Finnish words that don’t translate 2: löyly

Having the pleasure of showing a friend from North Wales the joys of Helsinki, I knew that I had to take him to a sauna. I also wanted to try out the wood sauna on the second floor at Yrjönkatu Swimming Baths which I had heard was a particularly pleasant place to hang out.  We were not disappointed. The place itself is a a delight, well cared for with a lovely twenties classicism interior. The impressive stove (or kiuas) in the sauna gave off a subtle aroma

René Descartes would almost certainly have reappraised his philosophy had he experienced löyly.

of wood-smoke and also, when someone threw water through a letter-box slot near the top, good löyly .

OK, so what does löyly mean? Well some people say that it’s just the word for the steam that comes off the stones. But my Finnish Language teacher explained that löyly is something that happens not in the physical world at all but in your head. There is a moment a few seconds after the steam rises (so long as it doesn’t drive you to dive for a lower shelf or out of the door) when you experience a sublime sensation of heat so overpowering that every worry or thought in your mind is banished by it. For me, it is a hit that surpasses anything else – a moment of shock and overpowering of the senses that, so long as you surrender to it, turns to state of complete relaxation, calm and contentment.

So perhaps löyly is a phenomena that confounds the both the dualist and the physicalist. It is something which is neither mental nor physical but both — a transitory place,  an event where the distinction between mind and body dissolves.

The resistable force meets the movable object

OK, that was much too easy.Congratulations to Nic and Toby for correctly identifying the object as a frame-mounted bike-immobilizer.

And I’m disappointed to hear about bike thefts in Helsinki being on the up. But clearly it’s not such a problem as in London where no one would dream of locking their bicycle with anything that did not secure it to an immovable object. Maybe the solution is just to have a bike so old that no one would want to pinch it.

Where I hope I am not being naive is in feeling much safer as I go around Helsinki. Although there’s a fair smattering of drunken behaviour it doesn’t seem to translate itself into aggression in the way that it does in so many British towns and cities. But talking of crime, I was surprised to see a leaflet in the tourist office warning people against handing over their wallets to people posing as police officers. Is this a rising form or criminal activity I wonder.

Competition time!

Can you guess the familiar object taken from an unfamiliar angle? Well probably not if your from the UK in which case this thing will probably not be very familiar at all. In fact, to a Londoner it may seem strange and bizarre, perhaps even risible. But it’s one of the signs of a society so secure that it barely needs security.

Answer tomorrow or the day after. Or the day after that.

The Iceman Cometh

Being an Alien with little in-depth experience of the Finnish winter, I am still quaintly delighted by snow. It started coming down last night as we sat in a Dodo meeting on ways to use wasted space in Helsinki. Ideas included guerilla gardening, earthships and squatting. Then walking out to the bar, it had already begun to settle, carpeting the dark streets of Kallio. An established English architect told me that he has no trouble with the Helsinki winters having prepared himself by spending two of them in Oulu, deep in the frozen North.

But so far, I really don’t have a problem either with the cold or the dark. in one way, what makes it so much more bearable than Winters in Enlgand is that when you get home (or even into the tram), you feel lovely snuggly and warm. I cast my mind back without nostaglia of the damp and drafty victorian dwellings of London and feel quite lucky to be here.

(Note to self: find out how much a pair of winter tyres for bicycle will set me back.)

Talkoot: first in an occasional series of Finnish words that don’t translate

Talkoot is another great Finnish idea. You get your friends and neighbours to come together to carry out some task either for the good of the community or for just for your own benefit. There are, in English,  the related concepts of Barn Raising (which will be familiar if you know the film, Witness with Harrison Ford) or, apparently, “bee”. In Latin America, there is something similar called a Minga. But the fact that such a custom survives in this country in the face of the pressures of market capitalism is testimony to the strength of the social fabric. No surprise then that Finland shows up the world’s most prosperous nation, according to an index which takes a broader definition of wealth, including health, freedom and security.

So today I find myself participating in the sociable and rather agreeable task of raking up the leaves in my friends’  garden along with half a dozen others. It’s a beautiful, cloudless day and we finish the job in less than an hour or so.

And then we got to sit down to a delicious meal of salmon baked with blue cheese, ratatouille and potatoes, drink wine and talk about Nietzsche, Twitter and the End of the World.  Today, on balance, I think that I’m against it.

Refreshingly the same

Truth be told, most of us have a love/hate relationship with globalization. I mean liberal (US), leftie (Br.) types who think of themselves as internationalists,  demanding that we should respect other cultures,  so long as they accept certain non-negotiable values like sexual equality.  We try to buy locally produced food and at the same time fill our homes with “ethnic” trinkets from Africa and South America. We decry the incursion of McDonalds and Starbucks into Asia while seeking out the latest Asian Fusion restaurant in Shoreditch. This malaise was cruelly mocked once by a Conservative politician at his party conference, reading out a leaflet which read, ‘Join the international fight against globalization.”

This cognitive dissonance is nicely encapsulated in a new exhibition at Design Forum Finland with the title Sámi Knife II. The Sámi knife (Leuku in Finnish, Stuorniibi in the Sámi language) is a traditional tool of the Sámi, the indigenous people of Northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The exhibition organisers point out in their introduction that the skill of making the knife is disappearing under pressure from global production and the resultant price competition. The exhibition celebrates this very localised artefact by inviting 23 international designers to ‘fight against the disappearance of material culture’, drawing them from as far afield as France, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Japan. Oh, and, I almost forgot, Finland.

photo Anssi Hietaharju

Each designer was sent a traditional Sámi knife made in Lapland. There were some very pretty ‘updatings’ of the knife including one with the handle and a scabbard bound in red and white cord, another with a fish shaped blade and a sexy black leather holster, another with a designer signature inlaid into the handle.

But for me, the runaway winner was Louse Campbell who is based in Copenhagen. Resisting the pressure to be “innovative”, she simply took the original knife and  coated it with a white paint (except for the edge of the blade) which is meant to wear off in use. In her spiel she writes:

I do not see any reason to redesign the knife. It is perfect as it is. Big, sharp, durable and beautifully crafted from local materials, it serves its purpose immaculately.

Leuku II / Sámi Knife II. Design Forum Finland, Erottajankatu 7 Helsinki. Exhibition ends 29.11.2009

Speaking of language

Overheard in an R-Kioski. Young woman behind the counter angrily to older woman customer: “I am sorry but I really can’t speak Swedish. At school I learned English and French.” Eventually the woman realising she couldn’t make herself understood, walked out of the shop. I couldn’t tell whether she was in fact Swedish or a Swedish-speaking Finn.

About six per cent of the population of Finland have Swedish as their mother-tongue. They certainly consider themselves Finns and also feel they have the right to communicate in what is, after all, one of the two official languages of the country as guaranteed by the constitution.  Thankfully, most people I speak to here are supportive of the Swedish speakers’ linguistic rights. However there is a fair bit of low-level and not so low-level resentment too.

I don’t think I can do justice to this  complex and controversial issue but there’s a good blog by a Swedish-speaking Finn and there’s also a Wikipedia article on the subject.

The First Snow of Winter, a correction

Seems like I was right after all – According to PPusa that is.

(Not) The First Snow of Winter

Bicycle outside the K

It didn’t snow today. Apparently. I thought it did and sent an excited text to Mrs. K. But no, it’s only sleet or lumirantä. Which is unfortunately the way things are when the temperature hovers as it is doing around +2 C. As I set off on my bike to contemplate ultimate reality at the local Buddhist Centre, the bitter wind and icy dampness nearly drove me back into the cosy Maya of our flat.

But I’m glad I went and on the way home, enjoyed the shimmering droplets caught in the streetlamps. Glad too that I wasn’t the only person braving the weather on their bike. This charming specimen parked outside the newly revamped K-market on Albertinkatu where I stopped off and bought some apples on the way home. Finnish apples of course. The owner came back laden with shopping bags. I hope she didn’t fall off.

Mind your language

Something unusual happened to me yesterday — somebody refused to speak to me in English. In Helsinki. They were under 70 years of age and over 7, stone-cold sober and very polite. And I am very grateful to them.

Just to explain. As any alien will tell you, the hardest thing about learning to speak Finnish in Helsinki is that most people you come into contact with not only speak excellent English but they enjoy doing so. They take such pride in it that, even say in the local R-Kioski they can be almost insulted if you don’t allow them to demonstrate their prowess.

So, I was in the Rikhardinkatu Library, returning a DVD called Mustaa valkoisella (1968) — a rather dry example of sixties realism made by Jörn Donner, good for learning Finnish as it continued the tradition of the actors speaking mostly kirjakieli or formal language which I can just about understand (although annoyingly, no one speaks it). As it happened I wanted to tell the library that there was a fault and it cut out in the last minute of the film. Having begun speaking in Finnish and soon running out of the vocabulary to describe this unfortunate turn of events, I politely asked the librarian if he spoke English. It’s a kind of non-question that I use by way of a polite request which is invariably answered in English in the affirmative. But to my surprise, the man said, in Finnish, “I speak English badly and you speak Finnish so we can talk in Finnish.” This I could hardly deny and even the recognition that I could speak Finnish at all I took as a huge compliment.

And in fact the encounter continued with my actually making myself understood as I asked if there was another copy of the film in the system. And I even understood him explaining that there was a copy in Espoo somewhere and he could have it for me by Friday.

If only this would happen more often. It’s hard enough keeping up the motivation to learn a language with no relation to any other Indo-European language, with its intricate grammar (21 noun cases and counting), similarly spelt but totally different near-homonyms, and exacting pronunciation. But, when you find that no one deigns to speak their language with you, it’s easy to get downright disheartened.

And it’s also very sad that Finns seem to hold their own beautiful language in such low esteem that many advertising slogans are in English, perhaps to convey some ersatz feel of cosmpolitan sophistication. In fact, so much has English become a third domestic language (after Swedish) that annoying salespersons accost you in Kampi Shopping Centre saying, “Can I ask you a question?” Well I have a question for you — what’s wrong with speaking Finnish?

So a big thank you to the man in Rikhardinkatu Library. May you continue to stick to your guns, or rather to your pyssyt. After all, try going into a library in say, Lewisham and insisting on speaking in Finnish, or for that matter, any language other than English.