Finnish finish

You’ll have to take my word for it, but the text on the side of this building in Tampere, Finland, is in Latin. The building is the Tampereen klassillinen lukio (“Tampere classical upper secondary school”; I’ve stolen the image from its website), the older part bearing the Latin text dating from 1907, and indeed the text was written to mark the completion of these new school premises.

The author of the Latin text was Fridolf Gustafsson, Professor of Latin at the Imperial Alexander University, as the University of Helsinki was known for as long as Finland formed part of the Russian Empire. Gustafsson was one of Carl Heinrich Ulrichs’ most important correspondents during his composition of his Latin newspaper Alaudae, but I’m now doing a little work on Gustafsson as a composer of Latin in his own right.

Here is the poem that is inscribed on the wall of the school. It has eight lines, but actually consists of two elegiac couplets, with each of the four lines divided at the main caesura:

Fennia vos genuit,|| gremio vos intima fovit,

    arboris auscultet || murmura quisque suae.

Fenni vos maneatis,|| at hoc animis retinete,

    Graecia quid dederit || vobis et Hesperia.

“Finland bred you, cherished you deep in her bosom,/ Let each lend ear to the rustling of his tree./ Finns may you remain, but hold this in your thoughts,/ What Greece gave you, and what Italy.”

There’s something else to say about the metre of this poem, but first some words on its content. Gustafsson was much involved in public life, indeed in 1907 elected an MP for the short-lived Finnish parliament of 1907-1908. National sentiment in Finland was a complicated phenomenon at this point, and while Gustafsson was a man of liberal views and in favour of Finnish self-determination, his emphasis in politics was on the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority (who tended to be the social, cultural and commercial elite), a position which can perhaps seem in retrospect more reactionary than it really was. All that being said, however, this poem is a pretty impeccable exercise in Finnish patriotism. The tree to which each pupil should listen is (I think) the silver birch, Finland’s national tree.

The school was (and is) a classical school. Latin is still taught there today, I’m delighted to say, but Gustafsson’s poem indicates how prominent a role Classics played in its ethos and curriculum 120 years ago.

The metrical issue is that, as has been noted, the verse doesn’t quite scan. The Latin word vobis consists of two long syllables, and to be metrical the second needs to be short. Having twice composed Latin for a permanent memorial, it is the content of one’s most distressing dreams that one’s errors might be immortalised in stone for the foreseeable future. In Gustafsson’s case it is very odd, as he was an active and talented Latin poet, using Classical quantitative forms. I have wondered whether his text might have become garbled in its transmission from Helsinki to Tampere, since a simple transposition of two words, vobis and Graecia would yield an acceptable, if in respects other than the metrical less elegant, pentameter line, vobis quid dederit Graecia et Hesperia. (Platnauer assures me that the elision of -a in that position has good precedents.)

To end, though, another off-cut from my research, more Finnish Latin, but this time for Fridolf Gustafsson rather than by him, verse presented to him on his sixtieth birthday by Finnish teachers of Classics. I offer it as potential inspiration to my former students as I close in with regrettable speed on the same milestone. The translation was composed in airports and on trains around a short talk I gave last weekend at a wonderful event in Castel Madama near Tivoli, in which I combined these thoughts with these. So as always I welcome corrections and better ideas. I must also add that I owe a huge debt in all this research to my Finnish student Aune Tytti Hyttinen.