Classics

Norvik Press has some excerpts from new translations of Hagar Olsson's Chitambo (tr. Sarah Death) and Karin Boye's Crisis (tr. Amanda Doxtater)

The publisher notes:

In many countries, the lockdown continues. We are thinking of you all.

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

Norvik Press website down?

We've recently noticed that the website of Norvik Press is apparently inaccessible (the site has been replaced by a spam page). We trust that this situation is only temporary, and look forward to a resumption of normal service by our colleagues in due course.

The SELTA site, which was down for a couple of days, now seems to be working normally again.

Cornering the Market

Here in the U.K., with the arrival of spring the London Book Fair is once again in the offing. Ever since it moved to the Barbican Centre in 1982 (which was the first year I attended it), and from there to the Olympia exhibition centre in Earls Court, this annual gathering has become a steady fixture in the diaries of publishers, agents and translators. It is really a trading opportunity for publishers and agents - translators occupy a peripheral status, but are none the less present, as the event is an international one, and rights representatives with publishing houses from many countries visit it.

It's a crowded, exhausting, at times even frantic get-together: there is usually nowhere to sit down, snack and refreshment facilities are minimal, if they exist at all, and the stands are often confusingly arranged and numbered, making it hard to find the location and/or people one is looking for. So what's in it for a translator of Nordic literature? Well, on April 20 there's a Nordic Reception at Stand W335/W335/407/W425/Y345 hosted by the Swedish Arts Council, Bok & Bilbiotek (Gothenburg Book Fair, Sweden), FILI (Finnish Literature Centre), Kunstrådet (Denmark), The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award (Sweden), Bókmenntasjóður (Iceland) and NORLA (Norway). Although members of SELTA (the Swedish-English Literary Translators' Association) receive an invitation to the reception in advance, in order to attend it at all they have to register for the entire Fair, at a price of 40 UKP. However, since most or all of the organizations mentioned send one or two representatives, it's a chance for translators to meet the potential providers of funding for their various projects. They can also meet publishers, of whom there are many in attendance, if not at the reception itself, then hidden away in the clusters of booths and stands that stretch to the horizon.

Most of the serious buying and selling of Nordic books at the Fair is concentrated on the now all-pervasive field of the detective novel, which over the past few years has become the hallmark of Scandinavian literary endeavour. PanMacmillan, Vintage, Harvill Press are the names to look for here. Translators whose interests lie outside this sphere may find it slightly more difficult to find takers, or even listeners, for their proposals and will, with a few exceptions, usually end up in the hands of one or two specialist publishers, not all of whom are even fully represented at the Fair. For poetry, Bloodaxe Books is probably still the most likely home for new translations of Nordic collections, or anthologies. Since its inception in 1979, Bloodaxe has published work by Finnish, Finland-Swedish, Swedish and Danish poets as part of its embrace of poetry from around the world -- a noble aim which more recently seemed to become at least partially obscured by a growing emphasis on Anglo-American poetry of a certain narrative and personal kind that tends to replace the internationalism of the former Bloodaxe with a new, issue-centred focus that is driven at least in part by concerns that have less to do with literature as such, and are connected rather with concerns of a sociological or even left-wing political kind. Nearly all of the Nordic titles published by Bloodaxe have been funded by Nordic arts council-type agencies like the ones referred to earlier.

For prose fiction, there is Dalkey Archive Press, a U.S.-based house that relies heavily on funding from foreign cultural foundations and government-sourced grants. Given the active presence of so many Nordic publishers, rights representatives and state cultural agencies at the Fair, it's not hard to see why Dalkey keeps up its visits each year. Although so far Dalkey's impressive list includes only a few Nordic writers, there are signs that the publisher intends to expand in this direction.

And there's Norvik Press, which Eric covered in an earlier post and which remains the UK's principal publisher of translated Nordic writing, both new and classical.

In a way it's too bad that translations of remarkable, original and unusual literary texts from Scandinavia still tend to fall into the hands of the specialist houses, both here and in the United States, My hope is that one day, with the rise of English as a second language in many or most of the Nordic countries (many younger Nordic writers and poets have a good though not perfect grasp of spoken and written English), translation of these texts will become less of a traditional "author/translator" process, and more a question of Nordic writers preparing "international" English-language versions of their work in collaboration with English-speaking advisers and consultants - perhaps the very same people whom today we know as "literary translators". Then the novels and poems can join their peers in the English-speaking world, and take their chance not as "translations" but as original works in English.

With a Nordic poet I recently embarked on a project of this kind: she prepared some English translations of her own poems, and I worked with her to make them into something that reads like English poetry. When the author has a decent grasp of English, this becomes possible, and it opens up a new line of approach - instead of aiming for "recreation" (or gjendiktning!), one works at the details and fabric of the writing itself, so that eventually the poem emerges as it would have done had the poet written it in English. I see this as a way forward not only for poetry, but also for prose. And some day, when English is universally spoken all over the world, it will seem the most natural way to work. The distinction between "original" and "translation" will become blurred and even effaced, for this is what writing is really all about in the end - the erasure of barriers, with the aim of reaching readers wherever they live, on a basis of universality.

As you can probably tell from my opening paragraphs, I won't be hot-footing it to Olympia in April. But I'll be keeping my eyes and ears open for new developments, new names and new departures. Eric says that he will be attending the 3-day event, and on this blog we'll try to keep up with what's new, as usual.

See also in this blog: Books and Publishers
Detective Story

Norvik Press

Norvik Press, which moved in August 2008 from the University of East Anglia in Norwich to University College London, must surely be the only publishing house of its kind in the UK. It publishes a variety of literature from the Nordic countries.

Looking at the list of authors on the website, you can see that there are ones from different countries, genres and epochs. The press also published two periodicals: the more scholarly Scandinavica, and the magazine that is the shop window for what books are available and being published in the Swedish language, Swedish Book Review.

The website sections entitled Authors, Special Offers and Out of Print give you an overview of what is, and has been, published by the press. Even the Baltic countries are represented:

In 1994, a book of several short-stories from the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, edited and translated by Christopher Moseley was published: From Baltic Shores. Authors include Arvo Valton, Romualdas Lankauskas, Alberts Bels, Bo Carpelan and Suzanne Brøgger.

A more recent Baltic addition is the poetic Estonian novel by Viivi Luik, The Beauty of History (translator: Hildi Hawkins; 2007). This novel has been translated widely, and this translation was launched at the Estonian Embassy in London. It deals with an Estonian country girl who goes to Riga to visit her boyfriend during the Prague Spring in 1968, when the boyfriend risks being called up to go to Czechoslovakia as part of the Soviet troop contingent. He goes off to Moscow to get his exemption certificate, and the Estonian girl is left behind with his mother in the flat in Riga, where this atmospheric novel, full of observation and mood, is set.

But Scandinavia forms the trunk of the tree, including such names as Victoria Benedictsson, August Strindberg, Gunnar Ekelöf, Hjalmar Söderberg, Johan Borgen, Knut Hamsun, Jens Bjørneboe, Suzanne Brøgger, Svend Åge Madsen, Edith Södergran, and Runar Schildt.

The press was started by James McFarlane and Janet Garton, and is now run by Neil Smith.

Swedish Book Review - Contemporary Finland-Swedish Fiction

Swedish Book Review, published in London, has had several articles about, or short translations of, Finland-Swedish material in issues since the year 2000. But halfway through the decade, the editor Sarah Death decided to have a Finland-Swedish issue as a supplement to the review for 2005. The guest editor was Neil Smith, who also regularly publishes the Swedish Book Review with Norvik Press, now housed at University College London. And what is interesting is that this supplement concentrates on contemporary Finland-Swedish literature, i.e. what is being written now.

The introductory article is by Maria Antas of FILI, the Finnish Literature Centre in Helsinki, and she gives some insights into recent prose works by Ulla-Lena Lundberg, Lars Sund, Anders Larsson, Erik Wahlström, Zinaida Lindén, Merete Mazzarella, Robert Åsbacka, Sabine Forsblom, Monika Fagerholm, Mikaela Sundström, Kjell Westö, Henrik Jansson, Peter Sandström, Fredrik Lång, and a few others. These names alone are proof of the continuing vitality of Finland-Swedish literature during the 2000s, despite the fact that the language is spoken as mother-tongue by only about 6% of the total Finnish population.

There follows a compilation by Neil Smith called "Collected Thoughts", where various Finland-Swedish publishers, academics and critics are interviewed and asked to answer five questions about the characteristics, scope, and viability of Finland-Swedish literature today. These people are also asked to identify authors worth translating into English and introducing to the English-speaking world. Some of the most interesting answers come from the freelance researcher Trygve Söderling, who points to the shift in background of Finland-Swedish writers nowadays. He notes that writers no longer come from traditional Finland-Swedish cultural families, with major authors now also coming from what he terms the "periphery". Zinaida Lindén even comes originally from Saint Petersburg. Söderling also notes the strong tradition, with pioneers such as Södergran, Diktonius and Björling. Finally, Finland-Swedish literature sits on the cusp between the Swedish culture of Sweden and the Finnish-speaking one of Finland.

The rest of the special supplement is devoted to introductions to specific contemporary authors, plus excerpts from their recent work. So, for instance, there is a story entitled 1968 from Kjell Westö's recent collection (translator: Sarah Death); an excerpt from Lars Sund's 1991 novel Colorado Avenue (translator Laurie Thompson); an interview with Fredrik Lång and an excerpt from his novel Ryska kusinen (translator: Neil Smith); an excerpt from Zinaida Lindén's novel I väntan på en jordbävning (translator: Silvester Mazzarella); an excerpt from Robert Åsbacka's novel Fallstudie (translator: Henning Koch); an excerpt from Candida by Pirkko Lindberg (translator: David McDuff); plus further excerpts from works by Henrik Jansson, Erik Wahlström, Sabine Forsblom, Mathias Nystrand, and others. The list is too long to give here in full.

These authors represent four geographical areas of Finland: Nyland & Greater Helsinki; the Åland Isles; Ostrobothnia; plus the area around Åbo including the parts of archipelago. This is where what is left of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland still live. Åland is still around 90% Swedish-speaking, but the percentages are far lower in the other three regions.

A couple of terminological matters are interesting. For this supplement, the editor decided to call Helsinki by its Swedish name Helsingfors, a name that was current in English too until the 1930s. Another word introduced - and a very useful one too - is the word Finlandic, which should be used much more in the English language. Using Finlandic gets rid of the eternal confusion, when using the word Finnish to describe the country as a whole, and the specifically Finnish-speaking majority. When speaking about matters that concern both language groups, Finlandic would be much better. This distinction is made in the Swedish language. But decades of English usage mean that it would be hard to introduce this term in Britain and the USA.

I really hope that British and U.S. publishers, critics, reviewers and comparative literature academics read this supplement, so that they become acquainted with a literature that has been going since about 1890, and is still alive today. During this short period for a literature, a lot has been achieved, not least, as Maria Antas points out because there is a Swedish-speaking hinterland, i.e. Sweden itself, that speaks the same language and will buy Finland-Swedish books. Plus the fact that history has been somewhat different in Finland than it has in Sweden.