In this article, we discuss language- and culture-specific elements in versions of Evas klass/Eevan luokka (1917), a Finnish youth literature classic by Kersti Bergroth (1886–1975), a self-translator who wrote the Finland-Swedish and Finnish versions under the pseudonym of Mary Marck. The novel has also been translated into Norwegian (Eva’s klasse, 1933) by Anne Marie Worm-Müller. Drawing on translation theory and cultural semiotics, we explore the extent to which the three versions diverge from one another as far as global and local translation strategies are concerned. The analysis, which focus on the linguistic identity and the names of the characters, the geographical names, cultural traits, and quotations of J.L. Runeberg’s poetry, shows differences between the Finland-Swedish and the Finnish version (intracultural translation) and the Finland-Swedish and the Norwegian version (intercultural translation). When translating her own original text, Bergroth uses official equivalents and other source-oriented strategies, as both the Finland-Swedish version and the Finnish version are primarily intended for readers living in Finland, where both the Finnish and the Finland-Swedish culture share a multitude of similarities notwithstanding the two different languages. The Norwegian translator, however, often uses target-oriented strategies, i.e., generalizations, substitutions, and omissions that are explainable by the longer cultural distance between Norway and Finland.

Då Pentti Saarikoski flyttar till Sverige 1975 fortsätter han att skriva på finska samtidigt som svenskan blir hans nya språk, i vardagen men också i litteraturen. Dagboksanteckningarna visar att Saarikoski brottas med känslor av utanförskap och trötthet som är förknippade med flytten och det nya språket. Samtidigt som känslor av detta slag förmodligen kännetecknar de flesta som flyttar – även då flytten sker frivilligt som i Saarikoskis fall – blir det en överraskning att få veta att Saarikoski bara några månader i landet börjar föra dagbok på svenska. Och det är via dagboksanteckningarna det går att följa hur hans förhållande till svenskan – och också finskan – förändras. De förstärker uppfattningen om att svenskan blir viktig som uttrycksmedel vid sidan av finskan för Saarikoski och markerar en övergång till en ny fas i hans författarskap. 

Evald Ferdinand Jahnsson (1844–1895) wrote at a time when the Finnish national movement was undergoing a transformation from an elite project to mass movement. In contrast to many other Finnish nationalists, Jahnsson was born into a rural lower-class family, but was privileged enough to get an education: a key to social mobility at the time. He began his career as an author writing in Swedish but also started to write in Finnish in the 1870s, known as the decade during which the “sense of Finnishness” was significantly reinforced, not only in formal and institutional education but also in literature and culture in general. Jahnsson became a teacher, journalist and writer who actively promoted Finnish literature and Finnish-language culture. Among other things, he wrote several historical plays, and in 1884, he published the first Finnish-language historical novel. Through analysing Jahnsson’s fictional texts as well as texts related to them, such as reviews, the preface to his novel and letters, this chapter follows Jahnsson’s language shift from Swedish to Finnish. It is an investigation on how one individual coped with feelings of loss, but also how feelings of loss would come to mark Jahnsson’s literary endeavours throughout his career. The chapter highlights not only how loss is embedded in the history of nationalism, but also how difficult it was to carry out this idea in practice.

This chapter addresses autobiography as a genre which has an important role in bringing into discussion issues of changing linguistic borders. Heidi Grönstrand looks specifically at the multilingual traits of Abu-Hanna’s literary language in Sinut (You), a story that portrays the life of Umayya Abu-Hanna, who in the beginning of the 1980s moved from Palestine to Finland. The story foregrounds the narrator-protagonist’s efforts to meet the required language standards in Finnish, but the border between her language use and the norm remains sharp. Because the protagonist’s collisions with the language border are almost comedic, humour becomes an important means by which a demand for a change of attitudes towards interpretations of questions of language and belonging is signalled. The main language of Sinut is Finnish, but by including long passages in English and giving space to the newcomer’s language, which is characterized by creativity and innovation, Umayya Abu-Hanna widens the language repertoire of Finnish literature.

The “Introduction” presents a new approach to literary multilingualism by demonstrating it as a phenomenon that emerges as a result of interactions between authors, texts and readers, as well as literary and political institutions on different societal levels. It emphasizes the practices and processes of linguistic borders, as opposed to a notion of multilingualism as a stable entity, identifiable by analysing texts against a set of fixed criteria. The “Introduction” also provides an overview of research on literary multilingualism in the last decades, including emerging new directions. The chapter concludes by providing a novel theoretical framework for the study of literary multilingualism, demonstrating how linguistic borders are actively formed in the production, circulation and reception of literature, and that processes of “bordering” have large-scale effects on conceptions of literature and its value.