Translating Encounters with War Widows—Lost/Found in Translation

Abstract

A useful point of departure for discussing ethics and the role of the researcher in history‐writing is in translations, in the post‐encounter stage, when what was in the mind of the researcher while preparing, what happened in the interaction with research subjects, and how this dialogue started to find its shape, is translated into conceptual thinking on paper. This includes, in this article on translating encounters with Finnish war widows, reflexive work at all levels of the process, including considerations of concepts, theory, positions, cultural reading, and gender. Translating as a term, even beyond its use for linguistic and cultural transfers, expresses the crux of research praxis, since it involves a process of choices made in relation to the intentions and preferences of the researcher. It is an “ethics in practice”.

Notes

1. The idea of an “adequate translator” comes from Walter Benjamin (1999: 71) discussing when a work is translatable, in his introduction to his own translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens.

2. This three‐fold division is an adaptation of Liz Stanley's seminar presentations for the Centre for Narrative and Auto/Biographical Studies at Edinburgh (see also http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/NABS/).

3. I had also discussions about my research with the local and the national War Widow's Association organization, but the announcement (modified version) was published in their own magazine only a couple of years later.

4. “Ethics in practice”, everyday ethical choices, and “procedural ethics” are discussed in Guillemin and Gillam (2004).

5. Marianna Hirsch (2002) identifies strongly with Eva Hoffman when she writes in Lost in Translation (Hoffman 1989: 23): “I come from the war; it's my true origin.” “I too come from the war” Hirsch acknowledges (2002: 219), “from that generation of the immediate postwar in Eastern Europe which grew up hearing stories of hiding, persecution, extermination, and miraculous survival every day and dreaming of them every night.” First, Hoffman (1989: 25) does not think she can derive anything from her parents' experience, but then she hears a new story of what her parents went through during the war: “[T]his—the pain of this—is where I come from, and that it's useless to try to get away.” Although, she continues later, those children who come from the war are perhaps overshadowed by their parents' stories (Hoffman 1989: 230).

6. This name, Bertta Kaukinen, is a pseudonym. Interview 3 April 2001.

7. Karelia is a much‐researched subject in Finland, especially when it comes to the history and ethnography of the area, Karelia as landscape of the national epic Kalevala and the interpretations around this subject leading up to Karelianism as a major cultural movement in the late twentieth century (Sihvo 2003/1973), etc. Lately the focus has shifted to new view‐points, for example on gender and emotion in folk poetry (Timonen 2004), and even on the ceded Karelia as told by the Soviets as resettled immigrants (Hakamies 2005). New interpretations concerning both the present day and the past of Karelia are discussed in Fingerroos and Loipponen (2007).

8. Besides, the more I looked into it, the more I noticed how much my own interest in war had influenced the way I posed questions (this thought is further examined in my doctoral thesis).

9. Olavi Paavolainen, a Finnish writer, crossed the old border to East Karelia in August 1941, after the Finnish army had started to conquer parts that had never before belonged to Finland. In a self‐evident manner, he writes in his war diary (27 August 1941), how the houses are familiar ever since his childhood from books concerning Kalevala, later from the famous Karelisnist paintings and from the early symphonies by Sibelius (Paavolainen 1982: 123).

10. Rachel Thompson (2004) brings up the closeness to and distance from the interviewee. She introduces examples of approaches which are encouraging in self‐reflexion.

11. With the exception of Joy Damousi's (1999; 2001) writing on Australian war widows, war widows have been mostly excluded from the history of war. Other groups of women have been increasingly included in the historiography of war, though (see for example Duchen and Bandhauer‐Schöffmann 2000).

12. See Jaar 1998: 55–62; and also www.alfredojaar.net, Recent Projects, The Rwanda Project 1994–2000.