Jean-Louis Perret 1930

”Men hur har det gått med edra finska språkstudier? (But how have your studies of the Finnish language proceeded?) Och intresserar ni er fortfarande i Kalevala och finsk folklore? (in English: And do you still have an interest in the Kalevala and Finnish folklore?), professor Yrjö Hirn asked Jean-Louis Perret in his letter from Helsinki, dated December 19, 1920. Perret, who at that point stayed in Florence, replied a month later that he had discussed the matter with professor P. E. Pavolini, who was a linguistic who had translated the Kalevala into Italian. He mentions that he has studied the French translation of the Kalevala by Léouzon Le Duc, Pavolini’s translation from 1910 and, of course, the original work by Lönnrot. He also said that he was planning to write an article on Finnish folk poetry and the Kalevala. The article was published in May 1921 in the publication Bibliothéque Universelle et Revue Suisse.

A Swiss private tutor in Helsinki

The Swiss Jean-Louis Perret’s (1895–1968) interest in the Kalevala had begun in Helsinki one year earlier. Perret had studied Roman philology, literature and history at the university in Lausanne and, after his graduation, he had got a job as a private tutor in a Finnish family that lived in Clarens. Henrik Travers-Borgström was a wealthy businessman and, among other things, the owner of a tobacco factory in Kruununhaka in Helsinki. His wife, Maria (Macha) von Heiroth, was originally from St. Petersburg and she was known to be a lover of literature and music and a socialite. As the rest of the elite in Helsinki, also this couple was in many ways connected to the Russian aristocracy and emigrants who, after the revolution in Russia, had moved to the shores of the Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

Jean-Louis Perret accompanied the Borgström family to Helsinki for the first time in the spring 1919. Yrjö Hirn belonged to the large number of acquaintances of the family and he seems to be the person who inspired the young Swiss to study Finnish folk poetry. He was also farsighted and encouraged Perret to learn both Swedish and Finnish. When staying with Hirn, Perret also learned to know Finnish speaking members of the intelligentsia, as for example, the translator and poet Otto Manninen, who happened to become very influential on Perret’s work as a conveyor of Finnish and French culture.

Working as a press officer at the French embassy

After having lived for two years in Italy, mainly in Florence, Macha von Heiroth returned to Helsinki with her son Algar and the boy’s private tutor, Perret, and she settled permanently in Kulosaari in the autumn 1923. Jean-Louis soon took on a broader role. Because Perret had learned both Swedish and Finnish, the newly appointed minister of France in Finland Maurice de Coppe offered him a position as a press officer at the embassy – it was indeed quite remarkable that someone was able to report the contents of newspapers both in Swedish and Finnish. At the same time, Perret became some sort of homme de liaison to the minister, thanks to his large number of contacts. He presented de Coppet to the intelligentsia outside the diplomatic circles. Surprisingly enough, the fact that Perret was Swiss, did not influence his work negatively. Perhaps it was even an advantage. A member of the old empire that had shown its mercilessness in the Treaty of the Versailles, would most likely have had a more difficult time in the vulnerable and cautious political atmosphere in Finland than a citizen from a small neutral country.

It seems that Perret, already at an early stage saw his possibilities to attain a focal position when bringing the Finnish, particularly The Finnish speaking, and the French culture more closely together. Besides his own interest in the matter, the support he got from his friends also helped him realise this. From the beginning of the 1920’s Perret specifically focused on translating Finnish literature into French and he also started working on a doctoral thesis as he hoped to become a university teacher in French. He earned his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1927 with a doctoral thesis on the subject of the Roman poet Juvenalis, and the following year he was appointed as a university teacher. At that point of time, he had translated the following literary works into French: Aleksis Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä (Les Sept Frères, Stock 1926), Johannes Linnankoski’s Pakolaiset (Les Fugitifs, Rieder 1926) and F. E. Sillanpää’s Hurskaan kurjuuden (Saint Misére, Rieder 1928). Later in the 1930’s Perret continued his work as a translator and also wrote four books about Finland, La Finlande 1930, Littérature de la Finlande 1936, Portrait de la Finlande 1937 and Finlande en guèrre 1940.

A miniature Kalevala

However, Jean-Louis Perret did not forget the Kalevala. Le Kalevala. Épopée populaire finnois, was published in 1927 by La Rennaissance du Livre in Paris. Perret had written the preface and done the translation of the text. The book came out in the series Les cent chefs-d’oeuvres étrangers. The book is a translation of an abridged version of the Kalevala, compiled by F. A. Hästesko (Heporauta from 1935) to be used in the schools in Finland. There are about 8000 verses in the abridged version, in other words it comprises about one third of the Kalevala from 1849. It is a kind of “miniature of the Kalevala”, as Perret states in his preface. The work with the translation was initiated when a publishing company contacted Perret through professor O. J. Tallgren and asked Perret to translate excerpts of the Kalevala. Because Perret considered it to be an impossible task to make a translation using the poetic meter, he ended up using rhythmic prose.

In the foreword of Le Kalevala, Perret writes that he did not have the courage to translate the verses using the trochaic octameter as he was afraid to stray too far away from the original text. However, he says that he strived to keep the rhythm of the original text and to use a free poetic meter, in which the amount of syllables in each verse varies from seven to nine. Perret is already drawing close to his complete French translation of the Kalevala and many of the verses are the same as in the later translation.

In his foreword, Perret follows the example of Léouzon Le Duc, who was the first person to translate the Kalevala into French. Perret gives an extensive presentation of the Finnish language and the history and folk poetry of the Finnish people as well as on the mythology that it stems from. He also writes about Lönnrot and Lönnrot’s predecessors: Porthan, who evoked the scientific interest in Finnish folk poetry and folk tradition, and Ganander and Gottlund, who already were pondering the possibility to compile the poems into some sort of complete collection, an epic. Perret talks about the “national awakening” of the Finnish people and about the linguistic conflict that followed. He mentions that this was still an ongoing conflict.

Perret presents a quite strong critique against the French translation by Léouzon Le Duc from 1845: he does not think that it corresponds to the original text and that it is not able to convey the spirit of the Kalevala. Perret does not like the later version of the translation by Le Duc (1867) either. He finds this inaccurate and insufficient as well and obviously lacking the poetic meter. According to Perret, Le Duc had ignored the folksy nature of the poems in the Kalevala as well as taken too many liberties when he had deleted the repetitive verses. The translation does not convey the original text correctly, which is something of a prerequisite, particularly in a prose version.

Folk poetry according to meter

Perret’s closest friends were members of the older generation of the Finnish speaking university and cultural intelligentsia and they were reasonable Fennomans. Many of his students at the university, were, on the other hand, enthusiastic true Finns, as was common for the time period. Perret was very fluent in the Finnish language and his closest advisor, when he worked with the translations, Otto Manninen, was one of the leading experts in the country when it came to the Finnish language and literature. The premises for Perret were, when he translated the Kalevala, thus, very different from the circumstances that his predecessor worked in.

Perret had given excerpts from his translation from 1927 to the French authors Georges Duhamel and Jules Romains, whom he knew and he asked them for comments on the translations. Both encouraged Perret to continue his enormous work: “[T]hey told me to give my work a completely new base. They did not think that rhythmic prose was that far away from the trochaic octometer without an end rhyme”, the translator said in the Yearbook of the Kalevala Society in 1930. Encouraged by the response from his friends, Perret continued his work on the translations and he continued to receive advice from them regarding issues with the poetic meter, style and the use of poetic images.

“It was not easy to translate a poetic work that is as unique and extensive as the Kalevala is, particularly into French, where the vocabulary is very exact and strictly follows rules and where the sentences follow an analytical structure […] I was happy to realise […] that it was possible to interpret, not only the textual context of the original work, but also its poetic tone.”

Perret did not find the verse layers problematic: he did not have to alter the order of the verses, take liberties that deviated from the original text and he did not have to use verse bridges or broadly constructed sentences, that would have been uncommon to Finnish folk poetry.

Doing translations between other jobs

During the academic terms, Perreti’s other jobs prevented him from concentrating on the translation work, but he primarily spent the summers 1928, 1929 and 1930 at Otto Manninen’s summerhouse at Kotavuori in Kangasniemi – the same place where several other translators of the Kalevala went during the years to learn from the great master. At the Kalevala Society’s annual party in 1931, Perret gave a speech in which he describes how he, when he encountered problems in the translation work, took a book and left the sauna chamber where he worked and walked through the currant and raspberry bushes to the great sage’s cave and left all the complex questions to Otto Manninen in order for him to come up with solutions.

Before the complete French translation was published in 1930, translations by Perret were published in the series Cahiers de Finlande, the first part of which contains the 25 first poems in the Kalevala. This series of works was a joint project by Perret and the aforementioned French minister, Maurice de Coppet. In the series, a selection of Finnish literary pieces by for example Runeberg, Topelius, Kivi and Linnankoski was presented to the French audience. The texts had been translated by Perret and de Coppet. This series received funding from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and it was mainly distributed through embassies. Parts of the series also ended up at the desk of the president of France, Doumergue.

Le Kalevala. Épopée populaire finnoi came out at the end of the year 1930 and it was widely noted in the biggest newspapers in Paris and Lausanne. For example, Le Temps praised profusely both the original work and its French translation. A second printing was published the following year and this was a complete reprint of the previous edition, but its title was changed to Épopée populaire finlandaise, Finnish folk epic, (compared to finnois, which refers to the Finnish language). In the foreword, Perret emphasizes that the Kalevala explicitly is a national epic and he states that it has unnecessarily been mixed in the “Homeric discourse” by the intellectuals in Europe. Perret writes that a national epic can certainly not be written by the people of the country, but instead by one person, in the same way as all good poetry. The uneducated folk singers would not have been able to create a grand epic tale, but they had the ability to teach Lönnrot a way to combine the poem and the plot with another. Perret finds that Lönnrot’s greatest accomplish is, in fact, that he did not force the poems into the literary form of a traditional epic, but instead, he has preserved “the connection to the people’s mouth”.

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Elina Seppälä: “Proosaa vai poljentoa – Le Kalevala” – Kalevala maailmalla. Helsinki: SKS. 2012.