Tiny languages need books like this. If your language is a bigger sibling to a tiny language, you could help your smaller sibling reach more readers through a bilingual edition.
Poetry needs more bilingual editions like this. Even if you’ve never read a sentence in the lefthand language before, the righthand language will give you clues to follow. The first language will show you what the second language marked or missed. It’s a treasure hunt through text.
Texts need team translations like this. Renāte Blumberga did the first version of 17 translations from Livonian into Finnish. The translator Olli Heikkonen, who’s name is on the cover, also consulted closely with one of the poets, Valt Ernštreit. The second modern Livonian poet is Baiba Damberg. For the Salaca Livonian poems by the third one, Ķempi Kārl, Heikkonen and used the poet’s Estonian translations. And a well-thumbed Estonian-Finnish dictionary.
Dictionaries of endangered languages need living letters like this. While lexical recording is vital, what’s most vital is encountering the language in use, where it touches the heart.
The heart sings through poems like this. I’ve been through Livonia, on buses along the Baltic coast. But I haven’t stopped for long, until reading these poems. They are rooted in the landscape and the language. There’s joy here, and mourning.
I felt the mourning keenly, reading these. They reminded me of a dear friend who died a few years ago, a polyglot with whom I shared a love of Polish and Finno-Ugric languages. The last time we visited him, he cooked us a fabulous Greek vegan dinner and over dessert of talqan and strawberries, we got the dictionaries out… I miss him. He would have loved this book, and been fluent in Livonian before you knew it.
You might not be able to read this book of modern Livonian poems in Finnish, Kerran olin taivaan suolajärvi. The title, Kōrd vóļ minā touvõs sūoljõraks in Livonian, or “Once I was a salt lake coy in the clouds,” is the first line from Baiba Damberg’s poem. That one verse shows the links between Finnish and Livonian – and the distance from English. The English reinterpretation is in a smaller collection of the same three poets by Uldis Balodis and Ryan Van Winkle: Trillium. If you can’t find that book, my favourite poet of the three, Damberg, is in Van Winkle’s English on Modern Poetry in Translation. That’s your first clue on this treasure hunt through text.
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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