Snapshots

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

The Smell of Snow

Me reading my translations of 'Ånd', 'Prana' and 'Rimtåge' from Pia Tafdrup's LUGTEN AF SNE.

Kallocain

The cover of my forthcoming new Penguin Classics translation of Karin Boye's dystopian novel Kallocain. It's a work by Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a Swedish artist who created some of the very first purely abstract paintings - before Kandinsky.

Annensky

Not strictly a Nordic item, though it has many Finnish echoes and connections*: the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) has made available a complete downloadable scan of my 1971 doctoral dissertation on the poetry and poetics of Innokenty Annensky.

It’s interesting to see this work again after such a long time.  My writing style has changed somewhat in the interim, but I can still recognise the author as myself. The dissertation is detailed and academically disciplined – there's also some application of the structuralist principles current in literary criticism at that time – but I wasn’t afraid to let my emotions speak now and then. The introduction was written last of all, in 1970, after my return from a second study period in Moscow, and some of the gloom that surrounded politics and literature in the Soviet Union at that time can be detected in the text.

*See, for example, the Imatra page on the Мир Иннокентия Анненского website.

Encountering myself - and FILI (FLIC)

My profile and interview are up - in Finnish - on the FILI 40th Anniversary website, with among other things my own account of my somewhat tortuous path as a translator:

Tieni kääntäjäksi:
Olen laajentanut kielivalikoimaani venäjästä saksaan ja pohjoismaisiin kieliin. Suomenruotsalaisen kirjallisuuden pariin päädyin tietysti ruotsin kautta, mutta sitä kautta kiinnostuin myös suomenkielisestä kirjallisuudesta. Se tuntui luonnolliselta kehitykseltä.

It's nice to be included along with Danish translator Siri Nordborg Møller and so many other translators of Finnish and Finland-Swedish literature. And it comes as a pleasant surprise that there are so many of us all round the world!

My first visit to Finland under FILI's auspices (though not my first visit) was in 1983 -- back then they were called FLIC. Now, after so many years, I almost feel like one of the family.

My Translations

I've made a list of my published Nordic book-length translations. At present it looks like this:

from Finland-Swedish and Swedish

Edith Södergran: Complete Poems (Bloodaxe Books, UK)
Ice Around Our Lips - 10 Finland-Swedish Poets (Bloodaxe)
Bo Carpelan: Axel (Carcanet Press, UK)
Tua Forsström: Snow Leopard (Bloodaxe)
Tua Forsström: I Studied Once At A Wonderful Faculty (Bloodaxe) [with S. Katchadourian]
Tua Forsström: One Evening in October I Rowed Out on the Lake (Bloodaxe)
Gösta Ågren: A Valley In The Midst of Violence (Bloodaxe) (awarded TLS/George Bernard Shaw Translation Prize, 1994)
Gösta Ågren: Standing Here (ebook), The Cities (ebook), Coming Here (ebook)
Bo Carpelan: Homecoming (Carcanet)
Karin Boye: Complete Poems (Bloodaxe)
Mirjam Tuominen: Selected Writings (Bloodaxe)
Bo Carpelan: Urwind (Carcanet)
Bo Carpelan: The Year's Circle (Marjukka Vainio)
Tove Jansson: The Moomins And The Great Flood (Schildts)
Tove Jansson: The Moomins And The Great Flood (Sortof Books, UK)
Various authors: Dolce far niente in Arabia [G.A. Wallin and His Travels in the 1840s] (Museum Tusculanum Press/Society of Swedish Literature in Finland)

 from Finnish

Marianne Aav (ed.) Marimekko - Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture (Yale University Press)
Anni Sumari (ed.) How To Address the Fog (Carcanet, UK) - with Donald Adamson and Robin Fulton
Rosa Liksom:  Dark Paradise (Dalkey Archive Press, USA)
Tuomas Kyrö: The Beggar and the Hare (Short Books)
Tuula Karjalainen: Tove Jansson: Work and Love (Particular Books)

from Norwegian

Contemporary Norwegian Prose Writers (Oslo University Press, Norway)
Gunnar Staalesen: At Night All Wolves Are Grey (Quartet, UK)
Geir Kjetsaa: Fyodor Dostoyevsky - A Writer's Life (Viking USA and Macmillan UK) - translated with Siri Hustvedt
Øysteinn Lønn: Tom Reber's Last Retreat (Marion Boyars)

from Icelandic

Ólafur Gunnarsson: Gaga (Penumbra Press, Toronto, Canada), Trolls’ Cathedral (Shad Thames Books/Mare's Nest, UK), and Million-Percent Men (FORLAGIÐ JPV útgáfa, Iceland)
Brushstrokes of Blue [with Bernard Scudder]: The Young Poets of Iceland, anthology, ed. P. Valsson (Shad Thames Books/Greyhound Press, UK)
Einar Kárason: Devil's Island (Canongate, UK)
Bjarni Bjarnason: The Return of the Divine Mary (Red Hand Books, UK)
Bjarni Bjarnason: The Reputation (Red Hand Books, UK)

from Danish

Pia Tafdrup: Queen's Gate (Bloodaxe Books, UK)
Pia Tafdrup: Tarkovsky’s Horses and Other Poems (Bloodaxe Books, UK)
Pia Tafdrup: Salamander Sun (Bloodaxe)

http://metaphrases.co.uk/web/dmcdnordic.htm

Words in Nature

I've put an electronic version of my early poetry collection Words in Nature (1971) for sale in Amazon's Kindle e-bookstore. For a change, these are nearly all original poems, not translations. The Kindle Store looks as though it may be a useful way to bring back titles that once sold reasonably well but are now out of print, and I may eventually broaden the experiment to include some Nordic titles for which I have the publishing rights.

Incidentally, you don't need to own a Kindle e-reader in order to read Kindle e-books - the free-of-charge Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for iPhone/iPod touch and Kindle for iPad all make it possible on the respective devices.

Tarkovsky's Horses

The book is now available for pre-order from Amazon UK (publication date January 28).

Whales and Horses

I was pleased to learn that Tarkovsky's Horses and Other Poems, my translation of two collections of Pia Tafdrup's poetry (The Whales in Paris and Tarkovsky's Horses) due to be published by Bloodaxe early next year, was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The PBS book club recommendations mark out the books, not the authors or translators, and in the field of poetry translation there's usually only one recommendation per quarter. The PBS list for Spring 2010 is:

Choice: Derek Walcott, White Egrets (Faber)
Recommendations:
Edward Hirsch, The Living Fire (Carcanet)
Lachlan MacKinnon, Small Hours (Faber)
Patrick McGuinness, Jilted City (Carcanet)
Robin Robertson, The Wrecking Light (Picador)
Recommended Translation: Pia Tafdrup (trans. David McDuff), Tarkovsky’s Horses (Bloodaxe)
Special Commendation: Louis Simpson, Voices in the Distance: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe)

Hat tip: Neil Astley

Karin Boye - a biographical profile - 1

By David McDuff

1. 1900-1922

Karin Boye was born on 26 October 1900, in the Swedish city of Göteborg. On her father's side she had German blood. Her paternal grandfather, Carl Joachim Eduard Boye, was the Prussian consul in the town. The Boye family originally came from Bohemia, and most of its male members devoted themselves to various forms of financial or commercial activity, both in Europe and in South America. As a young man, Eduard Boye was head of a large English clothes manufacturing business in Hamburg until the Great Fire of Hamburg in 1842 destroyed the office, warehouse and shops. He then moved to Leeds, in England, and took up clothes manufacturing there; later, he moved to Göteborg, where he was his firm's agent for a number of years. Eventually he established his own cotton and textile importing business in Göteborg, E. Boye & Co., and adopted Swedish citizenship in 1849. In addition to cotton importing, he also took an interest in industrial and marine engineering. Eduard Boye was one of the pillars of Göteborg society, and together with his wife, Hilda, ran both a town and a country home in patriarchal style, entertaining many guests at dinners and soirées, and patronizing the arts. They had five children, and it was their eldest son, Fritz (Carl Fredrik) who was Karin Boye's father. Fritz Boye trained at the Göteborg Technical High School as a civil engineer, practised as a draughtsman and designer at various works and plants, but eventually moved into the insurance business, becoming head of the Svea Fire-Life Company. He married Signe Liljestrand, an employee at his office, some eighteen years his junior - she made up in vitality and energy for his somewhat dour and retiring nature. The couple had several children, of whom Karin was the first. At first, her education was undertaken by her mother, who was very well-read in European classical literature and was also influenced by spiritualism and oriental religions. Her father remained a somewhat distant figure - his sons said later in life that they had never known him, and he seldom showed any tenderness towards his children. On the other hand, he possessed a speculative, imaginative mind, and even wrote a 'Fragment of a Story About the Future', which is inspired by notions of utopian reform. His emotional instability and nervous temperament were perhaps the real reason why he found it difficult to come close to his children.

Karin Boye attended a private junior school in Göteborg. According to Karin Boye's biographer, Margit Abenius (author of Victim of Purity, a Swedish-language account of the poet's life, published in 1950), her first teacher, Fröken Mimmie Agardh, had almost never had a pupil who stayed in her memory as Karin Boye did:

The round, soft little girl was far ahead of her school-mates, she was remarkably well-informed and could answer any question, often did so with a little rhyme or other inventive and well-chosen words. Fröken Agardh offered to let her sit and read an interesting book while the others did their spelling, but Karin wanted to take part and help. Fröken Agardh especially remembers her delight at the spring. She would jump and rejoice: 'Aunt Mimmie, Aunt Mimmie, it's spring! How happy I am!' Jeanna Osterdahl also taught at the school, and Karin told 'Aunt' Jeanna that she wrote stories. Among her papers Fröken Agardh has preserved some short verses and fables by her pupil, including this 'Story of the Crocus, by Karin Boye, aged 7':

There was once a little boy who had a little crocus. Inside the crocus there was a little elf; she could do magic spells. The crocus was yellow, and pretty. Now autumn came, and the crocus began to wilt. Krokusa (that was the elf's name) thought that was nasty, and flew away. Then the crocus fell. Have you seen a crocus fall?

The story is illustrated with a drawing of the flying Krokusa with a crown on her head, and underneath are the words: 'Krokusa flew away'.

In 1909 the family moved to Stockholm after Fritz Boye went into premature retirement because of nervous debility. This involved some reduction in the family's standard of living, but it did not affect the children's lives. Later on, Fritz Boye became an inspector in the Swedish Private Insurance Supervisory Service. At her new school, Karin made friends with a few girls of similarly introspective and imaginative temperament. Together they read the works of Dumas, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and Maeterlinck, and also those of Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore's poetry seems to have made an especially strong impression on the young Karin Boye: she immersed herself in Indian mythology, and sought to experience the country itself through Karl Gjellerup's Indian novel Pilgrimen Kamanita ('Kamanita the Pilgrim'). Above all, she studied Buddhism, and made serious efforts to learn Sanskrit. With her friend Signe Myrbäck as 'disciple', Karin played the role of guru, and the two girls would sit crosslegged on the lawn together, practising the art of breathing in and out. Signe Myrbäck relates that when their ecclesiastical history teacher once told the class that Sweden had only a small minority of Buddhists, Karin claimed to be one of them. Her history teacher, Lydia Wahlström, also once made some slightly disparaging remarks about Buddhists during a lesson, and Karin Boye put up her hand and said sternly: 'I'm a Buddhist!'

(to be continued)