LuonnotarLuonnotar, noria neito,
iliman impi, tulenleimu.
Luonnotar, kasuava kauno,
tuulen tuiver, vetten vaimu.
Luontoni on luonnostasi,
ihteni on ihtestäsi.
Kanssas' elän, kanssas' kuolen,
kanssas' kasvan kylessäsi.
Missä kulen, missä könnin,
siellä kulet, siellä könnit.
Missä elo, missä kuolo,
siellä olet, siellä elät.
Luonnotar, noria neito,
iliman impi, tulenleimu.
Luonnotar, kasuava kauno,
tuulen tuiver, vetten vaimu.
Taivas, tarpa, tuli, tuiske,
salonsilmä, merten henki.
Kaikessa on kantavoimas',
syömmesi ja syntysi.
Missä kulen, missä könnin,
siellä kulet, siellä könnit.
Missä elo, missä kuolo,
siellä olet, siellä elät.
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Here is
veeery cruel translation of Luonnotar in English. I didn't use much time to translate it.
Luonnotar the Nature-GoddessLuonnotar, you graceful maid,
the maiden of the air, the flame of fire,
Luonnotar, you growing beauty,
the whirlwind, the spirit of waters.
My nature comes from you,
my inner spirit comes from you.
I live with you, I die with you,
I'll grow side by side with you.
Where do I walk, where do I travel,
there you walk, there you travel.
Where is life, where is death,
there you are, there you live.
Luonnotar, you graceful maid,
the maiden of the air, the flame of fire,
Luonnotar, you growing beauty,
the whirlwind, the spirit of waters.
The sky, the earth, the fire and the snowstorm,
The eye of the forest, the spirit of the seas.
In everything there is your primeval force,
your heart and your birth.
All the lyrics which are born in your native tongue are impossible to translate into the other language. Of course it's possible to translate well, but the inner concept, beautyness, atmosphere and all the poetic details will be all left out. As I saw the translation of Luonnotar, I felt that over half of the power from the original text had died out. I put the original text in here again - along with the translation, so you can see the difference.
The Finnish runo-singing metre, which is based in our language is a very special one. Only some other Baltic-Finnic languages, like Karelian, Estonian and Votic share the same metre. Although ie. Kalevala is translated into over 60 languages (it's the most translated Finnish book ever), you can never-ever get the same feeling from it, as a native Finnish speaker can have.
I've noticed that there comes very
long text if I even take a try to translate something from Finnish to English. In Finnish one word can have information so much, that in the best case I'll have to use the whole sentence to translate it in English! Let's take a raw example from my band name Poropetra. It means "The elk of Hiisi". Hiisi means the sacred forest, so Poropetra can be translated as "The elk from the sacred forest." Literally Poropetra means Reindeer-elk, but the inner concept of the word is what I described above. I'm interested about translation, because interpreter, translator or teacher is most likely my forthcoming occupation. Fortunately it's from Estonian to Finnish or opposite - not from English - so it's a little bit easier task to handle!
As an interesting detail what comes to our runo-singing metre I can tell you something about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his epic poem Hiawatha. Longfellow had been inspired from Kalevala, and he used same features in his epic poem as in our folk-poetry. But in English runo-singing metre doesn't work, so that's why we can't speak that he had used runo-singing style, thus is only to mentioned that he was inspired from it. As an honour to original inspiration of Hiawatha, in Finnish the poem has been translated to fit into our
real runo-singing metre, though. But the poem Hiawatha is good, and I recommend it to you.
HERE I found you a link into it.