Plagiarism of Finnish books
@ 10:18 pm This is sort of old news, but I came across this article telling how a bloke named Colin Slater tried to take Mika Waltari’s book The Roman, change the name to Lindum Colonia, and sell it as his own work. Waltari wrote some real masterpieces, and all or most of them are also available in English. The most famous is Sinuhe, The Egyptian also know simply as The Egyptian. What an idiot to think he could take such a master’s work and try to call it his own, thinking noone would notice.
In a way it is flattering that someone would see the potential in such great works, but it is a pretty lowdown deliberate crime to take it, call it your own work, and then sell it to a publisher. If you want to make money selling Mika Waltari’s books, why not sell them as Mika Waltari’s books. The dude probably would have been stupid enough to move on to The Egyptian, and try to plagiarize it, when a Hollywood movie has even been made from it. This might also be an indication that it is time to make a new round of publishing Mika Waltari’s books.
If only more people spoke Finnish, there would be so much more good stuff that never gets translated into English that could be published.
The guy seems to be a serial plagiarist.
http://www.hs.fi/kulttuuri/artikkeli/1135238228265
The only consolation is that he seems to get into print only via vanity publishers – it would be a real scandal if some proper publishing house were to run with one of these.
Comment by Anonymous — Tue, Aug 19th, 2008 @ 12:35 am
Fortunately, this guy’s books have both sold under a hundred copies, if I recall correctly.
Comment by Anonymous Coward — Tue, Aug 19th, 2008 @ 10:02 am
“If only more people spoke Finnish, there would be so much more good stuff that never gets translated into English that could be published.”
Yeah…if I could only get Iltalehti translated into English
Comment by chic sheik — Tue, Aug 19th, 2008 @ 1:44 pm
hi Phil,
a coverage of the olympic games is missing from you blog..
thanks
Comment by Em — Tue, Aug 19th, 2008 @ 4:46 pm
#4: There’s no point in doing free PR for the Chinese communist party.
Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Tue, Aug 19th, 2008 @ 4:49 pm
Phil, you should do a comparison between Chinese and Finnish communism. Do you know about these?
Comment by Perttu — Tue, Aug 19th, 2008 @ 6:19 pm
If only more people spoke Finnish?
That’ll be interesting.
Comment by Jay — Wed, Aug 20th, 2008 @ 5:49 am
#4 The reason the coverage of The Olympic Games is missing from the blog is because with Finland’s performance in these Games being what it is it is probably better to just pretend they’re not happening.
Comment by Punter — Wed, Aug 20th, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
What? Finland is ahead of Sweden in the medal standings (and you know that’s all we care about) whereas Americans are taking a beating from the Chinese with 26 vs. 45 gold medals. Getting humiliated by commies again, man that must be hard!
And then those Jamaicans, so fast, so fast…
Comment by donkey — Wed, Aug 20th, 2008 @ 6:13 pm
So far, we’re very slightly ahead of the predictions in terms of our performance in this Olympics (and we haven’t go to javelin yet). But yes, Donkey has the right focus. The Swedes are doing horribly. It makes the Swedish newspapers that more entertaining to read as I doubt there is a country on earth that are such bad losers.
Let’s also not forgot, in terms of all time olympic medals per capita, only the Liechtensteiners and Norwegians beat us. Right, I will end the friendly sporting nationalism there.
Comment by Jonas G — Wed, Aug 20th, 2008 @ 6:48 pm
Finnish success or the lack of it notwithstanding, this celebration of totalitarianism bears such a resemblance to 1936 that I can’t really bring myself to watching it.
Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Thu, Aug 21st, 2008 @ 2:36 am
Gareth Hale does it better!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJZ8NEEw5Jo&feature=related§
Comment by Auriga — Thu, Aug 21st, 2008 @ 3:13 am
#6: Maoism had some following in Finland as well, approximately the same as libertarians now. Indeed, they score about the same on the hörhömeter. In comparison, Taistoites represented the sensible, moderate mainstream.
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maolaisuus
Comment by Freeridin' Franklin — Thu, Aug 21st, 2008 @ 1:06 pm
Blog name change idea:
http://www.FinlandForgot.net
Comment by Dave the Revelator — Thu, Aug 21st, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Did you know that the English translation, The Egyptian, is abridged? It seems that it was somewhat “adjusted for American audiences” during the translation. The sex and action were left intact, but for example the stylish repetition in the first chapter was cut to a minimum. And yes, this version was the number one translated best-seller in the United States until The Name of the Rose topped the charts…
Well, the abridgement doesn’t really ruin the book especially if you like your books entertaining. It just has slightly less Waltari’s wisdom of life, discussion about religion and general pessimism.
Many translations were actually made using the Swedish translation which is complete.
Comment by olavi — Fri, Aug 22nd, 2008 @ 12:50 am
tomorrow, Finland has the chance to do a triple in the javelin contest. They also did that in 36, if I have the facts right. Ergo, Finnish javelin athletes perform best in games in fascist äh totalitarian communist regimes.
Comment by phone user — Fri, Aug 22nd, 2008 @ 8:42 pm
I wish Finnish were not so fiendishly difficult for the learner. I was able to develop a simple reading ability in Swedish and Norwegian in a few months – Finnish is of course a different language family and unrecognizable except for the loan words. – This is a great blog. I hope I visit Finland someday.
Comment by interglossa — Sat, Aug 23rd, 2008 @ 5:10 am
@16 Finnish is a pretty exotic language. It’s closely related to Estonian and Lappish, more distantly to Mordvin and Mari spoken over in Russia, and distantly to Hungarian. Distantly means Greek is about as close to English than Finnish is to Hungarian.
Some linguists clump the Uralic languages to which Finnish belongs together with the Altaic languages, to which Turkish, Mongol, and Korean belong. (with some disupute over Japanese) Many of these languages have some form of endings added to words to form prepositional phrases and vowel harmony. (Istanbul also has umlaut pollution, even on a clear day.)
Comment by Sirkuspelle — Sat, Aug 23rd, 2008 @ 11:37 am
he still has it listed under his LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/in/directorwriter
Comment by tt — Thu, Sep 11th, 2008 @ 11:23 am
I’m curious about this. Was plagiarism ever proved, and if so, were there any charges brought?
Comment by Elleda — Fri, Jul 2nd, 2010 @ 1:03 am