Sheep View

William Heinesen (1900-1991) is probably still the best-known Faroese writer internationally - perhaps because he wrote in Danish, and perhaps also because of the English translations by W. Glyn Jones. Yet there is a considerable body of Faroese literature written in the Faroese language, most of which still awaits international recognition. On the British Library's European Studies blog, Pardaad Chamsaz writes about a collection of books of modern Faroese writing the Library has recently acquired, noting the problems encountered by Faroese authors in making their work known and read abroad:

It is safe to say that Faroese writers have a difficult task to become known beyond their shores. As the Faroese nominee for the 2020 Nordic Council Literature Prize, Oddfríður Marni Rasmussen, writes, ‘only a half-dozen or so can make a living off their writing. And in order to do that, a writer has to be translated into a bigger language, but publishing houses in other countries do not want to spend money on some book from the Faroe Islands.

Hammershaimb, Aasen, Aavik

Linguistics, the nation and literature.

I regard myself as a literary translator, rather than a linguist as such, but certain linguistic phenomena interest me, such as the creation and restitution of languages. This is where linguistics meets social, and especially literary, needs.

The three men listed in the title are by no means the only linguists who have actually built and formed parts of their respective languages, but they are representative of people who felt it their duty to do something for the written language of their respective countries, so that it would become a usable national language - not least that a national literature could be written in them.

Ivar Aasen (1813-1896) started of what was to become nynorsk. Venceslaus Hammershaimb (1819-1909) created a new spelling for Faroese so that it could become a viable written language. Johannes Aavik (1880-1973) even created neologisms and used Finnish calques to expand the Estonian language, also to make it more suited to writing literature.

Their efforts are not to be divorced from a national (language) consciousness, first perhaps hinted at by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who had moved from East Prussia to Riga and was maybe the first leading poet and intellectual to make people, in this case in the Baltic countries, aware of the fact that what many regarded as mere peasant dialects and idioms could be turned into literary languages, by drawing on oral folk tales and poems, committing them to paper, and using words to be found there when writing new poetry. His efforts in turn sparked off the work of, for instance, Johann Snellman (1806-1881) and Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884) in Finland, and Friedrich Kreutzwald (1803-1882) in Estonia.

For more details on all these linguists and men of letters, you can turn to Google. The phenomenon of raising the dignity of a national language is not restricted to northern countries alone. The same was done with, for example, what was to become modern Hebrew, and Afrikaans, which was in effect a breakaway dialect of Dutch.

But my point is that when all these linguistic efforts were made to consolidate national languages, literature, at first poetry, later novels, were an essential and symbiotic part of the efforts. I wonder how linguists, anno 2009, would go about the same tasks. Would literature, as such, still play an equally major part?

Scandinavian Newsletter

Since the demise of the annual publication "Nordic Literature - Nordisk litteratur", the gap has to an extent been filled by the "Scandinavian Newsletter". This 100-page annual magazine is published in the English language in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, where Nordic languages and Estonian are taught at the local university.

Twelve issues have now been published by a group of editors attached to the Scandinavian Translation and Information Bureau there. It is financed by grants from the Danish Arts Agency, Mentanargrunnur Landsins in Tórshavn, FILI in Finland, the Fund for the Promotion of Icelandic Literature in Reykjavík, NORLA in Norway, and the Swedish Institute.

The magazine is slightly broader in focus than for literature alone, although authors and books are certainly the main focus. While the bibliography at the back tends to focus on translations of Scandinavian books into Dutch, all the articles are of international scope.

The latest issue, number 12, 2008, contains some Faroese material, as one of the editors, Roald van Elswijk, specialises in that language. So there are articles on the major prose author Heðin Brú, the state of literature on the Faroes, postmodernism in Faroese poetry, the first Faroese opera, and so on. But all the other Scandinavian or Nordic countries are well represented, with articles on and reviews of, for instance, Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish magazine "Nuori Voima", Astrid Lindgren, Henrik Wergeland, Herman Bang, Alexander Ahndoril, Alva Myrdal, Werner Aspenström, and lots more. Contributors are Dutch, but also from the Nordic countries themselves.

If you wish to subscribe, the 12th issue costs €12.50, excluding postage, and back issues and bank details for payment can be obtained by sending an e-mail to: svin@svin.nl .

Their website is at: http://www.svin.nl/en/newsletter_en.htm

For those of you who are wondering where the "svin" comes from, this porcine pun is an abbreviation of the Dutch "Scandinavisch Vertaal- en Informatiebureau Nederland".