Finnish help for Vietnamese national epic

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By Juha Honkonen
     
      The home of artist Dang Thu Huong in Hanoi is an austere one-room apartment with nothing unnecessary in it. The eye rapidly focuses on paintings leaning against a wall. They depict Finnish barns and national costumes.
      Huong has made illustrations for the Kanteletar, the companion work to the national epic poem, the Kalevala, which has been translated into Vietnamese by Bui Viet Hoa.
      The next effort of the women is to compile and illustrate Vietnam's first national epic by the end of next year.
     
The two are getting support from the Juminkeko Foundation, which specialises in the Kalevala. It has received development cooperation funding for the project from the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
      The Foundation operates in an imposing wooden building in Kuhmo in the far reaches of Kainuu. The contrast with steamy Vietnam could hardly be greater.
      The cold nips at the cheeks, and snow crunches under the shoes, when Bui Viet Hoa, who lives in Espoo, visits the wintry place. She has been referred to as "Vietnam's Elias Lönnrot".
      Lönnrot wrote the Kalevala based on folk poetry from the oral tradition that he compiled during travels in Russian Karelia in the 19th century. Hoa translated the epic into Vietnamese in 1994.
     
What got a woman from Hanoi interested in the Finnish national epic? To some extent, it was necessity. In the mid-1980s the communist Vietnam sent talented young people to study in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Hoa found herself in Budapest.
      While studying literature and the Finnish Language, she encountered the Kalevala, which has an even greater following in Hungary than it does in Finland.
      When Hoa was in Kuopio on a language course she was invited by Markku and Sirpa Nieminen of the Juminkeko Foundation to go on a trip to villages in Russian Karelia where the poems were collected. Interest in the epic flared up at the grave of Arhippa Perttunen, a famous reciter of folk poetry.
      After translating the Kanteletar and the Kalevala into Vietnamese, Hoa returned to Hungary, where she wrote her dissertation on the differences between Finnish and Vietnamese national poetry. She harboured a dream of collecting a Vietnamese epic. At the turn of the millennium, the woman managed to step into the boots of Lönnrot when development funding was granted to the extensive epic project.
     
Vietnam has 54 ethnic groups with dozens of oral miniature epics. Hoa uses them as a basis for her own work, which is to unite the nation. The most challenging job is to compile a unified story out of very many different epics.
      Hoa solves the problem by dividing the book into two parts - the world of myths, and the world of heroes.
      Like the Kalevala, the Vietnamese myths describe the origin of the world. In both epics, everything begins with a bird's egg. In Hoa's book, there is a separate story about how water-buffalo and rice came into being.
      Like Lönnrot, Hoa has travelled among the people to collect her stories. Accompanying her was the third worker in the project, Hoa's husband, linguistic researcher Vo Xuan Que. The two have gone into Vietnamese villages and asked men and women of different ages to sing for them.
      "I showed them the Kalevala and said that the idea now is to collect Vietnamese poems in the same manner. People agreed to sing, and I recorded and photographed them", Hoa explains.
      Songs in minority languages had to be translated into the main national language. One of the challenges facing Hoa is to come up with a name for the epic that is easy to pronounce in all of the languages.
      Hoa says that the biggest differences between her epic and the Kalevala is that Finns solve their problems alone, while the Vietnamese work in groups.
      "Growing rice has required the power of the community, and people have also hunted in groups."
     
While Lönnrot wrote about three per cent of the Kalevala poetry himself, Hoa is writing 20-30 per cent of the poetry in the Vietnamese epic.
      Vietnam has lacked a national epic, because local epic research has not approved of the role of a compiler of national poetry. Hoa might manage to change the situation.
      Hoa is a bit embarrassed by the comparisons between herself and Lönnrot. Whereas the development toward Finnish independence can be seen to have started with the Kalevala, the Vietnamese epic cannot be seen to have had as much of an influence. However, Hoa believes that her work can bring Vietnam's dozens of ethnic groups closer together.
      "Vietnam does not yet have a work that would unite all people. I hope that all Vietnamese will be able to feel that the epic is theirs, and that it would also be read in schools."
     
In the heat of Hanoi Dang Thu Huong is doing the illustrations for Hoa's epic using the same technique that she had for the paintings of the Kanteletar.
      "There are many layers on the painting, and I use water and a stone to grind them down. It can take up to a year for one work to dry."
      She also uses real gold in powdered form inside the paints. This makes the final work shine. The work is finalised with a thin layer of oil.
      Vietnam's first epic has an immediate benefit, at least for its illustrator.
      "If I do not paint, I easily get angry. When I grab the paintbrush, the anger eases", Huong laughs.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print on Kalevala Day, 28.2.2007

More on this subject:
 The Kalevala is read around the world

JUHA HONKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
juha.honkonen@sanoma.fi