The New York Times has an article today about Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary cum autobiography, translated into English and published posthumously in 1964 as Markings. The book is receiving renewed scrutiny in the run-up to the centenary of Hammarskjöld’s birth in July 1905.
It turns out that comparing the original Swedish text to the English-language edition reveals a slew of heavy-handed “refinements” by the editor, W.H. Auden, reflecting Auden’s own obsessions and beliefs at the time:
“This behavior seems to me to be a kind of crime,” said Kai Falkman, a retired Swedish diplomat who has scrutinized the text and has written scholarly essays citing hundreds of flaws, starting with the translation of the book’s title, “Vagmarken” in Swedish, as “Markings.” He said it should be “Waymarks,” the word from the King James version of the Bible (Jeremiah 31:21) that was Hammarskjold’s source.
What I think is a kind of crime is that an article about accuracy in language manages not only to get the name of the subject of the article wrong (it’s Hammarskjöld, not Hammarskjold) but also the name of the book around which the discussion on accuracy centers. The original is called Vägmärken, not Vagmarken: The letters A and Ä are completely different letters in Swedish, situated on opposite ends of the alphabet. O and Ö are just as unlike.
Vägmärken corresponds to “waymarks”. Vagmarken, to the extent that it can be considered a word in Swedish, would translate to “the vague territory,” which presumably is not what Hammarskjold, nor Hammarskjöld, had in mind.
I know it often happens that the Swedish language, when it travels abroad, loses something in translation, not least its graphemesIn Swedish the dots on the Ö are not an umlaut, nor a diaeresis; Ö really is a separate letter of the alphabet. A friend, Östen, regularly sees his name transformed into Osten in the US. This is quite amusing, now that I am in on the joke, as in Swedish Osten means “the cheese.”
But The New York Times has no excuse. It doesn’t bat an editorial eyelid at spelling Chloé tops with an accent, nor Mark Lappé. Those acute accents are just cruddy diacriticals. Why do they get special respect?
And why replace the Ö with an O, of all possible letters, and the Ä with an A? Because those letters look similar graphically? They certainly don’t sound similar phonetically. In English, if for some unfathomable reason it is very important not to write letters containing dots if the letters are not i or j, then it would be much more accurate, phonetically, to write Hammarskjuld, and Vegmerk. It would look just as ridiculous, but at least it would sound slightly better.
I agree whole-heartedly with this post. With modern publishing techniques, there is no reason not to spell words correctly.
However, as far as the “Hammarskjuld” idea – why not go all the way and spell it “Hawmmarwheld?” (Or “Hawmarshelled” if you live in Östermalm.) That way it would be pronounced correctly by anglophones. Along those lines, I’m thinking of changing the spelling of my first name to “Djan” so Swedes can pronounce it correctly.
-John
“Vagmarken” – wonderful title for a Swedish language blog! “The vague territory” – exactly!
..vad skall jag säga Stefan, håller helt med dig naturligtvis..
Tyckte du om At frontier?..
/Sofia
Brilliant. I’ve been known to harass F1 web sites to get Kimi Räikönnen’s name right.
As I like to put it: An Ö is no more an O with two dots over it than an R is a P with a backslash underneath it.
As for translation liberties, I once had the opportunity to compare an English original of Luke Rinehart’s grossly overrated “The Dice Man” to the Swedish version, and the translator (and I use the term loosely here) has simply skipped any phrase or line that she might find difficult and even joined two chapters into one. If it’d been a better book, I might have contacted somebody.
In silly defense of the silly newspapers and reporters and translators in the usa…. they do not know how to use an international keyboard that has the swedish characters and someone forgot to tell them they can load it from microsoft without extra charge. Silly Americans… they can be slightly lazy in language … that could be why we have so many problems in SWEDEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Stefan:
A more peculiar aspect of the article was its failure to explain why, if the translation is so grossly inaccurate, it has taken 40 years for any Swedes to complain about it and/or offer a better translation for publication. It is not as though it is an obscure book that no English-speaking Swedes had access to until now.
Ben – the really peculiar aspect of your post is how it completely overlooks this paragraph from the article:
“Sir Brian said he had not accompanied the project to the end, but added: “I do remember there was a feeling among Swedes right from the beginning that Auden had used his predilections rather to distort Hammarskjold’s meaning. I think they thought that the very Swedish nature of Hammarskjold’s writing had been gussied up by Auden.”
I would say that the failure here is that you not reading to the end of the article.
John:
My comment was not that the Swedes did not notice the problems, but rather that they did not let the English speaking readership know about their unhappiness and/or do anything about it. Given the book’s high profile, you would think that someone would have been moved to write and market a more accurate translation.
Ben,
I’m assuming from the name and title that “Sir Brian” is English, so at least one English speaker was informed by at least some Swedes that they were unhappy.
As far as “someone” writing and marketing a more accurate translation – have you ever translated or written and marketed a book yourself? If you have, you should know that it’s not that easy and if you haven’t, well, it’s not that easy.
Anyway, it’s amazing to me that Auden manipulates the text and somehow in your mind, all Swedes are at fault. Do I sense just a slight bit of projection here?
If I may interrupt this budding tête-a-tête with a projection of my own. New translations take time and effort. And WH Auden’s version, if inaccurate, was positive towards Hammarskjöld, so it was hard to muster credible moral outrage in a world full of far more egregious misdeeds. But now it’s the centenary of Hammarskjöld’s birth and as commemorations are afoot, the active peddling of a faulty translation would feel a bit off. Hence, to my mind, why there is agitation for a new translation now.
So yes, the NYT forgot to proffer a reason as to why the article should be written now. I think my reason will do.
Indeed I often wondered and been upset that scandinavian dots and rings disappear in english publications, and the more so in places where you’d expexct to find competent and educated typographers, like, for instance, the leading newspaper in a town that happens harbour the United Nations.
And it is even more irksome when german umlauts get the respect they deserve; one would be more understanding of missing rings over å’s (or even more exotic graphemes like the icelandic or fi), but if you can write Schröder you can write Göran, can’t you?
And it’s not American parochialism, the Economist is just as bad. I suppose that English beeing one of the few Latin alphabets with a total lack of indigenous diacritics could serve as an excuse to this misspellings, if a lame-ass one.
Om man nu skulle vara foerhindrad att skriva med skandinaviska bokstaever, saasom ofta haender naer man aer paa resa utomlands, daa tycker jag man ska ihaagkomma att att ‘aa’, ‘ae’ och ‘oe’ aer urprungligen ligaturer, naagot som aeer uppenbart i danska & norska, tex kan man stava ‘Aarhus’ likavael som ‘Århus’.
Daa skulle titeln paa Hammarskjoelds bok stavas ‘Vaegmaerken’.
I had a discussion with some Belgian web developpers some time ago, when they were improving a search engine for my employer. They wanted to add a line of text saying that all queries must be written without accents. I pointed out that for Swedes that would mean that they would write Irene instead of Irène, but never raksmorgas instead of räksmörgås. I think I convinced them in the end, but the search engine still works randomly…