| Sarah
Death gives a personal view of the first international
seminar for Kerstin Ekman translators, arranged by
the Swedish Institute and held in Stockholm in May
2000. Kerstin
Ekman is surely exceptional in modern Swedish literature
in that her work has attracted so many translators from
around the world, including half a dozen in the English-speaking
world alone. What does she think of that unique band
of translators? In her opening speech at the seminar
organized in Stockholm by the Swedish Institute on 12–14
May this year, she reflected on her translators’ task
and paid tribute to them. The only two people who read
an author’s work word for word, she said, are the author
and the translator. It is hard graft for both of them,
but at least the author has the compensation of those
wonderful moments of inspiration which feel like pulling
a glittering, fabulously decorated Christmas tree from
a cardboard tube. She expressed her sympathy for the
translators, who seem to have to manage without such
inspirational high points, and hoped very much that they
experience some equivalent pleasure in their work. She
also urged her translators to relax, telling them, "I
hope you can have fun." In her view, their role
is primarily the same as hers: "to tell a story
as well as possible" and avoid losing themselves
in the labyrinths of academic quest like poor, shrivelled
Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She expressed
the hope that her translators would perceive their work
as a light and airy game of words, not a struggle with "a
tough pancake of heavy allusions". She noted with
a smile that the three Swedish authors most widely translated
in their time were three "little old ladies",
Fredrika Bremer, Selma Lagerlöf and Astrid Lindgren.
And yet, she admitted, though many Swedish authors dream
of being translated and feel that they only truly exist
once they are known in other countries, translations
of her work are, for her, like children making their
own way in the world. Her work is, and always will be,
in her own language. Kerstin
Ekman’s long association with the Bonniers publishing
house made its elegant headquarters at 56, Sveavägen
a particularly appropriate venue for the opening of the
seminar. It seemed a historic yet slightly unreal moment
as Eva Bonnier, Teresa Carlström (Bonniers’ foreign
rights represent-ative), Kerstin Ekman and eighteen translators
originating from fourteen different countries assembled.
The countries represented were Croatia, Denmark, Finland,
Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, the
Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Slovakia and the
USA. The following day-and-a-half were devoted to plenary
workshops, held in the book-lined meeting room of the
Swedish Writers’ Union. Kerstin Ekman’s major novels
were introduced in reverse chrono-logical order, allowing
extra time for the latest books on which a number of
the translators are currently working. In a deliberate
attempt to give text-centred work sessions priority over
formal presentations, all the participants had been asked
to translate or prepare the same short extracts from
six different Ekman novels as a basis for discussion.
This common starting point made for some very focused
considerations of concrete problems of style and interpretation. Kerstin
Ekman impressed everyone with her enthusiasm and her
willingness to be at our disposal for so long. She not
only answered questions but proved an excellent teacher,
constantly volun-teered fascinating insights into the
writing process, the sources of her ideas and background
topics in Swedish language and culture. In the course
of the weekend, the translators found them-selves receiving
lessons in a number of fascinating but notoriously difficult
areas thrown up by the texts, such as the hierarchy of
the Swedish church (what is a "komminister",
for example?) and regional names for geographical features
in mountain landscapes. The author also provided us with
a cultural history of the Swedish forest, formerly the
hiding place of creatures of the night onto whom people
would project their most inarticulate fears, but now
tamed as the habitat of cuddly trolls and a less threatening
alternative to claustrophobic urban settings. There was,
inevitably, much valuable discussion of linguistic and
stylistic devices, such as the diffi-culty of finding
the right tone on the very first page of a novel (and
Ekman’s first pages are often microcosms of all that
is to follow); deliberate use of anachronistic vocabulary
to create an ambivalent narrative voice; authors’ inconsistencies
in use of past tenses; and the importance of rhythm in
choice of sentence length. Kerstin Ekman maintained to
general approval that she would continue to assert her
right to produce long sentences despite editorial disapproval
and the modern literary trend towards, chopped-up, journalistic
prose. The thorny questions of how – if at all – to translate
dialect, its signifi-cance as a sociolect and political
marker and the potential risks involved in using existing
regional varieties of the target language created a lively
debate and would be worthy of a seminar in their own
right. The translators agreed that Kerstin Ekman had
set them a near-impossible puzzle in her latest novel Guds
barmhärtighet (God’s Mercy), which features
not only educated Swedish and more than one regional
dialect but also the Sami language and several varieties
of Norwegian The
participants were free throughout to quiz the author
about everything from individual lexical items to ideological
or philosophical concepts. The conver-sation ranged far
and wide, from religious beliefs via water symbolism
to the minutiae of furniture design, chronic illnesses,
midwifery and, inevitably, flora and fauna. Kerstin Ekman
described her own daily writing routines and working
methods and gave thanks for modern technologies: the
convenience of the Internet as a research tool and the
labour-saving uses of e-mail for corresponding with translators.
But the commercial pressures of the fast-changing modern
world also cast a shadow; all of us, including the author,
were well aware that the speed at which publishers insist
translators work makes it increasingly difficult to afford
the luxury of producing considered, thoroughly researched
translations. Kerstin Ekman’s novels are packed with
technical descriptions of processes and procedures from
many periods, be it medieval alchemy, nineteenth-century
laundries, pre-war foundry techniques or the modern forestry
industry, and the translator faces the challenge of matching
the author’s own painstaking research and omnivorous
reading. Jokingly deciding that working as a permanent
group would solve many of their problems, both author
and trans-lators were keen to exchange advice on sources,
and not only those in reference book form. Many translators
had developed ingenious research strategies. The availability
on the Internet of the full version of Svenska Akademins
Ordbok and a multilingual flora, Den virtuella
floran (http://linnaeus.nrm.se)
seems likely to make all our lives easier. Swedish museums
such as Arbets-museet in Norrköping, Järnvägsmuseet
in Gävle and Textilmuseet in Borås have proved
helpful, but everyone agreed that solutions are just
as likely to present themselves in surprising, unlooked-for
ways. The common denominator of all the participants
seemed to be a readiness to invest time and energy in
conscientious investi-gation. One positive, practical
outcome of the seminar was that the participants agreed
to form a network to pool expertise and information. Male
colleagues found themselves in a minority but their presence
was much valued and it would have been interesting to
hear more about any special problems they encounter in
translating texts which focus so closely on the female
experience. It was also fascinating to compare the varying
impact of Kerstin Ekman’s work in different countries.
In other Scandi-navian countries, the Netherlands and
Italy, for example, almost every title is quickly translated
and published, whereas perhaps only Händelser
vid vatten (published in English as Blackwater)
has been sold to many other European countries. The lack
of English Ekman translations published was a matter
of regret to the US and British translators and participants
from various countries had experienced the frustration
of translating a whole Ekman book which had then not
been published. It can also be unsettling for an author
when her works come out "in the wrong order" abroad
and her translators expect her to dredge her memory to
explain things written years ago. Conversely, Kerstin
Ekman works so closely with her Danish translator Anne
Marie Bjerg that she called her "my other self".
Does it worry her that many countries know only an unrepresentative
fraction of her work? Well, no, she has more pressing
preoccupations, but she is not indifferent to other nations’ opinion
of her: she spontaneously quoted a somewhat jaundiced
US reviewer who termed the characters of Blackwater "eccentric
people on the edge of the habitable world". One
evening of the seminar was devoted to an Ekman interpretation
of a different kind, with a showing of a recently-made
television film of her thriller Dödsklockan,
set in the Swedish forest among a group of men hunting
elk and first published in 1963. The film, with a script
by Jonas Frykberg and directed by Daniel Alfredson, was
made in consultation with the author, who told us how
uncomfortable she had felt when confronted with the first
draft of the script. It was so true to the original book
that she felt it drew attention to all the unsure touches
and unnecessary elaborations of the less-than-confident
young crime writer she then was. Rochelle
Wright from the USA gave the only formal presentation
of the seminar, a paper on the subject of intertextuality
in Gör mig levande igen (Remember me), a
novel which is full of sub-texts and intertexts, from
a sustained dialogue with Eyvind Johnson’s Krilon series
to playful references to Selma Lagerlöf, Elin Wägner
and a host of other writers. After all we had heard from
the author, Rochelle Wright readily admitted that even
she had missed one of the central allusions. This was,
after all, a seminar characterized by fellow feeling,
openness and willingness to share, where ego trips or
concern for personal prestige would have been totally
out of place. The fact that our working lan-guage was
Swedish meant that there was no question of participants
competitively defending their "rival" translated
versions. Kerstin Ekman appeared genuinely touched by
this rare encounter with a group of people so interested
in discussing literary texts in depth and so well-informed
about her work as a whole. She was at pains to reject
the "learned" label and reassure translators
depressed at the impossibility of ever emulating her
breadth of knowledge or recognizing all her allusions
that even informed Swedish readers are usually only partially
aware of what is going on. She reminded us on several
occasions not to lose touch with a more intuitive and
holistic approach to her writing. As in her opening speech,
she urged us to give our imaginations a freer rein – which
came as a relief, it must be said, after we had had struggled
with the literally untranslatable alphabetical lists
of goods in the village shop on pages 288-90 of Guds
barmhärtighet. The
seminar closed with Kerstin Ekman reading aloud from
her auto-biographical prose poem Knivkastarens kvinna (The
Knife-Thrower’s Woman), including the scene in which
her younger, clinically depressed self, living in a soulless
Uppsala suburb, buys fifty kilos of potatoes from a verbose
door-to-door potato-seller as an act of faith: if you
have bought that large a supply, you are not about
to take your own life. The author added a tragi-comic
personal postscript not found in the book: when she went
down to the cellar later, she found that the man had
cheated her, and not left the sacks of potatoes as promised
after all. But in spite of this, Kerstin Ekman’s watch-word
remains "Tro" (Have faith) and one hopes that
she left the seminar optimistic that her translators
would not only have faith in their own abilities but
also heed her invitation to have fun, because as Elisabeth
Seth of the Swedish Institute said in her concluding
remarks, it was a seminar full of laughter. Truly an
unforgettable experience for any literary translator. |
