I’ve been in the field so long that I can already look back on my career path with a critical eye. I have been blessed with many of “my own writers”, whose works I have translated in their entirety. I have translated all the works of the contemporary American author John Irving to date, with a Finnish translation of the latest novel manuscript forthcoming. The writer’s style and themes have become so familiar that I imagine I know him as a person better than I do, although we have met on a number of occasions over the years.

A few years back when I translated Irving’s first novel Setting Free the Bears (1968). I wrote the postscript. It’s been 25 years since I translated The World According to Garp and I wanted to translate the 1968 novel so the writer’s career trajectory would be complete. The first novel has the first shoots of the hit writer’s themes, subjects that later suffused his extensive output.

“My other writer” is Alice Munro. I’ve been working with her too for thirty years.

The Nobel prizewinner’s wisdom and carefully crafted story collections have been enjoyable to work with. I’m grateful that now, having had some experience of life, I’ve got to translate her tales dealing with sharply observed turning points in a woman’s life. I met Alice Munro in 1986 at the Toronto Literary Festival, having already translated two of her story collections. Not long ago I chanced upon a paperback in which she had written “Good luck, Kristiina!” Munro’s dry humour. Munro has talked about how she “wanders around in the short story like it was a house, touching and moving things from place to place”. The translator follows in the author’s footsteps in the same way experiencing and sensing different possibilities. As a translator, the visual is as important to me as heard experiences. My drama activities as a young woman have been a great help in getting a sense of a book’s characters.

An acquaintance writing in a newer way about a woman’s life is Siri Hustvedt, whose novels offer a portrait of contemporary urban reality in America and a woman’s place in it. Hustvedt is a writer I first drew to the attention of a number of publishers with no luck, until she was taken up by the publisher Otava. The way Hustvedt wraps her works in art, art history, the detailed descriptions of practising art, all this divides opinion among readers, but I like Hustvedt’s sense of aesthetics.

My third favourite American author is Philip Roth. Chancing upon my ancient study book, logging among others a course on sentence structure, I swore to myself that I would never structure anything again. But in ‘resolving’ the sentences in Roth’s American Pastoral, sentences which ran to several pages, I had no choice but to eat my words and grab my pencil! Nor has the grammar been allowed to gather dust at a later stage either. The work of the translator is a very specific exercise in dismantling and building up again. The structure of the source text has to be resurrected in a new position within the new language so that it doesn’t collapse and the joins don’t show. Roth’s trilogy was a profound journey into American society, seen through Jewish eyes.