2013:2

‘Translator as superstar’ may sound an unlikely concept, but there was no other way to describe the mood at the recent visit to the London Review Bookshop by Edith Grossman, US translator of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and many other works from Spanish. With the profile of the profession on the rise, an increasing number of events are bringing together working literary translators, academics and/or publishing-house editors. As one example of this, the December 2012 issue of The Warwick Review resulted from a symposium that yielded highly approachable personal views from leading British literary translators such as Anthea Bell, Margaret Jull Costa and Tim Parks. Also recommended is the Summer 2013 issue of the UK Translators Association journal In Other Words, which offers insights from practising translators and many others in the ‘translation chain’.

This issue of SBR spotlights translation, too. We present the second in a series of translation workshop reports, revealing some of the cultural and linguistic pitfalls facing the literary translator from Swedish. We also present survey findings about the number of languages from which translators of ‘Scandinavian’ typically work, and hear from translators helping a new Swedish literary journal get onto its bilingual feet.

The Bookshelf section this autumn is the usual satisfying mix, particularly rich in fiction reviews, and the translated extracts in this issue are equally diverse.  The first translation, accompanied by an illuminating essay, is a set of pieces from the latest novel by veteran author Kerstin Ekman, 80 this year and still writing with the same verve, intelligence and mischievous wit as ever.  Where many Swedish authors today begin as literary writers and then take to crime writing, she went the opposite way, diversifying from her early detective fiction into an oeuvre of amazing breadth and quality.

An impassioned article on hospitals and patients, incorporating extracts from fiction by Kristian Petri and a documentary work by Maciej Zaremba, takes the lid off the distressing distortions caused by letting market forces rule European health services today.  Then there is a whimsical story from a prolific and popular author perhaps less known of late, Stig Claesson, and finally we have an intriguing extract from Mikael Niemi’s unusual thriller Fallwater, in which the ‘villain’ is an unstoppable force of nature.

In a further nod to the crime fiction phenomenon that has propelled some translators in the Nordic field rather closer to star status, we have an iconic cover image familiar to TV viewers and a piece from leading crime reviewer Barry Forshaw, hijacked from the mainstream to become what might be called ‘the voice of Nordic noir’ in the UK, about a new prize for translated Scandinavian crime fiction set up in memory of late colleague Maxine Clarke.