Priorities

It’s remarkable that although two full-length biographies of Karin Boye now exist (Margit Abenius --Drabbad av renhet [1950) and Johan Svedjedal -- Den nya dagen gryr [2017]), neither has yet been published in English translation. It often increasingly seems that when it comes to the Nordic countries the interest of UK/US publishers lies almost exclusively in the direction of light fiction and fantasy, with much less attention given to the skönlitteratur that is the primary token of the Nordic presence in the European cultural heritage.

Stand Magazine

Not a specifically Nordic topic, but it's encouraging to see that Stand Magazine continues to publish work in translation, as well as much contemporary British and North American writing. Stand is where a number of the translations and essays of Göran Printz-Påhlson first saw the light, as well as some of the early English versions of the poems of Tomas Tranströmer. The magazine began publication in 1952 - it's wonderful that it has survived to the present day.

Hat tip: Neil Astley

Aino Kallas

There's a distinct gap in the translated classics publishing catalogue when it comes to the work of the great Finnish-Estonian author Aino Kallas (1878-1956). Amazon UK advertises for the most part only grossly overpriced collector's editions of the Mattson/Galsworthy White Ship from back in the 1920s, and the U.S. Amazon site has even less to offer.

The contemporary Finnish author Sofi Oksanen recently published an interesting piece about Aino Kallas and her remarkable short novel Sudenmorsian (The Wolf's Bride) as part of an article for the Literary Hub. An extract:

The story is written in archaic Finnish, and the character Aalo’s own voice is not represented, which is true to the time. Through use of this literary technique, Kallas found a clever way to demonstrate the way female perspectives were excluded in that era. Her method is unique in Finnish literature and she is a unique author: her main body of work is based on Estonian folklore and its focus is on women’s position in the world of men.

 An Oksanen-Kallas linkup would be most welcome.

Translation from Nowhere

In The Bookseller, a report of a talk by A L. Kennedy in which she excoriated publishers for their aversion to books in translation, noting that less than 5% of books published in Britain are translated from another language:

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.

The vexed question

Though it has no particular Nordic focus, this recent article by Tim Parks about literary translation and the conditions under which many or most translators live and work touches on some vital issues. In particular, I'm struck by Parks' suggestion at the conclusion of the piece, which echoes thoughts I've sometimes had myself:

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.

And Other Stories

Catharine Mansfield, interviewing Stefan Tobler in Booktrust, writes:

With the help of the reading groups and subscribers, the company plans to publish 4 or 5 new titles in 2012, including books by Argentinian heavyweight Carlos Gamerro, Russian author Oleg Zaionchkovsky and Swiss writer Christoph Simon. The company now has over 200 subscribers and aims to reach 300 by the end of the year. Reading groups are also thriving, with Swedish and Arabic groups planned for 2012.

Söderströms and Schildts to merge

According to an announcement on the website of the Finland-Swedish publisher Söderströms and another similar announcement on the website of its colleague and competitor Schildts, the two houses are to merge from the beginning of next year. From the Schildts announcement:

– Båda förlagen går med förlust. Med tanke på de utmaningar som branschen står inför är det nu rätt tid att stärka den finlandssvenska förlagsverksamheten genom att slå ihop resurserna. En fusion möjliggör att vi också i framtiden har en mångfald i utgivning av svenskspråkig lyrik, prosa och faktalitteratur i Finland, säger Stig–Björn Nyberg, ordförande i Schildts styrelse.

Kaj–Gustaf Bergh, ordförande i Söderströms styrelse, ser samgången som en möjlighet att stärka den finlandssvenska kulturen och därmed bibehålla tvåspråkigheten livskraftig i Finland:
–Vi kan skapa synergier som stärker förlagens viktiga kärnverksamhet: att trygga att de finlandssvenska skolorna får minst lika goda läromedel som de finska, och att kunna erbjuda finlandssvenska författare de bästa redaktörsresurserna, säger Bergh.  

Keeping translations alive

The following is mainly related to translations of poetry, though some of it may also be applicable to certain kinds of translated fiction. For some time now – at least during the past decade – I’ve become aware that trying to sell poetry in the form of printed books is increasingly an uphill struggle, and some alternative means of reaching a readership may need to be found.

The struggle has always has been there – for example, when I worked at the UK’s Anvil Press Poetry during the 1980s the firm produced no more than 12-14 titles a year,approcimately half of which were translations, and the notion of making a profit was out of the question. Like Bloodaxe, Carcanet and several other specialist publishers, Anvil survived mainly because of the Arts Council grant it received each year, which accounted for most of its income. In the second part of the 1980s and into the 90s, Bloodaxe Books, under its committed director Neil Astley, took a more aggressive approach to poetry publishing, endeavouring to embrace a wider audience and reach out to readers who didn’t normally read poetry at all. This project had some success – although still heavily AC-funded, Bloodaxe did manage to operate as a normal business, comparable to mainstream London publishers of fiction. Bloodaxe’s poetry translation list was (and still is) impressive, including a wide range of titles and poets. But the new vigour didn’t last – by the 2000s, one was again uneasily aware that the Bloodaxe operation was under something of a strain, and in the early part of the decade many Bloodaxe authors and translators were informed that the unsold copies of their back titles would either be sold to them at a discount, or pulped.

The situation with other poetry publishers was not much better, or even worse. Carcanet, which in addition to original poetry and translations also published fiction, seems to have got by on the strength of its fiction list. The smaller houses like Arc and Dedalus were also in trouble, and in 2008 Dedalus had its Arts Council funding cut drastically. After a long campaign, that funding was restored in July last year, but in the present economic climate the future still remains uncertain. Book publishing is currently undergoing a crisis, and because of their minority appeal published poetry and poetry translation are the the first to be seriously affected.

So what’s to be done? My own feeling is that with the increasing power and presence of the Internet, poetry translators, poetry editors and poets should start to take matters into their own hands. Online and ebook publishing may not be to everyone’s taste – I know that my colleague Eric Dickens heartily dislikes it – but at least it’s a way of sending the work out into the world, and can even be a commercially viable method of sale and distribution. I’ve already started to scan and put online the contents of some of my older Bloodaxe titles – the copyright in those translations rests with me, and the volumes in which they appeared are now of out of print.

Nordic Voices in Print is my first attempt in this direction – it’s only a basic blog, and is devoted exclusively to the reprinting of my translations of Nordic literature and poetry, but in time I hope to develop the project further and extend it into the area of ebook publishing. Above all I think it’s important to avoid the ghettoization of translated literature that’s evident in certain US-based publishing concerns (they shall be nameless) which enjoy a high profile in the translation world at present. While they may once have been inspired by selfless motives, I believe that those publishers are really taking advantage of the ever-growing marginalization of translated work. Poets and translators beware.

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?

Seeing the dark of print

WhyTranslator's Lev Hrytsyuk has a link to a site that specializes in unpublishable books. The site asks:

What constitutes an unpublishable work? It could be many things: too long, too experimental, too dull; too exciting; it could be a work of juvenilia or a style you've long since discarded; it could be a work that falls far outside the range of what you're best known for; it could be a guilty pleasure or it could simply be that the world judges it to be awful, but you think is quite good. We've all got a folder full of things that would otherwise never see the light of day.

In the field of Nordic translation one could think of a fair number of works that might fall into this category. How about the Collected Poems of Arvid Mörne, for example? Or even - The Unknown Soldier?

Nordic fingerprints

Reviewing Don Bartlett's translation of The Consorts of Death (Dødens drabanter), the thirteenth of Gunnar Staalesen's sixteen Varg Veum novels, in the Independent last month, Tone Sutterud relayed the news that Arcadia Books intend to publish all sixteen novels in English. This is welcome news, although I wonder why it has taken so long for Staalesen's work to reach an English-speaking public, when other Nordic crime writers, several of them somewhat less talented than the pioneering and innovative Staalesen, have fared so comparatively well. I have to confess an interest here: back in 1985 I translated an earlier novel in the Varg Veum series - At Night All Wolves Are Grey ( I mørket er alle ulver grå) - which attracted some favourable reviews in the British press, but  is now, more than two decades later, out of print.

I'm still equivocal about the rise of Nordic crime fiction in the Anglo-U.S. publishers' lists. When so little serious Scandinavian new writing and poetry is published in English translation, it seems wrong that quite so much attention should be given to what's really, in spite of attempts to characterize it otherwise, an escapist entertainment genre.  Also, when raising this point, I've constantly been struck by the intensity of the negative reaction that usually follows. There's a defensiveness in the reaction which suggests that some of the more central issues concerning the crime genre and the effects of its popularity are being avoided, and I feel that there's a reluctance to discuss those issues in public (though much is said in private).

Inclusions and exclusions

It's sometimes instructive to follow the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that characterize the relations between the Nordic countries and their neighbours, and these are often evident as in the field of literary activity and publishing. The Helsinki Book Fair opens on Thursday - a large-scale, 4-day event, each year it chooses a theme to bind together the various strands of interest that are represented by the numerous readings, mini-seminars, presentations and  discussions that supplement the static exhibition of books and other material.

This year, it looks as though one can take one's pick as to what the theme really is, for according to the English-language version of the advance publicity it is "What is really happening? - the question set in Pentti Saarikoski’s collection of poems published in 1962... The aim of the Book Fair is to give a comprehensive view of today’s reality and future visions. The starting point is the writers, the people involved and the books: the whole spectrum, from humor to science. There will be more than 900 performers and 600 programmes: interviews, seminars, panel discussions, debates and events."

On the other hand, looking further down the page, one reads that "In recognition of the anniversary 1809, Sweden is the Helsinki Book Fair country focus", and indeed on exploring the enormous schedule of events, it's possible to find a few Swedish authors (billed for talks and readings, and some other events, including a government-sponsored one, which have a more or less Swedish flavour. But it's hard to find confirmation of the claim that "more than thirty Swedish writers are attending the fair."

For the first time, one or two Russian authors and publishers are taking part in the fair. Yet the primary focus is surely, as usual, on Finnish writing and publishing - there's a truly vast array of writing talent on show, but one wonders if it can be appreciated by the foreign guests who may have come to acquaint themelves with the contemporary Finnish scene - for the language of nearly all of the events is Finnish, with a few in Swedish or Finland-Swedish.

On a different subject, though in some ways it's related, Sweden's prestigious literary August Prize has  presented its nominations for the 2009 award. Names on the fiction list include Eva Adolfsson, Johannes Anyuru, Per Agne Erkelius, Aris Fioretos, Ann Jäderlund and Steve Sem-Sandberg. But one looks in vain for any Finland-Swedish names: in particular, the absence of Monika Fagerholm and Kjell Westö, both of whom published major new works this autumn, is striking.

The electronic antiquariat

An increasing number of out-of-copyright editions of Nordic classics are now being scanned from the collections of U.S. university libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Recently I've been looking at the 1901 edition of Arvid Mörne's Nya sånger and the 1903 edition of Ny Tid, both from Harvard University Library. I also found it interesting to finally read Mikael Lybeck's plays about Finnish fortune-seekers and European industrial magnates in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, Dynastien Peterberg (The Peterberg Dynasty) and Den röde André (Red André). But if one looks further, both in the Archive and in Project Runeberg, there is now a very large amount of similar scanned material by Nordic authors available online, ranging from the works of Strindberg and Ibsen to much less well known names.

Serial readers

Over at Books from Finland, Teemu Manninen talks to science fiction author Michael Stackpole about publishing innovations:

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

E-books and translation

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post is publishing in four parts the presentation on e-books and literary translation he will deliver at next week's Icelandic Literary Festival in Reykjavik. The first part can be read here, and the subsequent installments are appearing on a day-to-day basis.

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

The skills gap

Something that translators might want to bear in mind when dealing with publishers nowadays: according to a new report by the U.K.'s Skillset council, the move to digitization in the publishing industry has "exposed existing skills gaps", some of which the report calls "critical". The Bookseller quotes Random House CEO and chairman Dame Gail Rebuck as saying:

"There are those who know the [publishing] business really well — often those who are more experienced, middle-management types — who are very uncomfortable with the wholly changing digital landscape.”

Missing from the list?

The Times newspaper has published a list of what it calls the best 60 books of the past 60 years. No Nordic titles there, predictably enough. One commenter calls the list "relentlessly low brow and Anglo-American". However, the compilers ask readers if they agree with their choice, and it's possible to vote for one's favourite novel, and even write a short review of it...

The missing midfield

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.