Death of Anna Kokko-Zalcman, Finnish teacher at Inalco from 1965 to 1998

Anna Kokko-Zalcman (1932-2023)

Born in Lahti on November 14, 1932, she began her schooling in the small town of Sysmä, on the shores of Lake Päijänne, where her father, the writer Yrjö Kokko, worked as a veterinarian. Evacuated to Sweden during the war, like many Finnish children, she completed her secondary education in 1951 in the small Swedish town of Haparanda, close to the Finnish border. She went on to study at the University of Helsinki, graduating in 1956 with a master's degree in Romance and Nordic philology. The following year, she took another degree at the University of Granada.

Installed in Paris from 1957, married to Polish-born French painter Maurice Zalcman, with whom she had two sons, Anna Kokko-Zalcman had first worked as a correspondent for the Finnish newspaper Aamulehti (1960-1965), before becoming a lecturer in Finnish at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes in 1965. After defending a post-graduate thesis in contrastive linguistics in 1982, written under the supervision of Jean Perrot (La formulation quantitative en finnois et en français), she was appointed lecturer at the same institution (now Inalco), a position she held until her retirement in 1998.

An enthusiastic and caring teacher, Anna Kokko-Zalcman knew how to pass on to her students a love of the Finnish language and of Finland. In 1984, she had responded to a request from the second-year group to visit Finland, by organizing a theatrical tour for them, in which she had participated: she had translated into Finnish the Farce du cuvier and the Sotie des gens nouveaux, which the students performed in French and Finnish in Tampere, Joensuu and Helsinki.

His Finnish textbook, On tie...: Finnish course in 24 lessons (1974, reissued in 1980 and 1989), took its title from the first line of the poem by Yrjö Kaijärvi that opened the first lesson. The beginning of this poem, which constituted a very singular introduction - almost a rite of initiation! - for French people wishing to learn Finnish, has remained engraved in the memory of all those who have used this work:

Oli tie.
Oli koukkuleuka akka.
Se akka oli kaunis,
suora ja vapaa,ja sydämeltä iloinen
ja mieleltä kevyt.
Ja tie oli sohjua ja rapaa.

Anna Kokko-Zalcman had subsequently published a second manual, more focused on everyday communication, Practical Manual of Spoken Finnish (1991, reissued 1995), also published in Spanish (1994). In 1989, with her colleague Anja Fantapié, she had set up a distance learning course in Finnish, as part of the distance learning program at the Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Aside from her teaching activities, Anna Kokko-Zalcman had published numerous articles and reviews, particularly in the journals Études finno-ougriennes and Boréales. A relatively little-known strand of her work consists of her three novels, published in the 1960s under the pseudonym Anna Ungelo (after the name of her father's house in Lapland, where he liked to retire to write). The first of these, Pysähtyneet kellot (Stopped Clocks, 1960), recently published in Spanish in a translation by the author, is set in an imaginary Spanish town inspired by Nerja, the Andalusian locality where the Zalcman family spent all their summers. Indeed, Spain was as dear to her heart as France.

Throughout her life and career, Anna Kokko-Zalcman tirelessly built bridges between French and Finnish cultures.

Antoine Chalvin, Elina Suomela-Härmä and Eva Toulouze

(This text is a slightly edited version of the obituary to appear in volume 55/2024 of the journal Finno-Ugric Studies).