About

Holy Songs
Original work: Helkavirsiä (1903)
Translated into (broken) English by Harri Perälä <harri.perala@iki.fi>


Helkavirsiä is a collection of poems by the Finnish poet Eino Leino (1878–1926). In 1916 it was followed by a “second series” (Helkavirsiä. Toinen sarja). In the words of Pirjo Lyytikäinen,¹ these two works bring together “the world of Kalevala and Kanteletar as well as Finnish folk tales” and “turn-of-the-century modern European poetry”.

For my own entertainment, I have been translating the first series into English. The translations will be published on this blog as I complete them, probably at a rate of one poem per week. Readers may also be interested to know that there exists a professional English translation by Keith Bosley (Whitsongs, 1978).

Licence

The textual content on this blog is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
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Notes

¹ Lyytikäinen, Pirjo. 2000. Ihmiset, sankarit ja jumalat. In: Leino, Eino. Helkavirsiä I–II. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.

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