Scandinavian crime writing goes to school

From co-editor Paula Arvas at the University of Helsinki comes news of Scandinavian Crime Fiction, a collection of articles that calls itself the first English-language study of the subject. The book has apparently been in the works awhile and is about to see the light of the day (th0ugh I'm not sure how much light there is in the Nordic lands this time of year.)

According to the cover blurb,

"This collection of articles studies the development of crime fiction in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden since the 1960s ... Scandinavian Crime Fiction identifies distinct features and changes in the Scandinavian crime tradition through analysis of some of its most well-known writers: Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Anne Holt, Liza Marklund, Leena Lehtolainen and Arnaldur Indriðason, among others. Focusing on Scandinavian crime fiction's snowballing prominence since the 1990s, articles concentrate on the transformation of the genre's social criticism, study of significance of cultural and geographical place in the tradition and analyse the cultural politics of crime fiction, including struggles over gender equity, sexuality, ethnicity, history and the fate of the welfare state."

I've written about geography in Arnaldur's novels, and I've been reading those pioneers in the genre's social criticism, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, so I'll look forward to this one. You should, too.

(The book appears to be the third in the University of Wales Press' European Crime Fictions series. Earlier volumes featured French and Italian crime fiction.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

On translating Andrea Camilleri

Earlier this year, I linked to an article by Stephen Sartarelli about translating Andrea Camilleri into English.

I singled out Sartarelli's assessment that Camilleri:

"writes in a language that he has been the first to grace with literary status. An invented language, in the sense that, though made up of existing manners of speech and writing, it has never before been assembled in quite this fashion."

The article turns up as a preface to Does the Night Smell the Same in Italy and in English Speaking Countries? An Essay on Translation: Camilleri in English by Emanuela Gutkowski.

The book is marred by a tendency to weigh down obvious statements with citations not just in footnotes but in the body of the text. If you can ignore that academic affectation, Gutkowski, a lecturer in English and translation studies at the University of Catania in Sicily, has interesting things to say to readers of Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano mysteries.

Her numerous quotations from Camilleri's L'odore della notte and its translation as The Smell of the Night (The Scent of the Night for delicate UK readers) highlight the sorts of choices a translator must make when literal renderings would make no sense in the "reception" language. Thus "Ho avuto una botta di culo incredibile, Mimi" becomes "I hit the goddamn jackpot, Mimi."

"The expression cannot be translated," Gutkowski writes, as the literal translation `I had a terrible ass-hit' appears to be nonsense." Sartarelli's choice is anything but nonsense, and he gets the tone just right.

Sartareli made wise choices as well in areas of linguistic untranslatablity, where Montalbano's distinctively Sicilian manipulations of grammar lack precise English equivalents. Such a locution, says, Gutkowski, is Montalbano's introduction of himself by "Montalbano sono" (literally "Montalbano I am") rather than the standard "I am Montalbano" or "It's Montalbano."

His choice of words thus violates normal word order in the interest of a strange, self-conscious formality. Just try getting that across in translation. Sartarelli's choice: "Montalbano the name." That, too, captures the tone, I'd say.

And then there's Catarella, Montalbano's thick, excitable, language-mangling colleague. I'd had ambivalent feelings about Sartarelli's rendering his speech in an English full of malapropisms and misspellings. Seeing his version beside the original, I appreciate the sensitivity he has to the strange, clanky sound of Catarella's speech.

"Vossia di pirsona pirsonalmente è?" becomes "Is that you yourself in person?" which both preserves the sense and offers an elegant substitution (you/yourself) for Catarella's cracked alliteration.

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Camilleri makes artful use of clichés, mostly to show how they drive Montalbano nuts. I wrote about those clichés and what Sartarelli does with them here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009