Translating Swedish

 

I've had a go at changing the blog colours -- for laptop users, not smartphones --, because someone told me that they found it tiring to read green on green. (That's also what the deleted comment is about -- I needed to check the comment colours.)

*

This is an idle follow-up post to my recent translation efforts, both of texts from the early twentieth century:

Selma Lagerlöf, "The Servant-Spirit" (Tjänsteanden) (1911):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2021/01/selma-lagerlof-attendant-spirit.html

Edith Södergran, poems from Dikter (1916):
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/12/i-saw-tree-edith-sodergran.html

That said, nearly all of these remarks are prompted by Tjänsteanden.

I didn't set out to do a free translation, but I'm always taken aback by how free I end up having to be. Swedish after all is a near relation to English, compared with most other languages. Yet it's remarkable the number of phrases that won't translate straightforwardly; the number of places where I found myself circling wider and wider from literalness in an effort to catch the right tone and to let the story flow. 

*

Swedish uses a number of subtle intensifiers, words such as ju and visst  (approximately "indeed" and "surely"). The effect can be nearly intangible and inexpressible in English, but it's there, providing a liveliness to the sentence, expressing the speaker's feelings and how the action is to be interpreted. Often I've translated them, but just as often I felt I didn't need to: the English sentence stood up without them. And now and then, in other places, I felt compelled to intrude an English intensifier of my own, a "sheer" or "utter" or "absolutely", when a literal translation lacked the necessary vigour. 

*

But it was not just about intensifiers. A labouring translator tends to be excessively aware of sentences in the original text that are somewhat tautologous -- and Swedish can certainly have that tendency -- , words I could safely ignore because they weren't really adding anything to the meaning. Yet there were other times when I felt compelled to do just the opposite, to include additional bits of English not because they were needed for the sense but because in English these words follow on so naturally that withholding them draws attention. 

Stories flow. Sentences are weighted and a story needs to balance them, to keep it all afloat. 

*

Translation is about clichés, to some extent. In a story such as this it's not about avoiding them. It's about using the right ones at the right time. These clichés, or proverbial expressions, are part of the common language, they are simply the correct way of saying things -- not according to august bodies or academies but according to ordinary communities. For example, during the shoe-making contest:

Med detta blev de färdiga lika snart båda två . . .

At this point were they finished equally soon both two

I think virtually everyone trying to re-express this in natural English would find themselves using the same phrase I did:

At this point they were neck and neck . . .

"Neck and neck" is simply the right way to express this idea. It's there to be used! 

But at the same time one must be cautious. One mustn't get so addicted to snatching at proverbial expressions that the text looks like a patchwork. And should you use a cliché in the wrong context or when it isn't a perfect fit, it really stands out. You'll get funny looks at the local pub, and from your reader too.

*

Swedish word-order is different from English, though not as different as German. The verb always comes second, so I morgon går jag till banken,  literally "tomorrow go I to the bank" isn't a stylistic inversion but mandatory. 

Re-sequencing here is a simple matter, but I found I was changing the word order a lot more than that. For all sorts of reasons, but basically to keep the sentences flowing lucidly, to avoid clottedness or ambiguity or long suspensions between words that English likes to keep together.

*

Regional accents or dialect are always a problem for the translator. How many times have I seen e.g. Gascon rendered in broad Yorkshire or Scots, and it never goes well. In this case Selma Lagerlöf herself didn't make much use of regional expressions. Nevertheless when translating provincial stories such as this one it's tempting to draw on local English expressions to convey a certain colour, but I've resisted it as much as possible. There are a couple in the text ("See here, Krus Erik. . ." or "he didn't rightly know") but only when they carried no particular special regional implication and I felt they emerged absolutely naturally. 

In general I found the best thing was to have the characters speak in fairly neutral but not too literary English. To hope to make the characters live "not by a caricatured and exaggerated use of . . . dialect, but by their habits, manners, and feelings" (Scott).

I used expressions that wouldn't have been current in 1911; I had to convey how I understood the story, in the language that I had. I tried to avoid the obtrusively modern. But I took the view that although the life depicted in the story is very different from ours in obvious respects yet most of its important elements still exist. Teenage boys are still self-centred and are still put upon and judged by others and still aspire to a life beyond what their circumstances allow. The world is still full of Konstantins. 

*

Swedish has two words (men, utan) that both translate to the same word in English: but. And Swedes often form sentences by chaining the two together: a men clause followed by an utan clause. These sentences always bring pain to the English translator because in English it's ugly and confusing to have two but clauses in succession. Here's an example, from the second paragraph of the story:

Det var höst, och solen var nergången för längesedan,

It was autumn, and the sun had gone down long since,

men vandringen gick inte fördenskull fram i mörker,

but (men) the walking did not go for that reason forward in darkness,

utan genom klar luft och månsken. 

but (utan) through clear air and moonlight.

Here's what I ended up with:

It was autumn, and the sun had gone down long ago, though that didn't mean they were walking in the dark, but through clear air and moonlight.

It was the best I could do, but the awkwardness is apparent. 

*

It's taken me a while to realize that Swedish is relatively chary when it comes to possessive pronouns. Hence in this story where the text has  mästarn ("the master") modern ("the mother") systern ("the sister") händerna ("the hands") fötterna ("the feet"), the best translation is often "his master", "his mother", "his sister", "his hands", "his feet". 

Before I grasped this, I was apt to read into the story a certain distance between master and apprentice or mother and son that, confusingly, was indeed there but not to the extent I at first imagined. 

*

Primarily I use, of course, the treasured Esselte dictionary that my Swedish grandmother gave me fifty years ago, a gift that in my mind has become a lifelong mission. 

But I also used Google Translate quite a lot, more than perhaps I should admit. Though all its results are to be scrutinized with caution, it can be useful when the dictionary won't play, e.g. for an unfamiliar form of an irregular verb, or an idiom that's only sprung up in the last few decades. 

The other thing that can help, as I've mentioned before, is to use Google searches to find the problematic word or phrase being used in other Swedish texts, which may shed light on what it means and how it's used. (I use Ecosia as my everyday search engine, because I like the tree-planting and the lack of "sponsored" results, but I must concede that for this kind of foreign-language search Google is far more effective.)

The essential online tool, though, is the Svenska Akademiens Ordbok (SAOB), the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, but free to access. (Not being very fluent in Swedish, I often paste its definitions into Google Translate to work out what it's trying to tell me.)