Cat came over once again. I live closer to the city center so we hang out here much more often although I know it’s not fair. We had talked earlier and found out that we both love poetry. I had written down some of my favorite poems in a notebook which I showed Cat. The first poem I wanted her to read was Lauri Viita – Sota, meaning “the war”. She got the idea of the poem which surprised me as I wouldn’t expect her to know war vocabulary. She wanted me to try and translate it in English. There were two words I couldn’t translate, “hurme” and “peitsi” but as I described them she knew what I meant. I learned that “peitsi” is a lance. Hurme on the other hand was much more difficult, I believe “a frenzy” would be the closest if it was only a positive kind of frenzy.
Cat told me about her earliest memory of Finland in Finnish. She was on a bus and trying to remember all the words she had tried to learn. One of them was “poro”, a reindeer, and she considers it the first word she learned in Finnish. She says it remarkably well considering her mother tongue doesn’t include the harsh R sound we do.
She wanted to read another poem in Finnish trying to understand it so I gave her a poem that I had written at age 12. It was about an angel who lost her wings because she fell in love with the devil. She understood it somewhat well too, although the vocabulary wasn’t your everyday conversation Finnish. Again, she wanted me to translate it and there were two words I struggled with: “kielo” and “haparoiden”. Kielo, apparently, is “lily of the valley” which I find incredibly beautiful. I told Cat that “kielo” sounds like “kielto” which means a ban, prohibition or forbidden. “Haparoiden” means “(to proceed) with caution”.
As we were talking we heard the thunder and saw some lightning too. I love the thunder.
ATB, Sonja
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