Spuyten Duyvil of NYC have published my translation of Susanne Jorn's Andalusiske øjebliksbilleder i November/Andalusian Snapshots in November. This is really a collaborative venture, and the book is bilingual, with facing Danish and English texts.
From dark mood
to light mood
Pastel yellow Photosensitivity
There are many theories of translation, but from what I’ve heard, translators mostly shrug them off in practice and just keep going as they were. Is there any theory of translation or simply a translator’s creed that you hold dear? Did translating Kross put it to the test in any way?
FvN: I’m no theoretician, but I believe the practical summary of translating is an eternal question phrased by the poet and translator Martinus Nijhoff, whom the Netherlands’ most prestigious translation award is named after: “In what kind of Dutch would a foreigner have written their book if they were Dutch and have relied upon in terms of their conceptual form?” One must always keep that question in mind.
JN: Just like Frans, I’m no theoretician. Apart from a few courses on translating Russian literature, I also do not have much formal education in literary translation. I think I learned most while translating The Man Who Spoke Snakish in 2014, for which I received funding and practical help (a mentorship) from the Dutch Foundation for Literature. Since Frans was the only active translator from Estonian at that time, and was more experienced, he served as my mentor. He taught me many things, but most of all, I learned to be more precise. I remember him saying, “What is lost in your first version (or first ‘working’ translation) is most likely lost forever.” I always have that sentence in the back of my mind when I’m translating. And, needless to say, it’s a very important lesson when you’re translating the work and the style of a writer like Jaan Kross.
The problem hadn’t been with the translation of the second part of my novel—it had been with me. In my novel, Jonas was speaking English like a twenty-eight-year-old American. He was sarcastic at times, as if he were frequently sharing an inside joke with an invisible spectator. He had command of his words, the selection of which he modulated to make someone laugh, listen, or back off. The translator had rendered his English into the Swedish of a twenty-eight-year-old Swede with the same characteristics. But in my head, I heard Jonas in my own Swedish—the language of a twenty-eight-year old who has spent most of his life speaking Swedish only with his mother. The language of a twenty-eight-year old who sounds like an enthusiastic aunt. It was too sweet a language for my novel.
In part of an address originally given at European Literature Night, hosted by the British Library, the Royal Society of Literature and EUNIC, on the future of European writing, Kennedy passionately argued that writers have a responsibility “to resist” and to “say more and more often” on behalf of all “citizens of Nowhere”. Prime minister Theresa May used the phrase at the Conservative Party Conference in October, when she equated being a “citizen of the world” with being “a citizen of nowhere”. It refers to the poor, the sick, the old, the refugees, the immigrants, the non-white, the non-Christian and the non-compliant, Kennedy said.
Kennedy said British publishing’s aversion to risk meant it currently had “little appetite” for foreign works, especially since the abolition of the Net Book Agreement which fixed prices for books, which she lamented had led publishers “into a territory of simple calculations, of profit and loss”. In the UK, translators are “particularly poorly rewarded”, she added, and their positions “always insecure” - a state of affairs that limits the range of literature UK readers are exposed to.
My own feeling is that the problem is less difficult than everyone pretends; that it surely would not be impossible to bring together editor, translator, and, say, an expert in translation from this or that language to establish how demanding a text is, how much time will be involved in translating it, and what would be a reasonable payment for doing so. Perhaps it is time for translators and translators’ associations to focus on putting such arrangements in place, without getting bogged down in the vexed question of authorship and royalties.
is the first book to focus solely on literary translation from, to, and between the Nordic tongues. The book is divided into three main sections. These are novels, children’s literature, and other genres – encompassing drama, crime fiction, sagas, cookbooks, and music – although, naturally, there are connections and overlapping themes between the sections. Halldór Laxness, Virginia Woolf, Selma Lagerlöf, Astrid Lindgren, Mark Twain, Henrik Ibsen, Henning Mankell, Janis Joplin, and Jamie Oliver are just some of the authors analysed. Topics examined include particular translatorial challenges; translating for specific audiences or influencing audiences through translation; re-translation; the functions of translated texts; the ways in which translation can change a genre; the creation of identity through translation; and more.(from the publisher's book description)
The Finnish State International Translator's Prize is an award that I never expected to receive, and it means a great deal to me. I would like to thank everyone who recommended me for it.
Many years ago I visited Finland for the first time, as a young Edinburgh University student of Russian: it was July 1966, and I was travelling along the Baltic by ship, with some friends, on the way to the Soviet Union. Disembarking in Finland for a few all-too brief hours, my first impressions were of the city of Helsinki, but what I remember most of all were the light, stillness and calm of the late summer evening that greeted me as I walked up from the harbour. It was a calm that I hadn't experienced in any other city I'd been to, and I remember wondering where all the people were, for at that particular time of the evening there was almost no one about. I didn’t know it then, but in the years to come I would make many more visits to Finland and meet many people there, both in life and in books.
I've spent a large part of my life studying and translating, for the most part, the literature of three languages: Russian, Swedish and Finnish (I’ve translated poetry and fiction from other Northern languages, including Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic, but the three languages I mention are the ones that have held the most significance for me). The choice may at first sight seem strange, yet if one looks at the map it does makes sense, as Russia, Sweden and Finland are close neighbours, and have a common, if not always harmonious, history – and that is the context in which I discovered them.
Although the three languages – Russian, Swedish and Finnish – are structurally and lexically quite different from one another, my university study of Russian and Russian literature (which I pursued to doctorate level) was accompanied by a study of German. This led me to learn the Nordic languages, including Icelandic at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, and then some years later, with the encouragement of the Finnish Literature Information Centre – which is now called FILI – Finnish, first under Hannele Branch at London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and later at the University of Helsinki.
In the late nineteenth century and during the early twentieth century it was not uncommon for educated people in North-Eastern Europe to speak, read and understand all three of my chosen languages, although nowadays the unlikeness of Russian, Swedish and Finnish is thought to make them mutually exclusive. That was not the case in the past, and the change of attitude may be due at least in part to political and socio-historical factors.
I put the emphasis here on “languages” rather than “countries”, for in my experience literature only rarely coincides with frontiers on maps: it exists not behind national boundaries but in language, and in a psychic and emotional space that is governed by the laws of reading and common fellowship. The novels of Dostoyevsky and the poetry of Baratynsky and Blok may tell us something unique about the Russian soul, but they also speak in universal terms. Likewise, the verses of the Kalevala and the plays of Strindberg tell us much about the psyche of Northern Europe, but they also draw inner maps of human consciousness, and of the unconscious. And indeed, in my years of work as a literary translator I have become aware that in literary terms the three linguistic cultures I mentioned tend to overlap with one another. The work of Edith Södergran, the first of the poets of Finland whom I endeavoured to translate, is one of the living confirmations of that.
My first translations of Finland's literature were nearly all of Swedish-language poets and authors, of whom there are almost more than in Sweden itself. Then I began to study Finnish, first at London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and later at the University of Helsinki. Through my own reading and my many years of contact with members of the Finnish Literature Centre and the editors of Books from Finland magazine, I developed a knowledge of both Finland-Swedish and Finnish literature. This was further helped by meetings and friendships with contemporary authors – especially the poets Gösta Ågren, Bo Carpelan and Tua Forsström, with whom I worked on translations of their poetry, learning an enormous amount in the process – and with their editors and publishers in Finland. My British publishers Penguin and Bloodaxe also gave me encouragement in my work as a literary translator.
In recent years I have been reading the Finnish poetry of the early twentieth century, and am surprised to learn how few of the poets who lived in that period are translated into English. So that is one of my projects both for the present and for the future: to try to make the voices of Saima Harmaja, Kaarlo Sarkia, Katri Vala, Uuno Kailas and other poets from that long-ago time heard in English, for they still have many things to tell us.
Again, I would like to say thank you for this award, which I’m honoured to receive: for me it’s a landmark in my continuing discovery of Finland, its people, and its extraordinarily rich and diverse literature.
The 2010 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation was awarded to Benjamin Mier-Cruz, a Ph.D. candidate in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, for his proposed translation of selected letters and poems by the Finland-Swedish author Elmer Diktonius (1896 -1961). In celebration of the translation prize, programs will include the panel discussions The Challenges of Literary Translation Today and Elmer Diktonius, Finland-Swedish Literature, and Modernism in Scandinavia. Programs will also include a screening of the rare Sontag film Duet for Cannibals/Duett för kannibaler (Sweden, 1969).
There is no circle in Dante’s Inferno to accommodate this kind of punishment for a life conducted in sin; those of us who have tormented others with words will probably have to move in somewhere on Levels Two to Five alongside other incontinents: the gluttons, misers and spendthrifts, the wrathful and sullen. (Plenty of friends there, then, and no shortage of translators).
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.With its 55 volumes, to be completed by 2009, this is the largest comprehensive edition of Danish literature in a century, if not in all of Danish history.The site does not give a list of translators, however, and although there is copious information on scholars, researchers and other academic Kierkegaard specialists, there does not appear to be much regarding the principles underlying the translations themselves, or on how these new versions differ from those of the Hongs and earlier Kierkegaard translators.
This Danish edition will subsequently be translated into English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese.
An electronic version will also be established, containing not only the full printed version, but also the collected drafts for published and unpublished works, as well as the second edition of works, which were published by Kierkegaard himself. The first electronic version was published on the web in 2007.
