Stefan Moster has in recent years translated a large   number of works of modern Finnish fiction into German.   Sometimes, however, a date proves a problem The problems confronted by the literary translator at work are, as a rule, exaggerated; otherwise, translators would not constantly be asked to talk about such problems. In reality, the arena in which the translator solves his/her problems is made up of trivial little components which are no fun to talk about at length – and which anyway swiftly become boring for listeners.      And to insist that translating Finnish literature is oh so difficult seems to me perfectly absurd. A doctor might just as legitimately complain about how taxing his profession is, because it demands of him that he is acquainted with the entire human anatomy. Undoubtedly a doctor is faced with a difficult task when he has, for example, to carry out a liver transplant. Prescribing a remedy for flu, however, can hardly be portrayed as a challenge. The same goes for literary translation. There are difficulties. They are not greater and not smaller than those encountered in other professions, but they are specific, and some of them, albeit very few, are extremely interesting.      What really fascinates me about literary translation is how easy it ultimately is to convey one culture to another. The reason is obvious. The unifying code that is literature (or else: literary experience) makes cultural differences accessible, even removing them from time to time. And yet now and again there are situations in which it doesn't work. Suddenly a simple date can become problematic. An example of this from my work:      A few years ago I translated the novel Ukkosenjumalan poika ('The son of the thunder god') by Arto Paasilinna. In doing so, I had day by day to wrestle with the unpleasant little difficulties of my profession, since Paasilinna writes with scant care, continually making use of identical sentence structures and tending towards repetition and stereotypical classications. In Finnish that might be just about tolerable, but it goes against the German ideal of style. As a translator in such a situation you have to be inventive, to vary and modify. This led to an unprecedented amount of cursing on my part during the work, but it's just these banal little problems which aren't worth wasting one's breath on. But then a date which Paasilinna employs woke me up with a jolt, and on that one must waste breath.      The novel deals with the depravity of the present time, which the few right-minded Finns are forced to suffer. The old Finnish god of thunder is opposed to this situation, and so he decides to intervene with the aim of rectifying it, by sending his son to Finland. In the novel the results of modern achievements (e.g. the emancipation of women) are belittled. As a positive counter-plan imaginings of a vaguely defined atavistic-heathen authenticity are presented, and embodied by means of the son of the thunder god. Of course, this is all done in a terribly jokey fashion and would in fact be harmless in itself, were it not for the fact that at the end, the son of the thunder god in turn fathers a son, whose arrival is said to herald the dawn of a new era in Finland. As the birthday of this bearer of hope Paasilinna cites 20 April. And at just this point I had to give up the translation. I rang the editor and informed her that I could not accept this date. Why?      Well, 20 April is Arto Paasilinna's birthday. The author had, then, permitted himself a little joke, one might say. But: 20 April is also Adolf Hitler's birthday, and in Germany everyone knows that. At least ('old' and neo-) Nazis know that. And for them, reading Paasilinna's novel would have made something click; I did not wish to encourage that. Simply by means of this date of birth, attributed to a saviour of the people, it would have been possible to read the novel as a parafascist fantasy, which in its narrative technique reveals striking similarities with propagandistic entertainment from the 1930s and 40s: denigration of the enlightened present as decadent and degenerate, linked with an apotheosis of the Volk's (people's) heathen heritage and the vision of a reconstruction of the old order by a chosen leader.      Quite possibly, the book had what it took to become a cult novel in right-wing circles, and I did not want to let that happen to it – or, most of all, to me – for which reason I replaced 20 April with another date. And I did not actually ask the author, as I am wont to do in similar cases, for I wanted to avoid him disallowing the (to me) essential modication.      In doing so I valued my stake as originator of the text more highly than that of the author. Is that allowed? Yes, when you think you have to do it. Is it a problem? Not really, when you know what you're doing. Translated by Emily Jeremiah Top of page