Leevi Lehto facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Leevi Lehto
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Leevi Lehto at Writers' and Literary Translators' International Conference (Stockholm, June 2008)
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| Born | 23 February 1951 Asikkala, Finland |
| Died | 22 June 2019 (aged 68) Helsinki, Finland |
Leevi Lehto (born February 23, 1951 – died June 22, 2019) was a talented person from Finland. He was a poet (someone who writes poems), a translator (someone who changes words from one language to another), and a programmer (someone who writes computer code).
About Leevi Lehto
Leevi Lehto started writing poems in 1967. He wrote six books of poetry. He also wrote a novel called Janajevin unet (which means Yanayev's Dreams) in 1991. Later, in 2004, he wrote an interesting experimental book called Päivä (Day).
In the 1970s, he was involved in politics, supporting ideas that aimed to help society's less fortunate. Later, in the 1990s, he worked as a leader in companies that dealt with things like phones and the internet.
He was also famous for trying new things with writing and computers, which is called digital writing. One of his cool projects was the Google Poem Generator. This program could create poems using words from Google searches.
Leevi Lehto also had an idea called "Barbaric English." He believed that when people who speak other languages learn English, their own language influences how they speak it. He thought this created new, unique ways of speaking English, just like how people in New Zealand or Australia have their own English dialects.
His Work as a Translator
Leevi Lehto was a very busy translator. He translated more than forty books into Finnish. These books covered many different topics, from mystery stories to deep ideas about philosophy and sociology, and even other poets' works.
Some of the famous writers he translated include George Orwell, Stephen King, and James Joyce. In 2006, he completed a new Finnish translation of Joyce's very famous and long novel, Ulysses.
After he passed away, in 2020, his translation of John Keats's "Autumn and other poems" won a special Finnish award for translators called Kääntäjäkarhulla (The Dancing Bear).
Teaching and Other Activities
Leevi Lehto taught poetry at the Critical Academy in Helsinki. He also helped plan the yearly Helsinki Poetics Conference. He was part of the group that planned the Kuopio Sound Poetry Seminar.
He was in charge of a series of poetry books called "poEsia." He was also on the editorial team for Sibila, a poetry magazine from Brazil, and a contributing editor for the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) in the United States.
Leevi Lehto's first book of poetry in English, Lake Onega and Other Poems, was published in 2006. His last collection of poems in Finnish was called "Handy McCoystysen's Rakkauslaulu" (Handy McCoystysen's love song). He was able to see this book printed at his home in Helsinki just one day before he died.
His Final Years
For several years, Leevi Lehto had a serious illness called multiple system atrophy. He passed away on June 22, 2019, when he was 68 years old.
