{"id":484,"date":"2005-05-22T11:38:19","date_gmt":"2005-05-22T18:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=484"},"modified":"2005-05-22T11:38:19","modified_gmt":"2005-05-22T18:38:19","slug":"on-graphemectomy-at-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2005\/05\/on-graphemectomy-at-the-new-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"On Graphemectomy at the New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has an article<\/a> today about Dag Hammarskj\u00f6ld’s diary cum autobiography, translated into English and published posthumously in 1964 as Markings<\/em>. The book is receiving renewed scrutiny in the run-up to the centenary of Hammarskj\u00f6ld’s birth in July 1905.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 Hammarskj\u00f6ld<\/em>, not Hammarskjold) but also the name of the book around which the discussion on accuracy centers. The original is called V\u00e4gm\u00e4rken<\/em>, not Vagmarken<\/em>: The letters A and \u00c4 are completely different letters in Swedish, situated on opposite ends of the alphabet. O and \u00d6 are just as unlike.<\/p>\n

V\u00e4gm\u00e4rken<\/em> corresponds to “waymarks”. Vagmarken<\/em>, 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 Hammarskj\u00f6ld, had in mind.<\/p>\n

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 \u00d6 are not an umlaut, nor a diaeresis; \u00d6 really is a separate letter of the alphabet<\/span>. A friend, \u00d6sten, regularly sees his name transformed into Osten<\/em> in the US. This is quite amusing, now that I am in on the joke, as in Swedish Osten<\/em> means “the cheese.”<\/p>\n

But The New York Times has no excuse. It doesn’t bat an editorial eyelid at spelling Chlo\u00e9 tops<\/a> with an accent, nor Mark Lapp\u00e9<\/a>. Those acute accents are just cruddy diacriticals. Why do they get special respect?<\/p>\n

And why replace the \u00d6 with an O, of all possible letters, and the \u00c4 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<\/em>, and Vegmerk<\/em>. It would look just as ridiculous, but at least it would sound slightly better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has an article today about Dag Hammarskj\u00f6ld’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 Hammarskj\u00f6ld’s birth in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-sweden"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-7O","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}