[erelvenewmeva]

As I translate Estonian literature myself, I thought that I'd review "The Beauty of History" by Viivi Luik. This is one of the very few Estonian novels to have been published in in translation in Britain since the Second World War.

What is interesting about this novel is that it touches upon various themes such as the Prague Spring in 1968, which was an attempt to foster Communism with a human face in what was then Czechoslovakia, A country girl from Estonia meets a sophisticated Jew from Riga, someone who wants to travel to Moscow to obtain papers to get him out of the army. He, like most Balts, wasn't too excited about shooting Czechs while he was conscripted into the Soviet occupation army, when in fact the Balts harboured the same thoughts of shrugging off Soviet domination as did Czechs and Slovaks (Alexander Dubček was a Slovak).

The style is poetic and from the point of view of a young woman, the Estonian country girl, the alter ego of Viivi Luik herself, who was brought up in the countryside, but ended up the wife of an ambassador who has served terms in, for instance, Italy.

This combination of hard historical facts and a slightly dreamy poetic style makes this quite an unusual novel. Viivi Luik (born 1946) started out as a poet during her teens in the 1960s. Her first novel, "The Seventh Summer of Peace" (i.e. after 1945), described the Estonian countryside after many farmers had been deported to Russia in 1949, and was a masterpiece of allusion and indirect criticism of Soviet reality. As with her compatriot Jaan Kross, the aim was to evade censorship - in her case, by poetry, not samizdat.

Full review of "The Beauty of History" at:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/tra...dex.php?id=110

The Beauty of History
by Viivi Luik
Translator: Hildi Hawkins
Afterword: Richard C.M. Mole
Original language: Estonian
Length: 152 pages
Publisher: The Norvik Press, UEA, Norwich
Year of publication: 2007
ISBN 978-1-870041-73-7

[cbUDaNFRu]

Thanks, Eric. The first author posted here whose name I'd truly never heard of in some capacity.

Publisher: The Norvik Press, UEA, Norwich
Year of publication: 2007

Bizarrely, this caught my eye. I was browsing the Norvik Press' site about a month ago and wasn't sure if they were still active as the link to the contents of their 'latest issue' of their magazine, Scandinavica, is headed May 2000.

[erelvenewmeva]

I wrote the following to someone else recently:

I tried to interest a few British literary publications in a review, when the poetic Estonian novel "The Beauty of History" by Viivi Luik (already translated into French, Finnish, Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Russian in the early 1990s, plus Hungarian and Icelandic in the late 1990s!) appeared with the Norvik Press some months ago - for the first time in English, many years after the others. I either received no reply at all, or a brush-off. Why something published by Norvik is of less interest to British reviewers than something published by Harvill-Secker, some other branch of Random House, or some of the other bigger names in publishing, I cannot tell.

The English-speaking world is sometimes chronically slow to pick up works of literature that appear as a matter of course in other parts of Europe.

The Norvik Press does a lot of Scandinavian literature in English translation, as can be seen at:

http://www.norvikpress.com/index.php

I hope to review Strindberg's "Tschandala", one of their more recent books (translator Peter Graves), and will post the review here too in due course.

[cbUDaNFRu]

The Norvik Press does a lot of Scandinavian literature in English translation, as can be seen at:

http://www.norvikpress.com/index.php

Fantastic. For some reason the site I was on was this one.

[erelvenewmeva]

Yes, Stewart, I fell into that trap on a number of occasions. Norvik should remove that older website, as it makes you think that's all there is. But Norvik is not over-manned. It is run on a part-time basis by one man, Neil Smith, who is a translator himself, and a lady, Professor Janet Garton, who has just retired as the last of what used to be the Scandinavian Department at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UEA, for short).

Symptomatic-symbolic of the decline of language tuition in Britain, is the decline of the Scandinavian Department at UEA.

When I was interviewed in about 1970 to try and get in as an undergrad, I felt I was lucky I got a place. I'd said some nonsense in the interview about "Scandinavia being neutral during WWII". Erm, well, only Sweden was, actually. But I got in. And studied principally Swedish.

In those days, you could study Swedish, Norwegian or Danish to degree level (B.A. and M.A.). There was even a little tuition in Finnish, for those who were interested. There was a professor, James McFarlane, who doubled up as a translator of Ibsen, plus a full-time lecturer for each language and other staff.

When they stopped with Scandinavian at Newcastle University, the Scandinavian library was moved from there to UEA.

Then, in the 1990s, the rot set in. McFarlane retired, was replaced for a short while by someone else, but this chap got shunted off to teach drama in the English Department, and by stages, Scandinavian Studies was reduced to... nothing.