Chapter 3. - Test case 2: Semiotranslating “Prufrock” into Finnish
Chapter 3. - Test case 2: Semiotranslating “Prufrock” into Finnish

Summary/Abstract: Perhaps a translation history focused on translations by different hands of the disparate writings of the same author is not the right kind of test case for semiotranslation? Perhaps what we need instead is a series of translations of the same text? Aft er all, the idea behind semiotranslation is translation as semiosis – and that can be read as translations getting “better” in the aggregate, over time. So for our second round of semiotranslational testing, let us examine the first two Finnish translations of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” arguably the key translated text for the importation of modernism to Finland. As far as I can tell, the poem has been translated into Finnish five times, by Leo Tiainen in 1949 (Eliot 1949), by Ville Repo in 1956 (Eliot 1956), by Ville Repo again (revising his own 1956 translation) in 1992 (Eliot 1992), by Pekka Sauri in 1995 (Eliot 1995), and by Juha Silvo in 2009 (Eliot 1995); it will suffice for our purposes here to look mainly at the first two, with only an occasional glance at a later version.

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