The scope of this blog

Responding to my view of how I see this blog, Eric wrote:

My only plaint so far is that Latvia and Lithuania are not included. Estonia is certainly tied in with Finland. But the Baltic countries do have many aspects of recent history in common. Their literature is fascinating. If we can embrace the whole of Scandinavia, disregarding language background (e.g. with Finnish, Lappish and Greenlandic), we could perhaps take on board the other two Baltic countries. If we have visitors from the Baltic states, maybe we could take on board all three.

I think that to include Latvia and Lithuania would be stretching the frame of reference a bit too far. Greenlandic literature was discussed because there is a genuine possibility that Greenland might become a sixth Nordic state. As far as I'm aware, there's no such possibility at present for Latvia and Lithuania. Also, as anyone who has visited them knows, those countries (especially Lithuania) are culturally distinct from the Nordic states, and while Estonia can be given guest status here because of its close ties with Finland and Sweden, I don't really see how the other two can fit the frame.

A similar problem occurred in the life of Usenet back in the early 1990s, when the newsgroup soc.culture.baltics was formed as a breakaway from groups like soc.culture.soviet and soc.culture.nordic. I think a separate Baltic literature blog might be a more interesting avenue to explore, and maybe you could think about setting one up, Eric? It would certainly be the first of its kind.

My feeling is that there's a lot of Nordic writing, especially in Finnish and Danish, that isn't familiar to readers from outside the region, and I would rather concentrate on exploring those literary areas, rather than widening the focus outside the Nordic region in the way you suggest.

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.

Comments

To judge by some of the feedback we've been getting recently, there has been something of a problem with embedded comments on the blog.

To try to work round this, I've changed the settings so that comments appear in a pop-up window. This is fine most of the time, except that if a link is included in a comment as hyperlinked text, it also appears inside a box-sized pop-up window, which may or may not be ideal.

Another possible alternative would be to display comments in full page format.

It would help if commenters would comment on any improvement they've noted with regard to the new arrangement.

Graph

And here's the Google Analytics graph...

Nordic Voices Reviewed Again

Blowing our trumpet and banging our drum, we note that we received another favourable review - this time from BiblioBuffet:

Nordic Voices in Translation is a wonderful blog devoted to “the English translation of the literatures of the Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. And also Estonia.” Their translations include not only literature but pieces from new works be they fiction, drama, poetry and criticism. This is a rather impressive site.

Thanks, BiblioBuffet.

See also: Nordic Voices Reviewed

The List

Some time ago Eric posted a comment to this blog in which he outlined a list of points that reflect his views on the role of the literary translator. I added point 8, but essentially the other points are ones with which I'm in general agreement. I thought it might be worth reposting the list, as Nordic Voices has a few more readers now, some of whom are professional literary translators, and they may like to reflect on the contents of the list, and possibly even comment on it here. Also, with the approach of the London Book Fair, when translators will be contacting publishers and meeting with them, it occurs to me that publishers might also like to take a look at this (though probably most of them won't).

Eric wrote (and I added a point at the end):

1) The literary translator should be an ambassador of interesting serious literature written in the languages he or she has a good command of. By serious literature, I mean straightforward or experimental literature written to examine life, rather than make money.

2) The translator should not be the extended arm of the profits end of the publishing industry. I too will gladly accept subsidies, and even translate a crime novel when I need the money. But my real aim as a translator is to introduce interesting authors to an English-speaking readership.

3) For that reason, I feel that literary translators should cultivate tastes of their own, not merely wait for publishers to contact them and suggest assignments on a "take it or leave it" basis, with the hint that if they don't take this one, they will be regarded as belonging to the awkward squad.

4) Publishers should treat translators like normal clients or employees, not people who are called up in indecent haste to do a job, then dumped when a cheaper, or more docile, alternative comes along.

5) Translators should not be strung along. When you agree (by gentleman's agreement) to translate a book, the contract should be forthcoming within a shortish amount of time. No promises, followed by promises, and stretching over two years or more, should be made.

6) While I like conferences, receptions and workshops (not necessarily in that order, as Eric Morecambe and Lee Mack would say), the schmoozing aspect should not override the translation work itself.

7) Poetry should not eternally remain the poor relation to prose, in publishing terms. Those who naïvely think that poetry is easier to translate, just because it's shorter, will have another think coming, once they start doing some real translation work, as opposed to theorising about it.

8) Authors should not expect their translators to act as literary agents for them.

I'm particularly struck by points 4 and 5, and wonder whether anyone has some further thoughts on these difficult and thorny issues.

100th Post

Just a note to record the fact that Nordic Voices in Translation recently published its 100th post - not bad for a blog that's still less than a month old.

Nordic Voices Reviewed

We're pleased to note that Nordic Voices in Translation has received its first online review, by Chad Post at Three Percent, who writes:

Nordic Voices is an interesting addition to the lit blog world. Run by three British literary translators (who combined translate from Finnish, Swedish, Russian, and Estonian), the goal of the blog is to bring more attention to Nordic literature (beyond the thrillers) and related translation issues. The site is still relatively new, but the early posts are really interesting, well thought out, and unique.

And there's a quote from Eric Dickens's recent post on Thomas Warburton's memoirs.