In her evocative and insightful study, Songs of the Border People: Genre, Reflexivity, and Performance in Karelian Oral Poetry, Lotte Tarkka explores the ethnographic traces of singers and songs in Finnish folklore archives. The text represents a translation and reworking of Tarkka’s 2005 dissertation on the song tradition of the parish of Vuokkiniemi, Archangel Karelia, from 1821 to 1921. Tarkka’s study seeks to recover a “connectedness between the poems, the people who sang them, their social life, and the natural environment” (12) lost in the collecting, archiving, editing, and anthologizing that marked the multigenerational process of Finnish folklorists’ “discovery” of Karelian song. As a larger career-long project, Tarkka aims to bring to a close the creative displacement of earlier romantic folklorists, who collected from Karelians but sought often to uncover in their songs an ancient past, a Finnish nation, or a quintessential folk, and replace these acts with more specifically local and historicized interpretations of the song culture and its meanings among singers and their audiences over the course of the century under examination. Tarkka’s work is one of archival investigation but also of dialogue with past scholarly constructs of folklore that often cling tenaciously to folksong genres in many European contexts. Tarkka’s work will prove of interest to folklorists with interests in epic, lyric, and wider genres of folksong. It will also furnish insights for scholars of the comparative history of the discipline, as it examines in nuanced detail the effects of romanticism and mounting Finnish national identity in the ways songs were collected and interpreted during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The study also provides a fascinating glimpse into the workings of magic and ritual in daily farm life within the context of Karelian folk Orthodoxy, particularly as evinced by specific singers and sages, whose lives and times Tarkka carefully reconstructs from extant archival evidence.
The study consists of twelve main chapters, or a total of thirty-six subchapters. After a historical and theoretical introduction, chapter 2 introduces the parish of Vuokkiniemi, its predominant livelihoods and religiosity, as shaped over time. Chapter 3 examines the genres of song performed in the parish and the collectors and singers known chiefly through archival records. Chapter 4 represents the theoretical core of the study, presenting Tarkka’s analysis of the (inter)textuality of the songs, and presenting a framework for understanding how songs relate to one another within the song tradition. Chapters 5 and 6 then present honed case studies regarding particular motifs and genres and their characteristics or meanings within the tradition: songs about the act of singing and song descriptions of great singers/sages. Chapter 7 explores what songs say about cosmogony and other great mythic events, while chapter 8 examines the more immediate, interpersonal dramas of courtship and marriage. Particularly intriguing in relation to current scholarship in ecocriticism is chapter 9, which examines the ways in which villagers interacted with the forest and its powers through song. Chapter 10 explores the abundant themes of the otherworld, death, and sorrow in the song tradition. Chapter 11 examines the effects of the First World War on the singers and songs of the region and the ways in which the political fortunes of Finland and Russia/Soviet Union transformed the meanings of “border” Karelia in profound and unmistakable ways.
The text’s careful and nuanced translations, achieved jointly by Tarkka and fellow folklorist Leila Virtanen, allow the reader to glimpse the songs’ poetic style and content, sometimes earthy and direct, sometimes cryptic and elusive. Translating songs in ways that convey both their clear messages and their ambiguities is a daunting and humbling task, and a great strength of this study is its enlightening and valuable rendering of Karelian song texts with a degree of accuracy and feeling that allows the reader of English to sense the artistry of the originals. Understandably, the translations do not attempt to reproduce the poetic mechanisms of the originals (e.g., alliteration and meter) but they achieve an appealing blank verse tone and a subtle attention to word choice that reminds the reader of the fact that the works at hand are poetry. Of course, lost still is the fact that they were also music, something difficult to recover in the era before large-scale sound recordings and in a context in which many collectors lacked the skills to produce even rough musical transcriptions of the melodies they heard. Nonetheless, the study refers at times to tantalizing bodies of evidence, like sound recordings made by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (463), and these materials would add further depth and richness to the study if included in the form of transcriptions. Yet the translations of the song texts are sufficient in themselves to give the reader a sense of the excitement and admiration often displayed by the travelers and collectors Tarkka quotes, people whose romantic ideals helped both preserve, and in some ways distort, the song culture they witnessed. Tarkka’s study is a valuable contribution to a long tradition of research on Karelian song and song culture.
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[Review length: 828 words • Review posted on December 10, 2014]