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esseetNely KeinänenOn Translating Style, Finnish into EnglishFor a literary translator, translating style is at once fun and nerve-wracking: fun becausestyle unleashes the translator’s greatest creativity, and nerve-wracking, becausethe aesthetic and political consequences of our choices are so complex, and it’s so easyto get it wrong. As Adnan K. Abdulla warns, “the author’s particular mode of vision isseverely compromised when translated into a different culture and the translated versionbecomes a text with a different effect, a different meaning” (1993, 77). On a morepositive note, Susan Bassnett points out that translations can also “regenerate literatureby introducing new forms, new styles of writing, new ways of seeing” (2004, 10), as inthe case of Ezra Pound’s translations of Chinese poetry into English. Translators mustmake often very difficult choices when deciding upon what effects and meanings arepossible in the target language, choices that become all the more difficult in the translationof literature, where style and meaning are inseparable. These choices take placealong a long continuum, beginning with large pragmatic decisions like whether to domesticateor localize, moving down to how to treat dialect/dialogue, how to translatefigurative language and idioms, how to manage rhythms and even individual sounds,how to translate the “mind style” of the original author. Choices at one level affectchoices at other levels, and indeed are so closely intertwined that separating them outlike this feels entirely artificial.The present essay will discuss stylistic issues in translation from the perspective ofa practicing translator, selecting material from three plays I’ve translated from Finnishinto English: Anna Krogerus’s Rakkaudesta minuun (2006; trans. For Sheer Love of Me,2007), Juha Lehtola’s Othellohyrrä (2003; trans. Spinning Othello, 2005), and LauraRuohonen’s Olga (2002; trans. 2007), plus two short examples from a work in progress.1 I shall not attempt to identify my own personal translation style, 2 but rather toshow through a kind of retrospective think-aloud protocol how I have approached stylisticissues in the past, and how I might approach such issues differently in the future.Becoming a TranslatorA few background words are perhaps in order. Some of my most strongly held feelingsabout translation are rooted in my childhood experiences, and concern issues connectedto what I can best describe as the materiality of language. Although one of my parentsis Finnish, I grew up speaking English and only learned Finnish as an adult. From the39