#(finnish is my actual language in case it wasn't clear)

[why-the-heck-not]

reading these two side by side (the og one in finnish, the other translated to french) and it's a very space-demanding reading situation

[very-grownup]

Book 51, 2023

The best thing about the version of Arto Paasilinna's "The Howling Miller" that I read, is that it wasn't translated into English from Finnish.

It was translated into English from a French translation of the original Finnish novel.

There's some decade between those, too, which is amazing. In the late 20th/early 21st century there is only one person who can translate Finnish for the rest of the world, and that's one woman in France.

This is my first experience with Finnish literature (unless we're counting Tove Jansson, but I understand the nuances of Swedes and Finns and Swedish speaking Finns are complicated) and it feels very interesting. There is, for lack of a better word, a brain I get from books translated from other languages which I'm sure is in part due to the translator themselves but I have to assume also a result of sentence structure and shared cultural touchstones. Although this is all supposition in this case, since it's based on a single book and, as mentioned above, it's a translation of a translation (still a wild thing to consider in 2023).

Reading "The Howling Miller" feels like someone smashed together early 20th century prairie literature, the grimmer Grimm's Fairytales, and the letters to the editor section of a newspaper.

The book is divided into two halves. The first half is when Huttunen, the titular howling miller, exists and is accepted as the miller in his small community. The second half is when Huttunen ceases to be the miller after he is arrested and sent to a psychiatric asylum in the city. He does escape the asylum, but he never returns to be Huttunen the Miller.

It's not a sad story, but it has a melancholy to it (because people in the Nordic countries have lost their joy organ to frostbite and/or hereditary alcoholism HEY YO). I'm finding myself at a loss for words to describe how Paasilinna treats Huttunen, because the novel is ultimately concerned with outsiderness and otherness and how much of that can be tolerated within society before it pushes into the realm of the criminal and mentally ill.

The thing is: Huttunen IS someone who won't, or can't, conduct himself in a way that is acceptable to society. "The Howling Miller" is literal; he has bouts where he spends all night howling like a wolf and keeping the other people in the village up. He breaks into people's homes in the middle of the night to ask them questions. He absolutely has a negative effect on the community he lives in and that's not something the novel interrogates. It just is. When he's committed to the asylum by the community (he has no family) it's supposedly because of war trauma, but the novel makes no bones about the fact that the commitment has nothing to do with actual concerns about Huttunen's mental health. They just want him to go away and that's the easiest way to do it when he hasn't actually done punishable harm.

Society doesn't treat Huttunen fairly and lies to itself about what it's doing, to the point where it's not clear if they remember how much of what they're saying about Huttunen in the end is made up to justify earlier decisions.

But even prior to his expulsion from the community, Huttunen doesn't really seem like he wants to exist in it, he doesn't try to correct himself. And maybe he shouldn't have to and the problem is that society, especially post-war society, doesn't offer him an alternative and doesn't want him to find one.

The fairytale element comes partially in the ending of the novel although I don't think that has to be taken literally -- while it does take on a fantastical note, I think that maybe is supposed to be reflective of the impossibility of an acceptable resolution for Huttunen's situation. But it's also part of how the characters are simply but strongly drawn, always faintly removed, and, for a reader in 2023, there's something inherently fairytaleish in the small town setting, the mill, the constant circling back to the forest that provides for Huttunen when he's in hiding.

(The early 20th century prairie literature part is, of course, in how isolated and selfish and deceitful and miserable existing seems to be for some characters.)

It's the sort of book where I think I need to read more of Paasilinna's work to better know what I think about "The Howling Miller". But it's a simple little novel that puts a lot into its pages, even if we only have it in English because of translation telephone.

[yellow-lemon-lime]

An anecdoctal tale on how having to learn a new language in my 30s helped my overall speech.

Under cut because I still ramble way too much it seems

I have had speech problems for years. I suspect they have been there for longer than I remember, but they came especially prevalent to me in my teenage years because that was when people around me started saying "speak slower" or "HTL" which translated to English is an acronym for "loud, clear and slow" and I came to despise whenever people would say that, which they sometimes would before I had even started saying anything. It was as if they expected the worst. The thing though was that I couldn't hear my own speech as being particularly fast, so when I did try to slow down it would feel like I was "humping" along the words and it just felt unnatural for me to speak like that. I did seek help in 2022 (I think?) and met with a speech therapist who not only confirmed that I had both stuttering and cluttering, but she also did these excersises with me as well hear my backstory and look at the psychological aspect of my speech. Also an interesting thing that she did is, one time my brother called on the phone while I was at an appointment (I don't remember if he had called while I was in the waiting room, or if I called when I was already in the ST's office) but while I was having the 1-2 minute conversation with my brother, she had apparantly been listening to and analysing my speech, because she told me afterwards the pattern she had heard. I think it's a very common thing to do when you come across something that you are an expert in (in her case, speech) to analyse things (in regards to your patient, she obviously wouldn't go up to a random stranger on the street and give her thoughts to them about the way that they speak).

During these speech therapy appointments I realised that part of my speech problems stemmed from the fear of not being taken seriously, but it was like the snake that bites its own tale, because my speech made me sound anxious and uncertain, but it was my anxiety and uncertainty that caused me to have speech problems. I was a very very shy kid and it didn't wasn't much better in my teens either, and my speech often depicted that, but only to an extend, because if I was with people who didn't make me nervous (which were very few) I would still talk fast and cluttered, but there wasn't the usual "They probably think I'm an idiot because I can't speak normally"-idea in my head.

Coincidentally 2022 was also the year that a Finnish guy sent me a message, which changed my life. I moved to Finland, got married to that guy, and as a consequence of moving to Finland, I am now in the process of learning Finnish (I moved in January 2023 and started officially learning in February 2023, although I did do a little bit of intimidating green owl before I moved, but I haven't used that one since coming to Finland) My language learning was also severally halted for over a year by my former job because it was English-speaking and in my free time I would be so depleted of energy (long commute) that even when I went to the Finnish course I wouldn't able to comprehend what was being said even though it was like A1 Finnish that I normally have no trouble understanding. I am now without a job (the job market here is really really bad, everyone knows that, I have also reach the age where I am not willing to risk my health, my fertility or my relationship for a workplace that won't even remember me in 20 years, which makes it more important for me to actually learn Finnish so I have a better chance of finding a workplace where language isn't a problem (although to be fair even for Finns finding a job is hard, so who the hell knows what to do)

But although my learning was halted for a very long, I did notice another change recently, and I had at first attributed it to being in my 30s, way older and more different thinking than my teens and 20s (and also escaping a family with a mother who I later realized neglected me emotionally. I still talk to her sometimes, but there's nothing in me that screams I'm her daughter, and whenever I think I have a physical trait that looks like her, I have to remove it instantly) but the change I noticed was beyond my own shyness and lack of hugs in my childhood. Finnish is often considered one of the hardest languages to learn so when having to start learning it in my 30s I knew that it was going to be a struggle and an uphill battle, but that was also what ultimately helped me view the psychological aspect of my speech problems in the languages I know by heart. Throughout my teenage years and 20s I was afraid of speaking to people and engaging in conversation because I feared sounding stupid, or saying the wrong word or just generally messing up my speech, would make them either think I was dumb, or they would feel overly sorry for me. When speaking Finnish I know that I will often use the wrong word for something, that I will conjugate a word wrong, that I will mess up complete sentences and that my speech will be far from good. And knowing that it will most likely sound stupid whenever I speak Finnish, ultimately set me free from worrying how I sound when I speak the languages that I know fluenty.

These are still only my experiences, my speech problems came from a mental problem, so I'm not even sure starting to learn a new language would benefit someone whose speech problems are because of physical trauma, and I'm not even sure if other people whose speech problems ARE an effect of mental illness and mental trauma could be helped by learning a new language. My knowledge of how acquired languages work in comparison to native languages in the brain is nonexistent. These are just anectdotes and what I personally experienced.