Translation in ... Norway

[BlogSpy]

In his 'The Week In Books'-column in The Independent Boyd Tonkin looks at Master builders of a global reputation, as he's impressed by the Norwegian commitment to spreading their literary words:

This comparatively lavish exposure to a small state's literary talent does not come about by accident. Norla, the state foundation that promotes Norwegian literature, has managed by shrewd encouragement of publishers and translators to amplify the nation's voice abroad. Not, of course, that it would ever cross the seas unless the quality of the raw material justified the voyage in the first place. It does.

(Quite a few of these authors are under review at the complete review; see the whole Scandinavian selection.)

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[hdw]

Thanks for these interesting links. It's important that non-crime stories also get an airing in the English-speaking world, for Norway-according-to-Nesb?-and-Fossum is a bleak place of teenage psychopaths and neo-Nazis.

I admit to reading Norwegian, Swedish and Icelandic crime fiction myself, but I do get fed-up with their sadistic obsession with the psychotic and the pathological.

And who am I to talk, from my Caledonian vantage-point? I've been studying the programme for the Edinburgh Book Festival (see thread started by Stewart), and Scotland seems to have more crime writers than the rest of Europe put together. And they're all coming to this year's festival.

Harry

[Stewart]

Scotland seems to have more crime writers than the rest of Europe put together.

It's that old adage, isn't it, saying write about what you know.

[hdw]

There speaks the true Glaswegian (OK, I lived there and thereabouts for several years myself!). This isn't the right place to talk about Scottish literature (it's not the right place to talk about translation either) but for the record it irritates that me that even writers from outside the usual Scottish urban centres are now writing nothing but violent crime stories. Can we please have another Muriel Spark, Neil Gunn, Robin Jenkins, Ian Crichton Smith, Fred Urquhart - Scottish writers who also wrote about "what they knew", and what they knew was how ordinary civilised non-knife-wielding Scots lived their lives. So much modern Scottish fiction is like the BBC Scotland 6.30 news bulletin - nothing but permutations on murder, rape, prisons and football.

A sudden thought - one of the current wave of Scottish crime writers is the daughter of my old secondary-school rector ["headmaster" in broad Sassenach]. To save her from the embarrassment of being the rector's daughter, he sent her to the poshest private girls' school in Scotland, from where she went on to one of the Oxbridge colleges. So where she gets her knowledge of crime and police procedure from, I don't know. Maybe from reading Ian Rankin.

Harry

[hdw]

In his 'The Week In Books'-column in The Independent Boyd Tonkin looks at Master builders of a global reputation, as he's impressed by the Norwegian commitment to spreading their literary words:

This comparatively lavish exposure to a small state's literary talent does not come about by accident. Norla, the state foundation that promotes Norwegian literature, has managed by shrewd encouragement of publishers and translators to amplify the nation's voice abroad. Not, of course, that it would ever cross the seas unless the quality of the raw material justified the voyage in the first place. It does.

(Quite a few of these authors are under review at the complete review; see the whole Scandinavian selection.)

More...

The Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen is going to be at the Edinburgh Book Festival in August. His latest novel Beatles has been voted "the best Norwegian novel of the past twenty-five years".

Harry