Kalevala in Portuguese
The Portuguese translation of the Kalevala by Merja de Mattos-Parreira and Ana Soares was published in 2013. The artist Rogério Ribeiro illustrated the translation and it was published by the Portuguese publishing company Dom Quixote. The translation also includes a section with detailed explanations of the words and a comprehensive preface by professor emeritus Seppo Knuuttila.
The Kalevala translation by Ana Soares and Merja de Mattos-Parreira was illustrated by Rogério Ribeiro.
Merja de Mattos-Parreira is an adjunct professor of English linguistics and Ana Soares is an adjunct professor of literature at the University of Algarve. Their work on the translation of the epic began already in the beginning of the 21st century, when only short excerpts of the Kalevala had been translated into Portuguese. De Mattos-Parreira and Santos thoroughly studied the folk poetry that the epic was based upon. They visited the Kalevala Society and during this trip the Juminkeko-foundation took the translators to the villages in Viena (White Karelia) where they met the oral folk poetry singer Jussi Huovinen. This meeting became very important since the translators found an old Portuguese poetic meter in one of Huovinen’s songs. They later used this meter in their translation.
The translation by de Mattos-Parreira and Soares was finished in 2007, but, to some surprise, a Portuguese translation by the engineer Orlando Moreira was published as well. He did not know Finnish and used English sources for the translation. He had made the translation in a very fast pace. Although the translation project by de Mattos-Pareira and Soares, obviously, was significantly more thorough, the recently published Portuguese translation of the Kalevala by Moreira made it much more difficult to find a publisher.
The death of the illustrator Rogéiro Ribeiro further delayed the publication. The highly respected Portuguese artist Ribeiro placed the events in a Portuguese environment and gave the heroes characteristics from his own people. However, before the artist died, the Kalevala illustrations were on display in the summer exhibition at Juminkeko in Kuhmoinen in 2007.
Lue lisää
Kalevalaseura.fi: “Portugalinkielinen Kalevala on ilmestynyt”. 26.2.2013