ABSTRACT
In this article, I analyse the work of two writers who have been presented as if they were the eyewitnesses to war and historical calamity, namely the poetry of Araki Yasusada, about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the short stories of the Albanian writer Jiri Kajane¨, about the last years of Enver Hoxha’s Cold-War-era dictatorship. Neither writer actually exists: their work was composed by those named as their translators. In each case, the eagerness with which the work was received under its false attribution lays bare the high literary value accorded to testimonial works, and the incorporation of life-writing, here in the form of elaborately invented biographies and the insistence on a link between author and text, into war-writing. In this way, satire is directed at current literary priorities in the same act that enabled the work of little-known American writers to be published under pseudonyms. For good measure, each implies criticism of US foreign policy through the representation of past atrocities.
