Finishing university, Bosley started work with the
night shifts: this allowed him to spend some time at work translating. Bosley has been praised for his voice, being described as having a "distinctive, resonant and musical voice, much admired by his devoted followers all over the world"; concerning his audio-book work, Finnish folklorist Henni Ilomäki [Wikidata] wrote of his "practised enunciation [as] beautiful and clear." His career spanned over 30 years with the Corporation: he retired in 1993.[1][2]
Translations
Finnish
Bosley first encountered the Finnish language when he was given a Finnish-English dictionary by his uncle during his youth. Afterwards, he studied Finnish it with a grammar written in German. Finding William Forsell Kirby's 1907 translation of the Kalevala in a used bookstore, he became irritated by its lack of fluidity, and resolved to read the original Finnish.[2][3]
As a translator, Bosley realised several books of Finnish folk poetry into English, as well as modern works:
Whitsongs by Eino Leino, and work by Aleksis Kivi as Odes. Over the course of several decades, Bosley translated and published the Kalevala, a 22,795-verse-long epic poem compiled and edited by Elias Lönnrot from the folk poetry of Karelia and Finland; the poem is Finland's national epic.[4][2] In 1966, and again in 1971, Bosley published extracts of it for children, and two years later published the fourth canto under the title The Song of Aino. In 1977, folklorist Matti Kuusi and linguist Michael Branch, having seen these poetry translations, brought him to work together on a bilingual anthology of Finnish verse, which was released in 1977.[2]
Bosley published some verses of the Kalevala in 1985, but a full version only appeared four years later: due to its older style and ideas, the text was more challenging to work on than others. Bosley wrote about his experiences in translating the work and his philosophy of translation in Taking the Rough with the Smooth, and an article, Translating the Kalevala: Midway Reflections. In these, he wrote of his responsibility as translator towards the text, and the importance of not introducing himself into the text, and thereby hindering connection with the original author. Thus, he stood against using more modern
free metre and using modern phrasing. Bosley especially had issue with finding an appropriate metre - Finnish poetry uses metre constructed on a unit of syllables, whereas English-language poetry uses multi-syllable feet. However, he found using feet too flat, and so to find a natural-sounding metre drew on the cywydd of Middle Welsh poetry he had read as a child:[2]
The only way I could devise of reflecting the vitality of Kalevala metre was to invent my own, based on syllables rather than feet… I eventually arrived at seven, five and nine syllables respectively, using the impair [
Finno-Ugric peoples and languages: this comprised over 30 poets, 450 poems, and 13 languages, including Veps, Mordvin, Udmurt, and Livonian.[2][6]
Bosley was first married to vocalist Helen Sava, and with her had one son. In 1982, several years after concluding his partnership with Sava, he married harpist Satu Salo, and with her had two sons. Bosley played the pipe organ and piano, particularly enjoying the works of Johann Sebastian Bach.[1][3] Starting public performance on the organ at sixteen, he was organist of his local church of St Laurence's Church, Upton-cum-Chalvey for over forty years, finishing in 2015. Bosley wrote a pamphlet about the location of the churchyard in Thomas Gray'sElegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in which he hypothesised that the titular location was that of St. Laurence's instead of at the nearby Church of St Giles, Stoke Poges.[1][2][7]
On 24 June, 2018, Bosley died in a nursing home in Slough, aged 80, after a short illness.[1][2]
