Can you talk about how Ædnan came into the world—first, the germ of the original language, and then the translation?

 

 

Listen to Linnea Axelsson discuss the origins of Ædnan

Linnea Axelsson: The first sprout I think to Ædnan was an image I saw, an inner image, of a woman, an older woman and her kind of silence, the silence she had in her face and the seriousness she had. I struggled for a long time to approach her and get into her life and understand who she was and what she had lived. She seemed a bit distant from me in time.

And while I was imagining her life, I saw this man out by the river where I lived at the time. I came to understand that he was working at this construction site close to where I lived and he was from elsewhere. He wasn’t from the place and he didn’t speak the language, and I think that during his lunch breaks he liked to go fishing by this river and talk on the phone with his family. A family that lived far away, I guess, and he kind of brought my attention to this reality of how work can separate members of a family. And the image in my mind grew into the image of a family, and a family that worked in a way that separated them periodically. So they became reindeer herders and a lot of the loss that I understood that this woman and her family members were carrying had to do with political situations in Sweden, the experiences of colonialism from the Swedish government. That kind of shaped the whole arc of what they experienced in this family, and then another family that grew into the book. And it became this kind of movement over the land, through the reindeer and the rivers, and the people that have walked these lands. 

Another kind of important moment in this work was when I found the shape of some kind of narrative poem or epic poem. Because I was at the time really struggling with the idea of writing a story, the idea of writing a novel. I realized this wasn’t kind of a collection of poetry. I wrote about characters and they were indeed part of a story. But I was so, I kind of felt that due to the political language in Sweden at the time, the word story and narrative was kind of corrupted by how certain politicians used them and misused the idea of what a story can be, the story of their party and how they said they changed their politics. I felt that I didn’t have access to this idea of writing a story—the context of, the shape of a novel. So the words kind of took another form into these sparse words in short stanzas, and that shape made it possible to kind of move and let the voices in the book speak, speak their experiences. Through this narrative poem that grew on the page, I kind of started to like the idea of the epic and what an epic can be. I started to think about the ancient epics and that this thing that I was trying to write could be something that gave space to . . . other people and another kind of masculinity and femininity and another idea of the nation and the we.

When the book was published, it didn’t take that long before Saskia Vogel, the translator, contacted me and said that she would love to work with the book, which was absolutely lovely and I’ve been so honored and happy to work with her and John Freeman and Knopf and see the book being published, born again into this new language in the new context of the English language.
 

What particular translation challenges arose as this book was brought into English? Were they points that the author anticipated, or was there something of a process of discovery in which the author found that the translator shed light on unexpected aspects of the original-language work?

 

 

Listen to Saskia Vogel discuss her translation of Linnea Axelsson’s novel Ædnan

Saskia Vogel: One of the things that was, I think, key with Ædnan was working with the idea of what bodies of knowledge are in the collective memory and where there might be a silence or a gap in knowledge. And in the case of Ædnan, that which is also described in the book around the land rights trial, like how much silence or not knowing there has been around Sámi history in Sweden. And so one of the things that I thought was really interesting was Linnea left the place names in Northern Sámi. And, you know, I kind of wondered, let’s use the word for lake as an example: So in Swedish, it’s sjö. In the north of Sweden sometimes you get jaure, and then in Sámi, it’s jávri. And jaure and jávri visually look the same, and I don’t know, me being a translator I’m like, oh people probably make the connection between the two. But they don’t necessarily. There isn’t necessarily an understanding that the word jávri relates to the [regionally-specific] word that is used in Swedish, jaure. And so that was a question that Linnea and I discussed early on: what assumed body of knowledge the readers from the majority Swedish culture would have about Sámi and the geographical region known as Sápmi. And she, in brief, [concluded]: very little. She wasn’t assuming that there would be a big body of knowledge that was in the cultural memory, which of course is a big theme in the book: the machinations of settler colonialism, including things that we recognize from the same process in North America—suppression of language, suppression of culture, suppression of even the acknowledgement of the history of these people on this land.

So the question then was like, how do we transfer? Like how do we, what do we carry over? And how do we, what does the book need to be received by the English-language reader? Because I think as a translator, there’s that place you sit in, or that I feel like I sit in, which is that I really love to see how much I can push the limits of language, or kind of storytelling, and what it can hold before the reader would get frustrated or alienated, or [before] the language doesn’t actually hold the experience of the text because I’ve gone too far with exploring what the options are in translation. And so I think when we were discussing the text for the English-language reader—also with John Freeman, the editor at Knopf—we concluded that we would need like a little more context because a Swedish-language reader is at the very least aware that there is a north of their country that looks a certain way geographically, even if they don’t really know anything about the Sámi people.

So with the place names, we ended up translating them to an extent. So there are these little moments of history as well that are maybe established concepts in the Swedish language but needed a little bit more in the English-language translation to provide enough historical context. With a book that has maybe fifty words per page, a book that is so much about the white space and the resonance of each word, it was a really, really exciting challenge to select the words that can hold the history that Linnea is pointing to . . . and to understand what is shared in the collective memory and what isn’t, and how to hold the tension of silence and presence of information, absence and presence.
 

Linnea Axelsson was born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden, and now lives in Stockholm. She studied humanities at Umeå University, where she earned her PhD in art history in 2009. She debuted as a novelist in 2010 and in 2018 won the August Prize for the epic poem Aednan.

Saskia Vogelis the author of Permission (2019) and a Swedish-to-English translator from Los Angeles. Her writing has been awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and can be read in Granta, The Offing, The White Review, and elsewhere.