Apart from the obvious theme about young men with ambitions of becoming businessmen, these two novels have several other elements and features in common – though often in contrasting shapes. I will not engage closely with the stories as such, but rather read the books from some distance (though not as distant as Franco Moretti suggests for reading world literature):6 first by discussing the literary technique by which these stories are told, second, by looking at how the novels converge with other forms of cultural productions and, third, by asking how the stories relate

6 Franco Moretti, "Conjectures on World Literature", *New Left Review* 1 (2000): 54–68.

to a contemporary Indian reality. My aim is to understand how vernacular and cosmopolitan tendencies are juxtaposed in various ways, thus constructing "world-making" narratives for separate audiences.

#### **Framing the Indian story**

To begin with, Adiga and Bhagat use similar techniques to narrate their core story within a frame tale: the protagonists themselves relate the events of their lives to a particular addressee. In Adiga's novel, this narration is conveyed in the form of letters that the self-taught entrepreneur Balram writes on his computer, addressed (but never sent) to the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

In Bhagat's book, Govind tells his story to an author (a fictive Chetan Bhagat) sitting by the young man's hospital bedside after his suicide attempt. However, in this novel the listener-author is recounting what Govind tells him, in contrast to Balram who, in Adiga's book, is narrating in the first person.

In both novels the respective frame tales are essential to the vernacular and cosmopolitan dynamics of its story. In Adiga's case, it is of course no incident that Balram writes his letters to a Chinese addressee. In the image of a new global world order India and China are siblings and need to share experiences with each other – "*Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai*" as Balram phrase it. Now, he wants to give the Chinese prime minister a true picture of the new entrepreneurial India. One point with this frame tale is that it gives the author plenty of reasons to *explain* and reveal Indian particularities. The Chinese prime minister can't possibly know much about caste, religion or politics in India – Balram has to clarify. One could claim that the book is, with a liberal use of Rebecca Walkowitz's term, "born translated" for an international audience – though in a cultural, rather than linguistic, sense.7

The story in Chetan Bhagat's book is, on the other hand, told to a person who is familiar with the same place, share similar

7 Rebecca L. Walkowitz, *Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

ideas and tacit knowledge as the protagonist. The author (both the fictive persona and the real individual) has, like Govind, been a young student in Ahmedabad. General Indian peculiarities do not need to be explained; only the local setting, Ahmedabad, is explicitly introduced to a non-local reader.

Thus, by different uses of a common frame tale technique Adiga and Bhagat are constructing literary worlds that relate to readers in contrasting ways. *The Three Mistakes* is a novel that offers opportunities for identification. The main characters are sympathetic and their everyday life is full of activities and incidents – cricket, school exams and family troubles – recognisable to any young middle class Indian. *The White Tiger* does not have that appeal; it is a dark novel and most characters are unsympathetic or even cruel. Few readers would feel close to the cynical underdog Balram – and audiences who possibly might identify do not read novels in English. A dominant theme in this book is the relation between middle class families and their domestic servants. This portrayal is certainly not flattering, thus, Adiga is in a sense "disloyal" to Indian middle class readers.

This difference with regard to identification is also emphasised linguistically. Adiga does use typical words and concepts from Hindi, but selectively and always in italics, thus emphasising the cultural "otherness" of the story. In Bhagat's novel, on the other hand, the characters speak English as if it is natural to them and they do not express themselves in obviously Indianised English.8 By contrast, Adiga is sometimes explicitly pointing out particular Indian English pronunciations and phrasing. Just as Aamir Mufti has observed with reference to Salman Rushdie's novels, Adiga attributes this form of speech to subaltern and illiterate people, rather than to the urban middle class who is more likely to speak such English.9 It is the low-caste villager Balram, who has a peculiar Indian accent, not his employer.

8 Rita Kothari and Rupert Snell, eds., *Chutnefying English: The*

*Phenomenon of Hinglish* (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2011). 9 Aamir R. Mufti, *Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), 166.

#### **Media convergence**

A particular Indian discourse, established since decades, is concerned with a cleavage within the society: a traditional, rural, vernacular and religious Indian population is contrasted with a modern, urban, secular, English-speaking elite. The problematic relation between these "two Indias" is a recurrent theme in political and intellectual debate as well as in popular cultural productions. At the time when Adiga's and Bhagat's novels were published, an advertisement appearing in major television channels, both English and vernacular, was topical. It consisted of a video in black and white in which the legendary film actor Amitabh Bachchan was walking completely alone on a long bridge, a huge uncompleted construction reaching out over the sea with no land in sight. With a dark and powerful voice, the actor reads a poem:

There are two Indias in this country.

One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been showering recently upon us.

The other India is the leash.

One India says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself". The other India says, "Prove yourself first and maybe then you'll have a chance".

One India lives in the optimism of our hearts. The other India lurks in the skepticism of our minds […].10

In *The White Tiger* this discourse is mirrored in Balram's desire to step out of "the Darkness" (tradition) into "the Light" (modernity) and in *The Three Mistakes* it is the Sabermati river dividing Ahmedabad into two worlds that represent this cleavage.

Looking at these two books from a little further distance it is also striking how both are associated with particular movies. *The Three Mistakes* has been made into a Bollywood film; it was

10 The advertisement was part of a campaign, called India Poised, commissioned by the newspaper *The Times of India* and run during 2007, celebrating the 60th anniversary of independence. The poem was written by Gulzar, a well-known Urdu poet and film director.

released 2013 with the title *Kai Po Che!.*11 Chetan Bhagat participated himself in writing the script, but one could indeed argue that already the novel contained most of the essential elements of a popular *Masala* movie, mixing romance, action, drama and comedy, and including archetypal characters of this film genre. The book even has a typical Bollywood film structure in which the narrative often takes a completely new direction after the compulsory half-way break in a three hour long production. Thus, the novel is written in a form in tune with Hindi cinema. In this sense it is *The Three Mistakes* which is "born translated", but for a vernacular, not a cosmopolitan, audience. Considering that most of Chetan Bhagat's novels have been adapted for the screen, he is a writer that blurs the boundaries of Francesca Orsini's taxonomy: he is published within the field of national English literature but has a much larger presence in vernacular popular culture.12

*The White Tiger* has not (yet) been adapted to film and it is not at all written in the style of a Bollywood production. Its relation to a particular movie is incidental. It was not only Aravind Adiga's book that attracted international attention to the "darkness" of a new global India in 2008. This was also the year when Danny Boyle's film *Slumdog Millionaire* premiered on cinema theaters around the world – it won eight Academy Awards (Oscars) in 2009.13 The film is about a slum boy and his everyday struggle for existence in a brutal and unequal society, but whose experiences ultimately become a resource for escaping from that cruel world. Almost simultaneously *The White Tiger* and *Slumdog Millionaire* reminded the world that India is still a very unjust society, thus contributing in challenging the recently successful international "rebranding" of India as a modern democratic market economy. Not surprisingly, this attention stimulated heated debate within

11 The film *Kai Po Che!* is directed by Abhichek Kapoor (2013). The title is a Gujarati expression used in kite flying competitions.

12 Bhagat's novels are also translated into several vernacular languages.

13 *Slumdog Millionaire* is based on another novel: *QA* by Vikas Swarup (London: Doubleday, 2005).

India about a representational "backlash"; these are not the success stories that should support India in the global economy.14

In this latter case of convergence between a novel and a film it becomes obvious that there is a certain friction between reality and fiction. This brings us to the next level of reading. That is, how do these two novels concretely relate to real events and persons in contemporary India?

### **Fiction and obtrusive realities**

In both Adiga's and Bhagat's novels there is a powerful politician recurring in the background of the story. In *The White Tiger* this is "The Great Socialist", the Chief Minister whose powerful hands are everywhere, affecting Balram from the village school into the city. For a domestic reader, this character is unmistakably recognisable by appearance and deeds, because he is closely modelled on an (in)famous political former Chief Minister in the state of Bihar. This is of course a level of meaning that is lost to most international readers, but it is also not essential. The White Tiger is concerned with fictionalising reality in its general tendencies, not in the details. It does, however, reveal that the novel is double coded, not only aimed at an international audience.

*The Three Mistakes* has a more intricate relation to reality. The book narrates two horrible events that are not literary inventions.15 The first is an earthquake that occurred on 26 January 2001, killing some 20 000 people in the state of Gujarat. The second, and in the novel more defining event, took place a year later, in February 2002, when a riot broke out in which 2 000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed by a mob. The Chief Minister of

14 Assa Doron and Ursula Rao, "From the Edge of Power: The Cultural Politics of Disadvantage in South Asia", *Asian Studies Review* 33, no. 4 (2009): 419–28; Ana Cristina Mendes, "Showcasing India Unshining: Film Tourism in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire", *Third Text* 24, no. 4 (2010): 471–79; Anjana Mudambi, "Another Look at Orientalism: (An) Othering in Slumdog Millionaire", *Howard Journal of Communications* 24, no. 3 (2013): 275–92.

15 This might sound strange in a commercial "feel-good"-novel, but is very consistent with the Bollywood form of the book.

Gujarat, at that time, was accused of not trying to stop – even to encourage – violence that later would be known as "the Gujarat massacre".16 In the book, neither the name nor any descriptions of this politician is mentioned. Still, Bhagat tells a story of violence masterminded by activists in a nationalist political party, with blessings from political leaders high in command. One could have expected that this delicate theme would be toned down in the Bollywood version of the story. Not so. The film narrative is even modified so that the riot is emphasised – with a twist, however, that makes it possible to interpret some justification for those committing the killings. The domestic debate around the movie was confused: was *Kai Po Che* (and Chetan Bhagat) for or against the accused Chief Minister? Importantly, the film was screened and debated during the year preceding the Indian parliament election of 2014, in which the controversial politician would campaign as leader of the opposition. Today the same man, Narendra Modi, is the Prime Minister of India. Rarely is "commercial fiction" so intricately intertwined with vernacular realities of such ramification.

This has consequences, however. *The Three Mistakes* (or its film version) hardly stands for itself as a fictional narrative. The local reality is too obtrusive; it becomes a meta-frame for the whole story. The book is of course possible to read for an international audience without familiarity with the political controversies around "the Gujarat massacre" – but that would be a completely different reading.17 In Adiga's novel it is, by contrast, rather the global reality that is obtrusive. That story is completely inscribed into a world scenario of rising economic power in Asia.

16 For an anthropological account of the "Gujarat Massacre" see Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, *Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India*. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

17 The global reading audience may, however, encounter the Gujarat riots of 2002 in Arundhati Roy's recent novel *The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,*  (London: Penguin 2017) in which they appear as a defining event of the story.

#### **Concluding discussion**

I have above discussed two books from the starting point that there are essential distinctions between two Indian English literatures: one international, "literary fiction" and one domestic, "commercial fiction". As I have tried to show, these differences are rather easy to find; in the framing of the stories, in the convergence with other media forms as well as in how they relate to actual political realities. In that sense this analyses would confirm the distinction that both Francesca Orsini and Suman Gupta identify between an international and a national Indian fiction written in English.

However, this presumption could also be challenged, not least on empirical grounds. *The White Tiger* is published, read and has a reputation within India – and it definitely has a commercial value – while *The Three Mistakes* circulates internationally, at least within a large Indian diaspora. Furthermore, it is very possible that other distinctions are more important than those between international and national texts, for example within fields of vernacular literary production.18 In one of very few anthropological studies of literature in India, Sadana Rashmi draws the attention to a context in which distinctions between literary fields are completely irrelevant. That is where most books are traded in India: by vendors at railway stations, on pavements or at major road crossings in large cities. In these places, all sorts of Indian books are hawked, often in pirated editions, alongside international best-sellers by authors such as John Grisham, Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown.19 Distinctions that one may find between fictional worlds of particular texts might soon blur when looking at the social reality where books are produced, sold, read, reviewed, debated or mixed up with other forms of cultural imaginaries. One example would be to see how distinctions are created and

18 Suman Gupta, *Consumable Texts in Contemporary India: Uncultured Books and Bibliographical Sociology* (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 39–60.

19 Rashmi Sadana, *English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India* (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012): 3.

negotiated on book fairs and literature festivals that lately have been mushrooming in India. It is in this direction that I intend to work further on Indian writing within the field of world literature.

## **Bibliography**

Adiga, Aravind. *The White Tiger*. London: Atlantic Books, 2008.

———. "Showcasing India Unshining: Film Tourism in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire". *Third Text* 24, no. 4 (2010): 471–79.

# **PART 4: LOST AND FOUND: TRANSLATION AND CIRCULATION**

# **24. Introduction to Part 4**

*Yvonne Lindqvist*

What are the conditions and consequences of textual migrancy?

In response to this question, translation studies has become one of the most dynamic and wide-ranging transdisciplinary fields in the humanities of today – a fact reflected in the variety of theoretical frames and methodologies of the chapters in this section dealing mainly with multidirectional cosmopolitan and vernacular translation, circulation and reception of literature. The chapters scrutinise cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation dynamics, i.e. literary migration on the global translation field from mainly dominated positions to the dominating in in the first case, and from dominating to dominated in the latter. The researchers clearly show that the processes of literary translation are implicated in struggles over cultural prestige and domination and that literary translation is one of the most strategic and consequential sites of negotiation between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. The seven essays in the section are organised according to focus in translation dynamics starting with vernacularising translation into Swedish, Danish and Norwegian moving on to cosmopolitanising translation dynamics from Swedish into English and French, and concludes with cosmopolitanising mediation in Mozambican lusophone and East African literature. Five out of seven chapters explore Scandinavian and particularly Swedish literary translation dynamics. This distinguishes the present section from the other three in this book, demonstrating thereby the research programme's grounding in Sweden and also

**How to cite this book chapter:**

Lindqvist, Yvonne. "Introduction to Part 4". In *World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange*, edited by Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, 289–294. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.x. License: CC-BY.

the potential gains of approaching world literature from within a given regional context (or a selection of such contexts).

Hence, in the chapter "Translation Bibliomigrancy", **Yvonne Lindqvist** presents the theoretical framework of her study of the meeting of Caribbean and Scandinavian literature by means of translation*.* Bibliomigrancy, i.e. the dynamics of cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation processes in world literatures, is a central concept in the study as well as the *double consecration hypothesis,* according to which this literature needs to be consecrated primarily within respective dominant literary centre(s), and secondly within the Anglo-American literary culture before agents in Scandinavia even consider a translation into the Scandinavian languages*.* Contending that translation is a form of literary consecration the study traces translations *from* the Caribbean French, English and Spanish languages to the Scandinavian Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages during the period 1990–2010*.*  Given the construction of the studied literary cultures (mono-, duo- or pluri-centric), bibliomigrancy to the Scandinavian periphery will evince individual characteristics. The chapter discusses how cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation dynamics influence bibliomigrancy and the hypothesised double consecration in the Scandinavian context.

The following chapter by **Cecilia Schwartz** suggests a methodological path to follow in order to find out more about attitudes towards Italian literature in contemporary Sweden. The focus is on four newly founded Swedish publishing houses specialised in Italian literature and their *selection* of titles as well as the *packaging* of the books – inscriptive and localising practices according to Venuti. In the study of the selection of Italian literature Schwartz proposes several analytical tools based on studies by Sapiro and Risterucci-Roudnicky (2008), for example a model for analysing the criteria used by the publishers when choosing titles for translation combining a vertical depoliticised-politicised axis with a horizontal axis from the particular (left) to the universal (right). By crossing these two axes, four different categories, in which the selected titles can be inserted and roughly classified, are distinguished. Schwartz's methodological path concludes with concrete signs of localising practices visible in the surroundings of the literary text, the paratext, particularly the editorial epitext and peritext.

**Paul Tenngart**'s essay, which also has a methodological focus, looks at the translation processes from a reversed perspective – cosmopolitanising translation – and concerns British and American translations of Swedish working-class fiction from the 1930s. The Swedish versions of these novels are not only reshaped into another language, but also repackaged and recontextualised inevitably entailing significant changes of the works. Drawing on theories from book history and the sociology of translation Tenngart discusses and richly exemplifies nine different kinds of *transformations due to literary migration*. He explores changes in situation, format, language, hermeneutic distance and cultural context as necessary recodings that constitute the migration process and formal, generic and thematic changes, as well as changes in world perspectives – as secondary effects prompted by the inevitable recodings. He finds Emily Apter's notion of "untranslatablility" constructive to discuss the translators' struggles with domestic and everyday phenomena in the texts. The tendency discovered is that the translators make the narrative techniques less complex and more smoothly accessible, but the changes not only neutralise the narrative and the stylistic peculiarities of the Swedish authors, but also create new kinds of narratives from the stories at hand.

In her chapter on Nordic Noir, **Louise Nilsson** focuses on how Swedish translated crime fiction becomes visually framed – as a foreign literature – on a transnational book market and how this domestic literature intersects with the cosmopolitan mediascape. The main argument is that the perception of Swedish crime fiction as a local literature – often perceived as exotic – rests upon the shoulders of cultural history, popular culture as well as fine arts. In sum: a cosmopolitan cluster of shared ideas and values. The cover of Arne Dahl's *En midsommarnattsdröm* – *A Midsummer Night's Dream is* contextualised and in relation to the novel's content it is shown how the local place intersect with the cosmopolitan space. Drawing on Peter Davidson's arguments in *The Idea of the North,* she discusses how the perception of a north connects to various geographical locations*.* Nilsson's approach is qualitative and she employs discourse analysis as the theoretical and methodological point of departure, discussing subject positions, nodal points and social relations discernable on the cover. She also shows that snow, ravens and forest are all iconic symbols and imageries that hold special symbolic positions in the discursive field of the crime fiction genre. This aesthetic belongs though to a multilayered and faceted mediascape where visual expressions intertwine with the circulation of literature, allowing not only foreign literature to enter the transnational book market for world literatures but also contributing to forging new imaginaries of foreign places as well as narratives.

In "Swedes in French", **Andreas Hedberg** discusses world literature as a circulational concept and particularly how a peripheral literature is established on a central literary field. The objective of the study is to analyse the logics at work in the meeting of two literary systems, and to make a general contribution to the understanding of literary circulation as such. With a starting point in Hans Hertel's concepts *concentration* and *polarisation*, Hedberg demonstrates that the development of the modern book market has meant considerable changes in the mediation of Swedish fiction to the international market, not only when it comes to pace and itineraries, but also when it comes to intermediary languages and selection. The significant rise of the number of Swedish novels published in French translation since the turn of the millennium is largely explained by the so called "boom" of Scandinavian crime fiction. In 2013, Swedish was the fifth most important source language for translated novels published in France. He concludes by affirming that the circulational approach to the concept of world literature, may strengthen the centripetal forces of world literary space.

In her contribution, **Chatarina Edfeldt** aims at mapping out some starting points for how gender can operate as a mediating category in the circulation of literature, by examining the migration of African lusophone literatures into the contemporary Portuguese book market. Discussing Mani's concept of bibliomigration and Owen's identification of exclusion of women's experiences in Mozambican national literary discourse, Edfeldt stresses that accessibility to literary agency can be restricted by gender

identity, which further affects the ability for the literary experience of women to circulate, or even to be written. Additionally, the lusophone literary system contains two centres (Portugal and Brazil), which means that Brazilian authors do not need to be recognised in Portugal and vice-versa for their wider consecration and circulation, while African authors are still dependent on being recognised in one of these two centres to enable their dissemination into a world market through translation. The essay rounds up with a discussion underlining how a gender-oriented reading of the Mozambican author Paulina Chiziane can provide an understanding of how *strategic exoticism* can be in place as a strategy both by the market forces, as well as a writer's strategy in the commodification process.

**Erik Falk**, finally, discusses some of the challenges facing the scholar approaching African literature from the sociological world literary studies perspective of Pascale Casanova. It draws throughout on postcolonial theory – and occasionally on book chain studies – to highlight central aspects of her theorisation that need questioning from an East African perspective or elaboration to be applicable. With the oppositions in theory between Casanova and Prendergast and using Kalliney's studies of Caribbean-British author relations, Falk discusses three general points in which the East African literary field differs from other fields. The first point is the impact of the dual economy, favouring the publication of educational literature in place of fiction. The second is the impact of the status of English as a national language, which means that the passage to literary fame look very different from European authors, who are established first in the national literary field and subsequently on the world stage through translation and/or foreign publication, processes which depend on recognition by literary institutions. The third point is that the cultural feedback loops need particular attention and empirical elaboration with respect to East African anglophone writing. The chapter ends with a discussion of the marketing of Ugandan author Doreen Baingana's short story collection, *Tropical Fish*, a concrete illustration of the points made.

To conclude the introduction I would like to underline that the focus of the chapters in this section has been on the exploration of the complex cosmopolitan and vernacular dynamics in literary translation and mediation. The methodological aspects of the presented research have also been foregrounded, since most of the participating scholars are in the initiating phase of their projects. This *Ansatzpunkt* might on the one hand have left the paramount economic aspect of transnational circulation of literature in the shade, on the other hand not so traditional but equally challenging aspects has been debated and brought out into the light.

# **25. Translation Bibliomigrancy: The Case of Contemporary Caribbean Literature in Scandinavia**

*Yvonne Lindqvist* Translation Studies, Stockholm University

This paper presents the theoretical framework for the project *The Meeting of Literary Peripheries by means of Translation – Prerequisites for Caribbean Literature in Scandinavia.* The framework is derived from the so-called "social turn" of translation studies where the general aim according to Wolf is:1

… to contribute to the conceptualisation of a general translation sociology and … to deliver a comprehensive methodological framework, substantiated by empirical studies, which would allow us to analyse the social implications of the translation process in its various contexts.2

This general translation sociology is based on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as further developed by for instance

#### **How to cite this book chapter:**

1 Michaela Wolf, "Translating and Interpreting as a Social Practice – Introspection into a New Field", in *Übersetzen–Translating–Traduire: Towards a "Social Turn"?* ed. Michaela Wolf (London: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 9–23.

2 Wolf, "Translating and Interpreting as a Social Practice", 9.

Lindqvist, Yvonne. "Translation Bibliomigrancy: The Case of Contemporary Caribbean Literature in Scandinavia". In *World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange*, edited by Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, 295–309. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.y. License: CC-BY.

Pascale Casanova, John Heilbron and Giséle Sapiro.3 It is commonly conceived of as hosting three main research areas: 1) the sociology of translators 2) the sociology of translating 3) the sociology of translations. The first area deals with translator status, prestige and working conditions. The second studies the act of translating – the translation process, practices and norms. The third area studies translations as products on an international market.4 The current research project belongs mainly within the third area of research within the sociology of translations. It examines the uneven and hierarchical "flows" of literature in the "world republic of letters" materialised in translation. Considered from a sociological perspective, translations are a function of the social relations between language groups and their transformations over time.5

Cultural exchanges such as translation have their own dynamics largely depending on the global market structures. Hence, the project constructs the market as a relatively autonomous global field with economic, political and symbolic dimensions. More specifically, the project examines the prerequisites for the meeting by means of translation of two local literary peripheries on the global translation field. It explores the necessary

3 Pascale Casanova, *La république mondiale des lettres* (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999); Pascale Casanova, "Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire. La traduction comme échange inégal", *Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales,* 144 (2002); Johan Heilbron, "Towards a Sociology of Translation. Book Translations as a Cultural World System", *European Journal of Social Theory* 2 (1999): 429–44; Johan Heilbron, "Responding to Globalization: The Development of Book Translations in France and the Netherlands", in *Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies. Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury* ed. Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger & Daniel Simeoni*.*(Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins Translation Library, 2008), 187–99; Gisèle Sapiro, ed. *Translatio: Le marché de la traduction en France à l'heure de la mondialisation* (Paris: CNRS, Collection Culture et Société, 2008). Gisele Sapiro, "Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France", *Poetics* 38 (2010), 419–39.

4 Andrew Chesterman, "The Name and Nature of Translator Studies", *Hermes* 42 (2009), 16. 5 Heilbron, "Towards a Sociology of Translation", 431.

consecration mechanisms for translation taking place from one local periphery to another, Caribbean to Scandinavian literature. Consecration is a term from the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which in short means recognition and legitimation by the agents of the field under study.6 To be consecrated by autonomous agents on the literary field signifies the crossing of a literary border – a metamorphosis of ordinary (literary) material into "gold", into absolute literary value. And translation is from a global point of view a form of consecration. It constitutes the principal means for access to the literary world for writers outside the centre.7

The aim of the project is to examine the bibliomigrancy dynamics on the global translation field. Bibliomigrancy is an umbrella term that describes the migration of literary works in the form of books from one part of the world to the other.8 The term comprises two strands:

Bibliomigrancy promotes and facilitates the processes of a "worlding"9 of literature – the most basic condition for connections between central and peripheral positions on the global translation field. Translation gives a wider audience to this "world-making" by helping literary texts to escape the confines of the national

6 Pierre Bourdieu, *Konstens regler. Det litterära fältets uppkomst och struktur* (Stockholm: Symposion, 2000), 326–27.

7 Pascale Casanova, *The World Republic of Letters*, trans. M B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 126.

8 Venkat Mani, "Bibliomigrancy: Book Series and the Making of World Literature", in *The Routledge Companion to World Literature,* ed. Teo D'haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (London and New York: Routledge 2014), 289.

9 Pheng Cheah, "What is a World? On World Literature as World-Making Activity", *Dædalus* 3 (2008): 34–25.

borders from which they have emerged to enter other contexts.10 The bibliomigrancy concept encapsulates both the material and ideational dimensions of literary cosmopolitanism.

One methodological step in the study of translation bibliomigrancy dynamics is to test the double consecration hypothesis11 stating that this kind of literature needs to be consecrated primarily within the centre(s) of the former colonial power, and secondly – due to the strong impact of the Anglo-American culture and literature in Scandinavia – within the British and American literary cultures. Caribbean literature written in French, Spanish and English has to be "filtered", so to speak, through the central British and American cultures in order to reach Scandinavian readers in translation. The relations are schematically represented in figure 5 showing the bibliomigrancy dynamics of Caribbean and Scandinavian literatures.

Nevertheless, each Caribbean language group will probably manifest a specific dynamic depending on how centralised the contemporary literary culture in question is. Casanova has shown that the French literary culture is strongly mono-centric with Paris as the sole consecration centre.12 The English contemporary literary culture on the other hand is hypothesised in this study as duo-centric counting New York and London as the most important consecration centres. The Spanish contemporary literary culture eventually, is hypothesised as pluri-centric in the sense that literary consecration takes place in several centres alike, notably in Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City and Buenos Aires for example. However, the British and American "filters" for reaching Scandinavia will be a common denominator for the involved

10 Kathryn Batchelor, "Translation: Spreading the Wings of Literature", in *Intimate Enemies. Translation in Francophone Contexts,* ed. Kathryn Batchelor & Claire Bisdorf (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 100.

11 Yvonne Lindqvist, "Det globala översättningsfältet och den svenska översättningsmarknaden. Förutsättningar för litterära periferiers möte", in *Läsarnas marknad, marknadens läsare. En forskningsantologi utarbetad för litteraturutredningen,* ed. Ulla Carlsson and Jenni Johannisson (NORDICOM. Göteborgs universitet, 2012), 10.

12 Casanova, *Consécration et accumulation,* 7–20.

**Figure 5.** Schematic representation of the double consecration hypothesis concerning bibliomigrancy dynamics of Caribbean and Scandinavian literatures.13

literary cultures in order to be translated into the Scandinavian languages. These complex dynamics probably also vary over time and according to genre. The project covers cosmopolitan and vernacular translation dynamics, i.e. literary migration on the global translation field from mainly dominated positions to the dominating in the first case, and from dominating to dominated in the latter, during the period 1990–2010.13

Consequently, the hypothesis of the study claims that for this kind of literary translation to take place *double consecration* within the dominating cultures for each language group on the global translation field is necessary, i.e. writers from peripheral cultures selected for translation into Swedish, Danish and Norwegian have to be consecrated within the centre(s) of their previous (colonial) culture on the global translation field and *then* within the centres of the British and American cultures. The hypothesis is a specification of a more general hypothesis put forward by Heilbron, Casanova and Moretti: Literature translated from one periphery to another is a consequence of what is translated from the peripheral language in question to the central languages and cultures and

13 An earlier version of the schematic representation of French Caribbean literature as an example has been published in Lindqvist 2012.

that, as Moretti puts it, "movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of".14

#### **Centre and Periphery Relations on the Global Translation Field**

In order to map out the bibliomigrancy dynamics on the global translation field power relations between language groups have to be taken into consideration. As Mona Baker15 has pointed out, translation is rarely the peaceful linear transfer of literary and semantic devices described in textbooks in translation. On the contrary, the global translation field has its own rules of functioning based on positions gained from constant struggles of accumulated symbolic power.

One of the most cited databases for statistically surveys of the most dominating – hence most central – source languages on the global translation field is Index Translationum of UNESCO. The percentages in Table 1 are compiled from the findings of Heilbron and Sapiro and then compared to the numbers from 2015 in Index Translationum of UNESCO.16 Table 1 shows that the ranking of centrality in the global translation field has not changed essentially during the last 30 years in the central positions – except for the decline of Russian in the 1990s – English, French, and German remain as the hyper-central and central languages, respectively. Some minor alterations concern the semi-central languages. Spanish and Italian have changed place in terms of importance comparing the 1990s and 2015 and Danish has lost ground from the seventh position of importance in 1980s to the

14 Heilbron, "Towards a Sociology", 437; Casanova, *Consécration et accumulation*, 8; Franco Moretti, "More Conjectures", *New Left Review* 20 (2003): 76.

15 Mona Baker, "Editor's Introduction", in *Critical Readings in Translation Studies.* ed. Mona Baker (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 285.

16 Heilbron, "Towards a Sociology", 433–35; Sapiro, "Translatio", 68–72, 423. For a discussion of the reliability of this database, see for instance Heilbron, "Globalization"; Sapiro, *Translatio*; Johan Svedjedal (ed.), *Svensk litteratur som världslitteratur: en antologi* (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2012).

**Table 1.** The ten most central source languages on the global translation filed during the period 1980–2015. Percentage of the source language of the total amount of published books on the global translation market.17

tenth in 1990 – surpassed by Japanese and Latin – and to the ninth position in the year 172015. 18The climb of Latin on the scale in the 1990s can probably be ascribed to a worldwide increase of translation of the literary classics and other medieval text genres for educational use.19

17 I am aware of the fact that Table 1 is rather unorthodox. The data in the overview shown should only be interpreted as indications of tendencies in the global translation field, since exact numbers are virtually impossible to produce. An earlier version of this table has been published in Lindqvist 2015.

18 http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatexp.aspx?crit1L=3&nTyp=min& topN=50&lg=0 accessed 25 November 2016.

19 Emily Wilson, "Translating the Classics". Society for Classical Studies 2014, http://apaclassics.org/blogs/emilywilson/translating-classics#sthash. rUe8ppA1.dpuf accessed 16 October 2016.

The tendency in the global translation field is towards greater diversification of the amount of source languages mainly due to the decline of the Russian language from 11 per cent in the 1980s to 1.5 per cent in the 1990s, shifting from a central position to a semi-central position and then gaining ground again in 2015 with 5 per cent of the translation market. Swedish has, on the other hand, advanced in the scale of importance from eighth place in the 1980s to sixth place in the 1990s as source language in the global translation field. Due to the Russian climb in 2015, Swedish is, however, pushed down to seventh place in that year.

Table 2 shows that domination dynamics in the global translation field are reproduced on a smaller scale within the Swedish literary space. The most dominant source languages occupy a given position even within Swedish literature, but the regional languages – Norwegian and Danish – also play a crucial role, thereby signalling the existence of a regional translation subfield, where Stockholm plays the role of centre in the regional periphery.20 This constitutes an explanation of the fact that two of the Scandinavian languages occupy a semi-peripheral position on the global translation field.

The average of translations among books published in the European countries21 amounts to 15 per cent.22 Nonetheless, the Swedish literary space is proven the most closed in Scandinavia – a decisive indication of centrality in the peripheral subfield.23 Hence the Scandinavian literary field fits the third category of four kinds of dominated languages 24 from a global translational

20 Yvonne Lindqvist, "The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field from a Global Point of View – A Peripheral (Sub)field?" in *Institutions of World Literature – Writing, Translation, Markets* eds. Stefan Helgesson and Pieter Vermulen (New York & London: Routledge, 2015), 185–87.

21 Pascale Casanova, *The World Republic of Letters* (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 168.

22 It has long been disputed where one should draw the line between open and closed systems based on publication statistics (cf. Bassnett 1998, Pym 1999). A pragmatic solution is to consider an average of 20 per cent or more as open systems.

23 Lindqvist, "The Scandinavian Literary Translation Field", 184–86.

Itamar Even-Zohar, "Polysystem Studies", *Poetics Today* 11 (Tel Aviv: Duke University Press, 1990), 47–53. See the Swedish National Bibliography 2000–2010. The percentage has fallen considerably during the last ten years mainly due to the strong consolidation of the Swedish book market and to the substantial increase of non-fiction publications. During the 1980s the percentage reached over 40 per cent of the total of published books in Sweden (Lindqvist 2002, 36).

24 point of view discussed by Casanova.25 She distinguishes between oral languages with young writing systems and Creole languages (for example Yoruba and Haitian Creole), languages with newly gained national status (Catalan), languages of established cultures with relatively small populations (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) and languages spoken by large populations possessing a rich literary tradition but nevertheless positioned in the very periphery of the global translation field (Hindi and Chinese). In the world republic of letters the accumulation of literary capital is decisive for the position on the global translation field. From the statistics and categorisations presented above it is possible to discern two overall orientations for literary translations on the global translation field: cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation.26 The orientations reveal the basic bibliomigrancy dynamics of translated literature on the global translation field and are presented in Figure 6.

The central positions of dominating literatures and languages are constructed by their historically high access to literary capital and relative autonomy vis-à-vis other national literatures and languages. Cornerstones of literary capital are on the one hand the age of the literary culture and its highly specialised literary institutions, on the other literary criticism, literary values and literary renown.27 High access to literary capital means that the culture in question possesses a very well-developed literary institution and a literary repertoire, which does not need to count on translations to assert itself in competing with repertoires of other literary cultures. When a text is translated into such a culture it is considered especially valuable by the dominated cultures, which does not possess an equally developed literary repertoire. Translation in this case then becomes a proof of the high literary quality of the text. In the terminology of

25 Casanova, *Consécration et accumulation*, 8.

26 I have schematically organised the main arguments in Casanova (2004) to create the model and adapted it to my study by adding the double consecration dynamics at the centre of my interest. The original terms in Casanova (2002:10) are Traduction accumulation and Traduction consécration.

27 Casanova, "The World Republic", 14–15.

**Figure 6.** The basic bibliomigrancy dynamics on the global translation field – cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation – with examples of relations from the involved languages of the presented project.

Bourdieu,28 this process constitutes a means for consecration of the text by the literary agents of the leading institutions of the target culture – a case of cosmopolitanising translation. A typical example of a cosmopolitansing translation is shown in figure 6, case A, when Scandinavian, i.e. Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, crime fiction novels translated into English are launched into the Anglo-American market. The novels then gain in literary prestige, accumulating literary capital by the consecration, and consequently become more interesting for other dominating literary cultures, for instance the French culture. A famous example from Swedish crime fiction is the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, in 2009 sold in 10 million copies.29 Other examples of Scandinavian peripheral writers in cosmopolitanising translation are the Norwegian Torkil Damhaug's *Oslo Crime Files Quartet* and the Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen winner of the Glas Key Prize in 2010 for best Scandinavian crime fiction novel.

Case B in figure 6 shows another dynamic of cosmopolitanising translation – translation taking place between two dominating cultures, for instance between the French and Spanish literary

28 Bourdieu, "*Konstens regler*", 326–27.

29 Erica Treijs, "Litteraturens ansikte", *Svenska Dagbladet,* 11 September 2009.

cultures. It is highly probable that the French Goncourt Prizewinner will be translated into Spanish and reversely that the Nadal Prize-winner will be translated into French. Consequently, the Goncourt Prize-winner of 2010, Michel Houellebecq with the novel *La carte et le territoire,* for instance, was translated into Spanish in 2012 under the title *La mapa y el territorio*. And Clara Sánchez, The Nadal Prize winner of 2010 with the novel *Lo que esconde tu nombre,* which was translated into French under the title *Ce que cache ton nom* in 2012*.*

The position of the dominated literatures and languages on the global translation field is, on the other hand, due to their lack of literary capital and relative autonomy. The translation relations occurring in these cultures are vernacularising translations, i.e. translations stemming from the dominant positions and languages. A prototypical example of vernacularising translation is from English to Swedish, case C in figure 6. As we have seen in table 2, this translation relation is by large the most common relationship in Sweden. In fact, 71 per cent of all published translations in Sweden during the period 2000–2010 had English as source language.30 The dynamics of English source language translations are very similar in Norway and Denmark31 (a veritable wave in the Moretti sense32).

Case D in figure 6 – the vernacularising translation in focus in the project – is elucidated in case D\* and illustrates the double consecration hypothesis. That is, in order for two literary peripheries on the global translation field – the Caribbean and the Scandinavian – to meet by means of translation, the migrating source texts have to be primarily consecrated within two central literary cultures, revealing cosmopolitanising dynamics in vernacularising translation as well. This is probably the prerequisite for Scandinavian publisher's decision to publish French, Spanish and English Caribbean writers in translation. Proceeding from this theoretical framework the project will examine the multidirectional dynamics of cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation on the global translation field.

30 Swedish National Bibliography, 2000–2010.

31 Lindqvist, "The Scandinavian", 180–83.

32 Franco Moretti,"Conjectures on World Literature", *New Left Review* 1 (2000): 67.

#### **Bibliography**

———. "Responding to Globalization. The Development of Book Translations in France and the Netherlands". In *Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies. Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury*, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger and Daniel Simeoni, 187–99. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2008.

Lindqvist, Yvonne. *Översättning som social praktik. Toni Morrison och Harlequinserien. Passion på svenska*. Diss. Stockholm Studies in Scandinavian Philology. N.S. 26. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. 2002.

———. "Det globala översättningsfältet och den svenska översättningsmarknaden. Förutsättningar för litterära periferiers möte". *In Läsarnas marknad, marknadens läsare. En forskningsantologi utarbetad för litteraturutredningen*, edited by Ulla Carlsson and Jenni Johannisson, 197–209. NORDICOM. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 2012.

———. "More conjectures". *New Left Review* 20 (2003): 73–81.

———. "Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Book Market: The Case of Literary Translations in the US and in France". *Poetics* 38 (2010): 419–39.

# **26. Profiles of Italy: Localising Practices of Swedish Publishing Houses**

*Cecilia Schwartz* Italian, Stockholm University

Is it possible to pinpoint the status of a foreign literature in a receiving culture? In this chapter, I will briefly suggest a methodological path that can be followed in order to find out more about attitudes towards translated literature, by focusing on the selection of titles and the packaging of books. Why is selection and packaging crucial to the understanding of transnational literary relations?

According to Lawrence Venuti, the translation process is a "localizing practice" that involves a whole series of actions that are "mediated by values, beliefs, and representations in the receiving situation. Far from reproducing the source text, a translation rather transforms it by inscribing an interpretation that reflects what is intelligible and interesting to receptors".1 Even though Venuti mainly pays attention to the discursive strategies performed in the translated texts, he also argues that the process of inscription "operates at every stage in the production, circulation, and reception of the translation".2

**How to cite this book chapter:**

1 Lawrence Venuti, *Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice* (London, New York: Routledge, 2013), 193.

2 Lawrence Venuti, *The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (*London, New York: Routledge, 1998), 67.

Schwartz, Cecilia. "Profiles of Italy: Localising Practices of Swedish Publishing Houses". In *World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange*, edited by Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, 310–323. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.z. License: CC-BY.

The suggested analysis takes into consideration the localising practices in the part of the production that does not include the translated texts, but rather some of the actions performed by the publishing houses: the selection and packaging of Italian texts for a Swedish readership. Furthermore, while this perspective is mainly relevant to the understanding of contemporary Italian literature's status in Sweden, it will also shed light on the relations between semi-peripheral literatures3 that tend to be overlooked in the studies of world literature.4 According to recent statistics, Italian is today the sixth or seventh most translated language into Swedish.5 Yet, Italian literature seems rather unheard of except for some worldwide bestselling writers such as Umberto Eco, Roberto Saviano and Elena Ferrante. So what is the overall status of Italian literature in Sweden today? To answer this question, the researcher has to start out with an analysis of Swedish publishing houses specialised in Italian literature.

Publishing houses are crucial gatekeepers when literature travels from one culture to another. In the years 2009–11, no fewer than four publishing houses with special focus on Italian literature were founded in Stockholm.6 This peculiar situation – four

3 Gisèle Sapiro, "The sociology of translation. A new research domain", in *A Companion to Translation Studies*, ed. Sandra Bermann et al. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 85. According to Sapiro, until 1989, Italian and Swedish, together with Spanish, Danish, Polish, Russian and Czech, belonged to the happy few in the literary semi-periphery, which means that these languages had a share that varied from one to three per cent of the languages in the world system of translations. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Polish and Czech lost their semi-peripheral position, while Italian, Spanish and Swedish literature remained stable.

4 Cf. Theo D'haen, *The Routledge Concise History of World Literature* (New York: Routledge, 2012), 153.

5 Due to these statistics provided by the National Library of Sweden, Italian was preceded by English, Norwegian, French, German and Danish in 2016 and by the same languages plus Finnish in 2017. Kungliga biblioteket. *Nationalbibliografin i siffror 2016* (Stockholm: Nationalbibliografin, Kungliga biblioteket, 2017), 14–15; Kungliga biblioteket. *Nationalbibliografin i siffror 2017* (Stockholm: Nationalbibliografin, Kungliga biblioteket, 2018), 11.

6 Cartaditalias bokserie (2009–2012) was established in the wake of a bilingual cultural magazine, *Cartaditalia*, both initiatives by the Italian

publishing houses founded in a two-year-period – raises questions closely related to the status of Italian literature in Sweden:

In the following, I will briefly outline a useful methodological path for analysing these four newcomers in the publishing field. First of all, a bibliographical research must be carried out in order to get a panoramic view of the Italian literature published in Sweden in the studied period.7 In this specific case, since the publishing houses were all founded in the years 2009–11, I suggest starting from at least year 2005 and list *all* Italian titles translated into

Cultural Institute in Stockholm. The house published novels, poetry, essays and short stories of Italy's most prestigious authors (Italo Calvino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Elsa Morante etc). In 2010 another publishing house arose, Astor (2010–2014), which mainly focused on contemporary literature from the Italian and Spanish language area. Astor published novels, short stories and essays by writers from the younger generation (born in the 1970s), who had never been translated into Swedish before. Still in 2010, another firm with an Italian profile was established in Stockholm, Laurella & Wallin (2010–2014). Their idea was to publish texts written in the borderland between fiction and travel literature. All in all, Laurella & Wallin published eight titles, of which the first five focused on one Italian city each (Palermo, Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples). The only publishing house that has survived until the present day is Contempo, which was founded in 2011 by a father and his daughter. As the name chosen for the house indicates, it concentrates on contemporary Italian novels, all very successful in their homeland. Currently they have published 15 titles.

7 On the importance of making lists and bibliographies, see Anthony Pym, *Method in Translation History,* (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 1998), 38–54.

Swedish up until 2015.8 This temporal perspective offers a frame for the analysis by mapping the importation of Italian literature into Sweden before and during the rise of these specific publishing houses. It also offers an objective context to which the following steps of the analysis can be related. To complete the picture, a quantitative analysis of optional variables – such as genre, publisher, author's and translator's gender etc. – is needed. Then of course the publications of the four publishers must be compared to the general picture.

However, if we want to consider the publishing houses' selection of titles as a localising practice, it has to be considered from a qualitative perspective, not least of all because the selection is "always an exclusion of other foreign texts and literatures".9 One factor that is crucial to an analysis focusing on publishing houses is the distinction between big and small publishing houses in the translation field. When it comes to foreign literature, big publishers tend to contribute to standardisation since they prefer traditional novels written in English, while smaller firms rather contribute to innovation by introducing new authors and translating from languages other than English.10 The *discovery* of new (or ignored) authors, which might lead to true innovation in the literary field, is actually perceived as one of the most important functions of small publishing houses.11 In order to survive in the competition with larger publishers, small firms often concentrate on a *niche*. One such *niche* strategy consists in choosing literature from a specific language area, which "explains the role they play in discovering writers in peripheral or semi-peripheral languages".12 But what are the consequences of this niche strategy in terms of localising practices? Are the selections made concerning

8 The easiest way would be to make a search on the Nationalbibliografin (Swedish National Bibliography).

9 Venuti, *Scandals*, 67.

10 Gisèle Sapiro, *Translatio: Le marché de la traduction en France è l'heure de la mondialisation* (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2008).

11 Sapiro, *Translatio*, 190.

12 Gisèle Sapiro, "Translation and the field of publishing. A commentary on Pierre Bourdieu's 'A conservative revolution in publishing'", *Translation studies* 1, no. 2 (2008): 157.

the source or target culture? Or do the publishers instead rely on the transnational circulation of the chosen literature? And what localising practices are visible in the presentations and packaging of the chosen language area?

In order to answer these questions, the selection of titles can be approached by using different analytical tools. A proficient way is to examine which other languages the selected works have already been translated to. This approach not only contributes to a better understanding of the circulation patterns of semi-peripheral literature, it also tests the legitimacy in Sapiro's statement that "the chance for a work published in a peripheral language to be translated in another peripheral language depends greatly on its being first translated into a central language".13 Similarly, Franco Moretti argues "that movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of".14 Is this assumption confirmed in our case as well? If not, the analysis must go beyond the macro-dimension and focus on other aspects, such as the agents involved in the importation.

The selection of texts could also be perceived as a way of "challenging domestic canons for foreign literatures and domestic stereotypes for foreign cultures",15 and on the contrary, the selection could confirm such domestic canons and stereotypes. For instance, if Swedes associate Italy with *mafia*, then one might expect that publishers specialised in Italian literature will be inclined to relate to this cliché in one way or another. Do they reinforce the cliché or do they try to challenge it by offering alternative perspectives of Italy?16

In terms of inclusion it is even more intriguing to compare the titles selected by the foreign publishers with the same titles' status in the national field, since canons of the source literature

13 Sapiro, *Sociology*, 86.

14 Franco Moretti, "More Conjectures", *New Left Review*, 20 (2003): 75.

15 Venuti, *Scandals*, 81.

16 Cf. Hanne Jansen, "*Bel Paese* or *Spaghetti noir*? The image of Italy in contemporary Italian fiction translated into Danish", in *Interconnecting translation studies and imagology*, ed. by Luc van Doorslaer, Peter Flynn and Joep Leerssen, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015), 163–79.

often differ from the target literature.17 Especially in the cases in which the publishing houses make their decisions in close relation to the source culture, it is appropriate to analyse the selected author's position in the source field. A useful tool for conducting this analysis is offered by Sapiro, who distinguishes between four ideal-typic writers: the notables, the aesthetes, the popular and the avant-garde writers.18

If the selection is made in a closer relation to the receiving culture or with an international perspective, another appropriate model is suggested by Danielle Risterucci-Roudnicky (2008),19 who argues that it is possible to locate every translation in the field by combining two opposing axes: the canonisation-discovery dimension and the distancing-naturalisation dimension, where the latter relies on the ways in which a translation is included in the new system: is the foreignness of a literary work highlighted (distancing) or hidden (naturalisation)?20 According to Risterucci-Roudnicky, the place that a translation occupies alongside these axes determines its symbolic position in the editorial landscape: a naturalised canonised title would have a higher symbolic capital than an unknown author's work where the distance from the receiving culture is underscored.21 Is this the case

17 Cf. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, *Mapping World Literature. International Canonization and Transnational Literatures* (London: Continuum, 2008).

18 Gisèle Sapiro, "Le champ littéraire français. Structure, dynamique et formes de politisation", in *Art et société. Recherches récentes et regards croisés, Brésil/France*, ed. Alain Quemin et al. **(**Marseille: Open Edition Press, 2016), accessed 23 January 2017, doi: 10.4000/books.oep.475. Even though Sapiro's distinction regards the French literary field, I argue that it could be applied on many other national fields. In the case of Italian literature, it is particularly appropriate since the boundaries between the French and the Italian literary fields are very strong.

19 Danielle Risterucci-Roudnicky, *Introduction à l'analyse des œuvres traduites* (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008).

20 See also Lawrence Venuti's discussion on foreignising and domesticating translations in *The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation* (London, New York: Routledge, 2008).

21 Risterucci-Roudnicky, *Introduction*, 18.

in a semi-peripheral culture as well? Or could the underscored foreignness – for instance in the packaging – be a way to gain symbolic capital?

Another method is put forward by Sapiro. Drawing on Bourdieu, she has elaborated a model for analysing translated literature that can be applied to the selection in order to find out about the criteria used more or less deliberately by the publishers when choosing titles for translation.22 Suggesting how works translated into French can be classified, the method combines a vertical depoliticised-politicised axis with a horizontal axis that goes from the particular (left) to the universal (right). By crossing these two axes, four different categories, in which the selected titles can be inserted and roughly classified, are distinguished:

**Depoliticised particularism**: This dimension is particularly strong when it comes to the selection of foreign literature, as it focuses on the ethnographic dimension of culture and often balances on the edge of exoticism.

**Depoliticised universalism**: literary texts marked by individualism, subjectivism and formalism. By expressing a subjectivity that can be shared over time and space these works inscribe themselves into the "universal" literature – the classics. In this category, Sapiro inserts the catalogues of a prestigious publisher such as Gallimard as well as many smaller highbrow publishers.

**Politicised universalism**: Even though this category includes works that are conceived as universal, it differs from the former as it features the historical and moral dimension of literature. Although these works are often believed to grasp the universal from the particular, as for instance in memoirs and ethical world fiction, they dissociate from exoticism and identity politics by encouraging hybrid identities.

**Politicised particularism**: When the socio-political dimension is combined with the particular identity dimension, we find a category of works defined as identity political. These are narratives in which the author's identity is crucial and where the cultural particularity, as well as the political or social dimension, is privileged.

22 Sapiro, *Translatio*, 204–9.

When applying this model, the researcher must be aware of the fact that it is a description of translations into French during the years 1984–2002. Obviously, not only the dimensions are likely to differ from one literature to another (and from one time to another), but there will always be works that do not fit into such schematic representations.23 This brings us to the next step in the analysis, which takes into account more concrete signs of localising practices visible in the surroundings of the literary text, the *paratext*.

In his seminal work *Seuils,*24 Gérard Genette outlines a theory of the paratext, which includes all the elements that accompany the literary text: covers, titles, the author's name, notes, prefaces, interviews with the author etc. According to Genette, the concept of paratext should be conceived as an umbrella term that is bifurcated into two main areas: the *peritext* and the *epitext*. The elements of the peritext are more closely related to the text *per se* – prefaces, titles, titles of the chapters, footnotes, covers, blurbs – while the epitext addresses all the messages outside the actual volume, such as interviews with the author, private conversations, letters, diaries etc. Genette mainly focused on literary works in their original language, and the theory has only recently been adapted to the area of translated literature, where much remains to be done.25

23 However, in the case of the four "Italian" publishing houses it seems that the selection could be inserted in all categories described above, except one, the politicised particularism. This suggests that publishing houses with an Italian focus deliberately exclude postcolonial narratives from their catalogues.

24 Gérard Genette, *Seuils* (Paris: Seuil, 1987). Translated by Jane E. Lewin as *Paratexts. Thresholds of interpretation* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

25 Until now only a few volumes that combine the paratextual perspective with the translational to any lengthier extent have been published: Richard Watts, *Packaging Post/coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World*, (2005), Danielle Risterucci-Roudnicky, *Introduction à l'analyse des œuvres traduites*, (Paris: Armand Colin, 2008); Anna Gil-Bardají et al. (eds.), *Translation peripheries: Paratextual Elements in Translation* (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012); Chiara Elefante, *Traduzione e paratesto*, (Bologna: Bononia University Press,

I would argue that when it comes to translated works, an analysis of the paratext is even more relevant than it might be for source texts. Why is that? Generally, it has to do with the mediating role performed by paratextual items in the transmission of literary texts between cultures. Paratexts represent *hybrid spaces* where source and target cultures meet.26 Since the current research task concerns the status of Italian literature in present Sweden, an analysis of the localising practices performed by the publishers is required: to what extent do the publishers remain faithful to the source edition, and to what extent do they adapt the surroundings of the text to the receiving culture? Focusing on the publisher's paratext reveals motives for publishing a certain text as well as suggestions on how to read and use the volume: the paratext invites the reader to share the publisher's own interpretation of the text,27 and at the same time it designs and defines the publishing houses' target readers.

Even though the most intriguing part of the paratext, at least for the purpose of the research task presented here, concerns the *publisher's peritext* (and especially covers, titles, prefaces and notes), a proficient starting point would be to examine the *publisher's epitext*, i.e. presentation texts on the website, interviews and articles in the press in order to trace the publishers' profile and self-perceived function in the Swedish field.28 This first step of

2012), Valerie Pellatt (ed.), *Text, Extratext, Metatext and Paratext in Translation* (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). For studies on translation and paratexts with a particular attention given to the Swedish literary field, see Jerry Määttä, *Raketsommar. Science fiction i Sverige 1950–1968* (Lund: Ellerströms) and Cecilia Alvstad "The Strategic moves of Paratexts: World Literature through Swedish Eyes",

*Translation Studies,* 5 (1) (2012): 78–94. 26 Cf. Risterucci-Roudnicky, *Introduction,* 30.

27 Alberto Cadioli, "Il patto editoriale nelle edizioni moderne e contemporanee", in *I dintorni del testo. Approcci alle periferie del libro*, ed. Marco Santoro et al. (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 2005), 664. According to Alberto Cadioli, the very edition of a literary text reflects the publisher's intention to establish a pact with the reader, "il patto editoriale" ("the publisher's pact").

28 If the analysis considers contemporary publishers, the researcher can contact them in order to carry out interviews. An example of such a

the analysis would clearly indicate the publisher's view on Italian literature. Following Sapiro, other aspects that should be taken into consideration in the publisher's epitext are statements regarding innovation and tradition, language areas and niche strategies. This part of the analysis will contribute interesting facts about the publishers' own analysis of the sector and their choice to focus on Italian writers in that particular moment.

However, the publishers' localising efforts are mainly visible in the peritext. The elements of the cover and its appendages have been thoroughly listed by Genette.29 Among these, the localising practices are most explicit in the translation of the title (see below), in the choice of pictures, photos or other iconographic illustrations, and in the texts on the back cover as well as on the inside front and back covers, where presentations of the author and the intrigue share the space with blurbs and other promotional statements. All these items, which reflect the publishers' attempts to address a certain readership and to express an interpretation of the text, are likely to become revealing representations of the source culture.

The title, which Adorno once addressed as "the microcosm of the work",30 has been studied from various perspectives and disciplines. Linguists, for instance, have underscored the function of the determinative article in book titles, while others might have concentrated on the nominal style or the numbers of words used for the title. From a paratextual point of view, the title, being a compromise between the author, the translator and the publisher, is a hybrid space that lends itself to comparison between the source edition and target editions in different languages. What happens, for instance, when Valeria Parrella's novel *Lo spazio bianco* ("The white space") is translated into German (*Zeit des Wartens*, "Time

case study is Andreas Hedberg's article "Small Actors, Important Task: Independent Publishers and their Importance for the Transmission of French and Romance Language Fiction to Sweden Since the Turn of the Millennium". *Moderna Språk*, 110, no. 2 (2016): 21–30.

29 Genette, *Paratexts*, 23–26. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, *Notes on Literature* (New York, Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1992), 4.

of waiting"), French (*Le temps suspendu,* "The suspended time") and Swedish (*Väntrum*, "Waiting room")? Well, it is significant that while the French and German titles emphasise the temporal aspect, the Swedish title remains more faithful to the spatial dimension in the Italian original, but on the other hand the Swedish title concretises the somewhat elusive Italian title, which is better preserved in the French and German variants. This is just one illustration of how localising practices become visible in the paratext, and we could go on by analysing the presence and functions of footnotes and pre- and postfaces, not to mention the publisher's choice of the preface writer.31 Genette defines several functions of these peritextual elements, which he basically divides into the *themes of the why* and the *themes of the how.*32 When translated works eventually contain a translator's preface, Ellen McRae has shown that in a corpus of contemporary fiction translated into English, the main functions of the translator's fore- or afterword were to call for the reader's attention to the translator's role, as well as to promote a mutual understanding between cultures.33

## **Concluding remarks**

The research task proposed in this chapter draws on the conviction that current ideas of Italian literature and its overall status in present Sweden are manifested in the publishing houses' localising practices, which are expressed in the selection of titles as well as in paratexts. However, depending on the aim of the research task, the presented methods and models might be used together or separately, on similar material.

31 For instance, Ulf Norberg argues that in Sweden, "the writers of prefaces usually have a large literary capital (literary critics, literary scholars or authors)". *Translation peripheries,* ed. Anna Gil-Bardají (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 105.

32 Genette, *Paratexts*, 198–223.

33 Ellen McRae, "The role of translators' prefaces to contemporary literary translations into English: An empirical study", in *Translation Peripheries: Paratextual elements in translation,* ed. Anna Gil-Bardají et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 81.

The methods presented in this brief chapter are only samples of the resources that are available for a researcher today. It is important to keep in mind, though, that most of the existing models originate from the Anglo-American and French-speaking areas, which might not be adequate for describing the situation in semi-peripheral or peripheral language areas. As researchers we must therefore presume that the overall picture might differ from one literature to another and from one time to another. From this we can draw the intriguing and stimulating conclusion that methods that are better suited for describing (semi-)peripheral relations need to be elaborated and developed if we want to obtain a deeper understanding of neglected areas of world literature.

## **Bibliography**

# **27. Literary Migration as Transformation**

*Paul Tenngart*

Comparative Literature, Lund University

Examining how literature circulates across geographical, cultural and linguistic borders is a central task for contemporary literary studies. As other chapters in this section also demonstrate, nuanced insights into the patterns and conditions of what B. Venkat Mani calls "bibliomigrancy"1 – literary circulation by way of books – enhance our understanding of intercultural traffic and intercultural relations in general. Such studies may focus on the material conditions for circulation – the economic reality of producing and distributing books, the establishment and maintenance of libraries or potential readers' various degrees of access to books – but in order to reach literature's significance on a more general and substantial level of intercultural communication another point of view is just as important: that of transformation. A work of literature, David Damrosch reminds us, "*manifests* differently abroad than it does at home", and the ways in which literature transforms when it travels tell us a great deal about intercultural manifestations as such.2

My case in point will be British and American translations of Swedish working-class fiction from the 1930s. This literary

#### **How to cite this book chapter:**

1 B. Venkat Mani, "Bibliomigrancy: Book series and the making of world literature", in Theo D'haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir (eds.), *The Routledge Companion to World Literature* (London and New York: Routledge, 2011).

2 David Damrosch, *What Is World Literature?* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 6.

Tenngart, Paul. "Literary Migration as Transformation". In *World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange*, edited by Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, 324–339. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.16993/bat.aa. License: CC-BY.

current has a central position in Swedish twentieth-century literature, with a distinct connection to the particularly Swedish version of the welfare state – a compromise between socialism and capitalism. The English translations of these novels amount to 13 publications: four of these are British, five are American, and four of them are published in the USA and the UK simultaneously. In two cases, the same translation is published in the US and the UK separately by different publishers. Five of the translated texts are from the 1930s, one is from the 1940s, one is from the 1970s, five are from the 1980s, and two are published in the 1990s.3 This material is, then, quite diverse: it involves two different literary markets, several historical periods, and six translators. A common

3 The 13 publications are: Harry Martinson, *Cape Farewell* (London: Cresset Press, 1934), transl. Naomi Campbell (*Kap Farväl!*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1933); Harry Martinson, *Cape Farewell* (New York: Putnam, 1934), transl. Naomi Cambell (*Kap Farväl!*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1933); Harry Martinson, *Flowering Nettle* (London: Cresset Press, 1936), transl. Naomi Campbell (*Nässlorna blomma*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1935); Vilhelm Moberg, *Memory of Youth* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937), transl. Edwin Björkman (*Sänkt sedebetyg*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1935); Vilhelm Moberg, *The Earth is Ours* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), transl. Edwin Björkman (*Sänkt sedebetyg*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1935; *Sömnlös*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1937; *Giv oss jorden!*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1939); Eyvind Johnson, *1914* (London: Adam Books, 1970), transl. Mary Sandbach (*Nu var det 1914*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1934); Jan Fridegård, *I, Lars Hård* (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), transl. Robert E. Bjork (*Jag Lars Hård*, Stockholm: Schildt, 1935); Jan Fridegård, *Jacob's Ladder & Mercy* (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), transl. Robert E. Bjork (*Tack för himlastegen*, Stockholm: Schildt, 1936; *Barmhärtighet*, Stockholm: Schildt, 1936); Moa Martinson, *Women and Appletrees* (New York: Feminist Press, 1985), transl. Margaret S. Lacy (*Kvinnor och äppelträd*, Stockholm: Bonniers 1933); Moa Martinson, *Women and Apple Trees* (London: Women's Press, 1987), transl. Margaret S. Lacy (*Kvinnor och äppelträd*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1933); Moa Martinson, *My Mother Gets Married* (New York: Feminist Press, 1988), transl. Margaret S. Lacy (*Mor gifter sig*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1936); Ivar Lo-Johansson, *Breaking Free* (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), transl. Rochelle Wright (*Godnatt, jord*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1933); Ivar Lo-Johansson, *Only a Mother* (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), transl. Robert E. Bjork (*Bara en mor*, Stockholm: Bonniers, 1939).

ground for the 13 publications, however, is the fact that they all execute a circulation from a peripheral literary language to a central one.4

When this domestically central Swedish literature, then, migrates to the very different political and cultural contexts of twentieth century UK and USA, its significance changes. Swedish working-class fiction is something else abroad. But *how* is it different? Well, that question needs multiple answers. The Swedish versions of these novels are not only reshaped into another language, but also repackaged and recontextualised. As a result of a first examination of these publications, this chapter will point out nine different kinds of transformations and a diverse set of theoretical frameworks required to analyse the changes. Faced with another material, some of these transformations may prove irrelevant, and other changes not evident in my material may instead emerge as crucial. I do think, however, that a similar set of aspects may be applied to all kinds of migrated literary material.

## **Situation, Format and Language**

First of all, when a literary work enters a new market, it is doing so in a particular situation. The text is translated by a particular translator, edited by an editor, and published, distributed and marketed by a particular publisher. To analyse these situational conditions – and perhaps compare them to how the original text was situated in the source culture – requires theories and methods from book history and translation sociology.5 In my material, four

4 The notion of central and peripheral literary languages is primarily drawn from Johan Heilbron's analysis of translation patterns, "Towards a Sociology of Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World-System", *European Journal of Social Theory* 2 (1999): 429–44. Heilbron argues that English is a "hyper-central" language and Swedish is a "semi-peripheral" language, but his statistics are based on a particular period, the 1970s and the 1980s, whereas my material covers many decades. Therefore, Heilbron's more detailed relations between literary languages cannot be applied.

5 For introductions to book history and translation sociology, see Leslie Howsam, "The Study of Book History", in *The Cambridge Companion*

different types of publishers are evident: small publishing houses with a narrow back list of literary fiction from abroad, large companies with a distinct commercial agenda, politically driven publishers with an ideological agenda and university presses with educational ambitions. These four types of publishers use different kinds of distribution and reach different kinds of readers. The translators can be divided into three groups: those whose principal profession is translation, those who translate texts alongside a principal occupation as writers or journalists, and academics who translate literature as a parallel activity to research and teaching.

More concrete and evident situations are created by the peritexts accompanying the translated texts in the books, including covers framing the narratives in quite a new way compared to the different Swedish editions.6 Observations like these require a book historical approach, but also narratological ideas about the role of peritexts as well as intermedial theories on the impact of covers. None of the books in my material, for example, use the same cover or cover artist as the Swedish versions. In some cases, the different versions make contrasting impressions and create contrary expectations of the novel at hand.

The most apparent situational transformation in my material occurs when Moa Martinson's novels *Kvinnor och äppelträd* and *Mor gifter sig* are published in the 1980s as *Women and Appletrees* and *My Mother Gets Married* by the New York–based Feminist Press. The publisher's political agenda is highlighted by the translator Margaret S. Lacy's afterword, in which Martinson is portrayed as a feminist rather than a proletarian writer. Martinson's narratives are removed from one political situation in the Swedish 1930s to quite another political situation in 1980s America. The new situation makes her texts function in another way, which is further stressed by the cover paintings: American

*to the History of the Book*, ed. Leslie Howsam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Andrew Chesterman, "The Name and Nature of Translator Studies", *Hermes* 42 (2009): 13–25.

6 Peritext is Gérard Genette's term for the kind of paratext that is part of the volume as such: introductions, afterwords, endnotes, covers etc. Gérard Genette, *Seuils* (Paris: Seuil, 1987).

artist Mary Cassatt's *Baby Reaching for an Apple* from 1893 on *Women and Appletrees* and German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker's *Mädchenbildnis* from 1905 on *My Mother Gets Married*. Cassatt's picture of a woman and a baby underneath an apple tree and Modersohn-Becker's portrait of a girl looking straight back at her observer signal womanhood and girlhood rather than poverty and class struggle.

In addition to these situational changes, editorial decisions also repackage the narratives into new text and book formats. In the migration process, several of the Swedish novels from the 1930s have undergone substantial changes as to the arrangement of chapters, shortenings, and volumes. For example, *1914* is a translation of the first book of Eyvind Johnson's autobiographical tetralogy *Nu var det 1914*, *Här har du ditt liv!*, *Se dig inte om!* and *Slutspel i ungdomen*. In the UK, the first part of this series is published as a single, isolated novel, giving it a sense of finality and closure it does not have in a Swedish context. Similarly, Vilhelm Moberg's trilogy *Sänkt sedebetyg*, *Sömnlös*, and *Giv oss jorden!* is published in two different ways. In 1937, the first part of the trilogy appears in the US as a separate novel, *Memory of Youth*, and in 1940 the whole series is published in a single volume, *The Earth is Ours*. These two publishing strategies have contrasting effects: in the first case a part is isolated from the rest of the narrative, in the second case three distinctly published parts are presented as a unity.

A more important change of format in my material, however, is abbreviation. All translated texts are not abridged, but some of them are considerably shorter than their Swedish counterparts. This is especially the case in the early translations: the practice of abbreviation tends to disappear in the last decades of the twentieth century. Exclusions appear on different levels: whole chapters, sections of chapters, paragraphs, sentences, and parts of sentences. Another kind of format change, just as important as shortenings, is the inclusion of footnotes and endnotes. This kind of peritext, interweaving the literary text with asterisks or numbers, is rare in the early publications but richly used in the translations from the 1980s and 1990s. Abbreviations and added notes are apparent examples of how literature changes shape when it migrates. In her book on African editions of John Bunyan's *The Pilgrim's Progress*, Isabel Hofmeyr notes that migrated literary works are "excised, summarized, abridged, and bowdlerized by the new intellectual formations into which they migrate".7 This holds true for Swedish realist narratives in the UK and the USA as well as for African versions of British Christian classics.

The most evident change in any translated material is of course the very shift from one language to another. It is crucial, however, to bear in mind that the translators' detailed work is only one kind of transformation among many in the migration process. In relation to my material, Emily Apter's notion of "untranslatability" has proven constructive to discuss the translators' struggles with certain words and concepts, especially those naming domestic and everyday phenomena,8 and Lawrence Venuti's take on the old terms "domestication" and "foreignisation" offers a good starting point to describe different translators' solutions to these problems.9 Judging from these translated texts there is, for example, one Swedish phenomenon proving more difficult to translate than any other: the habit of drinking liquor. The verb "supa" (drinking heavily, as opposed to just drinking, "dricka"), is simply translated as "drinking", and the word "brännvin" is dealt with in a variety of ways: "brandy",10 "potato-spirit",11 "booze",12 "aquavit"13 and, finally, kept as a foreign word in italics, "*brännvin*".14 Whereas "drinking" is a neutralisation of "supa", the words "brandy" and "booze" domesticate the kind of drink referred to,

7 Isabel Hofmeyr, *The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of* The Pilgrim's Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2f.

8 Emily Apter, *Against World Literature: on the Politics of Untranslatability* (London: Verso, 2013).

9 Lawrence Venuti, *The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation* (New York: Routledge, 1995).

10 Harry Martinson, *Flowering Nettle*, 7; Fridegård, *I, Lars Hård*, 19; Moa Martinson, *Women and Apple Trees*, 25.

11 Johnson, *1914*, 28. 12 Lo-Johansson, *Breaking Free*, 29. 13 Lo-Johansson, *Only a Mother*, 229. 14 Moberg, *Memory*, 21.

while "potato-spirit", "aquavit" and "*brännvin*" foreignise the Swedish liquor.

## **Distance and Integration**

Distributed on other literary markets, these texts are read in new cultural contexts framing and conditioning the understanding of the narratives. Interpreting literature, hermeneutics tells us, is very much about bridging gaps between the characters', the author's, and the reader's different historical positions.15 In translations, there is an added *cultural* gap, creating a cultural distance between author and reader. This recontextualisation has fundamental representational effects. Distributed and read in another context, far from its place of origin, a literary text often comes to represent more general phenomena than it represents in a context closer to home. The tendency in my material is that the translations are less distinctly connected to particular instances – a specific author, literary current, historical period and social stratum – and instead represent Swedish or Scandinavian literature, culture, society or ways of life. The hardships and injustices depicted come forth as generally Swedish, and the stylistic, thematic and narrative characteristics of these particular novels become characteristics of Swedish literature.

This kind of transformation due to cultural distance, however, not only reduces but also enlarges the novels' significance. Hermeneutic distance does not necessarily make us see less, but may enable us to acknowledge other kinds of significance, unnoticeable at a close range. Moa Martinson's novels are lifted from their firm position in Swedish literary history as proletarian narratives to a cosmopolitan context of women writers from different parts of the world. She contributes with a Swedish perspective on a vastly significant global issue. The same kind of transformation is evident in all the other novels: Moberg's, Fridegård's, Lo-Johansson's and Harry Martinson's narratives become

15 Hans-Georg Gadamer, *Gesammelte Werke: Band 1: Hermeneutik I: Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzuge Einer Philosophischen Hermeneutik* (Mohr Siebeck: Tübingen, 2010).

internationally significant accounts of injustice, frustration, exposure and vulnerability rather than depictions of particular instances in Swedish history.

Furthermore, translations often bring an additional historical gap to the process of interpretation: that between the author and the translator. Moa Martinson's *My Mother Gets Married*, for example, is written in the early 1930s with a 30-year distance from when it is set. With Margaret S. Lacy's translation and afterword, these two historical positions are clothed with words and perspectives from the 1980s, including, for example, a late twentieth-century discourse of gender and feminism. The American translation also includes a foreword by the author written for a new edition of the novel in 1956. Interpreting the novel involves, then, a navigation through five layers of different historical positions: the reader's own position, the translator's 1980s, the foreword's 1950s, the 1930s of Martinson's writing, and the setting's first decade of the twentieth century. These historical gaps interfere with the cultural distance between reader and author, and vice versa: the cultural gap between translator/ reader and writer/characters complicates the process of abridging the historical distance, threatening to blur the impressions of historical distinctness.

The ways in which cultural phenomena in the texts are understood differently by target culture readers compared to source culture readers is a hermeneutic question with a distinct anthropological significance. In Gabriele Schwab's words, translated literary texts function as "imaginary ethnographies",16 interpreted with the help of other sets of references than the original text. For a Swedish reader, for example, these novels have a distinct position in twentieth-century literary history and are understood as a special kind of literature, *arbetarlitteratur*, written from a particular social and historical point of view. For British and American readers, however, these narratives first and foremost come forth

16 Gabriele Schwab, *Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, & Subjectivity* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

as Swedish, and the depiction of customs and conditions is given a cultural rather than a social and historical significance.

At the same time, the translations also become integral parts of the target culture. With the help of polysystem theory, the Swedish novels can be related to different existing literary cultures, for example the tradition of social realism in the UK and the USA.17 There are many ways in which a translated text can be connected to a particular domestic sphere in the target culture. In my material, cover texts, afterwords and footnotes include quite a few comparisons to British and American literary and social events and phenomena. Other integrating connections are made in reviews and introductions. Furthermore, readers themselves have most certainly been prone to understand these narratives from their own cultural points of view via domestic counterparts. Here, it is important to bear in mind that the USA differs distinctly from the UK in that it has a Scandinavian-American minority culture for which these novels have a special audience. This is illustrated by the fact that three out of four American translators have Scandinavian roots: Edwin Björkman (Moberg), Robert E. Bjork (Fridegård and Lo-Johansson) and Margaret S. Lacy (Moa Martinson). The different ways in which these novels become integral parts of British and American majority or minority cultures of course affect the way in which the cultural phenomena depicted are perceived and understood.

#### **Formal, Generic and Thematic Changes**

Since there is never a one-to-one relation between different languages, literary translations often include changes in the use of literary devices. This kind of formal transformation is also found in British and Americans versions of Swedish working-class fiction. Due to substantial differences between Swedish and English, the translators have occasionally been forced to make significant changes in the novels' narrative techniques. This happens,

17 See Itamar Even-Zohar, "Polysystem Studies", *Poetics Today* 11, no. 1, (1990).

for example, when dramatic shifts of tense are skipped or a dialect-based free indirect speech has proven too difficult to keep. The tendency is that the translators make the narrative techniques less complex and more smoothly accessible, but these changes not only neutralise the narrative and the stylistic peculiarities of the Swedish authors, but also, and more significantly, create new kinds of narratives from the stories at hand. In Eyvind Johnson's *1914*, for example, the translator Mary Sandbach has added inverted commas to separate the characters' thoughts from the words of the anonymous narrator. Thereby, Johnson's fuzzy boundaries between narrator and characters are made distinct, and the narrative becomes more of an outside gaze into a foreign world than an account from within. A substantial analysis of this kind of observation requires a narratological framework.18

A couple of texts in my material undergo slight generic changes when translated. For example, a peritext can stress the autobiographical element of a novel so much that the text appears to be more of a direct testimony of a foreign life than an aesthetic account of a general experience. The use of explaining footnotes and endnotes enhances this impression, rendering the novels a distinct anthropological value and reshaping them from fiction to ethnographic sources. This kind of transformation occurs much more in the later than in the early translations, with a distinct shift around 1980. The most evident reason for this change is the fact that the later translations are predominantly published by university presses, with a focus on educational distributions and readerships. Generic changes are best studied through the lens of

18 The modern fundamentals of this framework are found in Gérard Genette's *Figures I–III* from 1967–1970 (*Figures I*, Paris: Seuil, 2007; *Figures II*, Paris: Seuil, 2007; *Figures III*, Paris: Seuil, 1999), of which *Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) is a selection, and in Dorrit Cohn, *Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). A more recent approach to the relation between narrator and character is found in Alan Palmer, *Fictional Minds* (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

genre studies and its development within and outside the discipline of literary studies.19

The cultural gap also has the tendency to affect the very themes of the novels. The new cultural context frames the understanding of the text in a way that makes it appear to be about something slightly different. To analyse this kind of thematic transformation, we need a hermeneutic perspective based on the texts' recontextualisations. Being isolated on the autumnal potato fields in northern Sweden, for example, the young protagonist of Johnson's *1914* is ignorant of the war going on in many parts of Europe. For a Swedish reader, this ignorance enhances the theme of alienation. The protagonist is stuck. He is trapped in the outskirts of the world, too remote from everyone and everything else to be able to change his situation. In Britain, where young working-class men were forced unto the continent to be killed en masse at the front, this non-participation in the world events may very well be seen as a lucky stroke of God's grace. The protagonist is spared, and when the war ends he will get on with his life. In Moa Martinson's *Women and Appletrees* and *My Mother Gets Married*, the cultural and historical gaps work together in transforming the narratives from being working-class novels written from a female point of view to being feminist or proto-feminist narratives from a working-class perspective. This substantial shift is first and foremost enforced by the translator's afterword and the publishing situation, and it has a fundamental impact on the understanding of the narratives, putting some of the novels' motifs in focus at the expense of others.

### **World Perspectives**

Finally, in recent literary scholarship, world literary theory has revitalised the concept of world-making in order to discuss what kind of relation to the world literary texts from different traditions encompass and evoke.20 Culturally recontextualised texts

19 For an overview, see John Frow, "'Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything

You Need': Genre Theory Today", *PMLA* 122, no. 5 (2007). 20 Pheng Cheah, "What is a World? On World Literature as World-making Activity", *Dædalus* 137, no. 3 (2008): 26–38.

are especially relevant cases to study from this perspective, since they are able to offer significantly different alternative outlooks upon the world we all share. At the end of Moberg's *The Earth Is Ours*, for example, the protagonist Knut Toring experiences a strong feeling of a two-fold belonging: he belongs in the small Swedish village of Lidalycke and "on this earth".21 This existential insight is prompted by the conflict between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain at the negotiation in Munich in 1938 and the threat of a new European war. The novel's concept of "this earth" is thus primarily European. From a Swedish perspective, Knut's insight reflects a similar position for the reader: every Swedish city, town or village is dangerously close to the escalating conflict down south. But whereas a Swedish reading perspective is placed within Knut's world, an American perspective exists outside its borders. In one sense, then, the American reader is an outsider looking into European affairs from a distance, but by reading about the world through the eyes of the protagonist he or she is simultaneously invited to share Knut's perspective. Unlike the contemporary Swedish reader, the translation reader is thus offered a negotiation of perspectives.22

An analysis of a text's world can be done in a number of ways. A method that has proven very fruitful in my material is a simple mapping of geographical and cultural references in order to grasp the scope of the novels' and their characters' worlds.23 In this respect, the narratives show huge differences. Eyvind Johnson's *1914*, for example, contains mostly local and very few international references, whereas Harry Martinson's *Flowering Nettle* is crammed with associations to and thoughts of places and phenomena from all over the world. Physically, the protagonists in these novels are equally bound to a limited place, but in their

21 Moberg, *The Earth*, 621.

22 For a discussion of the dynamics between the regional, the national and the cosmopolitan in all these novels, see Paul Tenngart, "Local Labour, Cosmopolitan Toil: Geo-Cultural Dynamics in Swedish Working-Class

Fiction", *Journal of World Literature*, no. 6, 2016. 23 For preliminary results of this mapping, see Paul Tenngart, "The Bamboos of Blekinge: The Writing of Cultures in Swedish Proletarian Fiction", *Journal of Literature and Art Studies* 5, no. 7, 2015.

minds their worlds are very different in geographical and cultural scope. Johnson's and Martinson's narratives thus represent two very different ways of experiencing the world, reminding us that outlooks upon the world are not merely conditioned by broadly drawn national, cultural and social belongings. Taken together, Swedish working-class narratives from the 1930s will give the reader a very diversified account of the world, despite the fact that they are all Swedish and written from a common historical and social perspective. Read separately and at a cultural distance, however, any of these novels may be understood as encompassing a general Swedish 1930s working-class perspective on the world.

### **Conclusion**

The kinds of transformation due to literary migration observed here are very different from one another. They are caused by different conditions, they have different effects, and they require different theoretical frameworks in order to be substantially analysed. Examining them one by one from separate theoretical perspectives is clearly possible, but it will not enable us to reach a general impression of how a text or a set of texts manifests in new languages and contexts. All these kinds of transformation are active at the same time, impacting each other – sometimes confirming each other, sometimes enhancing each other, and at other times ruling each other out or giving contradictory impressions. In other words, their interrelations are very complex, and we need to address them all together.

One fundamental distinction is important to make. Five of these transformations exist on a more basic level than the others. Changes in situation, format, language, hermeneutic distance and cultural context are all necessary recodings that constitute the migration process. The other four – formal, generic and thematic changes, and changes in world perspectives – are rather secondary effects prompted by the inevitable recodings. In addressing all the transformations together, this distinction will help us see their interconnections and structure our further examinations.

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———. "Local Labour, Cosmopolitan Toil: Geo-Cultural Dynamics in Swedish Working-Class Fiction". *Journal of World Literature* 1, no. 4 (2016): 484–502.

Venuti, Lawrence. *The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation*. New York: Routledge, 1995.

# **28. A Cosmopolitan North in Nordic Noir: Turning Swedish Crime Fiction into World Literature**

*Louise Nilsson*  English, Stockholm University

World literature does not carry itself across borders solely by the force of its words or at the behest of book reviewers vouching for the quality of the narratives. When translated literature travels outside its domestic context and becomes, following David Damrosch's definition, *a work of world literature*, its journey and perception is governed by a multifaceted (re)presentation that goes beyond common-sense perceptions of the book as an inert, unchangeable object.1 Literature is visually embedded in print and digital media, film adaptations or marketing strategies as alluring jacket designs. Through these modes of representation that produce as well reproduce meaning about cultures and societies, a domestic literature in translation becomes a visually *glocal* literature, depicting universal themes in a local setting. When studying how literature is perceived in a foreign context, the power of representation should never be underestimated. In the circulation of world literature, media plays a seminal part that exemplifies how the perception of a book is a negotiating between its *content* and *context*. 2

#### **How to cite this book chapter:**

1 David Damrosch, *What Is World Literature?* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5–6.

2 Louise Nilsson et al., "Introduction", in *Crime Fiction as World Literature*, ed. Louise Nilsson et al. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017),

Nilsson, Louise. "A Cosmopolitan North in Nordic Noir: Turning Swedish Crime Fiction into World Literature". In *World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange*, edited by Stefan Helgesson, Annika Mörte Alling, Yvonne Lindqvist, and Helena Wulff, 340–354. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/bat.ab. License: CC-BY.

A highly important aspect here, for the circulation of literature on the transnational book market, is how the book cover plays a key role in the representation of literature. When a domestic literature is integrated – and often assimilated – into other national and cultural contexts, the appearances of the books become especially crucial, either in reinforcing the branding of a known author or series, or else in setting the tone for a new entry into the market. The book cover is a highly relevant source for a deeper understanding of the circulation and perception of world literature, as it visually encloses the narrative.

This essay serves – by departing from the book cover as a source – as a *minor* sample example on how to *methodologically* approach the circulation of literature outside its own national context. The focus will be on the circulation of crime fiction outside its domestic context, focusing on works grouped together in the subgenre Nordic Noir, and it centres on Swedish crime fiction as a minor case study.

The aim is to examine, by departing from *one* cover, how translated literature becomes visually framed – as a foreign literature – on a transnational book market and how this domestic literature intersects with the cosmopolitan mediascape. The essay raises the question: how is a novel's narrative visually framed outside its domestic context on a transnational book market?

The investigation will discuss how the perception of Nordic Noir as exotic and well-marketed with wintry covers rests upon a culturally forged and globally disseminated idea of the north, found worldwide in various cultural expressions such as myths, folklore, fairy tales, literature and contemporary cinema and trails centuries back in cultural history. This idea embraces narratives of fear, as well as elements of the supernatural and fantastic, political dimensions or specific topographies. The main argument is that the perception of Swedish crime fiction as a local literature – often

1ff. Louise Nilsson, "Uncovering a Cover: Marketing Swedish Crime Fiction in a Transnational Context", *Journal of Transnational American Studies*, 7, no. 1 (2016): 1–16. My understanding of representation follows: Stuart Hall (ed.), *Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices* (London: Sage: The Open University, 1997), 1–3.

perceived as exotic – rests upon the shoulders of cultural history, popular culture as well as fine arts and in sum, a cosmopolitan cluster of shared ideas and values. The circulation of literature across borders is a multilayered and multifaceted process; the narrative itself is in fact only a part of the process that presents the novel to new potential readers. Therefore, the representation of literature in different media (film, magazines, marketing, blogs) contributes not only to our perception of literature's fictional narratives, but also to its surrounding cultural contexts and geographical location. The perception of world literature, I argue, is a negotiation between content and context, and the circulation of images, such as book covers, connects to other dimensions of culture and historically embedded ideas, often cosmopolitan in their orientation.

The choice of study object – the crime fiction genre – is motivated in several different ways. Crime fiction is a globally shared genre, intimately connected to the local place: the depicted milieus provide the *settings* for the plots and often play a thematic role in the novels.3 Crime fiction is one of the most widespread of all literary genres, read worldwide and known for portraying and formulating a social critique of its own native context. It is deeply rooted in a *local* place, yet at the same time dealing with universal questions about life and death, crime and punishment, conflicting values and morals. The genre blends together reality and fiction, depicting its own society through fictional plots and characters. The genre's intimate connection to other media, such as film adaptations, occupies a unique niche and offers as empirical departure an opportunity to closely investigate the dynamics between fictional narratives and perception of culturally embodied geographical places.4

3 Paul Geherin, *The Dragon Tattoo and Its Long Tail: The New Wave of European Crime Fiction in America* (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2012), 5–8. For further reading see Leonard Lutwack, *The Role of Place* (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press: 1984); Barbara Pezotti, *The Importance of Place in Contemporary Italian Crime Fiction: A Bloody Journey* (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012).

4 Nilsson et al., *Crime Fiction*; Hans Bertens et al. (eds.), *Contemporary American Crime Fiction* (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

The contemporary and internationally successful subgenre Nordic Noir is deliberately chosen as an empirical example as it is known narratively for its uniqueness or exoticism and aesthetically for its wintry book covers, due to its geographical northbound location in Europe.5 Within academic research the focus has been on "the success story" in the aftermath of bestselling writers such as Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson. The claim is that the success story is interwoven with a changed publishing industry that has merged into multimedia conglomerates and marketing strategies, drawing aesthetically upon the snowy landscapes of the Nordic countries.6

This encapsulation belies the complexity of marketing foreign literatures and simplifies how domestic crime fiction enters the transnational book market and merges into a cosmopolitan mediascape knit together by universal questions and shared ideas. Another aspect too substantial to disregard is the concept Nordicity, a research field developed by Canadian researchers in the 1960s, and that problematise the perception of high latitude regions – real and imagined – and how these connect to culturally forged ideas about the north in relation to natural conditions as well as culture and human psychology and identity.7 The following

5 I'm here using the word "aesthetically" in regard to the visual framing of crime fiction, for example, marketing. The term applies also, however, as a concept within literature studies, arching the aesthetic dimension of *language*.

6 Nilsson, *Uncovering*, 2016.

7 For research about Nordicity, see especially Daniel Chartier, "Towards a Grammar of the Idea of North: Nordicity, Winterity", *Nordlit* 22 (2007): 35–47; Sherrill E. Grace, *Canada and the Idea of North* (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001). Further reading, see: Margaret Atwood, *Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature*  (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1995); B. J. Epstein (ed.), *True North: Literary Translation in the Nordic Countries* (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014); Carolyn Strange et al. (eds.), *True Crime, True North: The Golden Age of Canadian Pulp Magazines* (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2004); Sumarliði Ísleifsson et al. (eds.), *Iceland and Images of the North* (Quebec; Presses de l'Université du Québec; Reykjavík: The Reykjavík Academy, 2011); Sverrir Jakobsson et al. (eds.), *Images of the North: Histories – Identities – Ideas* (Amsterdam; New York; Rodopi, 2009); Dolly Jørgensen et al. (eds.), *Northscapes: History,*

analysis will therefore by taking on the surface of a narrative – the cover – contextualise it and, in relation to the novel's content, show how the local place intersects with the cosmopolitan space and shared beliefs and ideas from cultural history.

## **Theoretical and Methodological Considerations**

A common approach to studying covers is quantitative and finds its inspiration in the work of Gérard Genette, statistically surveying paratexts (blurbs on the back cover, titles, additional text appearances on the cover).8 My own approach is qualitative and employs discourse analysis as a theoretical and methodological point of departure. Theoretically inspired by discourse analysis understand crime fiction as a discursive field *–* a network consisting of elements and nodal points that connect and build on each other. The nodal points forming this discursive field can include subgenres, authors, domestic literature or iconic works, which I will show further ahead play key roles in forging of marketing tropes. In my use of *iconic* I mean an "image that refers to something outside of its individual components, something (or someone) that has great symbolic meaning for many people".9

*Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments* (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013).

8 Gérard Genette, *Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Karl Berglund, *Mordförpackningar. Omslag, titlar och kringmaterial till svenska pocketdeckare 1998–2011* (Uppsala: Avd. för litteratursociologi; Uppsala universitet: 2016); Nicole Matthews et al. (eds.), *Judging a Book by Its Cover: Fans, Publishers, Designers, and the Marketing of Fiction* (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). For an introductory study to literature and its commercial context a seminal study is: Claire Squires, *Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain* (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2009).

9 For further reading about iconic and in relation to visual displays in culture, see: Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, *Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture*, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, quote from s. 36. For reading about iconic in relation to a northern setting, see: Robert G. David, *The Arctic in the British Imagination*, *1818– 1914,* Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

The discursive field is not static but flexible, yielding an openness where new nodal points can emerge. As an established genre, crime fiction holds a power position on the book market, intersecting with a number of other discourses, belonging to, for example, entertainment culture where female crime fiction heroines challenges gender stereotypes, or social critique, focusing on malfunctions and flaws in the societal system as law, police enforcement or power misuse in politics. My approach follows Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's development of discourse as a system of social relations consisting of both linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena, including forms of behavior or visual representations.10

The following analysis connects specifically to the nonlinguistic dimension. Within this discursive field, elements appear continuously, striving to establish identities and subject positions. Elements then compete to strengthen their position and become nodal points, which are constructed through linguistic as well as nonlinguistic practices. Consider a foreign literature or unknown writer, both elements within this discursive field. Through articulatory practices including the many elements that go into the construction of a compelling paratext, these can merge successfully into the field, connecting to other nodal points, then establishing independent identities to become fixed nodal points connected to others. As discourses are open, identities continuously change and evolve. Meaning, therefore, is only partially fixed within the field.11

As Laclau and Mouffe discuss, a subject position can possess a number of social relations, all providing different identities. Thus, a domestic literature may represent the local or national, and can circulate within the transnational field as a cosmopolitan literature. A crime fiction novel may spur entertainment-oriented movie or television adaptations, yet at the same time spotlight a

10 For further reading about discourse, see: David R. Howarth, *Discourse* (Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, 2000) 101; Ernesto Laclau et al., *Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics* (London: Verso, 1985).

11 Howarth, *Discourse*, 101–7.

specific social problem (thereby connecting to another discourse). Swedish crime fiction has gone from being a foreign element to a well-established nodal point in many markets – a nodal point connecting to the node for the cluster of Nordic Noir – by successfully articulating its own identity and by connecting to other nodal points of the discursive field, via genre, nationality, author-branding, bestseller status or place-representation, and its specific geography that intersect with the cosmopolitan idea of the *north*.

In the following case study the analysis focuses on the Swedish crime fiction writer Arne Dahl and departs empirically from his novel *En midsommarnattsdröm* (2003) and its German translation, *Ungeschoren* since its jacket design displays a typically snowy Nordic Noir cover.

## **A Contradictory Cover**

The author Arne Dahl's *En midsommarnattsdröm* – *A Midsummer Night's Dream* – is the sixth novel in the series of ten about the Stockholm-based crime-fighting squad called *A-gruppen* (A-unit, the *Intercrime Group* in English translation) and was adapted to the screen in 2015. Dahl's Intercrime Group series has been translated internationally and its Swedish TV-adaptation has been exported to Argentina, Chile, Finland, Germany, Japan and the UK among other countries. The plot in *A Midsummer Night's Dream* begins with the discovery – over a short time – of four dead bodies in Stockholm: a corpse in Riddarfjärden, a polish nurse killed with an axe, a Swedish television-manager involved in a popular reality TV-show and a murder, which appears to be an honor killing. The murder victims become connected by tattoo; each body has a small tattoo on the back of their knee and that together spell *PUCK*. 12

The novel's title (its *paratext*) presents a multilayered meaning. Besides paraphrasing Shakespeare's well-known play *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, it refers to the Swedish holiday

12 For information about translations and film adaptations of Arne Dahl's novels, see: http:// www.arnedahl.net (accessed February 2017).

*midsommar* (*midsummer*) in June. In regard to geography and climate, the midsummer holiday spawns the year's brightest night in Sweden, known as the night the sun never goes down. Traditionally it is celebrated by dancing outdoors around a flower-decorated maypole that resembles a cross (taking place during daytime, oriented towards families with children), eating traditional food (potatoes, herring, bread), singing traditional drinking songs and toasting in Swedish hard liquor served as shots.

In addition, the novel's plot takes place during the week before midsummer celebrations. The week before midsummer is when Sweden is gearing into vacation mode for a smooth and slow shut down before disappearing away to midsummer celebrations. The letters spelling PUCK is another reference to Shakespeare's play, and with a slightly different spelling it forms the old-fashioned Swedish word *Puke*, which refers to the devil or a devilish creature. Shakespeare figures, of course, as a source of inspiration for this novel.