Electric verses

"Christmas 2009 was the time when e-book sales in America began to have financial significance," writes Clare Alexander in the Bookseller, and as someone who has recently begun to use a Kindle, I think I can see why. The convenience of being able to download books, newspapers and magazines instantly, without having to visit a bookstore, is certainly something new, and the lightness, clear display and portability of the device is also a factor that speaks in its favour. To be able to read not simply one book, but three or four simultaneously, without having to prop them up or otherwise support them (large volumes can be hard on the hands and wrists), is to me a definite step forward. Recently, when reading a biography of T.S. Eliot, I wanted to have several other Eliot-related books available, including the poet's own works, and on the Kindle I was able to do this neatly and without effort, switching between automatically bookmarked pages in different volumes. It's also possible to bring up Wikipedia while reading in order to check references. The whole experience is a bit like having a reference library in the palm of one's hand.

When the royalties question is settled and some kind of standardization takes place in the matter of e-book formats, I can see foresee that e-books could even come to replace the paper versions. Whether this development will be truly international or confined to the English-speaking world, it's hard to know at present. Certainly in Scandinavian publishing circles there still seems to be some resistance to the electronic incursion, but this may change as countries like Finland and Estonia, which have always been at the forefront of developments in information technology, begin to respond. It would obviously help if Amazon were to acquire a presence in the Nordic countries, and one wonders if that will happen any time soon.

Inclusions and exclusions

It's sometimes instructive to follow the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that characterize the relations between the Nordic countries and their neighbours, and these are often evident as in the field of literary activity and publishing. The Helsinki Book Fair opens on Thursday - a large-scale, 4-day event, each year it chooses a theme to bind together the various strands of interest that are represented by the numerous readings, mini-seminars, presentations and  discussions that supplement the static exhibition of books and other material.

This year, it looks as though one can take one's pick as to what the theme really is, for according to the English-language version of the advance publicity it is "What is really happening? - the question set in Pentti Saarikoski’s collection of poems published in 1962... The aim of the Book Fair is to give a comprehensive view of today’s reality and future visions. The starting point is the writers, the people involved and the books: the whole spectrum, from humor to science. There will be more than 900 performers and 600 programmes: interviews, seminars, panel discussions, debates and events."

On the other hand, looking further down the page, one reads that "In recognition of the anniversary 1809, Sweden is the Helsinki Book Fair country focus", and indeed on exploring the enormous schedule of events, it's possible to find a few Swedish authors (billed for talks and readings, and some other events, including a government-sponsored one, which have a more or less Swedish flavour. But it's hard to find confirmation of the claim that "more than thirty Swedish writers are attending the fair."

For the first time, one or two Russian authors and publishers are taking part in the fair. Yet the primary focus is surely, as usual, on Finnish writing and publishing - there's a truly vast array of writing talent on show, but one wonders if it can be appreciated by the foreign guests who may have come to acquaint themelves with the contemporary Finnish scene - for the language of nearly all of the events is Finnish, with a few in Swedish or Finland-Swedish.

On a different subject, though in some ways it's related, Sweden's prestigious literary August Prize has  presented its nominations for the 2009 award. Names on the fiction list include Eva Adolfsson, Johannes Anyuru, Per Agne Erkelius, Aris Fioretos, Ann Jäderlund and Steve Sem-Sandberg. But one looks in vain for any Finland-Swedish names: in particular, the absence of Monika Fagerholm and Kjell Westö, both of whom published major new works this autumn, is striking.

The electronic antiquariat

An increasing number of out-of-copyright editions of Nordic classics are now being scanned from the collections of U.S. university libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Recently I've been looking at the 1901 edition of Arvid Mörne's Nya sånger and the 1903 edition of Ny Tid, both from Harvard University Library. I also found it interesting to finally read Mikael Lybeck's plays about Finnish fortune-seekers and European industrial magnates in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, Dynastien Peterberg (The Peterberg Dynasty) and Den röde André (Red André). But if one looks further, both in the Archive and in Project Runeberg, there is now a very large amount of similar scanned material by Nordic authors available online, ranging from the works of Strindberg and Ibsen to much less well known names.

Shop talk

Discussing the current state of translated Nordic fiction with a publisher in the field recently, I ventured to suggest that a good deal of the really interesting, original and creative new writing from Scandinavia doesn't make it into English at all. The field as a whole is clearly marked out. Specialist houses like Norvik Press cater to the market in translations of Nordic classics, where the readers and buyers are often ethnic Scandinavians who have forgotten or never learned their mother tongue. The larger companies - Harvill Secker, Vintage, Orion, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Random House, etc. - look for bestsellers, whether crime novels (from Henning Mankell to Kerstin Ekmnan) or cult fiction of the Saabye Christensen type. In the middle are smaller publishers like Arcadia or Graywolf Press, who do try to publish Nordic writers who fall outside these major categories, but whose sales and distribution are - of necessity - strictly limited.

The publisher with whom I was talking told me that, especially where serious literature is concerned, he thought the "Nordic" label almost by definition implies a specialized minority readership - one for which it's important that the books that are translated and published should be identifiably "Scandinavian" in character. I mentioned two recent examples of Scandinavian novels where most or all of the characters and settings don't meet those criteria - Olli Jalonen's 14 Knots to Greenwich and Kristina Carlson's Mr Darwin's Gardener. It seems, however, that while these books may be very well-written and deserving of being read, they wouldn't have much appeal to the general reading public, as they're not set in Scandinavia.

In the the field of poetry, the situation is a little more encouraging. The work of major poets like Tomas Tranströmer, Paavo Haavikko, Roy Jacobsen, Gösta Ågren, Pia Tafdrup and many others has been able to reach an English-speaking public largely outside any specfic Nordic context, as voices in the universal language of poetry. It's this kind of freedom in relations between author and reader that's currently lacking in the sphere of prose fiction, where the message is often lost in exotic details and carefully-mapped journalistic agendas. One wonders, perhaps, whether a writer like August Strindberg - who held wildly changing views on society and human beings but at the same time possessed an authorial sweep and magnificence of writing style that made such considerations appear irrelevant - could achieve an international reputation if he were producing his works in today's literary and publishing world.

David McDuff

Ordering Swedish books

Although it's intended for readers and translators in North America, Laura Wideburg's page of information on how to order Swedish (and other Nordic) books from abroad is a useful resource.

Detective Story - 4

Continuing the discussion of this thorny subject, I've raised two contributions from the comments to this post:

Larissa Kyzer said...

I wrote the article responding to Nathaniel Rich’s piece about Scandinavian crime fiction, and have followed the discussion here and in other blogs surrounding these pieces with interest. The debate over what country or region produces the ‘best’ of any type of literature is bound to be limited (I said as much in my article), but I find myself a bit at odds with the polarization here: those who are for Scandinavian crime fiction and those who are against it. I am deeply interested in Scandinavian literature--including crime fiction--and aspire to translate Danish literature myself one day. I’d hope that one can be a ‘committed’ translator and also foster an appreciation for genre fiction at the same time. (It’s seemed to me that many Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian fiction translators have translated both ‘literary’ and genre fiction.)

While many of the points made by David McDuff regarding crime fiction have raised some important and interesting points—particularly that current Scandinavian crime fiction marks a “continuation of the "radical" movement that produced the socially-committed novels and poetry of the 1970s,”—I wonder at the assessment that the prevalence of this genre within Scandinavian literature is “a tragedy whose consequences it will take several generations to overcome.”

It’s a common enough opinion that genre fiction of any stripe is inherently sub-literary, which is a debate that is perhaps larger than needs be argued here. Suffice to say that I do think that genre fiction merits serious literary consideration for its content, structure, and yes, even prose style. There are certainly many, many poorly written and conceived crime novels, but surely enough there are terrible ‘literary’ novels as well. However, I don't believe that the existence of crime novels can, with any credibility, be faulted with ‘diverting’ Nordic writing talent. Rather, I tend to hope that translation begets translation—that every new Henning Mankell or Karin Fossum novel that is published in English opens the door a little wider for more ‘literary’ Scandinavian authors to be translated as well.

David McDuff said...

Thank you for this contribution to the discussion. While I also don't think there should be a "polarization" of the kind you mention, I do believe that it's important to set some sort of markers as to what constitutes literary culture and what is basically just "reading entertainment". I'm certainly not against the latter, and have translated at least one Scandinavian crime novel myself - but when crime novels become the flagship of a nation's literary production, I think it's a danger signal.

In a later post to this blog, I've been more specific. There I argue (together with the author of the article quoted by the anonymous blogger at Scandinavian Crime Fiction), that of all the Nordic countries it's primarily Sweden where the problem is most acute - in Sweden there is virtually no middle ground between the marginalized avant-garde literary scene and the huge space that's occupied by bestsellerdom, led primarily by trend-following crime novels of various kinds and tendencies. The situation in Denmark is different, as is evidenced by the popularity of the traditional historical novel genre there, for example. Finland presents a similar picture.

So while the problem isn't yet universal, what I have tried to make clear is that it has the potential for a disaster, a tragedy - please read what I wrote in my original post a little more carefully. My caveats are just that: a warning of what may happen, rather than a statement of accomplished fact. The developments that have taken place in Swedish publishing could affect the rest of the Nordic publishing world, too - let's hope that doesn't happen, and as translators let's make some efforts to make sure that it doesn't.

See also:
Cornering the market
Detective Story
Detective Story - 2
Detective Story - 3
The missing midfield

The missing midfield

Writing in Sydsvenska Dagbladet (thanks for the link, SCF), journalist and author Per Svensson claims to see a major difference between the literary scenes in Sweden and Denmark respectively. In the preamble to an interesting but somewhat inconclusive interview with Danish poet and literary critic Lars Bukdahl, Svensson says that literature in Denmark plays a more central role than it does in Sweden. Presenting Bukdahl as "one of Denmark's most powerful and controversial literary critics", he styles this description as "an expression of differences between the Danish literary landscape and the Swedish one":

In Sweden, there is hardly a literary critic who could claim to be either influential or controversial... It's often said that soccer matches are decided in midfield. In Sweden, the literary midfield has gradually grown weaker and weaker. Audience-centred quality literature has been forced back. Instead we have a polarization - with on the one flank, an ever more dominant and confident bestseller culture, and on the other a marginalized, closed-off and self-sufficient avant-garde literature.

Both get along very well without the literary reviewers of the daily newspapers.

In Denmark, things appear to be different. There the expansive novel with artistic ambitions is still perceived as so important that it can spark magnificent quarrels.

To back up his assertion, Svensson points to a poll that was organized last autumn by Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper. In this, readers were asked to name "the Danish novel of our time" and a panel of experts chose its favourite novels of the past 25 years. The book that came top of the readers' list was Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned (Vi, de druknede, a book about seafarers, variously described as an "ocean adventure", a "family saga", and "a chronicle about the birth of modern Denmark").

While one might reasonably question the "novel of our time" label, at least Jensen's book is a genuine historical novel, which doesn't rely on a crime plot or the devices of an entertainment genre for its success. In some ways it can be compared to another Nordic historical prose work which was mentioned here in an earlier post. Svensson's characterization of the Swedish literary scene as one in which bestsellerdom has taken over to the point where it's now probably more or less out of control is a though-provoking one. Together with his reflections on the absence of a "middle ground", it adds a further dimension to our ongoing discussion about the decline of mainstream quality writing in Sweden (as evidenced by the "crime wave"), and the negative effect this is having on the general availability in the English-speaking world of new, non-bestseller translated titles by Scandinavian authors in general.

E-books in Scandinavia - 2

News from Sweden that print-on-demand publisher Publit is to develop a software-based e-book reader specifically for the Swedish book market. E-books have been slow to gain acceptance in Scandinavia, even though they have been discussed for ten years now, and Publit hopes to change this.

See also: E-books in Scandinavia

Finnish publishing news

Parnasso's Jarmo Papinniemi writes that Finland's third largest publisher, Tammi, has announced plans for drastic cutbacks in staff, while there is also speculation that another publisher, Gummerus, may be taken over by Tammi (=Bonnier) or WSOY (= Sanoma). One major reason for the changes appears to be the drop in sales of non-fiction: younger Finns especially find that they can locate most of the reference material they need online, through sources such as Google.

A note for the curious: Parnasso's post is headed with the (relatively new) Finnish online chat acronym KVG (Kato ,Vittu, Googlella).

See also in this blog: Changes at Teos.

LBF - 2

The Bookseller notes a fact about the flow of visitors to this year's London Book Fair:

Many publishers and agents have noticed an absence of Americans and Australians at this year's LBF. Peter Straus of Rogers, Coleridge & White: "It's in a different key. Fewer people are taking longer journeys: Text and Allen & Unwin are coming from Australia, but other Australian publishers are not. With some of the bigger US companies, fewer editors are coming. I also haven't heard of many people auctioning huge books at the fair."

Despite absences from further afield, European presence in London appears to be booming with exchange rates named as a prime reason. Carole Blake of Blake Friedman said: "It's going crazy. We have completely full schedules with four of us taking appointments every 30 minutes."

It will be interesting to see how this is reflected in rights sales of Nordic books to UK publishers - though the true effect is likely to be felt in the other direction, one supposes.

E-books in Scandinavia

It looks as though it may still be some time before the commercially downloadable e-book finds a secure place in Scandinavian publishing. The absence of Amazon from the Nordic countries (there is still no Nordic equivalent of amazon.de or amazon.fr) has meant that the distribution of e-books has not yet really reached the Scandinavian reading public. The tremendous amount of uptake on the Kindle e-reading device in the United States during the past year or so remains mostly a U.S.-focused phenomenon, and although the Sony reader has made inroads in the U.K. publishing world, with Penguin releasing a growing number of titles in the Adobe .ePub format, readable on the Sony PRS-505, it doesn't yet appear that these recent developments in publishing technology are reaching a wider European public, especially in the North. At the end of last year, Swedish firms like Atlas and Bra Böcker announced plans to release e-book versions of many of their titles, but on visiting the websites of these companies it's hard to find specifics or details, or even the e-books themselves.

It's possible, one guesses, that the concept of e-book publishing clashes with certain ingrained Nordic attitudes - and certainly the authoritarian trend noticeable in the recent Pirate Bay trial has given some pointers to this hypothesis. Although the outcome of the trial is still uncertain, the whole proceeding gives a good idea of where the priorities of Swedish and Nordic media content providers lie. Even so, there is one area of electronic publishing where Nordic classical literature has quite a strong representation: the appropriately-named Project Runeberg has been archiving Nordic-language literature online since December 1992. Like its larger sister enterprise, Project Gutenberg, it is largely a volunteer effort, publishing freely available electronic versions of books which have a cultural and historical significance. Nowadays it also releases facsimile editions of classic works, as well as sheet music, and Latin works by Nordic authors.

At Project Runeberg one can find freely available electronic editions of works (including collected works) by most of Scandinavia's major 19th century authors, as well as writings by many minor and lesser-known ones. The archive contains books by more modern poets and authors, such as Edith Södergran, Karin Boye and even Kjell Westö. According to the project catalog, the database lists 31698 authors, out of which 7746 have presentations of varying lengths. Although the primary emphasis is on Swedish, there are texts in all of the major Nordic languages, including Finnish.

One doesn't have to read the books while sitting at a computer screen -- they can be downloaded both directly and from one's PC to portable devices, PDAs and even mobile phones, making it possible to read them while one's on the move -- travelling by train, for example. I've found this a good way to catch up on my reading of Nordic classics, and I look forward to the day when I will also be able to read commercially published books this way.

See also in this blog: Old Masters