Eino Leino Day
Description:
breathing at the foot of the hill,
and from the heavens a mysterious sign.
The moon is silver.
A cuckoo in the distance counts years.
And in the pine forest, slowly,
The traveler listened to nature.
and his soul is calm and easy.
Translation: Andrei Kokov
July 6 is Eino Leino Day (Summer and Poetry Day).
Finns deeply revere their famous poet-lyricist Eino Leino (Eino Leino, 1878-1926, real name Armas Eino Leopold Lönnbohm). His birthday is celebrated in Finland as a holiday of summer and poetry.
The name Eino Leino acts as a password in Finland. When you tell a Finn that you are captivated by Leyno’s poetry and translate it, after irrevocable exclamations of amazement and approval, the interlocutor considers it his duty to recite at least a couple of his lines. Almost every adult resident of the Suomi country has his favorite poems. Songs to his lyrics are often heard on the radio, some of his lines have become proverbs. There are still anecdotes and legends about his life. What is the reason for this unfading popularity?
The culture and history of the people is preserved and developed primarily in the Word, and is transmitted from generation to generation through language. And if the poet, according to Joseph Brodsky, is an instrument of language, then Leyno is a vivid example of this: in his poems, the Finnish language sounded completely new, Finnish poetry was enriched with new rhythms and forms. For him, it seems, there were no difficulties - he transferred all the achievements of European poetry to his native soil, with the same brilliance using a variety of forms and metrics of versification: from sonnets, rondo and canzon to ballads in Kaleval size. He translated into Finnish the tercines of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the iambas of German and Swedish poets. In addition, Leyno created dozens of novels, novels and dramatic works, he was a brilliant publicist, collaborator and editor of many newspapers and magazines; he wrote several thousand articles for various publications, and his works on literary criticism have not lost importance to this day. But still, first of all, he is a great lyrical poet with a gift of truly huge scale.
In the context of the development of Finnish national culture, this is all the more significant because for many centuries the Finnish language was in its country a stepchild, considered a primitive language of commoners, in which it is impossible to express all shades of feelings. The official status of the state language Finnish received only under Alexander II, in 1863. And what Leyno became for his native language is comparable only to what Pushkin was for the Russian language, and it seems to me that if he were not Finnish on the periphery of European culture, Leyno’s poetry would have taken a worthy place in world literature. In the spheres of art not related to the word, Leyno’s contemporaries – composer Jan Sibelius, singer Aino Akte, artists Axel Gallen-Kallela, Hugo Simberg, Helen Scherfbeck, architect Eliel Saarinen, sculptor Ville Valgren – have gained worldwide fame.