Aleksis Kivi: Odes

Aleksis Kivi (1834-72) is the Finnish writer best loved by his countrymen. His novel Seven Brothers -- the first Finnish novel -- has been widely translated, as has his comedy The Country Cobblers, and his tragedy Kullervo (developed from a Kalevala story) is the basis of Aulis Sallinen's opera of the same name. This is the first selection in English of Kivi's poems. They combine Romantic themes -- the natural world as paradise, the primacy of a child's vision -- with a sturdy realism that vividly describes a bear hunt, a gipsy family hilariously plying its trades, a peasant as mute as the oxen he loves. Meanwhile the technique used in most of the poems with their elaborate unrhymed stanzas, echoes Classical antiquity -- which is why the translator has chosen to call this book Odes.