In a look behind the scenes of international publishing, translators discuss some of the most popular Scandinavian novels to come to the United States. Excerpt from the program on November 8, 2011.

STEVEN T. MURRAY, Translator, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

TIINA NUNNALLY, Translator, Smilla’s Sense of Snow

In conversation with SEDGE THOMSON, Radio Host, “West Coast Live”

 

THOMSON: How did you meet? You’re a married couple, [and] you translate all these amazing books from around the world.

NUNNALLY: I was working for Scandinavian Airlines in Seattle, but before that, I had studied at the University [of Washington] in Scandinavian Studies. I was working on a doctorate, and I went to a conference on Scandinavian literature to hear someone else who happened to be on the same panel as Steve. Afterward, he had talked about running a small press, so I went and asked him for a job as a translator, and he was not interested at all.

THOMSON: In the work, or the person?

NUNNALLY: I wasn’t too sure. But then I was speaking Danish to another guest. Steve told me afterward that it was because I spoke such good Danish that he decided to ask me out for lunch.

THOMSON: How many languages do you know fluently, Steven?

MURRAY: I know all the Germanic ones pretty much, Spanish, and a little Russian.

THOMSON: [Let’s talk about your company,] Fjord Press. You had a very exhilarating time working as an independent publisher before – I think as you put it – you decided to let somebody else bother about the printing and distribution of the books.

MURRAY: Well, I hadn’t thought of calling it exhilarating. It was certainly expensive.

THOMSON: But what did you hope to do with that press?

MURRAY: We wanted to bring in some new, mainly Danish, authors, a few German, that nobody had ever heard of, and then we got into doing the classics. We just rifled the classics of Scandinavian literature as much as we could, because they were public domain and we didn’t have to pay anybody for the rights. That was just ideal for a small press.

NUNNALLY: We never made any money at Fjord Press. But since then, we’ve had to acquire a business sense, because translators don’t have agents, so we have to negotiate all of our own contracts.

THOMSON: I remember being in a reading group [with] a group of writers in the 1980s and reading Smilla’s Sense of Snow. In a way, the author kind of freaked out to find himself on the world stage, didn’t quite understand what you were doing in the translation. What are the issues when you bring somebody’s work into, in essence, sort of an alien land, an alien landscape?

NUNNALLY: We always like to say that our first loyalty is to the book. Not even to the author, certainly not to the publisher, and maybe not even to the reader. Our first loyalty is to the book, because we have to give you the book in English. It’s a very big responsibility, because if you have a poor translation, you can ruin an author’s chances to come out into the world. We’re talking about so-called “small” languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian. For those authors to get into English is a very big deal. All of a sudden, they have a huge audience instead of just, you know, several million people who can read their books.

We like to say that it’s kind of like a musician playing a piece. It’s an art. It’s definitely an art; it’s not a science. So we have to listen to the music of the book, and hope that we can then convey it to you as the reader, as close as possible to that original sound that we had in our head when we read it.

THOMSON: Smilla’s Sense of Snow, [known in the United States] by that title, was called what in the UK?

NUNNALLY: In the UK, it was called Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which is actually closer to the original Danish title but does not sound quite so good in English as Smilla’s Sense of Snow, at least in my opinion.

THOMSON: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was in the original Swedish… ?

MURRAY: Men Who Hate Women – which is really the theme of the whole trilogy.

THOMSON: How was that title of the book received – with the idea of coming to, say, an American or an English audience?

MURRAY: Well, obviously, the British publisher did not receive it well. He probably thought it sounded like Men Are from Mars or some kind of self-help book, or maybe a psycho-babble book. He decided he wanted to have a series with the girl going through – instead of women, of course, it had to be the girl – and so he took the second title, which really was The Girl Who Played with Fire, and he altered the first and third titles to fit the series idea.

THOMSON: The third title about the hornets’ nest [originally] was something about the castle in the air collapsing?

MURRAY: Actually, it was something like, The Castle in the Air that Was Blown Up.

NUNNALLY: That doesn’t work.

MURRAY: Kind of an unwieldy title.

THOMSON: How did you first come in touch with the publishers? Were [you] sought out to translate the trilogy?

MURRAY: I had known the foreign rights head at [Swedish publishing house] Norstedts in Stockholm for many years. We had worked together but never found a project we could work together on. Then they got a brand new foreign rights manager, and then these books came in – just fell into their lap; soon thereafter, Stieg Larsson died, and they also sold the movie rights to Yellow Bird Films in Ystad. I think Henning Mankell is one of the partners there. [Swedish writer Mankell, author of the popular Kurt Wallander series of mystery novels, was a founder of Yellow Bird Films. – Ed.]

THOMSON: Ystad is the setting for the Wallander mysteries, a kind of a coincidence you must have enjoyed.

MURRAY: Yeah. I had done three of Henning Mankell’s mysteries before that, so they knew who I was. They called up and said, “We need three books translated really fast. How fast can you do them?” I said, “How long are they?” They said, “Oh, 600, 700 pages each. Can you do them in three months?” I said, “No. How about nine?”

THOMSON: You’ve described them as a stack of 2,700 pages.

MURRAY: Yeah; in manuscript.

THOMSON: When you first took a look at this manuscript, at what point did you feel, “This is a really fine story. This is going to be good,” and do you leaf through the manuscript looking at what problems might be ahead, or do you just sort of take it on?

MURRAY: Not at all. I just read a few chapters, see if it’s a style that I can replicate, something I’d be comfortable doing. [With the Larsson novels,] I read maybe 150 pages, and I was totally hooked, like most people.

THOMSON: Did you read it at the same time, Tiina?

NUNNALLY: No. Since we do the same languages – it’s really fortunate – we can edit each other’s work. So I didn’t read it until Steve had finished the first draft, really.

THOMSON: How did he describe it as you were going along, over breakfast?

NUNNALLY: The one thing that we both thought about Stieg Larsson’s writing is that he had a very American – not so much attitude but American way of writing, of expressing himself. The Swedish was so close to American English that we thought, “This will be really good in American English.”

MURRAY: Yeah, [Larsson] was a big expert on American science fiction and mysteries. Not having met him, I don’t know, but definitely from his writing, he loved to use American phrases, which he threw into the book in Swedish. Now they’re invisible, of course, because it’s all in English.

THOMSON: There are certain words that show up in the book like forsooth and anon, and so on.

MURRAY: Not mine! Not gallimaufry, either.

THOMSON: So what were these words doing in a book that you translated?

MURRAY: Those were inserted by the British editor, who is from Scotland originally, so he has a few archaic notions about what sounds good. Forsooth – I mean, who says that? Actually, I did find out later that they do say “See you anon” in Scotland. It’s still a word that’s in use, amazingly enough.

THOMSON: How did that relationship go? You’ve worked through 2,700 pages; you have a sense of how the book is to sound, the tone, where you place the language; and then you find out that somebody’s been changing words behind your back?

MURRAY: Well, that didn’t happen for at least six months afterward, after I heard that a British publisher had bought it instead of an American that I had hoped would buy it and retain the American flavor. He sent me 135 pages with his editing and said, “Take a look at this. What do you think?” I just totally hated most of it, so I said, “Well, this is going to be a problem.”

THOMSON: So what did you do about it? What could you do about it?

MURRAY: Actually, I made a mistake there. I didn’t write back immediately and say I hated it. I just let it ride, waiting for the rest to show up. It didn’t show up, and in August they emailed me and said, “We’re going to the printer next week.” I said, “What? I haven’t seen the rest!” They said, “We assumed that you approved of it, since you didn’t say anything about the sample.” I said, “Unfortunately, I didn’t.”

THOMSON: So there was a change that you made, then, for your own interests, about the translator’s name.

MURRAY: Oh, yeah. Well, we went back and forth, trying to figure out what to do about this, and he said he could give me 10 days to look over the first 700 pages and argue about every tiny thing he had changed. I said, “You know, I have another book due in two weeks, so I don’t have time to do this.” Eventually I just said, “Forget it. I’m just going to have to use a pseudonym,” because this, to me, doesn’t represent my work, and I have a reputation to protect, and as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t represent Stieg’s tone, which I had found to be very American.

THOMSON: What name did you choose?

MURRAY: I chose Reg Keeland. We had done a book in the early ’90s, our first Swedish translation. It was a thriller, and a large, nameless New York house had edited about a fourth to a third of it out. They thought the author was too repetitive. You know, they took out stuff that “didn’t matter,” like the main character’s motivation. We made up a name for that one, Thomas Keeland, because we were embarrassed to say this was a translation; it was just a version.

Keeland comes from our hometowns, the last syllables thereof: Milwaukee, and Oakland. There you go.

THOMSON: Tina, you sometimes write under the name of Felicity David.

NUNNALLY: Felicity David is one of my translator pseudonyms. We don’t like having pseudonyms, because we think that translators should get credit for their work, and we work hard to get credit for translators. But occasionally we do feel like we have to take our names off the book if it doesn’t represent our work, if it’s something serious like that.

THOMSON: You translated a Nobel Prize laureate and changed, really, the reputation of this writer, who had been translated into very archaic, almost Middle Age language – as in [the] Middle Ages – and you brought it up to date in some way that sort of revivified [it]. Could you tell us about this writer?

NUNNALLY: This is Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian woman writer, one of the very few women writers to win the Nobel Prize – I think there are only twelve so far. So I was really disappointed to see how badly her work was represented in English. Steve was the one who pointed it out to me; he said, at one point years ago, “Have you ever looked at Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter and how it’s actually written in Norwegian?” I said, “No.” So I looked at it, and I was just appalled. The original translators decided that – since it’s set in medieval times, in Norway – that the language should reflect that in some way, and [that] it should sound archaic. But that is not how Sigrid Undset wrote it. She writes this beautifully clear, straightforward Norwegian.

For years, people have told me that they just couldn’t read that book, even though they thought they should, because she won the Nobel Prize. So I was really thrilled when Penguin called me up out of the blue and asked me if I would do a new translation. I know it’s a lot closer [to the original Norwegian text], and I hope that people can see that. There’s a really interesting debate on Amazon between the readers about the old versus the new Kristin Lavransdatter translation. Some people absolutely hate my version of it, and say that I’ve “modernized” it. If you read Norwegian, you know I haven’t modernized it; I’ve actually just brought it closer to the way it was.

THOMSON: Can I give an example? “But elsewhere in the Dale ‘twas not the use for the master’s womenfolk of the great manors to abide themselves at the sæters. Kristin knew that if she did it, there would be talk and wonderment about the folks. ‘In God’s name, then, they must even talk. Sure it was that they that gossiped about her and hers whether or no.’”

NUNNALLY: You can hardly read it.

THOMSON: Read us your translation.

NUNNALLY: “But elsewhere it wasn’t customary for the women of the gentry on the large estates to go up to the pastures. Kristin knew that if she did so, people would be surprised and would gossip about it.”

THOMSON: So which, in your view, then, is authentic, and represents the book?

NUNNALLY: There’s no question about it. That’s probably the worst translation I have ever read, the original English translation of Kristin Lavransdatter. It doesn’t make any sense to me, because the translators had to first translate it from Norwegian into their own modern English, and then they had to take another step and translate it into this archaic language which they made up. It’s not even a real medieval language, which would have been [at least] a better choice.

MURRAY: It’s like a fake Elizabethan, really.

NUNNALLY: Yes. It was a totally fake, artificial language. I once wrote an essay comparing translation to art restoration; it’s kind of like you try to get rid of the old dirt and dust that’s accumulated on some of these classics, which were poorly translated originally, and hope that you can get down to the real painting so you can show people what it’s supposed to be.