I was the last of the family litter so the child who was read to a great deal, and I myself read plenty. Reading got me telling stories; expressing myself verbally was easy. I had the good fortune to go first to the girls lyceum school in Lahti and then to get the teachers I did - Väinö Kamu and Aila Simula - at the Sysmä comprehensive in central Finland, who encouraged me to read and write. As a teenager I went in for amateur acting, tried to get into theatre school, and failed. I landed top grades in my school-leaving exams and in the autumn of 1967 got into the University of Helsinki to read Finnish and Finnish literature as well as phonetics.

What a combination! In the lectures I got to know Kersti Juva, and ended up in Eila Pennanen’s translation seminar and at the same time the translation profession. I had got familiar with translated literature during my schooldays and read with enthusiasm the so-called ‘yellow library’ in the sixties, including Steinbeck and Hemingway. But the translators didn’t really figure. If it weren’t for Eila I would have gone into journalism, become a Finnish teacher or speech therapist. I got my Bachelor’s degree in 1972 and threw myself recklessly into freelance work. My dissertation on Paavo Haavikko’s poetry stalled, and I never got back to it. I began my career by translating Robert van Gulik’s extensive historical detective series set in China, then Astrid Lindgren’s Karlsson-on-the-Roof and Madicken stories. Lindgren re-entered my life in 2007 in the shape of Pippi Longstocking, which I retranslated for the reading public.

In the beginning of the 1980s I got to run those same translation courses which I had sat through over several terms. Although the proseminar was intended for students whose main subject was Finnish, students of foreign languages wanted to attend. We did loads of work, a short story each week, the mood was good and the teacher undoubtedly learned as much if not more than the students! It was quite an eye-opener: the same source text could produce as many variations as there were translators! Each translation was the translator’s interpretation. If Kersti and I were the only ones from Eila’s course to go into translating, the star student on my course was Jaana Kapari, perhaps more familiar as the translator of a character who probably needs no introduction - Harry Potter.