Klevius Kalevala Day lesson: The God distortion of Kalevala

Only an Atheist reading of Kalevala has a chance of penetrating Lönnroth's and others God filter

 

Keith Boseley: The original Kalevala metre remains a mystery. Many Finns and translators into a variety of languages make matters worse by following Schiefner. The present English translator has learnt from his native tradition, begun by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s (1516/17 – 1547) sixteenth-century versions of Virgil, by avoiding original metres. Thousands of lines before tackling the Kalevala, I developed a syllabic line of seven — sometimes five, less often nine — owing something to medieval Welsh. This has enabled me, in my Oxford World’s Classics edition, to translate almost literally:

Words shall not be hid

nor spells be buried;

night shall not sink underground

though the mighty go.

Klevius comment: But compare Klevius' even more literal translation below.

Keith Boseley: The Song of Hiawatha, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 long narrative poem, imitated Schiefner for his retelling of Native American legends, and has proved a bestseller ever since, despite endless — and deserved — parodies by Lewis Carroll, among others. Result: for readers of English, the Kalevala is in trochaic tetrameters. W. F. Kirby (1844 – 1912), the English entomologist and folklorist whose 1907 version was the first complete English translation from the Finnish, rendered it thus:

Till no spells are hidden from me,

Nor the spells of magic hidden,

That in caves their power is lost not,

Even though the wizards perish.

In the original Finnish version of the Kalevala, published in 1849 (17: 523 – 526):

Ei sanat salahan joua

eikä luottehet lovehen;

mahti ei joua maan rakohon,

vaikka mahtajat menevät.

Klevius translation in an as good as possible reflection of the Finnish original:

Not words in secret have to go

nor confidences in grooves

power won't end in gaps of the ground

even if the mighty ones go

Compared to Keith Boseley's translation:

Words shall not be hid

nor spells be buried;

night shall not sink underground

though the mighty go.

Can you see the borderline between racist Godism and a less biased Atheist reading? And remember, even Lönnroth and most of his singers were also God-biased in their racist/sexist hatred for the Pagan Saami people in the North.
Also consider Klevius writings about the Finnish Mongoloid complex as well as Out of Africa as bipedal apes and back as global mongoloids.


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