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.