Cover of The Brothers Seven

The Brothers Seven

Aleksis Kivi
Translated by Douglas Robinson

Seitsemän veljestä (The Brothers Seven), the 1870 Finnish novel by Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872), is one of the most (in)famously unknown classics of world literature—unknown not only because so few people in the world can read Finnish, but also because the novel is so incredibly difficult to translate, the Mount Everest of translating from Finnish. It is difficult not only because it blends a saturation in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, and the Bible with a brilliantly stylized form of local dialect, but because it is wild, grotesque, carnivalistic, and laugh-out-loud funny on every page. It has been translated 58 times into 34 languages—but past translations always seemed to fall short of their flamboyant original.


· ISBN: 978-606-697-058-7 (ebook) · Published 2017 · Online access on this site ·
· ISBN: 978-606-697-059-4 (paperback) · Print / eBook available from Zeta Books ·


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