Shakespeare in Tuonela: towards a translation of Eeva-Liisa Manner’s 'Ofelia'

This year is the centenary year of Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921-1995). Having spent her childhood in Viipuri, she lived most of her adult life in Tampere, and is now considered one of Finland’s most distinguished 20th century poets. In the Finnish-British context it is interesting to look at a poem in which Manner drew inspiration from an English play, namely Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In the play it is reported that Ophelia died after falling from a tree overlooking a brook. She aimed to hang garlands of flowers on the branches, but a branch broke. She fell into the water, together with her flowers, and was drowned, making no effort to save herself, and singing all the while. The play contains suggestions that her death was self-willed.

Eeva-Liisa Manner’s ‘Ofelia’[1] (1949, from the collection Kuin tuuli tai pilvi) transforms the Ophelia episode in a marvellous way. The ‘brook’ becomes something deeper, darker and more universal, like a sea separating the living from Tuonela, the land of the dead. Moreover, the verses seem to transform the original Shakespeare into a kind of shaman, one with power to understand the language of animals such as – in this poem – birds and fish. They too are dead, and speak with the tongues of the dead.

Here, as a fanciful aside, I’d speculate that Shakespeare might have been thoroughly at home with the world of the Kalevala, had he come across it. After all, he includes the shamanic figure of Prospero in The Tempest, and incorporates the witch-haunted moors of Scotland into Macbeth[2].

Manner’s ‘Ofelia’ is quite long, but a flavour of it can be had from the extract below, which comes at the end of the poem. To add another layer of magic I chose, as a Scot, to translate the poem into Scots[3] – perhaps infused by the Scottish shamanic spirit of Thomas the Rhymer (seer, rune-sayer) who was given a ‘tongue that can never lie’ and taken to elf-land, a realm beyond heaven or hell, or good and evil. This seems appropriate for the vision of a poet in any century, and Manner’s characterisation of Ophelia’s entry to Tuonela seems to fit this notion very well.

Below you can read the end of the translated poem. There two voices, first of all the shamanic voice of the ‘dead bird’, lulling Ophelia to sleep in the water, to find peace, to be relieved of the burden of life. The final voice is that of Ophelia herself, describing how the daylight, the wind and the sky all fade away. On a literal level the event is tragic, but on the level of emotion it is soothing, like a lullaby[4], and in my opinion extraordinarily beautiful.

Sleep, be done wi dreary days, 
sleep amang the lily blooms,
whaur the watter rocks the flooer –                                 where the water
watter watchin ower the deid,                                           over the dead
ower the drooned that lig asleep.                                      lie
Lat the watter cradle ye,                                                     let
tak awaa yir dreary days,                                                    take away
ease yir burden, cairry it faur.                                           carry it far
Freendly are the fathoms deep,
blessèd the forfochen yins.                                                 weary ones
Lig doon on the watter’s lap,
in the cradle o the waves.

Sleep, sleep ...
Seelence.                                                                                   silence
Quate A gang, aye doun and faurer doun,                      quiet I go, always down, further
wi ma gealt haunds cairryin the bloom                            frozen hands
o the day as it mirkens                                                         darkens
till aathing swees and sinks intae the watter                 everything sways
as the wind saftens                                                               softens
and the lift dwynes awaa.                                                  sky fades

Notes.
1. I’m grateful to Nely Keinanen of Helsinki University for drawing my attention to the poem.
2. The chants of the witches in Macbeth are rare instances of the trochaic ‘Kalevala meter’ in Shakespeare’s plays. 
3. My translation won an award in the 2018 Scots Language Society Competition for translation into Scots. I’d point out that the translation is fairly free, focusing on sound and rhythm rather than word-for-word exactitude of meaning.
4. There are echoes of Aleksis Kivi’s famous lines here: Tuonen lehto, öinen lehto! / Siell’ on hieno hietakehto, / sinnepä lapseni saatan. [Grove of Tuoni, grove of night / There is a fine cradle of sand / There I shall escort my child]