Columbia's Multilingual Kalevala Marathon to Be Held This March

Columbia University's Kalevala Marathon will be held on March 1, 6-9pm. This year's program features a special performance by the cast of Kalevala The Musical (which is currently in development for Broadway) who will perform several songs.

The 11th Multilingual Kalevala Marathon
Thursday, March1, 2018 at 6 - 9pm
Deutsches Haus
420 West 116 th Street
New York, NY 10027
(b/t Amsterdam Ave and Morningside Dr.)

Special performance by the cast of Kalevala The Musical
Free and open to the public; all are invited to participate in the reading of Kalevala in their language!

*Press RSVP is appreciated.

Finnish Studies Program organizes the annual Multilingual Kalevala Marathon at Deutsches Haus at Columbia University. Aili Flint, Senior Lecturer in Finnish, Emerita at Columbia, created and launched the Kalevala Marathon in 1999.

The Kalevala Marathon is a biennial poetry-reading event encouraging people to read or recite passages of the Kalevala, the Finnish folklore epic, in any of the languages it has been translated into.

Today, it has been translated into over 60 languages. The Finnish Studies Program has translations available in the following: Arabic, Armenian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (in five different translations), Estonian, the Savo dialect of Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek (Ancient and Modern), Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Tulu, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Yiddish.

The first edition of The Kalevala, later called The Old Kalevala, came out in 1835. It had a print run of 500 copies. The expanded edition, which is now known as The Kalevala, came out in 1849.

Elias Lönnrot (1802 - 1884) compiled The Kalevala from folk poetry recorded in notebooks during his extensive collection trips. "KALEVALA The Musical" is a story of ancient legends told by the spirits of the haunted forest of Kalevala. Widely cherished across the world, yet lesser known than the Iliad and its contemporaries, several translations of Kalevala have been a source of inspiration to many fantasy authors, including J.R.R.Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Hobbit, who has acknowledged the direct influence of Kalevala in his works.

The Kalevala has become a symbol of the Finnish past, Finnishness, the Finnish language and culture, a foundation on which the Finns started to build their Finnish identity thus contributing to the establishment of an independent nation in 1917.