Given Linna’s own tendency to make explicit whatever tacit information he deemed necessary to understanding his text, I decided that this would be the most appropriate way of incorporating such information into the translation as well. So, on the rare occasions in which implicit information available to the Finnish reader needed to be explained to the English one, I have incorporated it into the translation following Linna’s own style. When the brawny Hietanen starts shouting out instructions ‘in his amusingly staccato Turku accent’, for example, the ‘amusing’ aspect of the dialect as well as its place of origin are implicit in the Finnish, explicit in the English (p. 7). I thought it important to retain the foreign, or semi-foreign, words Linna uses – undefined – throughout the Finnish text, which often meant inserting appositives for the English reader: ‘tshasovna, one of those Karelian Orthodox chapels’; ‘kolkhoz… collective farm,’ etc. (pp. 311, 129). The appositive ‘the women’s auxiliary’ beside the name ‘Lotta Svärd’ is also my addition, as is ‘the Friday Fishing Club’ beside ‘Rajamäki Regiment’ (pp. 21, 135). I chose to double these last two references rather than replace them with English equivalents because each presents a literary reference I wanted to retain. The women’s auxiliary ‘Lotta Svärd’ takes its name from a poem by the Swedish-speaking Finn Johan Ludvig Runeberg (Tales of Ensign Stål, 1860), and the ‘Rajamäki Regiment’ refers to a rather unruly crew in the first major novel written in Finnish, Aleksis Kivi’s Seven Brothers (1870). I privileged the sense of each reference in the appositives, as that was what comprehensibility in the English text required, but I left in the Swedish and Finnish names as well, so that the literary reader would have the means to recognize them.
I italicized the two attempted quotations from Runeberg’s Tales of Ensign Stål in Chapter Three (pp. 88–9, 102), though, as Hietanen remembers both sections from Paavo Cajander’s Finnish translation a bit erroneously, I improvised verse versions of his Finnish rather than quoting Clement Burbank Shaw’s translations from the Swedish.[2] Similarly, I tried to indicate, through English meter and rhyme, the versified origins of Ensign Jalovaara’s closing lines, which recall Eino Leino’s Finnish translation of Heinrich Heine’s ‘Die Grenadiere’ [‘The Two Grenadiers’]: ‘We heard… they let us know… that Finland’s dead… her tombs already deep beneath the snow…’ (p. 466). Because Jalovaara’s invocation of the lines relies so heavily upon the particular structure of Leino’s translation, adapting a published English translation of the Heine seemed wide of the mark.[3] Songs quoted in the text, like the poems, I have kept in verse measured to the tunes in question, and I have italicized or inset all sung lines to indicate their status as quotations. Though these lines are pulled from some of the best-known songs in Finland, I was unable to locate English verse translations for any of them, and so must answer for all such lyrics myself.
I am also responsible for all the speech patterns of the characters, which the reader will have noticed are often quite marked. In the Finnish text, the characters’ speech is rendered in more or less phonetic orthography, corresponding to regional variants of Finnish pronunciation. Evoking the tribal stereotypes of centuries, the Finnish dialects contribute to the creation of immediately identifiable characters, whose distinctive voices allow the author to omit such cumbersome attributions as ‘said Rokka’ or ‘said Hietanen’. The pronounced presence of the dialects also reflects the particular historical circumstance of the Continuation War in Finland, during which platoons were geographically integrated (during the earlier Winter War, they had been organized by hometown, as we glimpse through Rokka and Susling). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the dialects in the book carve out a particular socio-political position in relation to the verbal class distinctions of wartime Finland, as well as to the politics of the war itself.
Because the dialects function in so many different ways at different moments in the text – asserting class, authority, defiance, belonging, comedic intent – I felt that it would have been impossible, or at least irresponsible, to translate them in a single, formally systematic way. To substitute English dialects for Finnish ones would have been to reduce the many functions of a character’s dialectical speech into a flat, totalizing equivalence on the basis of one aspect like class, and it would also have created jarring confusions of geographical and national identity. So, stripped of the Finnish dialects, I developed an array of compensatory maneuvers, which I will endeavor to outline here.
The identificatory burden carried by the dialects in the Finnish was transferred onto a number of pronounced idiolects: particularly distinctive, individual voices crafted partly through speech patterns, rhythm and word choice, but also partly through systematic misspellings. Hence Hietanen’s signature ‘pre-tty strange’, Salo’s ‘purty good’, Rokka’s ‘Lissen!’ and so on. The stand-off between Riitaoja’s vulnerable dialectical Finnish and Lehto’s cold, impersonal standard Finnish was transposed into Riitaoja’s stutter on the word-initial /k/ and Lehto’s mockery of it. The Savo dialect posed a particular challenge because it appears explicitly in the text three times, in association with three different individuals: the Master Sergeant on the motorbike leading the truck transport (p. 35), Corporal Mielonen (p. 175), and finally Vanhala – who is not actually from Savo, but affects the dialect for comedic effect (pp. 307–8). Though the comedy (and distinction) of the Savo accent lies, to my ear, primarily in its prosody, marked prosody is a difficult thing to convey in the space of a line, so after much experimenting with risible effects in English, I finally went with the word-initial rolled /r/, transcribed rrr, which, like the Savo prosody, lies just far enough beyond the limits of the standard language to be striking. And it was precisely because the rolled /r/ does not fall within the limits of the English language that I transposed Lieutenant Colonel Karjula’s speech impediment – in Finnish, an inability to roll his /r/s – into an English lisp, or inability to pronounce the letter /s/.
2
Johan Ludvig Runeberg,
3
See Yrjö Varpio,