She has learnt the language from reading books and with the help of her children, as Finnish was spoken in their home. When she returned to Slovenia in 1977, she was one of the few Slovenians to be fluent in Finnish.

Translator and journalist Marjeta Novak Kajzer and Professor Janko Moder encouraged her to take up translating. In 1985, Slovenians got a translation of the novel The Forest of Hung Foxes by a popular Finnish author, Arto Paasilinna. The book was followed by eight more novels, two collections of fairytales and two editions of Kalevala. The Slovenian translation by Jelka Ovaska was the first translation of Arto Paasilinna's work into any foreign language. Only later did translations to other languages follow around the world.

Kalevala however, was Ovaska's biggest translation. This Finnish national epic poem, the most famous Finnish work of literature, has been translated into 52 languages to date. First Jelka Ovaska translated seven poems of Kalevala for the publisher Mladinska knjiga, but then Mladinska knjiga's editor, Aleš Berger, asked her to translate the whole text: 50 poems making up 22,795 verses. It should be pointed out that Slovenians were able to read the first attempt of Kalevala's translation back in 1939 when France Bezlaj and Marta Elmgren, translated two songs. In 1961, Matej Rode translated a Russian children's adaptation of Kalevala in prose, with interim verse fractions adapted by Severin Šali. Jelka Ovaska thus continued what had been started over 60 years earlier.

The entire volume of the Slovenian translation of Kalevala was published on the 80th anniversary of Finland's independence (1917-1997). On this special occasion, Jelka Ovaska was conferred a special medal established to mark the 150th anniversary of the Kalevala epic. Ovaska was awarded the medal by representatives of the Finnish government on September 10 1997. The ceremony was attended by one of the most prominent Finnish academicians, university professor Kai Laitinen, the author of a detailed Finnish literary history.

How does Jelka Ovaska remember this great translation undertaking? Where did she find the courage needed to solve the insolvable: poring from one language to another, transplanting with eloquent Slovenian, the most famous Finnish work of literature, which means so much to the Finns?

As Kai Laitinen said at the award ceremony, Kalevala brought to a little known nation, speaking an obscure language, awareness about the importance of their own folk treasure and originality. It gave this nation an identity, and encouraged its growth and development.

What is interesting is that in the beginning, there was no one epic poem. There were individual fragments, numerous versions dispersed geographically, so that the longest part had only about 400 verses. But at the same time, the events and the characters, regardless of where they were found, matched and were intertwined.

Physician Elias Lönnrot (1802 - 1884) was more in love with literature than medicine, according to Ovaska, so he enthusiastically collected folk material when he was still a student. It took him 17 years, and 11 travels around the country, to collect the material for the epic. He categorised the poems by characters and events, shaping them into short epic poems based on the collected versions. In 1835, the first version of Kalevala was published, containing 32 poems and 12,000 verses. Lönnrot kept completing the poems, and in 1849 he published the final version of Kalevala containing 50 poems and nearly 23,000 verses.

Kalevala is a paradox of sorts - nearly all of the material is authentic folk heritage, but put all together in one collection. Lönnrot made it complete and added his own verses where needed. These make up about three percent of the entire work. He was careful to retain the style and form of folk song, simplified the poetry and merged the main heroes of the songs. Kalevala bore and established the current popular form of Finnish mythology. Without Lönrott, Kalevala as one poem would not exist.

Jelka Ovaska remembers with much emotion and fondness, the time she lived in Finland and first read Kalevala in the original. She is enchanted by the Finns. How could a nation living for centuries on the edge of survival in the far north, amidst lakes, moors and deep forests, away from Europe and its past, create such a masterpiece? Not only that, they managed to preserve it in oral tradition, generation to generation in its entirety, since antiquity to the time when Lönnrot put it on paper. She thought about how such a small nation could become a great nation in the eyes of the world because of their spiritual greatness, culture and extreme love for their own language, said Ovaska.

Kalevala is written in old Finnish so far removed from the contemporary language that the Finns need a Kalevala dictionary to understand it. The Slovenian translator also had to overcome the obstacle of not having a Finnish-Slovenian dictionary-- it does not exist. She had to consult Finnish-English and English-Slovenian dictionaries. Sometimes she had to contact linguists and other experts in Finland. The direct translation from old Finnish in trochaic metre and rhymes, which Ovaska worked ten years on, is not only beautiful, but also very true to the original. To create a balance between beauty and accuracy, took her a few years more that it would have otherwise. Her husband, Bogdan Novak, improved the poetic form of the translation, so Ovaska says that Kalevala in Slovenian is a fruit of joint labour.

She has a lot of praise for the Finnish government and the Finnish Institute for Literature, both of which supported her financially in order to facilitate the publication of the work. The Finns make great efforts to preserve their language and introduce their literature to foreigners. The Institute is active within the Finnish Literature Association and is supported by Finland's Culture Ministry. The organisation holds working meetings for Finnish translators and aids publications of Finnish works. Jelka Ovaska has been invited to such meetings in Finland three times, where she met the authors whose work she had translated, publishers, and got an insight into the Finnish cultural scene. She is convinced that the Finns, with their way of presenting themselves and supporting their literature abroad, could serve as a good role model for Slovenia.