Annikki Laaksi

Annikki Laaksi is a Finnish theatre director and translator whose marriage to John McGahern is shaped by movement between countries and by the unequal demands of two artistic careers. In McGahern’s account, she is at once a partner in translation and a person with an independent vocation: the couple’s affection persists, but neither Finland nor England offers them a settled sense of belonging, and the choice between their working lives ultimately becomes a choice they cannot make together.

Identity and Introduction

McGahern met Laaksi in Paris in the summer after writing The Dark in Dublin in the winter of 1963–64. He had won the Macauley Prize, whose terms required the winner to travel abroad for a year. After the school granted him a year’s leave without pay, he went to Helsinki; later that year he and Laaksi married. Their early married life was already itinerant: Finland did not seem to McGahern a country in which he could live, and after Christmas they moved to London and then to Spain, where they borrowed a house on the Almería coast.

Laaksi’s work gave her a professional identity distinct from her husband’s. She had lived and worked in Russia and spoke Russian fluently; in London she translated Ostrovsky’s plays. She also worked for Finnish Radio and later in television. McGahern’s account presents language not simply as a practical skill but as a source of difference and displacement. Laaksi could speak several languages, and her English became fluent, yet fluency did not make England feel like home.

Encounters with Ireland and Family

During a visit to Ireland the summer after McGahern’s dismissal, Laaksi took an immediate dislike to the country, judging it paternalistic, duplicitous, and dominated by priests; the position of women particularly angered her. McGahern considered her judgment incomplete, but recognized that she would not have agreed to live in Ireland even if he had retained his teaching post. In this way, the dismissal that had seemed to threaten his livelihood became, in their shared circumstances, less decisive: it did not force a move she would otherwise have accepted.

Laaksi also disliked McGahern’s father and would not stay at his house for more than one night. The dislike was mutual. The father later became intrigued by her foreignness and beauty when he saw that she was not afraid of him, but this change in his interest came too late to alter the distance between them. In a letter addressed to the couple, he wrote about his love of roses and their recurring blooms. McGahern found the reflection unexpectedly comic, having never noticed this side of his father; the episode places Laaksi within the family’s correspondence while also showing how differently she and McGahern encountered his father’s household.

London: Family, Work, and Belonging

In London, Laaksi and McGahern initially stayed in the large house shared by his sisters Breedge and Rosaleen, their husbands, and their daughters while they looked for a place of their own. The arrangement reversed their earlier roles: McGahern now depended on his sisters for help. Laaksi liked them and was comfortable in the house, provided it was not to be their permanent home. She and McGahern eventually rented a flat in Notting Hill and later moved to an apartment overlooking Victoria Park in Bethnal Green. The siblings continued to meet, visit one another, shop in markets, and go for drinks; at weekends the group sometimes went together to the Three Blackbirds.

Their work followed different rhythms. McGahern taught as a supply teacher, while Laaksi translated Ostrovsky and was sought out at London and Oxford gatherings attended by theatre people, writers, journalists, editors, and academics. She was admired in those circles, but not happy. McGahern likewise felt, in a different way, that he did not belong in England, though he cared less about that question. Laaksi gave their difference a concise form: “What do we do but learn to express less well in another language what we can already say far better in our own.” The remark connects her fluency to a limit: learning another language may enable work and conversation without dissolving attachment to one’s own.

The couple also collaborated directly. In one winter they translated Veijo Meri’s Finnish novel The Manilla Rope for McGahern’s American publisher, Knopf. Laaksi made a rough English version from the original; McGahern reshaped it into Irish-English speech, and they worked out the final text together by checking it against the Finnish. Their shared translation was a practical meeting of their abilities, even as the rest of their work increasingly drew them in different directions. Laaksi continued translating from Russian, while McGahern wrote in the evenings and waited for his own writing to gather force again.

Helsinki and the Marriage’s Strain

A recurring pattern took shape: Laaksi returned to Helsinki in summer for work, and McGahern joined her when the schools closed. He enjoyed the beauty of the seas around the city and its long white nights, and saw again the friends they had known when they first came together there. Yet he remained certain he could not live in Finland. Laaksi, meanwhile, was earning well in television and was happy there. Their professional standing also shifted with location: in Finland she was famous and he was her appendage; in London, though on a smaller scale, he occupied the more prominent position. McGahern understood that this imbalance weighed more heavily on her.

When Laaksi returned from Helsinki, McGahern had begun writing again and was absorbed in new work. She then received an offer of permanent television work, alongside the possibility of producing freelance theatre productions of her own. The opportunity promised a larger income than the couple’s London earnings and a chance to pursue the work she had long wanted. She proposed that McGahern return with her to Helsinki; they could live in a comfortable apartment overlooking the sea, and he could write without taking a job. The offer was not merely a change of address: it placed her desired career and his renewed commitment to writing in direct competition over where their shared life could be built.

Separation and Narrative Significance

McGahern told Laaksi that he could not move to Helsinki, while saying she should take the job if she wanted it and that they would see whether they could manage. She replied that the marriage was already under enough strain and would not survive. She turned down the television offer, but the unhappiness continued through the London winter, and they separated unhappily in early summer. The account does not describe a reconciliation. Laaksi took little from their apartment, and McGahern gave away most of what remained.

As the rooms emptied, McGahern was overcome by a memory of the furniture being removed from the house at Aughawillan while his mother was dying: the furniture had been stacked in the poor rose garden with brown hens in the crates of a red lorry. The physical act of clearing the London apartment thus reopened an earlier scene of departure and death. Laaksi’s separation from McGahern becomes part of a larger pattern in his memoir, where movement between homes is never only logistical: it carries the pressure of work, belonging, family history, and loss. Her independent career makes that pattern reciprocal. She is not simply the companion who follows McGahern abroad; she has a home, language, and professional future of her own, and the marriage ends at the point where those futures cannot be made to coincide.