in the French Department of Yale University, and has been the managing editor of Yale French Studies for over twenty years.