Lists

SELTA is compiling a list of 100 ‘must-reads’ - popular Swedish books in translation, though it’s unclear what the purpose of the list may be. It’s actually quite hard to imagine that there are as many as 100 books fitting this category, with so many titles out of print, and especially in view of the fact that numerous  exclusions are made: for example, no poetry or drama is considered, while for unaccountable reasons the wide panorama of Finland-Swedish literature is kept out of the picture altogether. 

It seems that by ‘books’ the compilers mean ’novels’. 

One thing that did become clear during a ‘name your favourite books’ session on the SELTA discussion forum was that several interesting Swedish-language authors remain entirely untranslated, with no English versions of modern classics like the controversial novels of Agnes von Krusenstjerna and the books of Birgitta Trotzig.

The list is modelled on a similar venture from Deutsche Welle, though it’s significant that the German list is composed not of ‘German’ but of German-language titles - i.e. Austrian fiction is included along with the rest.

Presumably the SELTA list is intended for publication in Swedish Book Review, though this has not yet been announced. 

SELTA

This is just another of our occasional brief reviews of SELTA, the Swedish-English Literary Translators Association. Actually, there isn't much to report this time: the group seems to be fairly stable as regards membership numbers, though its practical work and activity seem to be dominated by a rather small and tightly-knit network of members who know one another and are colleagues. There's also a noticeable age factor: again the small network appears to be composed of younger members, while the wider membership is rather older and takes little part in the group activity - this is noticeable with regard to meetings, where many of the older members no longer attend.

It's good that there is an organisation like SELTA, bringing some order to the potential chaos of publishers, editors, agents, agencies, translators and contracts - but it doesn't seem quite the same as it was in the 1980s and 90s, when it was more than a network, functioning as a forum for ideas and reflections on contemporary and classical Swedish-language literature. In fact, it feels as though the literary element may have receded quite a bit in recent times. Perhaps, however, the role is still fulfilled by Swedish Book Review, though again there's a sense of a rather restricted network in charge of its editorial functions.

It's to be hoped that SELTA will continue to evolve. The founding of a sister organisation DELT is an interesting development: this blog has always advocated the forming of a pan-Nordic translators' association, and will go on doing so. Perhaps at some point SELTA and DELT will merge!

Out in the Field

A small group of Finnish-English translators who hail from both sides of the Atlantic has recently set itself up as a literary "translation cooperative" - FELT.  At present the aims of the new body are somewhat unclear: apparently it's not an association along the lines of SELTA, the long-established association of Swedish-English literary translators, but rather "a community where translators can exchange news, ideas, and working methods with each other and share their work with the public", to quote the official statement on the FELT website. It seems that it also exists, in the words of one member, "to unabashedly promote our own work to general readers, publishers, and agents."

So far so good, and one wishes the cooperative all the best for the future. It's still not clear, however, whether the new community is an open one which all Finnish-English translators may join - in the way that Swedish-English translators have joined SELTA over the past few decades as full or associate members - or whether it's a closed professional club with a fixed and restricted membership and a Facebook window on the wider world. It might perhaps be helpful if the organizers would make this less ambiguous, though one appreciates that the planning of the new organization may still be in the early stages.

More crime - 2

A few signs of what may be a slight change in the attitudes of some SELTA members to the issue of the current dominance of crime writing in the Nordic – and particularly the Swedish – book world, and in translation. One U.K.-based member writes of the present vogue:

I would guess that Swedish "culture" has never had such widespread
coverage in this country ever before.

And the next issue of Swedish Book Review will apparently contain an article on this thorny subject.

See also: More crime

More crime

Back again - to find among the mail on my doormat an invitation to yet another Nordic crime novel-related event. This time it's a literary function at the residence of Sweden's UK ambassador, to which members of the translators' association SELTA  are automatically invited as part of their membership. My address on the envelope, after my name, begins with "SELTA", as if SELTA were housed at my home, which it's not - I'm just an ordinary member.

The evening, to be held on March 18, is called "Crimes of the Millennium - Stieg Larsson and the rise of Swedish Mystery Fiction", with Barry Forshaw, Eva Gedin, Lynda La Plante, Mark Lawson (chair) and Håkan Nesser.

Readers who've followed this blog over the past year will know that I'm not a fan of this form of fiction, and believe that the "Nordic Crime Wave" is likely to have negative consequences for the chances of non-mass-market Nordic literature in translation, which is steadily being crowded out of the picture by the serried ranks of detectives. It seems perverse of the Swedish embassy to be hosting this event - in effect, raising the profile of Mystery Fiction (an elevated name for thrillers) still further when really it needs no more raising. Is it churlish of me to react in this way?

SELTA, etc.

Well, I've sent off my annual SELTA subscription renewal - by my calculations it's now 29 years since I first joined the society, and I guess it hasn't really changed much in all that time, in spite of some members' aspirations to give it a wider focus. This time last year members were arguing the pros and cons of a broader coverage of Nordic literature in general, then this blog was formed, then it broke up and became a one-man effort - and SELTA stayed the same.

My situation is still that, like other members, although I've done a fair amount of literary translation from Swedish, it's not my only field of activity - my most recent publication is a book of poetry translations from Danish, and I'm currently planning another one. But SELTA still fulfils an important function in keeping the U.K.'s various Nordic translators in contact with one another. Even if the pan-Nordic element is underplayed to the advantage of a Swedish emphasis, and many of the associate members have published little by way of literary translations, this continues to be a unique professional body - for translation is after all a profession, rather than an academic subject or a stop-gap, subsidiary activity, as this intelligent post by B.J. Epstein points out.

This blog

Readers may recall that this blog began last March, when some members of the Swedish literary translators' association SELTA decided it was time to try to create a forum or Web resource that might be of interest to translators and readers of all Nordic literature, not just Swedish (and occasionally Finland-Swedish). Another SELTA meeting - the AGM - is to be held early  in November, but to judge from the minutes and agenda that have just been sent out to members, there's not much likelihood of a change of direction, contrary to the expectations that arose earlier in the year.

It seems a pity that the association should be so closed within itself - although it's now running on a faster server, the website isn't updated very often (let's hope that changes), and the Google group is apparently members-only. Maybe SELTA needs to go onto Facebook or another networking service and interact with a wider public.

Now that Nordic Voices is my personal blog, I feel I want to continue posting here rather than taking part in more SELTA business and discussion. That way perhaps there's a better chance of reaching readers rather than fellow-translators (sometimes a cheerful experience, but not always), and of continuing to trace the links between the literatures and cultures of the different Nordic countries, and their links with the world at large.

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.

Individual concerns

This blog has now been running for all of four months. It evidently has a readership - 2,384 unique visits in that space of time is not bad for a minority interest blog, and Sitemeter shows that the visitors come not only from Scandinavia but also from locations in Australia, Malaysia, the U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, among others. But I can't help noticing that it's also almost alone in covering the field of Nordic writing in English translation. Apart from Scandinavian Books/Nordic Bookblog, who seem to concentrate most of their attention on the increasingly predictable area of Nordic crime writing, it doesn't look as though there may be many other English-language sites or blogs devoted to the subject. There are sites like Swedish Book Review, Books from Finland, and FILI, of course - but these mainly represent organizations of various kinds, either state-run or promoting professional interests.

When some of us left the SELTA Google Group discussions back in February and started Nordic Voices, I recall that Tom Geddes suggested that we should set up an alternative association for translators of Nordic - not just Swedish - literature. Yet with several months' experience of the blog now behind us, I can see that this is precisely what I don't want to do. In my opinion, approaching Nordic writing and its translation from an individual viewpoint, rather than as a member of a group or organization, is a more challenging and potentially more creative path to take.

In part I think this is because I feel that what we are trying to do here is detach the field of Nordic literature from the narrow circle of specialists, academics and translators where it normally ends up, and bring it to the attention of a wider public that may have little knowledge of Nordic life and language, or may view the subject of "Scandinavia" through preconceptions. Those preconceptions are often widespread, and mostly have the effect of blocking the realization that Nordic culture and literature are just as diverse and mixed as the rest of the world.

While "Nordic" writers tend to be based in the "North", they may also hail from a whole host of other geographic and cultural reference points, whether it's Hallgrímur Helgason writing about Stalinism from Manhattan, Siri Hustvedt describing life in Brooklyn, or Karmela Belinki, who says:

Karmela is Hebrew, OT, means "God's fruitful vineyard" (Mount Carmel in Israel). Belinki is Russian-Jewish and means "little white", probably from a river, which runs i.a. through Lithuania and parts of Belarus, where my paternal family stems from. I pronounce it Karméla Bélinki I consider myself mainly a Finland-Swedish writer, but I was brought up with multiple languages, Yiddish being one of them. I have also written and broadcast in Finnish, I was partly educated in the United Kingdom, and I am fluent in several other languages as well.

I think in the end this brings me back to the thought I was trying to express in an earlier post, where I said that I saw two strands in Nordic literature, and that for me the important one was the universal - or universalist - one.

We've chosen a particular cultural area (the Nordic one) as the focus for the blog - but the aim is probably a wider one: to present and consider literary work that may be new and unfamiliar to the English-speaking world, and to track the movement of its local essence out into a wider space where it speaks to everyone. I believe that can best be done on a one-to-one basis, through individual efforts rather than as the activity of a special interest group.

The Nordic Presence

It turns out that this year once again, as in previous years, the "Nordic presence" at the London Book Fair is to be marked by a reception at - guess where? (As far as I'm aware, all SELTA members receive one of these invitations to an event which is additional to the one held earlier in the evening (no, it's on the following evening - DM) at the book fair itself.)

See also in this blog: Cornering the Market

SELTA, again

Over the past few days, presumably like other members of SELTA (the Swedish-Emglish Translators' Association) I've received some email messages from the association's honorary secretary Peter Linton, drawing my attention to various events and requests. One of these was an advertisement for an exhibition of Swedish landscape paintings in Birmingham. Another was a reminder about the Swedish culture ministry's monthly newsletter, which is now circulated by email on a subscription list. The third item, however, was a message forwarded from GKLS, a translation recruitment agency in the U.K., seeking technical translators for "automotive texts" (apparently jargon for writing about cars).

While I can appreciate that some members may like to earn the odd krona by branching out into technical translation, it seems slightly odd that nearly all the requests of this kind which Peter has sent out relate not to literary translation - the focus and of our organization, and supposedly the reason for its existence - but to technical or non-literary commissions of this kind. The last one concerned a journalist's manuscript of a coffee table book about Japanese hot springs and open door baths, while the one before that was from a person in Sweden seeking translators for books about boats.

I'm not sure what the message is here: are SELTA members being given access to a database of clients in search of technical translators, and if so, what relation does this database have to the subject and practice of literary translation? It would be good to know, but so far Peter Linton hasn't offered an explanation. Perhaps he'd like to comment?

The Meeting

We're looking forward to receiving reports of last Wednesday's spring meeting in London of SELTA, the Swedish-English Literary Translators' Association, of which three of us are members but with whose committee we have recently had one or two differences of opinion. SELTA Members who attended the meeting are welcome to send us their impressions of the event by email.

See also in this blog: The Changes at SELTA
SELTA, and the need to move on
The Changes at SELTA - 2
The Changes at SELTA - 3

The Changes at SELTA - 3

Continuing my serial post on the recent changes and developments at SELTA (at least one member has now resigned, and several have unsubscribed from the Google Group), I would like to draw attention to the response of one of SELTA's most senior members - the association's former Honorary Secretary. A marked feature of the attempt to hold a discussion within the framework of the recently-opened SELTA Google Group was the apparent unwillingness of committee members to come forward and state their positions. Indeed, some of them seemed reluctant to make any contribution to the debate at all, and to view the expression of criticism and dissenting viewpoints as a kind of irritant, or even a betrayal.

However, Tom Geddes, who until his recent retirement from the post had served as SELTA's Hon. Sec. for virtually all of its more than 25 years of existence, did respond to my letter which was published both on the Google Group and in this blog. He did so by email, but indicated that he would have no objection to my making his contribution public. I'm therefore reproducing it now, both for the sake of informing blog readers (especially those in North America) about what is apparently SELTA's current position, and in order, hopefully, to stimulate further debate on the issues concerned. The text of Tom's letter is as follows:

David McDuff sent me on 20 February a copy of a note he had written to the Google group headed “SELTA’s Changing Identity”. Let me just say that I haven’t seen any of the other material on the Google group site, but I’m not sure that that’s the best forum for discussing SELTA policy. I must also say that what SELTA does in the future is a matter for the current and future membership and committee. But I will offer some comments on the past.

Becoming Scandinavian rather than just Swedish has been mooted several times before. As David says, a number of us are involved with more than one of the languages and countries and there are indeed areas of common interest that could be represented under one umbrella. The idea was rejected for two main reasons: the Hon Sec (me), who was doing all the work of running SELTA, was unwilling to increase his workload further, and we had quickly expanded from a dozen members to the average of 50 we have maintained. Not only would a pan-Scandinavian coverage increase the membership, it would also entail liaison with all 5 Scandinavian/Nordic countries. That would also involve a substantial increase in workload, in effect multiplying that aspect by more than 5, because one would also be drawn into the delicate balancing acts of inter-Scandinavian rivalries.

I will mention a few examples of that experience already: One of the early attempts to create a Nordic group of translators was made by Terry Carlbom, Swedish cultural attaché, at the British university teachers of Scandinavian Studies conference at the University of Hull in 1981. It was a one-day session, billed as a Scandinavian Translators’ Conference. During the proceedings a number of participants with non-Swedish interests ostentatiously walked out and complained of being misled (instead of contributing from their interest-areas). We did however continue the concept, and I was involved over a number of years in the organisation of a Scandinavian Translators Day at these subsequent biennial university conferences: each one entailed a difficult balancing act of 5 embassies and almost as many arts bodies in the home countries. I’ll mention just two negative results: a talk on Norwegian book clubs that was primarily on the schedule to ensure parity, and the accusation by a Danish cultural representative that I had invited her under false pretences because she had not been allocated enough time on the programme. It required careful diplomacy to ensure there weren’t more such examples. I should also mention that even within SELTA, one member resigned because he thought (to my mind incorrectly) that we weren’t positive enough towards Finland. Yet all along we had made it clear that we were dealing with Swedish-language literature wherever published and had from the start liaised with both Swedish and Finland-Swedish publishers and the relevant cultural bodies in both countries. The Shaw Prize has been awarded to a Finland-Swedish book (indeed David McDuff was the winner), the judges of which included two SELTA members, and a celebratory event was provided and funded by the Finns. We have had a lot of support from the Finnish Literature Information Centre (FILI) in Helsinki, though admittedly the Finnish Embassy in London has not been as active with us as the Swedes.

We should also bear in mind the important aspect of financial support. Without financial backing from the Swedish Embassy we would never have continued to exist in the form we have, with a couple of meetings a year where people can actually meet. To try to get such backing from several or all of the Nordic countries together would probably prove impossible. Similarly Swedish Book Review would never had started if we had tried to get pan-Scandinavian financial backing: funds would simply not have been forthcoming. (My own minor involvement with Chris Moseley’s ill-fated attempt to start Amber, a Baltic-region cultural journal, gave me an insight on how impossible the task was from outside Scandinavia to attempt to co-ordinate the unco-ordinated.) If SELTA were to become Scandinavian, would it still publish just a Swedish Book Review, and if not, who would fund a Scandinavian Book Review?

Perhaps I should add that some of the points above also informed our decision to exclude American translators from SELTA, although we several times encouraged individuals there to form a parallel group. This eventually bore fruit when Laura Wideburg started STiNA (Swedish Translators in North America), and we provided her with a lot of background information on our own activities. Significantly, the Americans have gone for a specifically Swedish-language interest group too.

David mentions the groupings of Norwegian and Danish translators brought together by their respective cultural bodies. Rather than opening up a new dimension in SELTA, one could say that this demonstrated that SELTA did not need to exist: in many ways translators from Swedish could have continued to be gathered together at intervals by the Swedish Embassy or Swedish Institute and we could have been spared all this work! (That said, I do nevertheless feel we have achieved more by following the then Swedish cultural attaché’s encouragement to form ourselves into an association.) No Norwegian cultural representative was at SELTA meetings in 1982, but the Norwegian and Finnish cultural counsellors were at the November 1983 meeting, 2 staff from FLIC (now FILI) at November 1987. Kristin Brudevoll from NORLA attended the SELTA meeting in November 1992 (like David, I would have remembered it as being earlier than that - and I haven’t looked through later minutes). Kristin didn’t exactly “pop up”: she was invited because she was interested in what we were doing and to share experience and ideas. Throughout my secretaryship I sent copies of all SELTA minutes and newsletters to all the embassies and relevant cultural bodies of all the Scandinavian countries, to keep them informed of our activities. It goes without saying that we have a common interest. Beyond our central contacts with Sweden and Finland, NORLA was the only one to show an active interest in us, as far as I remember.

FILI of course has also arranged gatherings of translators from Swedish in Finland (from which, as with Norway, David and I have both benefited), but has chosen to do so through direct individual invitation rather than through SELTA. Nowadays application forms for visits to Finland are available to all SELTA members and others through the FILI website.

In brief, I think David’s idea is culturally sound from our perspective, but pragmatically unrealistic. And certainly not all Scandinavians would agree with our lumping them together, not least because in any joint activities there is a substantial danger that the others would regard Sweden as an overbearing big brother! Even though (after many years of nagging from us!) the Nordic countries now have neighbouring stands and joint events at book fairs, I cannot see their cultural activities integrating further in the near future.

I also disagree with David’s analysis of SELTA’s “changing identity” in the past. Our relative emphases on Sweden and Finland never changed. Only one of SELTA’s early meetings was held at the School of Slavonic & East European Studies, in April 1984. The first meeting venues were: 1. Sw Emb; 2. UCL; 3. Univ Surrey; 4.Mostyn Hotel, London; 5. SSEES; 6. Sw Emb; 7. Lampeter Univ; 8. Sw Emb; 9. Sw Emb; 10. Poetry Soc, Ldn. After that, primarily at the Swedish Embassy, but a further 3 at UCL.

We have never been under the supervision of Michael Branch, then lecturer in and later professor of Finnish and Director of SSEES: he was an associate member of SELTA, invited to join in the “Committee discretion” category because he did not qualify for membership but had studied Swedish, had obvious connections with and interest in Finland and wanted to join as a gesture of support for our activities. We were very pleased to have him (and I will say personally that he gave me some very good advice when I drew up the SELTA constitution - and he taught me Finnish!). He left amicably after several years when he thought we were well established and in recognition that his own interests lay outside the Swedish language and literature sphere.

I have just agreed with the SELTA Committee and the Editor of SBR to write a brief history of “SELTA - the first 25 years”, for publication in SBR next year. The length of this response of mine to David’s proposal makes me wonder if I can be succinct enough! One thing I should perhaps do, also next year, is to scan all the past SELTA minutes and newsletters and ask Peter Linton to put them on the members’ section of the website.

Tom Geddes 4 March 2009

See also in this blog:
The Changes at SELTA
SELTA, and the need to move on
The Changes at SELTA - 2

The Changes at SELTA - 2

I'm rescuing a couple of comments from an earlier post because I think they raise some issues that could do with further discussion, and if they are lost back in an earlier thread there's less likelihood of that happening. Also, in view of the fact that SELTA holds its spring meeting next week on 18th March, it may be that some members would like to give their feedback here.

I wrote...

What I have always wondered is whether at some stage (probably fairly early on) in SELTA's history it was actually taken over as a sort of cultural arm of the Swedish authorities,although this has never been officially acknowledged by any of the parties involved. The insistence on the use of the Swedish Embassy premises for the association's meetings always looked to me a bit suspect, and there seemed to be a very cosy relationship between the various Swedish cultural counsellors and the top SELTA membership.

Also, SELTA has traditionally been a place where various rivals in a rather restricted field meet one another, not always with positive results, and I'm wondering too whether this may be one of the factors underlying the present troubles in the group. The online forum seems to have brought some of that latent disharmony out into the open at last.

And Rod Bradbury replied...

The Swedish authorities obviously pay to keep the Swedish Book Review going. And although that is called SELTA's journal, it feels more like a shopfront (and a very useful one too) for Swedish publishers, with the Swedish Arts Council (formerly it was the Swedish Institute)in the background. In a sense, that arrangement is beneficial to both. Sweden gets a magazine on the cheap and SELTA gets a forum for members' translations/articles etc that it would otherwise not have access to. There might be a clash of interests somewhere, of course, as translators also need to earn a living, and there is a limited amount of literary translation work available. But SBR seems to be open to translators to present their work / new authors and so on, so perhaps one should be satisfied with the system as it is.

One of the original reasons for establishing SELTA was to have an organisation for the Swedes to do business with, a 'motpart'. That is how things are done in Sweden.

See also in this blog: The Changes at SELTA

Welcome, SELTA and STiNA members

Welcome, SELTA and STiNA members who have discovered this blog. Let us read your opinions and feedback in the comments boxes!

SELTA, and the need to move on

Some time ago I wrote the letter below to the new SELTA Google Group, in the hope that it might stimulate some open discussion of issues that have troubled me as someone who has been a member of SELTA more or less since the beginning, nearly thirty years ago. There are some things in the letter I wrote - more or less impromptu, and without the benefit of SELTA's records and archives - which are not true. For example, SELTA met at SSEES (the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies) only once, in 1984. Michael Branch did not "supervise" the meeting, but acted as host to the association on that occasion.

On the other hand, the letter does reflect the way in which I've perceived SELTA over the years, including the perception near the beginning that this was a truly independent organization which stood beyond borders and considerations of statehood, national identity, and so on. I feel that in some ways, because of its name, the society has gravitated towards being a group which, although it represents the interests of many translators from different Nordic languages, has come to be dominated by Sweden - not only in a cultural sense, but also in a political and social one. And that strikes me as unhealthy for a United Kingdom-based organization, which needs to maintain its separation from considerations of Swedish state foreign and cultural policy.

The letter didn't awaken the response and discussion I had hoped for. Tom Geddes, SELTA's former Honorary Secretary, wrote me a long emailed reply, but declined to take part in the discussion online - or even to join the Google Group. From the SELTA committee there was more or less silence, and what several members experienced as a thinly veiled hostility. Partly because of this, we decided to start this blog, in the hope that it might let in some of the fresh air that has been lacking at SELTA, which has felt increasingly like a closed environment. However, it is now time to move on, and I hope that after this we can proceed to shape a new context for interaction between translators of Nordic literature, a context which to our great relef will lack "background and baggage" as one commentator put it.

Here is the text of my letter:

SELTA's Changing Identity

The recent discussion of Nordic translation workshops and memories of past meetings and seminars, together with a reading of B.J. Epstein’s lively and interesting blog and her account of the events and presentations at last year’s Nordic Translation Conference in London prompted me to reflect on the history of SELTA, its background and origins. What follows is a personal observation, and my comments are merely those of a SELTA member who first joined the association in 1981, back near the beginning.

When SELTA first began its life, its gatherings were held in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) under the general supervision of the School’s director, Michael Branch. As my background was in Russian studies (I hold a Ph.D. in Russian from Edinburgh University), the location of the meetings was one of the factors that aroused my interest in the new organization and prompted me to join it. At the time, I’d recently completed a translation of the complete poems of Edith Södergran, a transnational European modernist poet whose work embraces Russian futurism as much as it does German and Scandinavian literature. The fact that she wrote in Swedish is almost coincidental -- she could equally well have written the poems of her maturity in German, or even in Russian, as she was fluent in both of those languages.

I found the concept of an association nominally dedicated to literary translation from Swedish, but also aware of the cultural and literary heritage of the whole of the North-East European region, including Finland and the Baltic countries, a stimulating one. Michael Branch’s considerable reputation as a Finnish scholar added to the interesting mix. In Finland, the crossing and cross-pollination of several cultures – Russian, Swedish and Finnish – is an important part not only of Finnish history, but of the history of Europe.

As time went on, however, in the activities of the group I began to note a growing emphasis on Sweden, and on Swedish (as distinct from Finland-Swedish) literature. This was understandable, given the name of the association – and several of the members were indeed best known for their translations of rikssvensk literature. It was not until the location of the society’s meetings moved to the Swedish Embassy that I began to realize that a subtle shift of priorities had apparently taken place – instead of the general Nordic and East European context, there was now a specific emphasis on rikssvensk writing and authors. This again was understandable – the Swedish Embassy was, after all, offering its facilities to SELTA, and was even offering to pay members’ travel expenses to attend meetings. However, I saw this development as a limitation, and I still do.

Yet still there was a paradox. In 1981 I’d recently edited an issue of the international literary quarterly Stand devoted to new Norwegian writing (I worked as a co-editor of Stand with its principal founder, the poet Jon Silkin, from 1979 to 1981). This special issue was funded by the Norwegian cultural authorities, and the translators involved included Anne Born, Robin Fulton, Roger Greenwald, Tiina Nunnally, myself and others. The preparation of the material involved an officially-funded visit to Norway, which I made together with Jon Silkin and his wife Lorna Tracy – we were hosted by the poet Terje Johanssen, and the trip was organized by Kristin Brudevoll. This contact was one of the factors that eventually led to the formation of the NORLA agency. So when at a SELTA meeting in 1982 a Norwegian cultural representative popped up and promptly invited several of the members present to a seminar in Lillehammer the following year, I was not too surprised. This, however, opened up a new dimension in SELTA – while the Lillehammer seminar proved to be very valuable in terms of the forming of new contacts between authors, publishers and translators of Norwegian (and Nordic) literature, it also muddied the waters somewhat – as of 1983, there was now an “unofficial” SELTA of translators from Norwegian!

Much the same thing eventually happened in relation to Denmark, where some SELTA members, including myself, found themselves being invited to international seminars usually grouped around the Copenhagen Book Fair. And then there was the considerable project of the Finnish cultural authorities (FLIC and later FILI), which involved not only lavish translation get-togethers but also individual all-expenses-paid “study visits” for translators, usually with a carefully planned programme of meetings with authors, editors and publishers.

In spite of all this, however, SELTA meetings continued to be held (as they still are) at the Swedish Embassy. As far as I was aware, the Swedish cultural authorities did not replicate the activities of the Finns, Danes and Norwegians in holding international translation conferences, seminars and workshops. They did, however, make rooms for translators available in Sweden - and they offered sample translation subsidies, paid for selected Swedish authors to visit the UK, and helped Swedish Book Review. But this support seemed rather modest when compared to the extensive budget outlay of the other Nordic lands.

Although I can see some rational justification for it, I still don’t really understand completely why our association is called SELTA – for if one examines its history, one sees that many of its members have been active in translating books from other Nordic languages besides Swedish – in the past, Joan Tate, Tom Geddes, Anne Born and yours truly all translated books from Norwegian or Danish or both, and I’m sure there are many other examples of this. I’ve even translated a couple of books from Finnish. Eric Dickens is well-known as a translator of Estonian literature.

So shouldn’t the society’s name be something like the Nordic Literary Translators’ Association? I’d be interested to hear others’ views about this, if anyone cares to respond. I would be particularly interested to hear from Tom.

Regards,

David McDuff

The Changes at SELTA

SELTA (the UK-based Swedish-English Literary Translators' Association) seems to have undergone some changes lately. Perhaps the forming of the new Google Group has had a more far-reaching effect on the association than might have been expected.

Does anyone who is a SELTA member have views on what may happen to the organisation next?

It's possible to leave a comment on any post by clicking on the word "Comments" at the bottom - a box opens up and you can write in it. Perhaps someone could leave a test comment?