The Last Days of Maiju Lassila

Who wrote this novel? J I Vatanen was not a real person; he was a heteronym-a characterized pseudonym-of a strange Finnish author named Algot Untola, who was arrested as a Red agitator at the end of the Finnish Civil War in May, 1918, and summarily sentenced and shot. This novel is "J I Vatanen's" "memoir" of the events leading up to that violent death and its tragicomic aftermath. But who wrote it? Douglas Robinson, a noted Finnish-English translator and translation scholar, claims that he "pseudotranslated" it-but what does that mean? A pseudotranslation is a hoax translation, one with no original. But if the hoaxer declares the hoax up front, is it still a hoax? The Last Days of Maiju Lassila is a readable story with its backdrop in a volatile political history from the 1880s to 1919; but it is also an experimental memoir/novel/translation that toys with our "certainty" about reality.