Book Report: Finnish Proverbs translated by Inkeri Väänänen-Jensen (1990)

I have dived right into the stack of “poetry”” that I purchased earlier this month partially because I have not been arsed to put them on my bookshelves yet, so they’re still on my (rather large) desk. Maybe I’m thinking with dedicated effort, I will read them all before I shelve them kind of like I’m hoping to watch all the movies atop the movie cabinet soon (but my night gig has restarted, so my reading and viewing time will be lessened for a couple of months).

The translator/editor is the child of Finnish immigrants, and this book was partially funded by a university where the translator works (or worked) in a Finnish fellowship or something, so the author has other presumably short works related to Finnish literature as well. But this book is but a collection of proverbs and sayings along with some line drawings of Finnish places and design elements. So it’s definitely a quick read–under an hour, for sure, and it has some little bits of wisdom, although some of the proverbs are not unique to Finns.

I marked a couple:

• Better once too much than always too little.
• You can fool others only once but yourself for a lifetime.
• What you do not repair you destroy.
• You do not reach Heaven in one jump.
• Not all clouds bring rain.

I cannot wait to use them and announce they’re proverbs from the Finnish. You know I will.

I’m actually vicariously Finnish to a degree. One of my uncles is of Finnish lineage. His daughter is blonde and fair, but the son got the darker complection from the Noggle side of the family, so he has a Finnish last name but looks like a Mexican bandito. He, my cousin, has been to Finland to meet his relations several times and actually speaks a bit of Finnish. So I’m only vicariously Finnish, which is odd since I have lineage from just about every other European country.

So, yeah, worth the fifty cents I paid for it.