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Gems from the Moominvalley archives
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Finland Bound with a Socially Aukward Penguin

by Antonuzzo

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We’re just over a week into the new year and it already looks to be an interesting one.

The big bit of news for me is that I’m off to Finland for a month. This came about after discussions with FILI, The Finnish Literature Exchange. I’ll be house (and cat) sitting for renowned Finnish author Anneli Kanto, which is going to give me the chance to make serious inroads into my translations of Tove and Lars’ early material.

The British Council have interviewed me about this, and also highlighted some of my own cartoons – a recent strip about a Penguin called Aukward.

I’ll post more closer to the time and also provide despatches from Finland once I get there. It hardly need be said that I’m pretty excited about all this…

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The Lost Strips

by Antonuzzo

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Between 1954 and 1968, Tove and Lars Jansson created hundreds of Moomin comic strips for The Evening News. So what happened to all of these when the newspaper ceased to be? If you’re squeamish, look away now.

They were binned.

Aside from a few that found their way into collections or the hands of private collectors, all of the original hand-drawn Moomin strips were consigned to the skip. It’s very sad to think that those miniature works of art ended their days ingloriously in a bin in Fleet Street. Well, maybe not all of them…

A box in Canterbury came to light recently, and was found to contain a number of previously unpublished Moomin strips – the actual originals drawn by Tove Jansson. These were originally destined for the inaugural strip, Moomin and the Brigands, but the sequence – in which Moomin and Sniff are rescued from falling by a passing cloud – were evidentally dropped in favour of Moomin and Sniff selling their rejuvenating mixture.

What is interesting about these strips is seeing some of Tove Jansson’s creative processes at work. Jansson made extensive use of screentone in her strips, the pattern of black dots used to portray shading. In those pre-digital days, this was the only way to emulate a grey colour in newsprint. Many cartoonists actually laid the screentone directly onto their artworks, requiring extreme dexterity with a scalpel to cut adhesive sheets of Letratone or Zip-a-tone into place. Tove Jansson had the resources of The Evening News to rely on, however.

She would shade in blue the areas to be rendered in screentone, and the strip would be photographed twice. The first photo would be used to cut the dies for the black lines, and the second would capture the blue areas to be printed in screentone. The final strip was either laid down via a two-pass printing process, or an assembly of both dies.

The original Moomin strips are extremely scarce, and finding these unreleased strips is treat indeed. Some of these are on display at the Tove Jansson exhibition in Dulwich, so there’s yet another reason to make your way down there.

 

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More Than Just Moomins

by Antonuzzo

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Don’t worry – there are Moomins aplenty at the new exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery. But the simply-titled Tove Jansson exhibition digs deep into the history of her work. The exhibition has already been shown in other parts of the world, but this is its debut in the UK – in fact, it’s the first exhibition of Jansson’s work to ever come to Britain, something startling given the popularity of her books.

Even so, I’m going to go lightly on the spoilers. Photography is a bit of a no-no on this one, but (with permission) I’ve included a few shots to give an idea of what to expect. Suffice to say: this is one that really has to be seen.

The exhibition proceeds in chronological order, with her early paintings in the first room. Many of these are self-portraits, and her style is at once unique, confident and breathtaking. This is like being immersed in the classiest Instagram feed you’ve ever seen. Also in this room is a vitrine containing her covers from Garm, including a hastily-withdrawn unflattering portrait of Stalin; it was felt that running this cover could have threatened the peace talks that were underway. And of course Snork, her ur-Moomin makes an appearance on a few of the covers.

There are seascapes, there are portraits of family and Tuulikki Pietila, and there are some shining examples of her illustrations work. Jansson provided artwork for Swedish-language editions of The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and The Hunting of the Snark, and many of these are included. There are also a lot of the preliminary sketches and studies for these, done in pencil, ink, even ballpoint. One thing that constantly amazes is that these drawings are tiny. The pen strokes are microscopic in some cases, to the extent that you wonder if she was using a pin to draw them.

And yes, there are Moomins. There are early commercial models (and I’ll talk about these in a later post), actual artwork from the books and again, loads of preliminary sketches. And again, these are where the fascination lies; you get to see the subtle-but-important alterations made, minute changes in character position or framing. Even the roughest of the roughs have life and movement that make many completed cartoons look static and lifeless.

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And there are some real finds here too. Most of the original strips were destroyed when the Evening News closed down, but a cache of the originals were recently found in a box in Canterbury. Again, I’ll cover these in detail in a later post. There are some Lars Jansson strips too, including Moomin and the Ten Piggy Banks. This is an important find – there has been some question about whether Lars did his later strips in English or just Swedish.

There are many touching moments. Tove’s final, somewhat unflattering portrait of herself is powerful and beautiful. A poster for a play starring her former lover and lifelong friend Vivica Bandler is an unusual mix of dark colours and circus madness, and there are collaborative works signed by her and Lars, nicknamed ‘Lasse’ in one picture. We learn that they did indeed collaborate on the Håll Sverige Rent posters, which appeared on the immensely collectible mugs.

Needless to say, there’s a well-stocked gift shop, a café serving Finnish cinnamon buns, and an atmospheric reading room for children, with Moomin books in almost every language.

Jennifer Scott and her team – in particular Clare Simpson and Dana Mokkadem – have worked wonders in bringing this incredible exhibition to what is actually an incredible gallery (I felt a little embarrassed about not having visited before on its own merits). The exhibition is on now, so put down that iPhone and get yourself down to Dulwich.

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Halide Ghosts

by Antonuzzo

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One of the challenges in presenting Villain in the Moominhouse was acquiring images good enough to project onto a large screen. The Moomin Museum in Tampere provided immense and invaluable assistance here, rooting out the original slides taken by Per Olov Jansson for the book. That’s the actual slide reel pictured above.

But in some cases, the originals had deteriorated or – more alarmingly – were actually missing in a few cases. Fortunately, I had acquired copies of the 1980 original book in Finnish and the 2010 Swedish edition, and was able to take a few scans from each. But that in turn led to an interesting discovery: there are different photos in different editions.

The original was presented in A4 format, whilst the later impression was a much smaller, almost square book. Many of the pictures had been severely cropped to fit, and someone had definitely ramped up the saturation on almost every image.

Sometimes, the differences were subtle:

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In this early image, we see slightly different positioning of little My. The earlier one is more subtle, to my eye.

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This is a more marked difference. The camera angle is higher and the debris from the chair are differently positioned, with Little My’s face being obscured in the original. It’s possible that the second image was chosen to make her character more visible?

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Again, only a slight difference in shots here.

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This is an interesting one, in that it looks to be a different model of Moominpappa in the second image – look at the eyes and the hat, and the right hand. This is possible, though – the Moominhouse isn’t the only model in the Moomin Museum; there’s a great model of the Ocean Orchestra, so it’s possible that different models were used for some shots.

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This is the most interesting one. The second photo shows Too-Ticky playing her barrel organ, as described in the text; but the 1980 book showed a different image. Possibly this was chosen to show the Moomin family together – in the later image, Moominmamma and Moominpappa are obscured by the door. This was one of the missing slides, so we might never answer this one…

What prompted the changes? Commercial reasons in some cases, perhaps, but the most likely reason is the state of the negatives. Which is going to make things interesting when it’s time to publish the English edition….

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Translating Tove

by Antonuzzo

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It was an Autumn night, and the valley was silent. The full moon shone, and not a breath of wind stirred the sea. Everyone who was living or staying in the Moominhouse had agreed that it was bedtime, but none of them had turned out the light. They had a strong feeling that this night was unusual, that there was something mysterious in the air.

At midnight, unseen by anyone, a small black shadow stole up the steps to the veranda and crept into the house. Of course, there was nothing unusual about this; the Moomin family’s house was always open, and people came or went as it suited them, at any time of the day or night. But this guest was no ordinary person…

Thus begins Villain in the Moominhouse, the final Moomin tale and – until this week – unheard in English. I presented my translation at the ArchWay With Words book festival on September 25th, to a mixed crowd of adults and children from all over the place.

Translation is a funny process, often done by two people; one will undertake the vert translation, and the second will convert this into readable, flowing text. When I translated Villain just over a year ago, I found myself taking on both roles, and discovering a few challenges along the way.

First was finding a copy of the book. The 1980 impression is long out of print, and the 2000 reissue is also hard to find. But after scouring booksellers, I managed to find a copy of the latter. By pure chance, I stumbled upon a copy of the 1981 Finnish translation at a book sale in London, which gave me a second level of error checking.

I ran through the straight translations of both in about a week, and then the real work began: trying to recapture the writing voice of Tove Jansson.

The English language Moomin stories were published over a quarter of a century, starting in 1946, and the tone of the writing strongly reflects not only the era, but the style of Tove Jansson herself. Although her ‘home’ language was Swedish – which uses grammatical genders – Tove Jansson made much use of the passive voice. This is inherent in Finnish and doubtless stems from growing up in Helsinki.

This carried on into the English versions of the books, particularly in the use of one as a gender-neutral pronoun, giving the books a slightly arch, archaic flavour.

Tove Jansson also kept tweaking her books. There have been several Swedish versions of the earlier books, resulting from her going back and rewriting a sentence or even a paragraph here and there, to reflect how the characters had changed after being shaped by later stories. The English translations remained (largely) unaltered, but I spent quite some time researching the originals to get the feel of the flow.

It’s worth learning Swedish just to read these stories in their original language. As great as they are in English, they are incredible in their original tongue.

Back to the translations. It took another few weeks before I was happy with my first draft. There were some decisions to make in terms of paraphrasing. The words skitar and kissa appear in the original text, referring to pooping and peeing respectively. They’re not in themselves offensive words in Swedish (well, not very), but very out of place in the English translation; use of either would have represented an anomaly in Moomin stories.

In the end, I used the following for Little My’s line:

She said to herself: “Rats. There are rats in the woodshed, I just knew it. Now they’ll eat up our nets and leave their dirt all over place. This is what happens when Moominmamma insists on leaving saucers of milk out for them.”

And when a terrified Moomintroll worries about needing the toilet:

“But what if they have to go and… well…” objected Moomintroll.

“Very well, then,” said Little My. “But they’ll have to go quickly.”

The Finnish translation was useful as a reference book, but some liberties had been taken with the translation itself – something that I’ve noticed in other Finnish translations of Tove Jansson’s work.

In the months following the preparation for the book festival I was, like Tove, tweaking the text incessantly, making final edits two hours before the curtain went up.

As Moomin stories go, it’s something of a diversion. The images (and I’ll talk about them in my next post) were not the usual illustrations; instead, they were photographs of the model characters in and around the vast model Moominhouse built by Tove and Tuulikki Pietila. The photos were taken by Per Olov Jansson, Tove’s brother.

It’s a short tale, one that wouldn’t be out of place in Tales from Moominvalley, and – without giving anything away – it answers the question of whether or not they eventually came home.

But a short story is just that, and in order to make for a full event, I included another two translations – not of Moomin stories, but of Tove’s earliest published works. Again, I’ll cover these in another post…

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