Вяйнё Линна - Unknown Soldiers

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

See Jyrki Nummi, Jalon kansan parhaat voimat [ The Finest Forces in the Noble Nation ] (Helsinki: Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö [WSOY], 1993), pp. 48–9.

Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Fänrik Ståls Sägner (Helsingfors: Sederholm, 1860); Vänrikki Stoolin tarinat, trans. Paavo Cajander (Helsinki: Kansanvalistus-seura, 1889); The Songs of Ensign Stål , trans. Clement Burbank Shaw (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1925).

See Yrjö Varpio, Pentinkulma ja maailma [Pentti’s Corner and the World] (Helsinki: WSOY, 1979), pp. 35–6; Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder [Book of Songs] (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1844), p. 73; and Eino Leino, Maailman kannel [The World’s Lyre] (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Kosonen, 1908), p. 98.