Translating from Scandinavian languages to French

As Danny points out, it’s a bit strange that this is written in English. It’s an older article, from 2005, but it’s a familiar sounding complaint, despite the fact that it’s a French translator talking about Scandinavian books.

After over a quarter of a century in the trade, I have been asked to write about the situation of the translation of Swedish literature in France at the present moment. It is a matter dear to my heart – perhaps all too dear and I have some difficulty looking at it with an objective mind. But försöka duger, as they say up there: It is worth trying.

The situation as seen over the past half-century is rather simple, in fact. In the fifties, there was only one company which published any Nordic literature in French at all: Stock. I know it very well, since I was delighted, when I began studying Scandinavian languages in my late teens, at the existence of its Bibliothèque scandinave (part of the “Cabinet cosmopolite”). I swallowed every volume I could find (all too few, for my taste). I know very well too, to whom I owe what would later become my life-time passion: his name is Lucien Maury, a former French lecturer in Scandinavia who was virtually the only one in the country to know what was going on over there in the field of literature. The series ultimately included over fifty volumes, all of the best quality (Andersen, Kielland, Kinck, Kirkegaard, Kivi, Lagerlöf, Lagerkvist, Pontoppidan, Strindberg, Undset…). Unfortunately, it was very much one man’s work and did not survive his death in 1953. The series was discontinued for years – in fact it has not yet been reborn. Nordic literature was at that time poorly represented in such foreign series as Gallimard’s Du monde entier or Robert Laffont’s Pavillons and at Presses de la Renaissance. Nowadays, the tables are turned: there is one publishing house which does not publish any Swedish or Nordic work at all and it is, believe it or not, Stock! Whereas nearly all the others, big and small, have at least one or two Scandinavian authors or titles in their catalogues. Rejoicing? Yes and no, depending whether you think in terms of quantity or quality.