I do so enjoy sitting down to chat to you about whatever occurs to me; it scarcely counts as a letter any more—no need to bother rounding it off properly, it’s as if you’re simply here with me for a bit, while I smoke my post-breakfast cigarette.
Tove Jansson’s letters, collected and edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson and translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death, are like this missive to her mother: emphatic and physical, simultaneously whimsical and solemn, and full of chat. Again and again, the Finnish-Swedish artist and writer, best known for creating the Moomins, writes to family, friends, confidantes, and lovers for the simple pleasure of talking to them. She consistently circles around the only two things that matter in life: love and work. Beginning with the letters to her family, Tove impresses us with her emotional honesty. Her openness and attitude are such that the translation rather frequently omits a few of her dramatic exclamation points or settles for middling English equivalents for her lively swearing, perhaps to better maintain the Nordic artist’s international image as a ‘gentle, cultivated, enraptured child of nature,’ as she self-consciously and cheekily describes it in a letter to her partner Tuulikki Pietilä.
But even the more polished, anglicised Tove Jansson of this collection offers real intimacy to her readers in the shape of personal insights and agonies as well as protean samples of complex, changing relationships. The closest encounters in the letters—both from the perspective of their intended recipients and our ability as readers to steal into them—are often encased by Tove’s pronouncements of her having ‘stolen a moment to talk to you.’ In this selection, the person Tove talks most with—her original Swedish phrase ‘prata med dig’ insists on interaction—is her friend Eva Konikoff, who left Helsinki for America in 1941. Somewhat surprisingly, Eva’s remoteness enables extensive intimacy, although there are moments in the early 1940s when the only reader Tove knows will certainly peruse her chat is the censor checking post from Nazi-allied Finland to America: ‘CENSOR, PLEASE DON’T DELETE ANYTHING, IT’S ONLY ME! TOVE.’
Tove’s epistolary intimacy is figured as an intensely physical communion. She provides us with the image to describe the effects of her own letters when praising those of another: years after their love affair had quieted into a thoughtful friendship, she writes to Vivica Bandler that ‘[y]our letter felt like you taking me in your arms.’ Tove’s exalted conviction of her recipient being ‘always close to me’ is a touching performance of proximity, but at times its ferocity is physically chilling. In the most consuming phases of her and Vivica’s relationship, she enacts intimacy with her distant, already-lost lover not only by sketching and painting her and writing their entanglement into the Moomin characters Thingumy and Bob, but also by sending her letters in which, with a slightly manic hunger, Tove recounts how she ‘strode out into the snow and called out for you’ and felt ‘so close’ to Vivica that she claims she ‘really did hold you in my arms.’
Tove’s dialogic imagination allows her to create intimacy in her letters by summons that feel both physical and fantastic. Lovingly, she draws her reader, in this case boyfriend Atos Wirtanen, into her presence, to Florence:
I should like to place you here, on one of the flower-covered hillsides, full of colours, buzzy insects and warmth [. . .] Every day I drink your health in the red wine you like so much and fall asleep with you as some unfamiliar bird sings a single, melancholy note over and over again, down in the garden. It isn’t true that it’s “too beautiful”. It’s just as beautiful as it ought to be.
More broadly speaking, the letters also conjure up Tove’s world: a word or two in a foreign language evokes certain locales; a bit of Finnish recalls her particular cultural background. Little moments of life intersect with the writing: whether the intended recipient or the peruser of the collection, the reader is near when Tove loses ‘another of [her dentist] Sivén’s fillings, a huge one’; when she is anguished by one ‘[t]erribly long air-raid warning’; when the number of the Moomin comic strip she is simultaneously working on is randomly inserted in the letters; and even when she is writing a letter in the dark, when ‘it feels just as fascinating to be utterly alone.’
Yet in the midst of such closeness, the limits of intimacy are equally dear to Tove. Once, fed up with people worrying about how she manages on her own, she wisely asks: ‘Who worries about me not coping in company?’ It is clear that love requires constant work, and even Tove, with her open-minded curiosity and flexible geniality, wavers about the degree of intimacy that exists between her and her correspondents: ‘Are we further away now at last – or closer?’ she wonders in her last letter to Eva Konikoff. This appears to be the central, constant question in all the relationships documented in the collection. So understandably, the selection of letters and the titles given to the sections—like ‘“I am never alone when I talk to you”’ for the letters to Eva—draw our attention, and appreciation, to the mysteries of togetherness. The almost 500 pages of letters allow for many versions of the tale of Tove and her Loves: the traumas caused by the war and its ‘chaos of monologues’ making people ‘pig-headed’; her flight from brutal loneliness, ‘the greatest curse of our age’; the struggles for creative solitude in which she can comfortably work for herself (‘Who else is one to work for?’). And then there is the herstory that cuts through these battles, which is to say the story of how Tove dreamt of, and acquired, her island and the cottage on it, ‘the house for my friends and my solitude.’
Tove and her letters exist in the meeting point of dependence and independence, in the eye of the storm where love and solitude enable one another. Tove the letter-writer is a creature of the in-between: between the writer and the reader, but regularly also between lovers, cultures, languages, worlds, and even between the land and the sea. She deals with this liminal state in both images and words, with many of the collection’s funniest moments emerging from scenes of travelling between cultures. As a Swedish-speaking Finn, Tove occasionally feels like an intermediary amongst both finnar (Finnish-speaking Finns) and Swedes. English readers too are entertained by the aloof Finn’s adventures in Southern Europe. Tove, always capable of self-ironising, knows her family will be amused by her celebrating midsummer by renting a boat in Italy, in order to look for a shark—directly after mentioning that in Capri ‘four children had been eaten up.’ But besides the humour, such scenes are coloured by that occasionally dark, very human element, from which the Moomins would spring. The children of L’Île-de-Sein in Brittany had never seen a woman wearing a bathing suit:
the bellowing horde of them pursued me eagerly pelting me with stones, to a chorus of barking mutts. In the end I was so furious that I produced an even louder bellow and chased after them. Panic broke out. Now they see me as some primeval wild woman, likely to gobble them up at the very least. If they only knew I was more scared of them than they of me.
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One of the worlds Tove moves in and out of is that of ‘business’—a word she typically uses in English, thereby associating this necessary evil with London and her internationally acclaimed comic strips for the British Associated Newspapers. Tove’s ironic detachment towards ‘business’ is humorously depicted by her occasionally contrasting the English word with things from her domestic domain—‘the asparagus patch’ or lettuce growing back on her island might attract her attention to the extent that she is unable to write Tuulikki ‘an account of my complicated business’ from England. In this collection, italics helpfully signal Tove’s original English, and it is interesting to follow her increasing use of the language in expectation of a London business meeting or of Moomintroll’s launch in the United States.
One aspect of international business Tove took very seriously was translation. She offers a detailed critique of Elisabeth Porch’s ‘stiff and literal’ translation of Finn Family Moomintroll and ardently declares that it ‘[w]ould have been better to let Warburton (who translated James Joyce’s Odysseus) take it—which was what he wanted.’ (Thomas Warburton went on to translate some of the later Moomin books.) Tove considered it vital that translations of the Moomin books would sound as if they had been ‘“thought” in English,’ and in her other professional roles she was equally committed to the wizardry of words travelling between worlds. As she was preparing to illustrate the Swedish edition of Alice in Wonderland, she was ‘[t]hinking of the special magic of the words, the names of the creatures,’ and asked her editor to see the Swedish translation before she began. Tove already knew Alice well, which suggests that she wanted to render the particularity that the translation would possess in her own illustrations. For Tove, the special bond between translation and image existed even when the text was nonsense—‘do[ing] The Hunting of the Snark with the translation beside me,’ she recalls, was ‘a real tightrope adventure.’ The images of magic and circus arts, like so many details of addressing, signing off, and punning in the letters, point to the earnestness of Tove and her words even when they are at their most playful.
Words of intimacy are Tove’s means of coping in company and the letters’ most stirring offering to their readers. Harder (and softer) than the scenic descriptions of solitude, these are words that travel between people, constitute a challenge for translation, and perturb their creator. What sea of words could adequately depict love? When characterising her relationship with Atos, Tove finds speechless symbols most appropriate: ‘He cares for me just as he cares for the sun, the soil, laughter, the wind.’ But when Tove falls in love with Vivica, Atos is disturbed by Tove’s use of ‘so many Words,’ as she ecstatically describes her newly-discovered lesbian sensations: ‘Just feelings, women’s feelings. Happiness and Loving and Heart and other Words!’ But in a year’s time, after acknowledging her loss of Vivica, Tove reassesses: ‘It’s all turned into something that has little to do with “happiness” or “love”—oh, all those words—only work and peace of mind.’ This wealth of Words turns out to be vividly translatable, thanks to that universal experience and knowledge of Words that cover so much and yet are haunted by a vague feeling that they do not cover enough.
Alongside Tove’s attraction—and aversion—to such fatal Words, the letters trace how she introduces and plays with alternative vocabularies of intimacy. She draws from contemporary usage: a lesbian is a ‘borderliner’; her brother Lars might also have ‘gone over to the “rive gauche”.’ Tove also gives classical references the bite of local humour: her refusal to post a personal ad in Hufvudstadsbladet looking for someone to take her ‘to the distant shores of Lesbos’ is supposedly based on the risk of respondents thinking ‘I meant Esbo [a city just outside Helsinki]. . .’. Memorably, the most persistent word Tove uses to refer to lesbians is ‘ghost.’ The twilight zone, ‘the ghost side,’ Tove tells Eva, is her route to happiness and authenticity, and ‘ghost,’ or ‘spök’ in Swedish, becomes her standard tag for Vivica and her girlfriends. But these are just terms of reference, surface words, and finding an appropriate vocabulary becomes more difficult the deeper Tove dives into her homosexual feelings. Her longing for sufficient words parallels her first time falling in love with a woman, when she frets over not being able to communicate: ‘In words, any old words – I am desperately trying to make contact with you.’ The ‘old words,’ despite and perhaps because of their proliferation, just won’t do.
This problem of both too many and too few words of intimacy makes Letters from Tove a precious companion text to any biography of Tove as well as a freestanding literary work. Most significantly, though, the letters complement Tove’s individual books and even her characters, as in the way that her romance with Vivica coexists with Thingumy and Bob, whose Swedish names are Tofslan and Vifslan. Translator Sarah Death pays the characters’ names due attention in the notes provided, considering not only the nicknames for Tove and Vivica but also their original connotations and feminine diminutive forms. The Moomin characters constantly overlap with the lovers: Tove writes to Vivica that she ‘woke up to find I was shouting out for you. Then I had all the trouble of explaining who Vifslan was. A character in my new book! Who goes round holding hands with Tofslan and can’t speak a word of sense!’ Whilst Tofslan and Vifslan—or Thingumy and Bob—are intelligible and in that sense do make some sense, they talk in a unique manner. In Swedish, their chatter is typified by adding ‘-sla’ to nouns and verbs, so that the repetition of the sound their names share emphasises their bond. English does not have words for this, and so reproducing the cutesy, faintly maddening, childish impression with ‘ghostses’ and ‘sickses’ is a perfectly good solution. These echoes of Tofslan and Vifslan in the translated letters suggest the deeply personal origins of the Moomins, as do the numerous other Moomin-related expressions Tove uses, for which the collection provides witty translations and helpful notes. The most fillyjonkish readers, however, might feel somewhat begroked that the most interesting illustration in the book, a facsimile of a Moomin-themed picture-letter from Tove to Vivica, is not translated.
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If we look beyond Tove’s role as creator of the Moomins, which can be so very hard to do, and follow the length and strength of her attachments, the most personal and most enduring question we might ask of the letters is about the kind of vocabularies Tove uses with Tuulikki, with whom she lived for forty-five years. Of course, Tuulikki exists in the Moomins—she is Too-Ticky—but she is also one of the two protagonists of Tove’s story of the island. While the dream of an island was one of Tove’s staple fantasies in all her major romances, it was only with Tuulikki that she finally committed to the island life. Here, we are together with Tove in borderlands, between the land and the sea, in a predominantly Swedish-speaking community in the Finnish archipelago, and in love with a Finnish-speaking woman.
Whilst Tove’s occasional dalliances with English, French, and Italian thrive in the translation, her surprisingly lengthy, imaginative, and grammatically accurate use of Finnish in this volume sails on slightly choppier waters. Swedish and Finnish are the languages between Tove and Tuulikki: they primarily communicated in Swedish, but Finnish surrounds Tove’s letters to Tuulikki, who sometimes responded in Finnish, rendering the epistolary relationship bilingual. In all of her letters, including those to her family and Eva, Tove casually uses a discerning Finnish phrase every now and then, and while some of these are sufficiently noted and translated, others are silently merged into the English. Here, if we reflect on the political and social status of minority languages in general, perhaps one could have wished for more exactingness in the translation’s observation of the Finnishness of Tove’s Swedish, if only because it participates in the language question in Finland, where today some 290,000 people still speak finlandssvenska as their mother tongue. Noting this, it is a shame that Tove’s letters to Elisabeth Wolff are omitted from this translation, since in the original they contain Tove’s most extensive and fiery commentary on this particular Nordic cultural tension.
Finnish Swedish, as the means of communication between Tove and Tuulikki, may be read as another queer love language in these letters. In some letters in this translation, this variety of Swedish might have allowed for a demonstration of the unknowable at the core of intimate relationships. Tove occasionally calls Tuulikki ‘doj’, which, as a note first remarks, had no ‘meaning or special reference beyond its affectionate sound’. Psipsu, their cat, is also granted this name, and Tove tells Tuulikki that she and Psipsu ‘miss our third Doj.’ However, ‘doj’ is lost a few pages later, when it is translated as ‘shoe’—which it does indeed signify in Stockholm slang, but evidently not in Tove’s small triangle on her Finnish island.
Tove and Tuulikki’s Swedish is also typified by cross-contamination with Finnish. Tove may incorporate Tuulikki’s erroneous Swedish, or a Finnish neologism of Tuulikki’s may cross over from life into Tove’s letters, and a number of these pearls are, thankfully, noted in the translation. Indeed, some more explanatory (and exploratory) notes into the specifics of Finnish-Swedish culture might have helped to fill some of the small gaps in this edition. It is easy to categorise Finnish Swedish as peripheral—and the categorisation might be sped up when the luminaries of the language, like Tove, embrace the periphery by settling on an islet and always dreaming of an even remoter home.
Yet even the ‘Outer Island’ of Tove’s fantasies would be a retreat for her and for Tuulikki, and hence the peculiarities of the language between them matter. A letter, as we see time and again in this collection, does plenty by employing and playing with such essential words, and thanks to Tove Jansson’s guileless artistry, these letters, with all their affection, reach out to the reader—any reader—and invite them in, not only for a chat but perhaps even for a hug somewhere on the faraway island. At its best, Letters from Tove is a celebration of the borderline, a reminder of the richness and realness of intermediary loves and lives, and an illustration of the value of intimate words, whether too abundant or too few.
