As Different as Night and Day

On December 10, 2022, the Ocean City Free Public Library sponsored a live online talk with bestselling Swedish author Fredrik Backman. If you were lucky enough to have heard about it and attended, you came away, no doubt, feeling that you’d experienced a lively and informative hour-plus discussion.

I am extremely fond of Fredrik Backman’s fiction. I am one of the moderators of Mercer County Library’s Facebook Book Discussion Group and Backman is kinda the unofficial patron saint of our group. So far, we have discussed four of his books—A Man Called Ove; My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry; Anxious People; and And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer—and not one has disappointed. It goes without saying we will be featuring other works of his in future meetings.

When Fredrik Backman speaks, I, for one, listen.

In the course of that December discussion, Backman namechecked a fellow Swedish author: Niklas Natt och Dag, whose last name, unless the short bio on the dustjacket of his novel is lying to me, translates as “Night and Day”. (I mention this for no particular reason; it’s just a fun fact.) My ears perked up. Backman didn’t merely mention Natt och Dag—he called him “the most gifted writer that I know of my generation”!

Another Swedish author who writes like Backman! thought I. I am sooooo there!

Let this be a lesson: Never make facile assumptions like the one I made above. Backman never claimed Natt och Dag wrote like him. In fact, it would be difficult to find an author whose writing and world view are less like Fredrik Backman’s than Niklas Natt och Dag’s, even if you set out to create such an author from scratch in your home laboratory with your Junior Frankenstein Brand^TM mad scientist toolkit. The two are as different as Natt och Dag, you might say … though I wouldn’t recommend it. People will groan and give you the side-eye and quite possibly make rude mock-regurgitation noises at you, implying your humor is so bad it makes them want to vomit. (Everyone’s a critic.)

This is not to say that Natt och Dag is not a good writer—he most emphatically is. Backman specifically praises his debut novel, The Wolf and the Watchman (published to an unsuspecting Swedish audience under the innocuous title 1793, which gives no hint as to its disturbing subject matter), which was widely lauded and even named the best Swedish debut of 2017. No wonder Backman loves it.

But here is our library catalog’s restrained description of its plot:

When a mutilated corpse is discovered in a local swamp, watchman Mikel Cardell and lawyer Cecil Winge comb the underworld of eighteenth-century Stockholm to unmask a murderer before a young workhouse laborer becomes the next victim.

Not exactly Backmanesque. But that description doesn’t really do the book’s horror quotient justice. These paragraphs from an NPR review are slightly more to-the-point:

Niklas Natt och Dag's The Wolf and the Watchman … opens with a gruesome discovery: a hideously mutilated corpse floating in a filthy lake. The victim's eyes, tongue, teeth, arms and legs have all been systematically and slowly removed. What follows is a quest to discover both the identity of the victim and of the killer.

It's the late 1700s in Stockholm, which means there's no forensic specialist to phone, and the detective work is left to Mickel Cardell, an alcoholic, disabled ex-soldier, and Cecil Winge, a consumptive lawyer. Together, they give the reader a tour of the underbelly of the city. Sordid [doesn't] even begin to describe the world the characters in this book navigate…. There's murder and mutilation, but there are also beatings, rape, alcoholism, disease, corrupt authorities, theft, espionage, prostitution, executions and more.

The “and more” is doing some heavy lifting in that last sentence: The Wolf and the Watchman also features child abuse, torture, incest, incestuous rape, and a human flesh-eating dog-monster.

I innocently began reading The Wolf and the Watchman with the vague idea of featuring it in a future meeting of the Facebook discussion group. Hey, it’s recommended by Fredrik Backman—must be great family entertainment, right? I got no more than ten pages in when I realized the novel's subject matter and tone were quite different from Backman’s; and probably no more than fifty pages in when I concluded, uh…no, we wouldn’t be reading this title in our group. (The Prime Directive of our discussion group is: Don’t psychologically traumatize group members unnecessarily.)

Two of my colleagues^[1] also attended the Backman talk and, being big fans of Backman’s writing as well, decided to read Watchman based on his recommendation. Knowing the sensibilities and sensitivities of one of those two, I warned her not to even start the novel if she ever wanted to have a good night’s sleep again. Backman’s fiction is set in the relatively sedate (i.e., torture- and perversion-free) world of everyday life; while Natt och Dag’s characters inhabit a terrifying historic hellscape teeming with unspeakable horrors. Natt och Dag’s vision is more akin to Richard Bachman’s than Fredrik Backman’s. Or to put it another way, Niklas Natt och Dag is like Stephen King if Stephen King knew how to write^[2]. I have nothing against horror as a genre, but I’m not a fan of it myself, and The Wolf and the Watchman is disturbing in a way that only horror writing can be. But it is well-written.

But wait. How can I know that? This whole episode got me thinking…I am not experiencing Natt och Dag’s writing directly, because the version of his story that I read was translated from the Swedish sooo…how much of it is him? How much is a reflection of choices made by the translator? A version of these questions occurs to me any time I read a work in translation. You necessarily lose something when you read a work in translation.

One of my great regrets in life is that I never mastered a second language. Bilingual foax have a window into an almost entirely different world. I am reminded of this every time I and my wife (who is fluent in Spanish) watch a TV show or movie that has Spanish dialog in it. Almost invariably, she will point out things that the translation written at the bottom of the screen is either getting wrong or omitting.

Submitted for your consideration: On January 3, 2023, this was the Final Jeopardy question on the game show Jeopardy!:

Early in her career she translated romance novels into Spanish, often changing the dialogue to make the heroines smarter.

The answer, of course, was: Who is Isabel Allende?

Allende was fired for doing this, probably rightly, though can you really blame her for wanting to make insipid female characters slightly more interesting?

Point is, this is an example of the translator putting a heavy thumb on the scales—deliberately changing the author’s version of a character. But the changes that happen during translation don’t have to be intentional, or politically (or otherwise) motivated. They could be quite innocent.

Let’s say you are a translator charged with translating an English language text into French, and you run across the English idiom dog-eat-dog world. You know of no equivalent idiom in French. The phrase “monde de chien-mange-chien” would probably just leave your French readers scratching their têtes even though that is the literal translation. Sure, that's a possible translation, but it would be a pretty lazy one and a pretty bad one, as well, right?

So what do you, as a conscientious translator, do?

You probably try to find a French idiom that means approximately the same thing. Or you translate the passage into a non-idiomatic French phrase that accurately expresses the meaning of “dog-eat-dog world”. But this leads to other possible issues. What if the English source text is a poem, and the rhythm, cadence, and meter of your choice of equivalent French phrase matters? You’d need to choose a phrase that reflects those imperatives, too, wouldn’t you? Maybe, in some cases, even sacrifice meaning, to an extent, to preserve the meter and the rhythm. This may sound outlandish, and maybe it is, but keep in mind that James Joyce maintained that the sound of the words in his famously difficult novel Finnegans Wake were more important than the meaning of the words:

“It’s all so simple. If anyone doesn’t understand a passage, all he need do is read it aloud,” said Joyce …. “Hearing it out loud sheds different light on it[.]”

For a translator of Finnegans Wake (or any poetic or highly rhythmic text, be it poetry or prose), capturing the rhythm of the original text might very well be paramount. It certainly is a valid approach to preserving the essence of the original.

And it’s not just translators who face such choices.

When I was in graduate school, I took an elective interdisciplinary course called An Introduction to Scholarly Editing to fulfill a requirement, and I expected the course to be a real snooze. It was, in fact, pretty fascinating, at least at times. The instructor, whose name I still remember—G. Thomas Tanselle—regaled me and the roughly four other people in the seminar with the various philosophies of and approaches to scholarly editing. And some of it was pretty darn gripping. I still remember the most engrossing example, one that, no kidding, had elements of mystery and intrigue to it that I never expected to encounter when I signed up for a seminar about editing.

There is a story in William Faulkner’s 1942 short story collection Go Down Moses titled “The Fire and the Hearth” which includes the sentence:

He would never forget it — that night of early spring following ten days of such rain that even the old people remembered nothing to compare it with, and the white man’s wife’s time upon her and the creek out of banks until the whole valley rose, bled a river choked with down timber and drowned livestock until not even a horse could have crossed it in the darkness to reach a telephone and fetch the doctor back.

And for quite a while—years—that is how the sentence was rendered: “the whole valley rose, bled a river choked with down timber….” Until a new edition of the book was being readied and an eagle-eyed scholarly editor went back to the original document upon which the earlier edition was based: William Faulkner’s typescript. And the typescript read thusly: “the whole valley rese,bled a river”. Obviously, “rese,bled” is a mistake. The original editor’s assumption was that Faulkner misspelled “rose” and, in his haste, left out a space after the comma, and so the editor made the conjectural emendation: “the whole valley rose, bled a river”—a vivid image which sounds very Faulknerian.

Except it’s almost certainly not what Faulkner intended.

Because the new editor noticed not just the “misspelling” of “rose” as “rese” and the “missing” space after the comma. He noticed something more relevant, viz., that the character next to the comma on a standard typewriter is the letter “m”. So, he reasoned, should I assume that Faulkner made two unrelated mistakes: the “e” for an “o” and a missing space? Or one? Did he mean to type an “m” instead of a comma? Because if it was the latter, what Faulkner meant to type was “the whole valley resembled a river choked with down timber….” It seems far, far more likely that that is what Faulkner meant to type.

But it also makes the sentence far more pedestrian. The valley rising and bleeding a river! Wow! That’s way better, far more poetic, than its merely resembling a river.

And at that point, Professor Tanselle pointed out that one philosophy of scholarly editing takes as its mandate the primacy of giving the reader the “best” version of the text, which might not, in the editor’s mind, coincide with what the author’s intention was. Tanselle himself adhered to the philosophy that the editor’s job is to come as close as possible to the author’s intention, which, itself, can involve a ton of pretty shaky guesswork for a number of reasons. For example, which version of the author’s document do you consider to be the “authoritative” one? The manuscript? The typescript? The version he sent to magazine A to have published in the spring of 1942? Or the version he sent to magazine B in the fall of that year? Or is it the published version that the author owned and made emendations in? Or is it some amalgamation of all of those versions?

It’s a thorny question to which there is no right answer. Settling on a correct Ur-text can be a bit hairy.

So one valid solution to the “rese,bled” dilemma above is…to keep it as “rose, bled” even if that was probably not the author’s intent. It’s the version everyone knew for years and…it just sounds way more Faulknerian than boring old “resembled”, doesn’t it? Doesn’t that make it the best version? A case can be made that it does.

Now spare a sympathetic thought for the poor scholarly editor faced with the task of editing a new, “definitive” edition of the novels and tales of Henry James. Because back in 1907, that job was offered to James himself and he went at it with gusto:

Toward the end of Henry James's career, Charles Scribner's Sons offered him the opportunity to publish his collected works in a single edition under the overall title The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909). Rather than simply reprint his fictional oeuvre, James entered into a massive work of self-monumentalization: revising the texts extensively [my emphasis]; writing prefaces that have become classic texts on prose aesthetics and the novelist's art; and omitting many works, among them some major novels [again my emphasis; this isn’t really relevant to my main point but I just find it mind-boggling that editor Henry James wanted to consign some of the major novels of author Henry James to the memory hole; author HJ probably should have punched editor HJ right in his stupid face].

The writing style of circa-1904 Henry James is denser and far more involuted than that of circa-1878 Henry James—or even circa-1890 Henry James. (Pick up a copy of Daisy Miller (1878) and compare the prose therein to the prose of The Golden Bowl (1904). What I mean will become immediately, jarringly apparent to you^[3].) Yet James rewrote massive swaths of his early work while “editing” it for the New York edition and, of necessity, those rewrites were in his later style.

Daisy Miller existed in its original form for decades before James revised it and altered its tone in 1909.

Which version should a new, 2023 edition be based on? The one reflecting the author’s circa-1878 intentions and writing style? Or the one reflecting his circa-1909 intentions and far denser writing style?

So you can see, even setting the goal for a new edition as “rendering the author’s intention” can be a thorny issue.

These may be issues worth thinking about whenever you read a work in translation or a new edition of a classic work. For example, the title page of Fredrik Backman’s latest novel, The Winners, informs us that it was translated by Neil Smith. But what do we know about this Smith character?

Turns out, if you look, you can find a bit about Smith^[4], including this interview, in which he pretty clearly lays out his translating philosophy early on:

Most of a translator’s time is spent trying to capture the meaning and the spirit of the book they’re translating, and transposing it into clear, accurate, readable English. Understanding the words is the easy part! The hardest is always finding a way to convey each author’s voice as faithfully as possible in another language.

I’m cool with that philosophy. It means, assuming Smith did his job well, that I am reading a version of, e.g., The Winners that was translated with the idea in mind of making it as close to the Swedish text as possible. Great!

Thank you for all your hard work, Mr. Smith! And Mr. Backman! And Mister Natt och Dag!

- by Tom G., Hopewell

^[1] Anna Van Scoyoc and Robert W. “Chuck” Nuse, whom you may recognize as the cohosts of MCL’s award-coveting podcast Behind the Books.

^[2] I know how this sounds, but I stand by my assessment that, though King is undeniably a popular writer, he is not a very good writer. YMMV.

^[3] H.G. Wells once remarked that reading late-career James was like watching a hippopotamus try to pick up a pea. Which is mean and funny and true. (I admit this despite being a devout fan of late-period Henry James.)

^[4] But be careful, because there are two translatin’ Neil Smiths out there and we want the non-Canadian one.