Category Swedish
Girl Speak: Johanne Lykke Holm’s “Strega,” translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel
When narrative itself, literature itself, has been complicit in constructing oppression, how can it be escaped, resisted, unmade? Translation might be one answer. In the move from one language to another, the attempt to place a text or image or idea from the past in the present, or even (taking translation in a very broad sense) from one medium or genre to another, the act of translation opens little gaps that, with each word, phrase, sentence, chapter, even layout, cover, paratext, leave room for intervention.
In Love, at War, with Homer: Theodor Kallifatides’ “The Siege of Troy,” Translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
By Kirk Ormand Few works have been translated as often, or as with as many different poetic and political programs, as Homer’s Iliad. Kallifatides’ brief version, written originally in Swedish, is his attempt to bring the daunting epic to a new generation of readers (“Afterword,” 203). He accomplishes this by telling the story of a […]
Decline and Fall: “Eventide” by Therese Bohman, translated from Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
Reviewed by Gabi Reigh Eventide is Therese Bohman’s third novel and just as the heroines of Drowned (2012) and The Other Woman (2016), Karolina, the novel’s protagonist, is a disenchanted observer of the workings of Swedish society, rejecting its norms through her self-destructive emotional entanglements and exposing its hypocrisy about sexual politics. In an interview […]