Opening pages

Practicing my Swedish... translations of the opening pages of four of the (fairly random) Swedish books I've picked up over the years.

*

The wooden coffin is unpainted and placed on two stools in the middle of the kitchen floor, while the lid leans against a folded gate-leg table just next to the window. In the coffin lies the Swedish-American, dressed in his American army uniform.

The face is bare, with closed eyes but with mouth slightly open, and in one corner of the mouth there's a trace of powder that should manage to stave off decay for a few more hours.

The uniform jacket is buttoned right up to the throat. One can't see that the uniform is American, because from the second highest button down a white sheet covers his breast, arms and hands. But at heart level lies a miniature American flag, giving colour to all that white.

Why he has chosen to rest for ever dressed up in that way, none of the people in the room know. They are thirteen, the dead included. Six children and seven adults.

She who lived with him these last years, and bore him two children, stands nearest, somewhat bowed over the coffin, in a moment of stillness over him. She holds the two youngest children in her arms and ruckles her grey blouse, but her black skirt curves in to her waist as abruptly as if she's holding her breath and shows she's still young, for all that she's had five children.

The three others that are not his stand a little to one side,   ...

(From Dagsmeja by Bo R. Holmberg (1989). The title means day-thaw, i.e. thawing during the day and refreezing at night, common towards the end of winter. This story is set in a village in Ångermanland, in northern Sweden.)


*


Bus number 2013 departs Alexandria on squealing tyres. It's rained all night. The asphalt glitters in the morning sun. Against the light it looks like the street-sweeper is sweeping a lake.

It's only when we leave the city that we understand how big it is. Halts at an endless number of bus stations. A seller gets on, cries his wares, jumps off, is replaced by another. The industries and suburbs of this city of six million people lie between dams, ditches and canals, linked together by viaducts and roads lined with advertising billboards. Alexandria floats on the water of Africa's interior.

We roll out on a four-lane coast road that leads via El Alamein to Marsa Marruh, then south-west through the Libyan desert to Siwa; the same route that Alexander took exactly 2,335 years ago, when he wanted the Oracle of Amon to confirm his divine extraction.

It isn't the first time we've crossed the world-conqueror's indistinct path. For several years he has mocked us with his shadow. Fully read up and full of expectancy we've searched for signs and traces that witness to his former presence. Like outside the town of Gorgan in Iran, on the border with Turkmenistan, a stone's throw from the Caspian Sea. Here we sat for a whole day with drawn-up knees in the back seat of a Paykan taxi, crossing the flat-as-a-pancake landscape, staring like two owls out towards the horizon for Sadd-é Eskandar -- Alexander's wall. Ali, the young man who drove us, was an unemployed limnologist, specializing in the inland sea's flora and fauna. He had never heard any mention of the wall that our English guidebook so clearly indicated. ...

(From Café Musa: Egyptian Journeys by Tomas Andersson and Stefan Foconi (2007).)

limnologist -- studies inland aquatic ecosystems.
Paykan -- make of car, manufactured in Iran between 1967 and 2005.


*


"Here is a lad who has five barley loaves and two fishes; but what good is that among so many?"
                                                                                                                         John 6:9.


OF THE LIFE OF ANGELS

                Each year the lily stems bear
                their white flowering splendour.
                But if there weren't any angels
                who should then round the Throne
                better than lilies keep watch?
                For still vibrates the silver tone
                of the world's first choir,
                the white procession
                       that never dies.


OF THE LIFE OF ANGELS

Of the life of angels, of the service of God
    a psalm of praise, a song of penance.
Our harp is the wind -- who orders its sound?
Who raises, when the guard walks with the baton,
its curbed word like a lark's trill to the skies?
    What touches us with the seraphs' wings,
when the prison walls set bounds to our sight?
     -- Accompanied by menaces are the sounds
of the life of angels, of the service of God
    a psalm of praise, a song of penance.   ...


(From Five Barley Loaves and Two Fishes / Fem kornbröd och två fiskar by Hjalmar Gullberg (1942; eighth edition 1950).)


*


Foreword to the second edition

I've given birth to two children and I'm currently expecting my third. The first time was in 1985, I was 28 and was the first of my friends to have a baby. This was before the baby boom, which came a bit later, at the end of the 1980s. My world up to that point had been filled with travel and work and relations with other people without any children, and I was neither very informed about pregnancy nor very prepared for delivery.

The nine months were long and heavy. I had ten different midwives and didn't get to know any of them. And they in turn didn't even learn my name. I was three weeks overdue. The baby should have been born on the 19th of January if the midwives and doctor were correct. On the 13th of February I was taken in to the delivery unit. My delivery was to be artificially induced, I was told (and I went along with that and everything else). But most things went wrong and just two days later my baby was born by acute Caesarian section. What I recall most clearly about those nightmare days of delivery is all the medical students who came and went in my room, so as to see with their own eyes this especially unusual case.

My baby was a happy, curious, hungry and well-formed little girl. But it took some time for her mum to recover.

(From 100 Questions and Answers If You're Expecting a Baby by Anneli Rogeman (1990; second edition 1994).)

"och jag fann mig i detta ..." -- " and I went along with that..." (lit. and I found myself in that).  I found this the most troublesome expression in all these four pages. It wasn't in my dictionaries (or in Google Translate). I followed the usual procedure: guess the meaning from context, then check it by doing a search for other uses of the same expression...