La Vengeance m’appartient only has three stars (or close to it) on GoodReads and StoryGraph. I wonder: is it because their userbase is uncomfortable with ambiguous, difficult texts? Or is it because their userbase is, more often than not, reading in English?
I ask because there’s something in the English translation that I found clunky and off-putting that was completely absent in the Swedish. Both of their translators are prolific and well recognized: the English translator is a highly lauded figure in English/French translation and even won an award for his translation of another book by NDiaye, as did the Swedish translator. Is my inner ear not attuned enough to know the difference between elegant and clunky French? Or elegant and clunky Swedish, for that matter?
The point that springs to mind is all the various translations of War and Peace, and the fanfare that met the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s substantially different from older translations, and is often accused of being clunky in comparison. Pevear and Volokhonsky, however, insist that a lot of the original Russian is actually clunky, and that previous translations have done a lot—too much—to smooth it over. And in the middle of all this you have Constance Garnett: linguistic wunderkind? prudish censor? How central should her translations be when it comes to Russian literature in English?
It doesn’t help, either, that I find Stump’s style of writing irritating of its own accord. Maybe I was primed to dislike it because I didn’t bother looking him up until I was already annoyed with the English translation, who knows. But he has plenty of interviews to comb through: Words Without Borders, Center for the Art of Translation, Asymptote, Ploughshares, etc.
I suppose I’ll have to follow this post with a part two where I solicit my francophone friends for their opinions.
The theme for 2024’s first issue of Karavan was memory, and included a fair number of biographical essays from Julie Otsuka, Maaza Mengiste, Ann-Marie Tung Hermelin, and Nona Fernández. Otsuka’s The Swimmers and Mengiste’s The Shadow King went on my TBR as a result.
“Kino Karavan,” the recurring movie column, highlighted the animated film adaptation of Sultana’s Dream, El sueño de la sultana.
The translator’s diary column focused on Meta Ottosson’s work on Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor‘s Dust. I always find this segment to be an interesting peek into the lives of others, since literary translation is such a different beast from what I do. Ottosson chronicles her attempts to find the right words for things like buses, pole dance terminology, and Kenyan state officials and legislation; meanwhile, I’ve never had to cold email Nordiska Afrikainstitutet to answer a terminology question for me. The diary was followed by Ottosson’s translation of Owuor’s story “These Fragments.”
And then the grand finale, the reviews. The author interviews are always interesting, but the downside is that authors can be a lot more interesting than their books. Reviews, on the other hand, are always about the experience of reading a particular personality rather than conveying the personality, making them better indicators of what I might like or not. From this issue I took note of:
Rien ne t’appartient, Nathacha Appanah
Hardly War, Don Mee Choi
The Naked Eye, Yoko Tawada
The pile grows higher faster than I can read through it!
During peak corona days, I wandered down to an unofficial little free library someone had posted about in the neighborhood Facebook group to see what I could find. Mord ombord was one of the titles I brought back (on the basis that the title sounded like a fun murder mystery) but then I put off reading it for three years.
Now here we are!
This was the first I’d heard of American mystery writer Helen McCloy, despite several books and honors to her name. She was the first woman president of Mystery Writers and later awarded the title Grand Master by the same organization, in addition to an Edgar award for her literary criticism. Born in 1904, her mystery writing career began with the publication of Dance of Death in 1933 (or possibly 1938? I have conflicting data) and continued until her last novel, The Smoking Mirror, in 1979. She died in 1992, so I can only assume that she spent the 80s in comfortable retirement.
Mord ombord (previously published as Någon ämnar mörda mig) is the Swedish edition of McCloy’s 1947 She Walks Alone, and I have to admit that the English title isn’t nearly as punchy as the Swedish ones. I can only assume it’s a reference to this line from the book:
“Tony, did you ever hear of the Emperor Yao?”
“What on earth…?”
“He ruled China in its Golden Age. There is a saying about the peacefulness of his reign. ‘In the days of the Emperor Yao, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk alone from one end of the Empire to the other without fear of being molested.’ Since then, times have changed.”
The murders in question unfold on a ship from a fictional Caribbean country en route to New York. One of the passengers has been killed by a bite from the bushmaster snake under transport before the first port of call, where the ship’s captain brings the matter to the book’s detective, police captain Miguel Urizar. After a brief investigation, the coroner urges Urizar to declare the death an accident, but on a hunch Urizar decides to board the ship for the rest of its journey under the pretext of taking a vacation. This section closes with another death, after which the book skips ahead to give an account of some of the passengers’ whereabouts after docking in New York.
At stake in all of this is a package of $100,000 that everyone on board has reason to want to steal. But who’s willing to murder for it?
She Walks Alone has a somewhat unusual structure. It opens with a substantial first-person perspective, in the form of a letter “meant to be read in the case of my violent death.” This is the letter presented to Ulizar by the ship’s captain in the second section of the book and prompts his investigation into the matter. We follow Ulizar until the second death, at which point the narrative switches to a second letter, and then it ends in another third-person perspective for the parlor scene, which is satisfyingly enough set in an actual parlor.
These changes in perspective not only ratchet up the tension (McCloy knows how to write a cliffhanger!) but also contribute to the mystery itself. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the shifting boundaries of what is knowable to the reader at any point in time play a decisive role in the mystery. It’s all very natural, however, and doesn’t feel particularly gimmicky.
She Walks Alone is still in print and readily available, one edition in 2014 from the now-defunct imprint Murder Room and another from Agora Books as part of their 2020 “Uncrowned Queens of Crime” series. In their own words:
While Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh have held their own against the men of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in both sales and acclaim, most average readers rarely venture beyond the four queens. If classic crime ‘best of’ lists are packed full with a variety of men, it shouldn’t be so challenging to find more than just a handful of brilliant crime-writing women.
Agora believes there are female authors from this era whose heads still sit uncrowned. From discussions with the readers of its Crime Classics community to scouring historical libraries and coastal secondhand bookshops, the publisher has uncovered a few women worthy of the title.
But my copy wasn’t one of the new paperbacks; it was a Swedish hardcover edition from 1954 put out by Tidens bokklubb, translated by Erik Wilhelm Olson, about whom there is little to say. He was a literature and film critic for Svenska dagbladet, wrote several novels (I think novels?) and short story collections, wrote and directed a short film in the 1920s, and translated crime fiction into Swedish. His biography on Runeberg.org includes his portrait, so here you go:
Based on the language of the translation and the publication date, I would note some of-the-time racial terminology (which is, if memory serves, almost exclusively in the first-person perspectives and comes across as characterization more than anything else). But McCloy also clearly has some nuanced understanding of “the race issue” (as I assume she phrases it in English, based on the Swedish) in the US and presents the matter and her characters of color sympathetically. It’s hard to comment on the quality of the translation without having read the original, but I can at least say that I enjoyed it. As a writer and critic, it’s natural to assume that Olson had a good sense for what works.
I’ve deliberately avoided going into too much detail here because I think this is a fun, clever mystery and I’d rather prompt someone to pick it up and read it for themselves than pick it apart here and ruin the mystery. The clues are subtle, but they’re all there: this is a whodunit in the “the reader has all the tools to figure it out themselves” tradition. And while yes, Raymond Chandler, “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing,” there’s always an element of fun that’s ruined in a mystery when someone’s spoiled the ending for you—no matter how good everything around the mystery is.
Marie NDiaye’s La Vengeance m’appartient came into my life following a positive review in Karavan (which I’m very var behind in my reading!). I had the good fortune to find it in my top three languages: the original French, and then translations in Swedish and English. I have enough thoughts there that I think they would detract from talking about the novel qua novel, so that’s a separate post.
While Maître Susane has risen from the working class to become a lawyer, she’s not quite the picture of unmitigated success that her friends and family assume her to be. After leaving a larger, much more prestigious firm to start her own practice, Maître Susane has struggled financially, taking on banal cases that only just barely cover her bills. All of this has the potential to change when Gilles Principaux walks into her office and asks her to represent his wife, Marlyne, who is currently awaiting trial for the murder of their three children. This would be an incredibly high profile case and the first major one since Maître Susane started her own practice.
There is a catch, of course. Maître Susane believes to recognize in Gilles a certain influential teenager from her youth. One fateful day, at the age of ten, she accompanied her mother in her work as a cleaning lady, and spent the afternoon in the bedroom of the family’s teenage son. Much of what happened that day is lost down the memory hole, including the name of the family, but Maître Susane firmly believes that whatever it was set her on the path to becoming a lawyer.
What happened that day? Was it Gilles that Maître Susane encountered, or someone else?
Alongside all of this, Maître Susane is also negotiating a complicated relationship with her own cleaning lady (a not insignificant expense that she can barely afford), an undocumented worker from Mauritius named Sharon. Maître Susane is desperate for Sharon’s approval, maybe even her friendship, to the point of growing resentful when her advances are rebuffed. The relationship is only further complicated when Maître Susane volunteers Sharon as a babysitter for her beloved goddaughter Lila.
As Maître Susane prepares Marlyne Principaux’s defense, the rest of her life spins out of control. Her parents, distressed at her renewed fixation on what happened that day in her childhood, eventually cut off contact with her; Sharon reveals that she has been taking Lila with her to other cleaning jobs during the day, including the elderly widow Principaux (perhaps the same Principaux?) and Maître Susane is convinced that the girl is suffering; even her own memory of recent events starts playing tricks on her (or are the people in her life trying to deceive her?).
There is a lot to unpack in this book and quite frankly I don’t think I’m capable of it (writing two weeks or so after I finished reading it). I loved this book and my review cannot do it justice, but I’ll try anyway.
In a way, La Vengeance m’appartient has a lot of the trappings of noir, even though I don’t think it could be strictly classified as such. Psychological thriller? Raymond Chandler once claimed that “the ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing” and that’s what you get here. None of those seemingly urgent questions in the above summary are answered conclusively; we are presented with a life in turmoil that is only partially resolved by the end of the story. The point is not the meticulously pieced together mystery but rather the externalization of the subtle dramas and tensions of interpersonal relationships. The chaos that Gilles introduces in Maître Susane’s life had really already taken root inside of her long ago. She seeks approval and understanding from everyone—from her parents, from the teenage maybe-Principaux, from her ex (and father of her goddaughter), from Sharon, from Lila—and fails to obtain it anywhere.
Maître Susane is, in the parlance of our times, “hashtag ‘relateable.'” Her ambivalent relationship with her parents—simultaneously yearning to unburden her heart to them while also sensing that they would only be equally ambivalent about such a confession—is a familiar one, likewise her demanding urges with Sharon. On one level Maître Susane is magnanimous and forward thinking with Sharon: she is handling Sharon’s visa case for free, she pays her fairly and on time, she doesn’t have excessive demands in terms of labor. But she also clearly expects to be repaid for these favors with a more personal relationship, thereby crowning her (and here I’m using my own phrasing, not NDiaye’s) a Good Ally TM.
Part of the reason La Vengeance m’appartient might have been such an experience for me was that I read much of it while I was visiting my own parents, so I was already swimming in all those kinds of feelings already. Now that I’m well into adulthood, am I living up to my parents’ expectations for me? Their hopes? Am I even living up to my own? Maître Susane and I are around the same age, after all. There are absolutely biographical reasons that I was so taken with this book. But regardless, NDiaye touches on a lot of contemporary suffering and struggles with a deft, elegant hand.
Out of all the books I’ve read in my life, in all the places, Samar Yazbek‘s Där vinden vilar was the first to have me so engrossed that I missed my stop on the subway. Maybe that’s really the only review I need to write.
A young soldier in the Syrian civil war has been grievously injured by friendly fire. Ali’s struggle to reach the shelter of a nearby tree is interspersed with flashbacks to important people and moments of his short life. The lyrical translation from Marie Anell paints a vivid picture of a dreamy and mystical young man with a deep reverence for nature, completely ill-suited for the battlefield. Yazbek also uses this limited perspective to depict dictatorships from a grassroots, ground-up perspective.
If there’s any criticism to be made, you could argue that Ali is deliberately crafted to have the maximal emotional impact; to be the perfect war casualty. He is just too kind, too innocent to be anything but deeply sympathetic. The comparison to Frère d’âme is a natural one to make here, given their similar topics and structures. In Frère, however, it seems like Diop makes at least some effort to present unsavory or off-putting aspects of Alfa’s character alongside his more admirable traits. As a result he ends up as a perhaps more realistic, or at least more typical, teenage boy.
But I think if Yazbek had taken the same approach, it would have landed very differently, potentially undermining the point of the book. In a way, Ali is less of a character and more of a symbol, a way to link the anonymous violence of the battlefield to the people and the communities it devastates. He’s the best parts of everyone’s lost son, the physical embodiment of the collective hope a village or town has for their young people, the perfect angel doting parents see in their children. Alfa’s story is about himself; Ali’s story is about the people around him.
Edited to add, 25 June 2024: while mine is a tiny voice in the discourse, it would be in poor taste of me to just sit here and idly dunk on this poetry without explicitly acknowledging the horrific violence and war crimes currently being committed against Palestinians in Gaza, or the long-standing conditions that have led to el Sousi and many, many others living in exile. My hot take on this poetry collection is still here, unedited, if you feel like reading it, but first please donate to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
Thanks.
Somaya el Sousi was one of the writers featured in the flash fiction edition of Karavan, and one of the poets reading at Litteraturmässan, so that’s how I became aware of her. I picked up her slim Swedish collection, En flöjt av mörker, at Litteraturmässan in a fit of optimism. I had just read a whole book on how to read poetry metaphorically! Work was beginning to slow down! I could give this poetry collection my best college try and immerse myself in, according to the back of the book:
en berättelse där vi färdas genom tid och rum, och bortom tystnaden*
and fight alongside el Sousi in, quote:
kampen att vara sann mot sig själv som människa**
and bear witness to, quote:
hur samkönad kärlek kan gestaltas i sammanhang där den är förbjuden***
I really gave it my best possible try. I read things slowly, multiple times, out loud. I diligently looked up every unfamiliar word, and most of the vaguely familiar ones as well. It took ten years of collaborative work to translate the collection from Arabic to Swedish; el Sousi is a Palestinian refugee currently residing in Norway. I have mountains of respect for what she’s been through as a person and for the work it took to make this small volume of work available to me in Swedish.
And yet.
I’m still left feeling like the back-of-the-book description above is on par with a hackneyed description of a mediocre wine, and I pick that metaphor deliberately. A friend of mine was once asked to take over the tastings at a winery for a couple hours while the real owner had to run some kind of emergency errand. He and his companions made up the most ridiculous descriptions, really bonkers off-the-wall stuff, as they served wine they had only just tasted themselves to the guests arriving after them.
And the guests all went along with it. No one thought to question their authority or their presentation of the wine. The owner returned and took over tasting duties at an appropriate moment, and my friend’s group went on their way.
I get the impression that the same thing happens with any poetry that is still too new to have been put through the crucible of time to emerge either as a classic or just cruft. The owner is out to lunch and we have people who don’t know any better stringing together vague phrases and aphorisms to try to sell the product to us.
It’s either that, or I have to give up and admit that the problem is me.
*a story that takes us through time and space, beyond the silence
**the struggle to stay true to one’s self as a person
***how same-sex love can be depicted in an environment where it’s forbidden
I guess magazines are the only thing I read anymore?
My third and final subscription (though Med andra ord looks interesting, and we won’t count Asymptote since I don’t send them any money) is Karavan, a literary magazine that focuses on literature in translation, primarily from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The theme for this issue was “micronoveller,” or microfiction. That makes this the first issue I’ve read where all the literature featured was self contained, i.e. no extracts from novels.
What did I learn? In brief, that microfiction is a rich tradition in Iraq, a popular new form of content on apps and websites in China, and that Ana María Shua is Argentina’s reigning microfiction queen. In addition to the (very short) stories and poems translated from Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish, this issue featured interviews with Pilar Quintana and Monique Ilboudo, a précis on Jeferson Tonório by Balsam Karam (whose novel Singulariteten I recently finished) and an essay by Mariana Enríquez on journalism and Argentinian cuisine. Out of the new releases reviewed, this is my note to myself that Samar Yazbek‘s Where the Wind Calls Home (Swe: Där vinden vilar) sounded the most interesting.
Karam and a Palestinian poet from Gaza featured, Somaya el Sousi, were both featured at Stockholms litteraturmässan this past weekend. I was unable to attend el Sousi’s reading, though I did pick up her volume En flöjt av mörker. Karam’s panel discussion on libraries was much later in the day, however, and fit nicely into my schedule. She was very funny and very light, not at all what I would have expected from her writing here in Karavan or in Singulariteten, but those are separate thoughts.
My sambo has tremendous thrift shop karma, which is how I came to be in possession of this lovely hardback book, a Swedish translation of an English melodrama/romance by Winnifred Eaton writing under the pen name Onoto Watanna*: A Japanese Nightingale.
As a hardback book from 1907 with several full color illustrations, it seems like it should be kind of rare and expensive, yet the going price for this book on Bokbursen wasn’t anything more expensive than your standard new paperback release and there were several listings for it. I guess it just goes to show how much I don’t know about actual book collecting.
There were maybe half a dozen of these full page, full color illustrations throughout.My photography wasn’t the best here, but those green splotches are illustrations. Left: three figures singing or playing musical instruments in a tea house. Right: flowers in a landscape.
All-American wealthy playboy Jack Bigelow is in Japan for unclear reasons. While he is waiting for his mixed-race friend Taro to come join him, Bigelow marries Yuki, a charming and mysterious mixed-race geisha. Even as Bigelow reflects on Taro’s contempt for foreigners who take temporary Japanese wives, he lets himself be talked into just such a marriage. Still, their relationship is a happy one, except Yuki’s mood swings and constant requests for money. Bigelow acquiesces, though not without misgivings and suspicions.
Taro finally arrives and—here’s a shocker—Yuki is his sister! Taro is shocked and appalled, both at Bigelow’s actions and at Yuki’s condition. It turns out that Taro and Yuki are from a noble family that conveniently ran out of money while Taro was at university in the US with Bigelow, and rather than reveal the change in their fortunes Yuki began earning money to support her brother by performing in teahouses. When that proved insufficient, she agreed to be married off by a nakoda.
Taro and Yuki are stunned to see each other. Yuki runs away, distraught at her brother’s perceived disappointment in her. For plot-related reasons, neither Bigelow nor Taro immediately follow her, so she is allowed to slip away and disappear. In her absence, Taro falls ill and dies. Bigelow promises the dying Taro that he will spare no expense in tracking down Yuki. He wanders all over Japan, Yuki wanders all over Asia, but eventually they have a heartfelt reunion at their old house in Tokyo and swear to never leave each other again.
The end!
On its own, A Japanese Nightingale is very dated reading. Is it an improvement over Madame Butterfly, which it is theorized to be a response to? I…don’t know? How are we defining “improvement” here, anyway? The happier ending with a reunited Bigelow and Yuki seems to imagine better prospects for interpersonal relationships between white Westerners and Asians (or just Japanese) than Madame Butterfly, which makes sense given Canada-born Eaton’s English father and Cantonese mother.
But much of the book feels predicated on Orientalism and appealing to Western fascination with Japan, which I guess still happens today but not in the same way as in the years immediately following the Perry Expedition. There are didactic little asides about Japanese culture and beliefs and customs, but judging from her biography Eaton never visited Japan. She was also “rebuked” by maybe the only Japanese person she actually knew, the poet Yone Noguchi, for her “masquerade” (to use the language of that linked timeline), but I don’t have the Google-fu to dig that referenced article up.
All of that said, I think it’s ridiculous to go into a book like this with the expectations and standards we have for books today. And I don’t just mean expectations about race and Strong Female Characters TM and gender relations—I mean even just the construction of the narrative itself. Authors in 1907 were writing to meet different expectations than they would be today. One of the more obvious examples of this might be the shift in narrative distance that’s come to be regarded as acceptable in third-person narration, but also things like suspension of disbelief, the role of luck and coincidence in a plot, characterization, etc. etc.
The clues about Taro and Yuki’s relationship are there for readers to pick up on, but the suspension of disbelief required to accept that plot twist is a big ask. Taro’s death makes no sense on a surface level reading (he faints and hits his head and then…wastes away from a mysterious illness?) and is equally baffling from a plot perspective, since there’s no action or realization it prompts within Bigelow. Nor would Taro’s survival have impeded Bigelow in any way in his quest to find Yuki. The whole episode feels like nothing more than a melodramatic flourish to no purpose. Omatsu, Taro and Yuki’s mother, appears for a while during Taro’s lingering Mystery Illness, and Bigelow swears to look after her like she was his own mother, but then she gets shunted off to her own parents and never appears again.
To a modern reader, all those aspects and more are enough to make A Japanese Nightingale stylistically passé, never mind how completely unappealing a character and hero Jack Bigelow is in the Year of Our Lord 2023 or whether or not the depiction of Japan and Japanese characters is ProblematicTM and if so to what extent. Even though the book was by all accounts at least moderately popular in its time (it was turned into a stage play, and then a movie), it’s so “of its time” that the appeal today is one of historical curiosity rather than rip-roaring good yarn.
Oh! This was a translation, after all. Is there anything interesting I can share about Hilda Löwenhielm?
Not really. She was a teacher and a translator and died in 1927. Never married, no children. Well, cool.
The story itself may be underwhelming, but it at least it was delivered in a singularly attractive package that can serve a much more aesthetically pleasing purpose as an objet d’art.
*Onoto Watanna, what a wonderful phrase! Onoto Watanna, it ain’t no passing craze! It means no worries for the rest of your days. It’s our problem-free philosophy: Onoto Watanna!
I rescued this book from a “free to take” box along the sidewalk after a run sometime in summer 2020? 2021? What is time? Along with Miss Marples sista fall, because I can never say no to a free book, especially if it’s Agatha Christie.
There’s a Rian Johnson Tweet somewhere about how Christie’s novels are anything but formulaic and how she used the mystery novel as a front for experimenting in all kinds of other genres:
Something I love about Agatha Christie is how she never tread water creatively. I think there’s a misperception that her books use the same formula over and over, but fans know the opposite is true. It wasn’t just settings or murder methods, she was constantly stretching the genre conceptually. Under the umbrella of the whodunnit she wrote spy thrillers, proto-slasher horrors, serial killer hunts, gothic romances, psychological character studies, glam travelogues.
This element of Christie’s writing eluded me in my middle school whodunnit phase, but I think you can forgive a 12-year-old for not considering the finer points of genres like spy thrillers.
This quote came to mind as I was reading Döden till mötes (Appointment With Death), as did the fact that Christie rather famously couldn’t abide her fan-favorite protagonist. Appointment With Death came out in 1938, so there were still other Poirot books and stories to come, but already you can see Christie sidelining the Belgian detective as much as possible in order to tell another story.
Most of the book happens without Poirot present and, as Johnson’s observation above suggests, is a combination of gothic romance (the mysterious and alluring Raymond Boynton trapped by a domineering stepmother and protagonist Sarah King’s determination to rescue him) and glam travelogue (Christie’s eye for character is also turned to the landscapes of Jerusalem and Petra). And as far as that story goes, it’s…fine but dated. Anything set in Jerusalem these days is just going to come across as oof, to use a technical term. Even without the “aged like milk” setting, there’s a lot of surface-level psychoanalysis from the French psychologist Dr. Gerard that is meant to be narratively sound, and maybe even came across as reasonable and plausible in 1938, but today reads like pompous buffoonery.
On the other hand, Christie has a few conversations and observations that are still timely 80-odd years later. I don’t remember her roasting women quite so thoroughly in other books, but it’s been a while since I’ve read any so who can say. We have the tyrannical murder victim, Mrs. Boynton, who is quickly established as a vile and hideous creature through and through (the book never lets us forget that she’s fat!)*; we have the tiresome but accomplished Lady Westholme who is constantly the butt of everyone’s jokes, both for her domineering personality as well as her unattractive looks (powerful Hillary Clinton energy); and scatter-brained Miss Pierce is more or less dismissed by everyone. The golden mean of all three of these seems to be protagonist Sarah King, who can neither abide the airheaded Miss Pierce but who also finds Lady Westholme too much. As a result, King feels like a mouthpiece for Christie’s own opinions about women’s place in the world.
As for the whodunnit itself, it’s clever (to be expected!) but not as satisfying as other Christie novels. Some bits I untangled right away; other asides are dropped in that sound like they’re set up for a big reveal, but ultimately they just fizzle and go nowhere.
The Swedish translation is a job well done, though perhaps it’s easier to convey Agatha Christie in Swedish than Elmore Leonard. Regardless, Einar Thermaenius succeeded where Einar Heckscher failed; while my copy was fairly old, even new Swedish editions of Agatha Christie today are often still Thermaenius’s translation (his translation of The ABC Murders from 1938 saw an eleventh printing in 2015). Even “new translations” of Thermaenius (and others) are more often new edits of old translations rather than entirely new translations. Why mess with perfection?
*And a weird postscript to that. The English book covers all have covers that feature the landscape, elements of the plot, or spooky murder imagery unrelated to the actual story. It took a fair bit of scrolling to find one older example of a cover featuring Mrs. Boynton herself, and then rendered fairly neutrally:
It took me zero seconds and zero scrolling to find much less flattering Swedish portrayals of Mrs. Boynton:
This is the year of me obsessively reading Marguerite Duras (in French), for mostly circumstantial reasons.
She has plenty of relatively short novels.
They are available from the Stockholm library, along with Swedish translations.
Did I mention they’re short?
Compared to Moderato cantabile or Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia, there’s a lot that actually happens in Dix heures et demie.
Maria and her husband Pierre, along with their (mutual?) friend Claire and their daughter Judith, are a French couple on vacation in Spain. Inclement weather forces them to stay at a small village, where their lives quickly become entwined with that of a man who has just murdered his nineteen-year-old wife and her lover. At the same time, the sexual tension between Pierre and Claire ratchets up to eleven—all while Maria seems just as drawn to Claire as her husband is.
Like Les petits chevaux, I read the French original in parallel with the Swedish translation (one section in French, then in Swedish, then in French again). There appears to be only one Swedish translation, the one from Ingmar Forsström. (A different translator than Les petits chevaux, Suzanne Palme, but equally skilled.) There’s not much to find online about him except that Wikipedia entry, not even a paywalled obituary. Dead at 40 years old, a stone’s throw from where I currently live. Memento mori, etc.
Do I even like Duras? She has an eye for landscape and weather, and weaves them deftly into the plot to lend tension to what is otherwise just brooding, unhappy people who drink like fish. The fact that she can instill such a sense of foreboding in the reader when so little actually happens in any given story is remarkable. I respect that. But her brooding, unhappy characters are also seen at such a distance that they’re hard to really distinguish. These aren’t books I viscerally enjoy, in the sense that I find the characters interesting or relatable or very complexly sketched. But for mood and for technical skill (and for language practice) you could do a lot, lot worse.
