She Has That Kind of Stature: Two Translators Talk Pirkko Saisio’s “The Helsinki Trilogy”

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Pirkko Saisio’s The Helsinki Trilogy—Lowest Common Denominator, Backlight and The Red Book of Farewells—is finally available in the US via Two Lines Press, translated into English by Mia Spangenberg. The first book in the trilogy Lowest Common Denominator was published in the UK via Penguin UK on August 7^th. Much like Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy, The Helsinki Trilogy, is a coming-of-age series about Scandinavian womanhood and writing. The trilogies are equal in literary merit and canonical stature. 

What distinguishes Saisio’s trilogy is the recounting of her experiences in the radical, queer theater space of 1970’s Helsinki, as well as her continued career in theater and academia and constant grappling with memories. Saisio’s style stands out because it is effortless in how she blends styles and disciplines. It is the gestalt of her episodic, nimble, evocative writing mixed with humor and theater and poetry that makes Saisio the singular writer she is. 

Mia Spangenberg, the translator of The Helsinki Trilogy, is a literary translator of Finnish and has given us a beautiful translation of a very difficult book. Recreating Saisio’s agility is no easy task, and Spangenberg brings her verve, grace, and momentum to the translation, one such example follows:

A Romani woman’s abundant skirts have gotten caught in the escalator, and with dazed satisfaction she hears the quick footsteps of the subway guards and the screeching of the escalator as it’s forced to a halt; she watches as a steady, noisy stream of families, Japanese tourists, unhurried drunkards, retirees in white hats, veiled Muslim women, Somalis, Senegalese, and exasperated Finnish children flushed from the heat all rush past.

In the summer of 2024, I travelled to Finland for a translators conference and made time to visit Mia in Lauttasaari, just west of Helsinki. At the time of this interview, only the third book in the trilogy, The Red Book of Farewells, had come out by Two Lines Press. We talked about the forthcoming books, the life of translators, and the many merits of Saisio’s work and legacy.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Jordan Barger: To start, I’d love to hear about your career as a literary translator and the relationship with this book in particular.

Mia Spangenberg: I studied literature, and I have a PhD in Scandinavian Studies with a focus on Finnish, and I have a Finnish background. So, I’ve been reading my whole life. I grew up reading Finnish books and knowing about Finnish culture and so on, and I came to Finland many summers as a child. So I’ve known about Pirkko Saisio for a long time. And I’ve read the Helsinki Trilogy, of which the Red Book of Farewells is the last part. And as I got into translation about eight years ago, I just started to wonder: There are other Finnish authors being translated into English, but Pirkko Saisio is not one of them. Why is that? 

The Red Book of Farewells won the 2003 Finlandia Prize,Finland’s most prestigious Literary Award. I love all of her books, but this one is my favorite. I just thought, this is probably the book that I should start with. And so I was in touch with her agency, Helsinki Literary Agency, and they said, “No, we don’t actually have a sample translation of that. That would be great if you wanted to do one.” And then I was very open with them from the beginning. Like “Let’s work together and see what might happen. I can try and pitch this to different publishers.” So, I completed the sample translation and started pitching it to publishers. I think that was in the spring of 2021. CJ Evans is the editor-in-chief at Two Lines Press, and I met him earlier at one of these ALTA (American Literary Translator Association) pitch sessions. I had pitched something else to him, which he didn’t take, but he said, you know, please be in touch with me if you have something else. And then I was in touch with him about this and it took him about three months to decide. This is a very quick turnaround time, because you hear about people pitching books for years, or it takes at least six months or whatever, but he got back to me in three months, and he’s like, we want this. This is good.

JB: I mean, that’s the strength of the book. 

MS: It’s amazing that it happened that way. I’m lucky, but it just speaks to making those connections. Once editors have seen some of your sample translations, and they see the quality of your writing, then you can return to them with other books, even if they don’t take that first one.

JB: I tend to want everything I translate to be in everyone’s hands, on every bookshelf. But sometimes that sample is just not in the right place at the right time.

MS: Absolutely. It’s important to be gentle with yourself. It takes a lot of time to pitch these works and to provide the editor or the publisher with the context which they don’t have. Just keep your eyes open for whatever kind of connections you might be able to make.

JB: From a consumer’s market standpoint, the people that read Tove Ditlevsen’s trilogy will be on board like: here’s the Copenhagen trilogy and now, here’s the Helsinki trilogy. It seems like a smooth dovetail from one to the other. Especially considering the fact that this is coming out on Penguin Modern Classics in the UK.

MS: Agreed. It speaks to the fact that Saisio is a world-class writer, because she’s now going to be on that modern classics bookshelf with other authors like Tove Ditlevsen. The Helsinki Trilogy is an autofictional account of the life of a person called Pirkko Saisio and it starts with childhood, and then the second one focuses on her teenage years. And then the third book starts with her young adult life. But you can read them in any order and get different things out of them.

JB: This is my fourth day in Finland, and even in that time, Saisio’s name has come up a lot. And when I’ve mentioned that we’re meeting, and that I’ve read it, my Finnish friends get very excited. They’re really excited about this book coming out into the world. In my circles, especially like my Finnish poet buddies, they’re specifically excited about it coming out on Penguin UK Modern Classics. It seems like a badge of honor. Is that something you imagined with this all along? 

MS: No, I have to say that it’s all been a huge surprise. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, because it is such an amazing work, and I love it so much, and I know so many other Finns who love it so much. But you just never know with the English language. The market is unpredictable, and it depends on the editor, and it seems like you have to work really hard to sell something. And the magic that I had in my translation must have convinced CJ, I’m enchanted too.

But of course, I should say about Pirkko Saisio: people call her a living legend. In the art world, everybody knows who she is, because her fingers are everywhere. So, I should say she’s not just a writer, but she’s also a playwright, and she acts. She’s doing a movie. I don’t know when it’s coming out—sometime in the foreseeable future—and she’s continuing to write and, you know, she’s just been an inspiration to so many different kinds of artists, and just like Tove Jansson before her, continues to inspire people. So she has that kind of stature. The only difference being that Tove Jansson has gained that worldwide acclaim that Saisio does not yet have, but hopefully it’s coming.

JB: I’m sure you’ve done this a thousand times, but would you mind giving us a quick summary of the first book that came out, The Red Book of Farewells?

MS: It’s hard to summarize The Red Book of Farewells, except to say that it’s about the life of a young woman who’s trying to figure out who she is and come to terms with her sexuality and what she wants to do with her life. She finds herself in acting school, but at the same time the narrator is a person who is writing about this younger version of herself. 

That’s a really important element of the book, that it moves between the present and the past. It creates this intimacy, so I hope that comes across in the translation. And she also uses techniques from the theater like direct address, where an actor talks directly to their audience, and so she does that all the time in this book. Like “Why did I say that? Do I really feel that way?” 

JB: It’s interesting that the tenderness in this book doesn’t only come from scenes of intimacy, it’s also from this direct address. The two narrative styles in the book are really refined. And that’s what makes it so great to me, that the reflective scenes are very vivid, but just as vivid as the teenage scenes. There’s no nostalgia or distance, they’re both vibrant.

MS: So much literature today, for good reason, is full of angst, and it can be very beautiful prose, but it can be difficult to read. But in this book, you also end up laughing, and she often takes jabs at herself. There’s this kind of self-deprecating humor that comes through in a  laconic style.

Maybe it’s something that comes with the age when she wrote this, because she was in her 50s, and she’s still at it twenty years later.

JB: I think these stylistic elements were translated so beautifully. Another thing I love in this translation is how her being a Finnish queer icon shows up so well. It’s not just refreshing, it’s inspiring. I’ve always been blown away by those things, when writers express this quick acceptance. Because, me, I think about things forever and ever. 

MS: The moment she falls in love with Hava, it’s so funny, yet so natural. She just sort of falls into it, and then she’s like “okay, here I am.” So let’s see how I can get closer to this person. 

JB: I have this interest in Finland’s tradition of queer icons. There have been these queer icons for over 100 years in the cultural landscape here. And it is so natural and real, and they’re so good. Like, Ellen Theslef, who I adore, the 19th century Finnish painter who similarly worked with grace and naturalness. I see something similar in Thesleff in Saisio, where the elements are quite muted, but they come together to make this vividness. Thesleff’s art was a big reason I made this trip to Helsinki. 

Back to my original question: Do you have any comments or thoughts on how in Finnish culture, it is just so normal that there are so many queer icons in the canon. Any thoughts on this?

MS: It is astounding to me, too, because as I worked on these translations, I of course did more background research on Pirkko and thought a lot about how Tove Jansson has been an influence on her. And I realized how amazing it is that Tove had this free reign to live her life as she wanted to live it, and was able to become so famous and really actualize herself, and that, yeah, I see Pirkko able to follow in her footsteps, you know, even though, maybe it’s because she’s been in the arts, and the arts tend to be more open and welcoming and liberal, and probably because she’s been here in Helsinki, where she grew up, it must have something to do with that, because certainly the experience of other queer people living in rural areas was not the same.

JB: Do you mean other Finnish authors who are more rural?

MS: I’m not thinking of authors per se, but of my own family members. And other research I’ve done about what queer life was like in the 50s, that it was very clandestine and hidden, which she also alludes to in this book. She didn’t even know that she could be queer, that she could be a lesbian. It’s not something that was part of her vocabulary or her world.  So it was really by getting into these artistic circles that that world opened to her. 

JB: I appreciate the nuance on that, because I have been amazed by the plethora of these Finnish  icons and was curious about the context. It sure didn’t seem easy for Ellen Thesleff in the 1890’s.

MS: I don’t know enough about Ellen Thesleff’s background, but you know, Tove Jansson did come from an artistic Finnish-Swedish family,  so I think moving in artistic circles, and being in the city of Helsinki did make it easier for her. I mean, class is a factor that makes a big difference.

JB: My next question comes from something I learned about from the Finnish poet Reetta Pekkanen. Reetta did her linguistics thesis on the use of polyphony in this book. How all the different voices work together, she said it was a bit of a battle to, like, to convince the linguistics people that it wasn’t simply a literature thesis. But she said it went well because the examples are so plentiful.

So my question is: What was your experience, as a translator, dealing with all these voices? For that detail alone, the book seems really difficult to translate.

MS: It was. It was certainly time consuming in the sense that she switches not only from first to third person, but present to past tense, and tense works differently in Finnish. And then there’s also the fact that it’s much easier to write short, compact sentences in Finnish than it is in English. You can omit the subject, and in Finnish, you often write in the passive voice, which is one of the first rules you learn when you’re in English classes that you must use the active voice. So, you know, there are these kinds of challenges, but, really, the best way I can explain it is that I didn’t even really need to find her voice in English. Because I’ve loved her work for so long, and I’ve read this book many times over. I could just see the way it should sound. I had my editor, CJ Evans, help me fine tune it. When I sent him the sample translation, the laconic style and humor was mostly already there. That’s really been the joy of being able to work on three of her books, because Anton Hur has talked about “translator jet lag” that you get when you switch from one author’s voice to another, you need to give yourself time to make that change, because there’s this disconnect. Obviously, these voices are different, and so I’ve been able to sit with this. I mean, I’ve had other little projects that I’m working on too but, still, I’ve been able to sit with this voice for a really long time. And cultivate the voices of the other characters as well, like the fictive Pirkko’s mother and father whose voices really come through in dialogue.

And then, as you mentioned earlier, there’s the dreamy aspect of her work. Dreams are very important to Saisio. Throughout her work, she interrupts the narrative with different dreams. Should you take this as the truth? The dreams help to bring the point across, so that truth comes through fiction. Through aligning these elements together, Saisio emphasizes her narrators’ realizations.

JB: I think that’s the core of what makes her influential. Similar to how Kafka is so influential, particularly in how he doesn’t organize his stories by logic, but rather by feeling and intuition. 

One way to inspire a young writer, or anyone who needs a kick in the rear, is to free them from standardized structure. So, something like intuition or dream narratives can interrupt those sanitized narrative forms we’ve come to learn. That can be so freeing for a writer.

MS: There’s one chapter in particular I just love titled “fragments on people power.” Suddenly you have the story of Spartacus leading the slaves, and how that all backfires on him, and they’re all killed. Then she brings in the migration of the dragonflies and Koenigsberg. You don’t even know if this is true or not, but it just seamlessly flows in with the rest of the book. It’s one of my favorite chapters. And the first chapter, too, where she’s on an island and discovers that her manuscript is gone.

JB: Speaking of translation difficulties, I’d like to touch on how translation from Finnish to English really embodies that translation is rewriting. The tiny bit of translation I’ve done from Finnish, with Retta Pekkanen at my side, with three months together, with her very short poems, was still an immense challenge. We were essentially rewriting her poems. Not to exoticize it but translating from Finnish is an entirely different experience.

MS: One thing that comes to mind is that Pirkko Saisio likes to use alliteration. You might not be able to do it in one place, but you can bring it forward in another place, so you still get that flavor throughout the book. 

That’s part of the rewriting aspect. And you absolutely cannot do Finnish word for word. It would be garbage. We understood that on a linguistic and stylistic level, it wouldn’t work. 

Finnish tolerates repetition much more than English.  There is repetition here in the translation, because that’s true to Saisio’s style, but we did cut back on that a little bit. In English, too much repetition comes across as a lack of care. It doesn’t come across as beautiful prose, and that would have been a disservice to her work. 

JB: Well, I’m glad you took the time. Saiso’s writing is casual, almost effortless, like I think a lot of inspiring arts are. I remember seeing professional skateboarding when I was a kid and thought that’s awesome, I want to do that. And my dad was a skateboarder. I remember looking around the ramps thinking, I’m gonna jump off that. I’m gonna do this. Then I stood on the board and said “Oooh, this is really hard. Like really hard.” And I never have gotten good at skateboarding, but I love it so much. I think that’s part of truly inspiring work, because it makes you want to try. But then you give it a try and go “ohhh, Pirkko Saisio and Tony Hawk are geniuses.”

MS: Saisio is both casual and totally disciplined. The title of the novel is The Red Book of Farewells. And it actually is a series of farewells to her youth, to the ideology she believed in, and to her daughter as she grows up. You know, that’s how the book ends. And I just love the ending. Somebody told me they just broke down into tears when they read that.

JB: The first book of the trilogy, Lowest Common Denominator goes back in time to her childhood. Did she write these all in succession? 

MS: She did. She wrote them around the time she turned 50. The first one goes back and forth in time, and it’s prompted by the death of her father. And so it opens on their relationship. Then it goes back to her childhood, when she’s a toddler. Followed by some beautiful scenes, also funny and poignant, heartbreaking to some extent, of this little girl who does not feel like she is in the right body.

For instance, one of the chapters is about a green cap that her grandfather gives her, and she loves that green cap, but it makes her not look like a little girl anymore. So her mother and grandmother were dressing her in these little frilly dresses with aprons and stuff. Despite all this, she hides her green cap from everyone. At night, she puts it under her pillow. And one day, it’s gone. The first traumatic experience of her childhood.

JB: It’s interesting how objects seem to anchor her often-changing narrative. It gives her and the reader an object to focus on, and here it is a literal object of desire.

MS: So true. Then the book goes more into her problematic relationship with her father. Also how much she adores her mother. Her mother is not always so attuned to her daughter’s desires. Then she learns how to read and how this is a major theme of the trilogy. That it was the power of words that saved her.

JB: This is a theme that hits me hard every single time. I remember reading tons of different things over the pandemic. One of which was Terry Pratchett. The moment I realized that the main character of Discworld is not a failed wizard like he thinks he is. He doesn’t realize that it’s a magical gift that he can speak every language. When I realized that Pratchett is saying words are magic, I was floored.

MS: Yeah, that bit always gives me chills. I should read those books again. When I read those, I must have been a teenager. 

JB: And then the final book in the trilogy, Backlight, which we won’t have until June 2025.

MS: Backlight is about when she’s a teenager. It’s the funniest one. All the books are humorous, but she really hits a high note here. It goes between her being a teenager in Finland, and when she gets a summer job at an orphanage in Switzerland. And it is all absolutely hilarious. She decides to go to Switzerland because she’s seen The Sound of Music dozens of times. She thinks she’s going to become a nun, because she doesn’t have any idea how she can fit in anywhere. So she thinks she’s either going to become a nun or that she’s going to work in an orphanage. And then there’s just all kinds of teenage angst that makes it so funny.

JB: What a great description of the teenage mind. You’re like, I’m either gonna be an orphan or a nun. Everything is very black and white. And you take it all very seriously. This is why I teach my college students A Doll’s House, to blow the teenage mind. To remind them that there’s always a third option. 
Well, I’m so excited for this trilogy. November 2025, for Lowest Common Denominator in the US, June 10 for Backlight, and then in the UK, they’ll start coming out in 2025.