Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/28

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With regard to the translation, I have tried to make it as literal as is compatible with intelligibility, and without doing too great violence to English idiom. For I think folk-lorists require a greater adherence to the letter than a translation from a purely literary point of view ought to exhibit. Yet, as the original is in metre, a certain rhythmical measure has been preserved when that could be done without loss in other more important directions. In Finnish, the second line of a couplet is nearly always a repetition in other words of its predecessor, and stands in apposition to it. If there is no subject or no verb in the second line, this must be understood from the line above, though sometimes it is vice versâ. As I think intelligibility is gained by placing the parallel members of the couplet side by side, instead of one below the other, I have given two Finnish lines in one line in English. The apposition is marked by a dash when any portion of the first member—subject, verb, or preposition—has to be understood in the second member to complete its meaning. When a variant (v.) consists of a single couplet or only half a one, it is given in the body of the text; when of