Unknown Soldiers

by Väinö Linna

  And after that, they would stand free, cleared, blameless. Happy.

  The thunder continued. It roared in fantastic crashes far through the clear, autumn air. It churned on even in these final seconds, as if it were declaring, intoxicated by its own greatness: Woe to the vanquished!

  But at least they did not have to fear the voice resounding in its echo: Woe to the victors!

  Määttä opened his eyes. He saw dirt falling to the trench floor. A man appeared around the corner of the trench. It was some older guy who’d been called out of the reserves and who had seemed a bit off for a while now. He was bare-headed, and in the middle of his filthy face the whites of his eyes bulged out, round, wild and frightened.

  ‘Get under cover!’

  The man heard Määttä yell, but instead of obeying, he remained standing in front of his shelter.

  ‘Get down!’

  ‘Would if it was any use.’ The man stared straight ahead as he spoke, paying no attention to Määttä. The latter emerged from his shelter and said, ‘Get down. Peace is coming.’

  The man gazed wide-eyed at Määttä, and then, without further ado, started climbing up to the parapet. Määttä grabbed hold of him. The man started to wrench himself free, but Määttä yanked him to the trench floor, where a tough wrestling match ensued. Just then, the cannon fire ceased, and once it had fallen silent, the stillness was broken only by Määttä’s grunting and the shouts of the madman. ‘Get off! Goddamn parachutists! Lemme go! I’ll dictate … Land and peace for everybody … And I’ll give power to everybody … But lemme go for Christssake …’

  Vanhala, Sihvonen, Rahikainen and Honkajoki hurried over to help. The man struggled and howled as he thrashed about beneath Määttä, who was trying to hold him still. They didn’t manage to get him under control until there was a man on each of his arms and each of his legs, in addition to Määttä, who was sitting on his chest. The man screamed and cursed, his teeth clenched and his mouth foaming. He muttered senseless words and phrases between wild howls.

  Men emerged from the shelters. With tired faces, they followed in silence as the madman was led away.

  The Finnish War was over.

  Tins of ersatz coffee dangled from the ends of sticks. Mielonen walked along the road, calling out, ‘If anybody wants to hear, you can come listen to the rrradio at the command post. Some Secretary spoutin’ off.’

  The men were lying about by the roadside, some sleeping, others making coffee.

  ‘We can hear it from here. Anyway, we know what’s coming. Old as the alphabet.’

  ‘Them and their goddamn speeches. Speeches won’t help anything. When you’re all out of gunpowder, you’re better off just keepin’ your trap shut. Now they’re gonna go dronin’ on about the rights of small nations. Dog’s cue to piss.’

  It was Rahikainen.

  ‘Yup. That’s for sure. Losers get the shit kicked out of them. And that’s that.’

  It was Sihvonen. Angry and exhausted, but somehow not quite certain who it was he was angry at.

  ‘… the establishment of good relations with our neighbors. May friendship and cooperation with other nations be our aim henceforth.’

  It was the Secretary.

  Honkajoki fished some bread out of his pack and came across a couple of pieces of wood carved into bizarre shapes. He tossed them to Vanhala and said, ‘Into the fire with them, Priha! I’ve lost my inspiration.’

  Priha was on his knees beside the campfire. He blew into it and got a light flurry of ash in the eyes. He rubbed them with his fists. Then he looked at Honkajoki. Dirt and grime covered his face, which had lost much of its previous roundness. But the red, puffy corners of his eyes still crinkled with his smile as he shook with laughter and said, ‘If only we still had your bow … heeheehee!’

  ‘Alas. If only that damn Bushki, excuse me, that Soviet in the shrubbery, hadn’t made it into the position from the side … making me suffer the most distressing loss of this war.’

  Priha turned toward the campfire again and said, blowing on the flames, ‘The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics won, but racing to the line for a strong second place came feisty little Finland.’

  The ash swirled up. Heeheeheeheehee.

  Soon, even the last of them had dropped off to sleep. A lone horse-cart made its way along the road, its rattle echoing through the forest. Tent tarps covered its load. A stiff hand clenched into a fist dangled down beneath one of the edges. The last of the casualties were heading home.

  Ensign Jalovaara sat far off in the forest. He had made his way there gradually, as if he had no idea where he was going. When he saw that no one was around, he sat on a mound of grass and let his head drop between his hands. He sat motionless for a long time, staring at the ground. From far down the road, the clatter of the cart receded further and further into the distance.

  His eyes were damp. Jalovaara clenched his jaw for a long time, trying to steel himself against what was coming. But eventually his shoulders began to quiver, and his whole body shook with the bitter, violent convulsions of a man brought to tears. Between sobs and clenched teeth, he repeated over and over, ‘We heard … they let us know … that Finland’s dead … her tombs already deep beneath the snow … snow …’

  The autumn sun had climbed to midday, warming the ground and the men sprawled out over it. Clusters of lingonberries glistened in their low-lying bushes. The cart rattled faintly off into the distance and silence fell, swallowing everything up into the stillness of the dry pine forest. The tired men slept. The sun smiled down on them. It wasn’t angry – no, not by any means. Maybe it even felt some sort of sympathy for them.

  Rather dear, those boys.

  Note on the Translation

  ‘Some Secretary spoutin’ off,’ Mielonen calls out through the camp, unofficially signaling to the men that the Finnish authorities are conceding defeat. His tone in these final pages of the book is as flippant as it was at the start, when he made his rounds with a similar announcement portending the declaration of war. So perhaps it is not surprising to learn that the gentleman ‘spoutin’ off’, whose historic words are quoted verbatim, was not ‘some Secretary’, but Risto Ryti, President of Finland.* Mielonen’s misattribution could be a joke – or perhaps he just didn’t know who was going to speak before the voice came over the radio. Just after the decisive words are delivered, however, the narrator affirms Mielonen’s account with a gravity that would be difficult to construe as jocular. ‘It was the Secretary,’ we read, in the final installment of a parallel structure aligning the Secretary with Rahikainen and Sihvonen (p. 465).

  I like to think of this closing gesture on Väinö Linna’s part as a cautionary one: a reminder that the story you have just read is not history, but fiction. I’m not sure how else to make sense of the blatant and irresolvable incompatibility between narratorial assertion and historical fact. It certainly seems implausible that the author simply forgot that the words he was quoting verbatim were spoken by the president of his country. More convincing, I think, is the reading by which the deliberate violation of history seeks to clarify the distinction between testimonial truth and the kind of truth the novel pursues. The historical elements that have appeared here, the author seems to imply – the school songs, the propaganda, the President’s speech – are no more real than the imagined exclamations of Sihvonen and Rahikainen. Reality and the use I have made of it belong to separate worlds.

  The distinction between these two worlds was a matter of crucial importance for Väinö Linna. It is for this reason, above all, that I have refrained from annotating my trans
lation of his text with historical references, maps, timelines or other textual supports. To gloss unfamiliar items with information drawn from history seemed to me to suggest an unwarranted equivalence between Linna’s fictional world and the one we live in. Some readers will no doubt protest that some such information is necessary to a full understanding of the book. I would argue that, for the most part, this is not the case. One might turn to any number of examples, for instance: ‘Around Christmas time, the German battleship Scharnhorst sank in the Arctic Sea’ (p. 361). Should contemporary English readers be alerted to the fact that the Scharnhorst was a real German battleship that sank in the Arctic on 26 December 1943? Finns reading the novel in 1954 would have known, one could argue, and the information would have enabled them to recognize the reference as an ominous chronological signpost. But then, one might also note Linna’s introductory appositive, ‘the German battleship’. Had the author been confident that all his readers knew of the event, such an appositive would have been unintuitive. Surely ‘the Scharnhorst’ alone would have been more natural. Whatever its intention, the gesture bears two immediate consequences: it ensures the inclusion of readers situated slightly beyond the novel’s immediate frame of reference, and it creates a closed world whose logic relies on nothing outside of itself.

  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.* 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.* 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/.

  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.)