Excerpt from a translator's memoirs

If you look at the labels at the bottom of the page on this blog, you will see that the name Thomas Warburton already appears a couple of times in March 2009 postings. He is, if you remember, a Finland-Swedish translator of Finnish and English-language literature into Swedish, and estimates that during his long career he must have translated some 30,000 pages of book text.

One of the Finnish authors he has translated is the historical novelist Mika Waltari, and he translated seven novels and plays by this author. Here's what Warburton has to say, in a short excerpt from my translation in progress, i.e. a translation of a work where someone is himself writing about what it's like to translate:

At the time, Waltari was translated by two brilliant stylists, Lorenz von Numers and Örnulf Tigerstedt, with one book each, before I took on his later novels from Johannes Angelos. – By the 1950s and 1960s, Waltari had become an experienced author, with the perhaps unusual capacity of being able to look at his own work almost with the eye of a stranger, once he had finished the work and taken a few steps back from it. It was a joy to work with him, because he
was generous in conversation. – I tend not to go to funerals if I can avoid it, but I went to his with deep respect and wished him farewell when he his time came in July 1979.

Waltari used to claim that he had a tendency to write too much and be unable to excise things from the text. He said that he was therefore grateful for any suggestions for abridgements from his translators and editors, and would nearly always accept them completely. All his later voluminous novels have thus been abridged by about five, six or an even higher percent each.

This kind of editing is, no doubt, more common than you would believe, and there are many foreign authors who are not even aware that something has happened to their books in translation. Similar, if not worse, things have happened with our books when published abroad, when we have managed to check up.

Obviously, such a practice is completely unacceptable and comes quite close to an arrogation of the rights of the author. But the law is vague on that score and tends to allow changes that do not alter the artistic merit or aim of a work.

When such things happen, you cannot always blame the translator. Another literary professional that could come under suspicion is the editor at the publishing house. There is an inevitable and latent dividing line between translators and editors. I myself have stood on both sides of this line, or even on occasions with one foot on each side, so I know how it feels.

These publisher’s assistants come in a number of varieties, and I think that most are near to the ideal. There are people with a good ear for language and the eye of a hawk, who detect every careless inconsistency in the translator’s text, check up ever factual item, whether it be the author or translator that has made the mistake, listens carefully to what the translator has to say in defence of any differences of opinion, and will argue in favour of their own sensible opinions, before doing exactly what they want. I have met quite a few of these. But their also aberrations.

One of these is – or was, as the variant has surely vanished by now – what you could term the normaliser. He was a proponent of the theory that all books should sound as if they had been written in the target language, Swedish in this case, and why not make it the Swedish of Stockholm, just for good measure. That’s his problem. But such an editor will then go on to think that it becomes pretty unpleasant for the reader to come across rare or difficult words and expressions, however Swedish they may be. These words have to be simplified and aligned. Here, the fact that the original author may have wanted to express himself in an unusual way, even in a convoluted or stilted manner, is no excuse. You have to explain what he really means. – This problem area is adjacent to another: have you the right to improve the text, however tempting this may be, without consulting the author? No, you haven’t.

I suspect that the normalisers, who were prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, had brought with them a tradition originating with journalism, or maybe from that unfortunate school of children’s writers which laid emphasis on pedagogically simple and moralising material, all for the best of innocent little children.

Translated from Swedish by Eric Dickens

See also in this blog: Nykarleby - town of poets
Thomas Warburton

Nykarleby - town of poets

Nykarleby (Uusikaarlepyy) is a pleasant small town to the south of Jakobstad in Ostrobothnia, Finland. As you can see from the aerial photo, it is set in quite wooded countryside on flat plain of what locals mockingly call the Pampas. Most buildings are mercifully low-rise. The town has one of the highest percentages of Swedish-speakers of anywhere in mainland Finland. Only Åland competes on this score.

What is strange about this little town, which even now has no more than about 7,400 inhabitants, is that a disproportionately large number of Finland-Swedish poets, and some prose authors, were born there, or close by. Plus some who spent most of their lives there or wrote poems about it. Here is a list of some of them:

Jakob Backlund ) poet and songwriter; many years spent in the USA.
R.R. Eklund ) poet and short-story author.*
Evert Huldén ) poet, father of poet Lars Huldén.*
Lars Huldén (born 1926) poet, professor emeritus from Helsinki.
Bertel Klockars ) poet, educationalist on the Karelian front.
Ernst Knape ) poet and doctor.
Axel Lindholm ) poet and teacher.
Mikael Lybeck ) poet.
Sebastian Lybeck (born 1929) poet.*
Vilhelm Nyby ) poet and journalist.
Gunnar Nylund ) poet.
Viola Renvall ) religious poet.*
Hjalmar Krokfors ) religious and nature poet, husband of Viola Renvall.*
Joel Rundt ) poet and fulltime writer from 1929.
Viktor Sund ) poet, lyricist and teacher.
Zacharias Topelius ) major Finland-Swedish poet.
Emil Wichmann [alias Gånge Rolf] ) poet, prose author, educationalist.
Gösta Ågren (born 1936) poet.*

Several poems by each of the authors with an asterisk after them are included in an anthology of some 300 poems called Facklor över jorden - lyrik (Torches Over the Earth - Poetry ), compiled by Thomas Warburton, who is described on another thread here. It was published in 1959 in the excellent "Finlandssvenskt bibliotek" series. I shall be translating selected poems from this book and posting them up here in due course on new threads.

The Warburton anthology even contains early poems by Gösta Ågren, who is still an active poet. A selection of Ågren's poems, entitled A Valley in the Midst of Violence, was translated by David McDuff and published by Bloodaxe Books in 1992.

Looking at the number of names, it seems strange that so many Finland-Swedish poets who have made it into print, and sometimes gone on to fame in Sweden as well, were all connected with this small provincial town in Ostrobothnia. Sometimes nodes of culture arise.

Those who are able to read Swedish can look here.

Thomas Warburton - translator

Literary translators tend to be backroom boys and girls, and to a certain extent this is just. We are not the original creators of the texts we translate, so we are indeed nearer to musicians, actors or anyone else who transforms and interprets the work of others. Nevertheless, many people who enjoy the fruits of our labours do not realise what makes a literary translator tick. You see the actor or musician on stage and in the newspapers; the life of a literary translator, hidden behind his or her typewriter or PC, is mostly shrouded in mystery.

The translator Thomas Warburton (born 1918) has lifted the tip of the veil regarding literary translation in his little book Efter 30 000 sidor (After 30,000 Pages; 2003). This book was published in a joint edition by Söderström & Co in Finland and Atlantis in Sweden. It has now appeared in Finnish translation by Eila Kostamo, an appropriate fate for a book of memoirs dealing with the skill of translation. The 30,000 pages of the title are what Warburton himself estimates to have translated during his long career.

I am myself translating this book into English, thanks to a grant from Svenska kulturfonden, Helsinki. (Publisher, as yet unknown!) I am very happy to do so, not least because I recognise some of the good and bad things that can happen to a literary translator. But Thomas Warburton has translated a vastly larger amount of books than I have. Hence the title of his 140-page book of translator's memoirs. The reason this book is suitable for an English-speaking audience is that Warburton has translated important works of literature from Finnish and English into his mother-tongue, Swedish.

Thomas Warburton was born in Vasa, Ostrobothnia, and during the 1940s he ended up in Helsinki. It was in the 1940s that his career as a literary translator took off, after he had finally given up his forestry studies. Most curiously, one side of his family is English, as can clearly be seen from his name which has the traits of neither a typical Finland-Swedish name, nor a Finnish one.

While working part-time for the Schildts Swedish-language publishing house in Helsinki, he managed to translate important novels and poetry from English and Finnish. English-language works include Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Joyce's Ulysses, Henry Green's Loving, the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, plus works by Faulkner, E.E. Cummings and George Orwell. Also plays for stage and radio by, among others, Dorothy L. Sayers, Peter Ustinov, Dylan Thomas, Tom Stoppard and Sean O'Casey. From Finnish, Warburton translated, for instance, poetry by Uuno Kailas, Eeva-Liisa Manner, Paavo Haavikko and Leena Krohn, plus prose by Mika Waltari, Pentti Holappa, Antti Tuuri, and others.

One of his major achievements, alongside Joyce's Ulysses and Sterne's Tristram Shandy, is the two-volume novel by someone that Finland regards as their own Joyce or Proust, Volter Kilpi (1874-1939). The stream of conscious novel is called Alastalon salissa (i.e. I salen på Alastalo / In the Hall at Alastalo). This novel combines sea stories with narration that involves very slow takes on a group of shipowners, and experiments with vocabulary and point of view. It is not surprising that Warburton devotes a whole chapter of his memoirs to the course of this translation. The English translation was started a couple of decades ago by a British translator, but I believe that he gave up, daunted no doubt by the sheer complexity of the task. I do hope that one day, another translator from Finnish will have a try.

But Warburton also touches on a number of practical matters such as payment, working hours and making a living out of translation. One of the first financial risks he took early on in his career was to give up his forestry studies in order to translate Ulysses for Bonniers publishers in Stockholm. After that he never looked back, but was always thankful of his part-time publishing job to help him, his wife and their small daughter make ends meet.