One character’s dialect did compel anomalous treatment in the English, and that character is, of course, Antero Rokka. Even within the world of the text, Rokka’s dialect borders on incomprehensibility (recall the failed communication with the neighboring guard in the trench on p. 347), and it has only become more incomprehensible with time, having died out with the generation of Finns that saw the Karelian Isthmus ceded to the Soviet Union in 1944. Nevertheless, Rokka’s voice is still unmistakably sharp, lively and irreverent – and charged, precisely because of its lost place of origin. To create such a voice in English was obviously an impossible task, but just as inconceivable was the prospect of letting it fall flat. So, I fashioned an Antero Rokka in English, calling upon the sharpest, cleverest, mythically proportioned voices in my memory. If Rokka’s dialect sounds American, which of course it does, that is because the voices in my memory do, too. I could not really have written him any other way.
Finally, the ‘vicious verbal volley’ between Lammio’s stilted, standard Finnish and Rokka’s rapid-fire Karelian chatter was mostly transposed into a difference of register, though the textual reference of Lammio’s ‘pretentiously crossed ‘‘t’’s’ on p. 71 (known to the specialist as aspirated /t/s, roughly equivalent to Finnish /d/s) did prompt me to drop several ‘t’s from Rokka’s speech (‘listen’ became ‘lissen’; ‘winter’ ‘winner’, etc.). That these dropped ‘t’s resulted in the transformation of ‘Winter War’ into the comical commentary ‘Winner War’ (which, as we know, ‘both sides won’) was sheer luck.
The aspect of the dialects that proved most elusive was not their class hierarchies, which could be transposed into register and non-standard spelling with a little work, nor their geographical specificity, which is stated explicitly in the text. Even the dialects’ identificatory function could be carried by idiolect and orthography. The elusive element, in the end, was the particular distrust of the written word that Unknown Soldiers paradoxically enacts. For the Finnish dialects, in their phonetic transcription, exercise a peculiar effect on Finnish readers, and one that is not quite replicable in English. Calling upon a powerful Finnish metaphor by which phonetic spelling is equated with equality of access, transparency of representation, and even democracy, phonetic spellings in Finnish stage an unequivocal claim to truth. Pitted against the newly standardized, written Finnish of the nascent state, the phonetically transcribed dialects in Linna’s book lay bare the artifice of that state’s ‘paper language’, calling into question the entire national project and undercutting its proud wartime propaganda. (It is perhaps worth mentioning, for those rusty on their Finnish history, that when the Second World War broke out, the Finnish tongue as a written language was scarcely a century old, and the Finnish state, not yet a quarter-century.)
Unknown Soldiers is a national classic if ever there was one, but it is a national classic that rejects a single, national language in favor of a multiplicity of idioms. I am not entirely certain that the translation succeeds in embodying that profound act. In searching for ways of making the English language perform such a feat, I have to admit that I came up short, contenting myself with the most minute of gestures scattered throughout the text.
By way of conclusion, I will mention only one, which appears in the passage with which I began. The war has ended; the men are sitting, dazed, beside the road; and Mielonen has just invited them to come and hear the Secretary’s speech. Apathetic, one of the men replies, ‘We can hear it from here. Anyway, we know what’s coming. Old as the alphabet’ (p. 465). ‘Vanha kun aapinen’ – ‘Old as the ABC’ – is a Finnish saying, which in most instances one would replace with the English idiom ‘as old as the hills’. But such a formulation would run counter to the accusation staged through all of the dialects. ‘What’s coming’ – the entirely disingenuous speech of the Finnish Secretary, or indeed, the Finnish President – is not as old as the hills. On the contrary: it is as old as the alphabet.
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First published in Finnish as Tuntematon sotilas by Werner Söderström Corporation (WSOY) Helsinki, Finland 1954
This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2015
Published by arrangement with Werner Söderström Ltd. (WSOY)
This translation is based on the 1954 printing with the exception of the passage on pp. 265–6 [‘Lahtinen paused for a moment’ to ‘Just tryin’ to get this sled to move’], whose expansion just after the first printing reflects the author’s sole amendment to the published work.
The translation was supported by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Finnish Literature Exchange FILI and WSOY Literary Foundation.
Copyright © The Estate of Väinö Linna and WSOY
Translation and editorial matter copyright © Liesl Yamaguchi, 2015
Cover design © Martti Mykkänen
All rights reserved
The moral right of the copyright holder and the translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-97705-8