Local Flavor: Current Nordic Speculative Fiction Online

Well, I should get at least one blog post out this month–sorry this is coming so late. June tends to be a busy month for me, and this was more so, with a kidney stone procedure (blegh), job search drama (only in so far as I was waiting to see what would happen), and packing and prepping now that I’ve accepted a one year position at Gustavus Adolphus college (those of you who have been around will remember that I taught there for another one year position back in 2012-13). Whew. Lots going on. But after my Sweden trip in May (yes, I should probably post about that later…) I have been doing some more digging into the world of Nordic science fiction and fantasy, and this led me to one new source. Consider this a supplement to my previous post on the topic, except not limited to just Swedish (actually, just expanding to include Finnish here…), and now I’m focused on what you can find online for free, here and now. 🙂  (Incidentally, illustrations here are just random examples of my own sci-fi/fantasy sketches–go to the linked websites for their own art…)

The surprise discovery for me was the online magazine Brev från Cosmos (Letters from Cosmos), put out by Club Cosmos, a science fiction society out of Göteborg, Sweden. The issues are all available for free online. All in Swedish, I’m afraid–except the story “Sixty thousand and one” in issue 4, so you non-Swedish readers can check that one out if you want. To a degree it does feel like a club publication, a product of fandom, but I recognize at least a few of the authors as those who have been publishing short stories in the various Swedish collections out there, along with a few published novelists, so I think it is really just indicative of the fact that in smaller, non-Anglophone countries the fandom side of genre fiction and the professional side are much more closely intertwined and interdependent. How’s the quality? Well, I think I have to repeat my impression of the speculative short fiction collections I’ve reviewed in Swedish–a bit of a mixed bag, sometimes within the same story, though I’m waiting until a second read to make up my mind about some of them. Generally this magazine seems focused on science fiction, largely confined to the usual tropes, though at least one of the stories I read, Liv Vistisen-Rörby’s Nattramn (Night Raven, though using a dialectical or archaic Swedish word for Raven…) feels like it would fit in well with the creepier side of the Finnish Weird. Anyway, if you read Swedish, or are learning, and are, as they say, a geek (I am), you ought to check these out. But as noted in my previous post on this topic, if you are looking for more a more consistent quality and a higher one, better to check out the examples I give of more mainstream/”literary” authors who, for whatever reason, have decided to go “slumming” (sorry, that’s a bad metaphor to use…) in the speculative fiction ghetto–Vallgren, Gustafsson, etc. I personally feel like Swedish literature has an unusual number of great stories in this latter category, and this unfortunately makes it difficult (as I approach these stories, at least) for this new wave of more dedicated speculative fiction writers to shine in comparison. But I’ve seen some great stories out there, and I hope they will continue to rise to the challenge.

I’ve mentioned the Finnish online magazine (also free) Finnish Weird before, but it fits our topic here, so I’ll mention it again. It is obvious from the start that a lot more money has been put into this publication, so it is a bit of an unfair comparison with the Swedish magazine above–like comparing a pro-magazine with a semi-pro mag or fanzine (I believe that is the terminology used by SFWA…). I have not read every story in each of the issues, but generally I think it’s comparable to the quality you would get in an Anglophone magazine at the pro-level (pro vs semi pro is determined by the amount paid to the authors, but I am thinking in terms of literary quality–according to my own opinion, of course…). The Finnish Weird is also, as the name suggests, more about that mingling of fantasy and horror that we find in the old Weird Tales and related magazines, more recently revived as a more sophisticated “New Weird”, a term then appropriated by Johanna Sinisalo to describe this particular literary movement growing out of Finnish speculative fiction/pop culture fandom.

Finnish Weird is in English, so apologies to those who wanted to practice their Finnish. I’ve found a few stories (one Swedish, two Finnish) on Strange Horizons and its new extension Samovar (which publishes translations), so here are a few more stories in English for you:

Palimpsest by Anders Åslund is dystopian sci-fi, and while I haven’t nailed down what it is that makes Swedish sci-fi Swedish, I will note that this story feels similar to those I’ve read in the Swedish collections–one of the better quality ones, of course. And you know, dystopias are pretty big in Swedish lit… of course, they are everywhere, but for some reason I see the theme returning in the Swedish stories in a way that feels similar… Well, dystopia is prominent in Swedish literary history, with such heavy-hitters like Karin Boye’s Kallocain and Harry Martinson’s Aniara, plus there is a contemporary dystopian feel to all that crime fiction that Swedes love so much, so maybe there is a genealogy to trace here… I will have to work on it. 🙂

The Dying Embers by Inkeri Kontro is weird enough even for Finnish Weird, with a sauna as a narrator. A steamy story, in more ways than one. Fits well with the weirdness that Strange Horizons so often publishes (I mean that as a compliment, for the record), so I hope to see more Finnish Weird on their site. Though of course, now that will probably end up on Samovar, their translation site–which is where we find our next story.

Wither and Blossom, by Suvi Kauppila, a dark fairy tale with a lovely podcast version read beautifully by Anaea Lay. Be sure to read the interview with Suvi as well!

A little prelude to the differences between the Finnish vs the Swedish material–not so much riffing on identifiably Swedish culture in these stories, versus a more conspicuous interest in that sort of thing in (many but not all of) the Finnish stories. While I’ve posted my “Angry Tomte” picture here, I’ve been surprised to find so little Swedish fantasy riffing on traditional Swedish folklore/culture–possibly an aversion to anything that might look reactionary? I think the appropriation of traditional Germanic/Scandinavian culture by white supremacists has, along with just being shitty and evil, made it difficult for folks to bring, say, Swedish folk creatures into their stories without having to somehow mark that they are not trying to make a white supremacist argument by doing so (according to a paper I heard several years ago, this is also a problem faced by Swedish folk musicians). Personally I think there is a lot of potential for digging into the traditional material in a subversive and progressive way–but to be honest, I think the lack of this in the Swedish material is more a matter of Swedish fandom being more engaged with the tropes and styles of Anglophone spec fic–to get away from that, you have to go to the “mainstream” authors, as I’ve noted.

I do like that the Finnish Weird is more of a defined literary movement–not that you need to be a defined literary movement to be good and interesting, but I think that it is clear from the stories I’ve read that there is something local (specific to Finland), thoughtful, relatively coherent and unique, that is coming out of that milieu (well, could just be excellent branding, but hey…)–the ‘local flavor’ of my post title, and something that works very well in this particular case, whether it is simply the general “Finnish grimness/melancholy” that you get in many of these stories, or the use of local material within this international genre (for example, Sinisalo’s novel about a troll, or Kontro’s story about a sauna). The fantasy and science fiction I’ve read in Swedish (again, focusing on this current–90s-2010s–crop of genre authors) may be good, bad, or amazing depending on the story/novel, but for the most part seems simply to be a part of these international genres, rather than a more localized and unique contribution to that world scene–but I expect to find some more specifically Swedish tendencies as I go. And of course, the Swedish Steampunk I’ve read (so far primarily the collection I varje ångetag, though I’ve started a more recent collection now) has as a particular strength its focus on an alternate steam-power Sweden, versus the focus on reimagined Britains and Americas in Anglophone (and so more visible and internationally accessible) steampunk. That’s probably another blog post though…

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Heavenly Bodies: Translator’s Remarks

Yikes, this will be the only post I make this month–and I only did one last month too. Plus, I’ve already posted about my translation of Ola Sigurdson’s Heavenly Bodies, though last time it hadn’t actually come out yet (and the release date I shared then ended up getting pushed back by almost a month). Well, it is out now, and you should all GO OUT AND BUY TEN COPIES RIGHT NOW!!!! Well, OK, not so much urgency, I guess, given that I’ve already been paid for my translation services and will not be getting royalties myself (which doesn’t surprise me with an academic translation like this–I believe the case is different with literary translations, which I confess I would like to move into eventually…). The list price of the book is $60 (actually not so bad for a rather erudite, and potentially obscure, book like this, though I hope the price will help it become less obscure), but Amazon has it for about $43. I’m waiting for it to show up at the UC Berkeley and GTU libraries here in Berkeley… may have to nudge someone about that.

The book is, in short, on the theology of the body, beginning with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity’s scorn for the body, preferring the spiritual over the corporeal, and going on to both affirm this critique and then to place it in its proper historical situation in 19th century Protestantism–given the centrality of the Incarnation in Christianity, we have to suspect that the religion was not always so “body-denying.” The book then proceeds in three parts of several chapters each, covering first the Incarnation (both the development of the doctrine in the early Church and more recent theological contributions), the Gaze (covering philosophies thereof along with the Byzantine Iconoclasm and the particular Gaze embodied by Jesus in the Gospels), and, at most length, Embodiment (ranging from Merleau-Ponty to Foucault and Butler, from the “closed” Classical body to the open “grotesque” body, to torture, to S&M, to the Eucharist…) OK, look, you will just have to read it yourself. Only $43 on Amazon!!

Since I was (thankfully, given how little time I had finishing up) not asked to give any sort of “Translator’s Note” (I did not expect to write one–in fact, not all translators get to show up on the title page, so I’m very happy I made it to so prominent a place with my first such job), I did not have an opportunity to give the usual “Any reason you might find to dislike this book is clearly my (the translator’s) fault, and no one should blame Ola or the editors at all, because really, if there is a jackass here, it is me.” Or some such. Editors and author all seemed happy with the end result, but certainly there are plenty of places where I could wish for just one more pass of revisions, and here and there I see something where I think “I thought I’d changed that…” (and one place so far where the editors changed something without sticking to the phrasing Ola and I had agreed on, but it still works), but so far I haven’t caught any meaning-changing errors (nor, apparently, did Ola or Eerdmans), and I trust that there are not too many places (ideally very few, but it is my first time doing this…) where my clumsy prose gets in the way of Ola’s argumentation. My first drafts certainly had me thinking too much in Swedish while attempting to write in English. My many revisions (later on with Ola’s commentary) were very helpful in working this out and situating the text more firmly in the target language, but I fear there are still spots that held out till the end. I won’t share any thoughts here on particular translation choices (there were some tricky bits), but we’ll see, maybe that will be a post for the future.

The project itself was a delight, if often challenging (certainly in scope–let me tell you, this book is a brick), and in spite of the additional stress of translating the last third or so while also filling in as a lecturer in the Scandinavian Section at UCLA (also a fun job, just, you know, more work–also more $$ tho, so that was nice). I’ve told friends and family that this project was like being paid to sit in on three or more graduate seminars in very different fields, which I note was part of the attraction for me. While the ultimate point of the book belongs to (Christian) systematic theology (itself of non-professional interest for my very [in this subject] amateur self), Heavenly Bodies also constitutes a very erudite work in both the history of religions and philosophy, in particular the more continental side of philosophy that owes so much to the later reception of phenomenology, and in particular with regard to two subjects I have long been interested in within the humanities: the gaze and embodiment (the former of which figured prominently in my dissertation on ekphrasis in Viking age poetry–but let the uninitiated beware, while treatments of the gaze and embodiment are ubiquitous from the early 20th century on, what is meant by and the significance of each can vary widely depending what school of thought you are looking at). Ola covers a lot of ground, and diligently and clearly (again, fingers crossed that damn translator did his job right) presents the thought of everyone from St Paul to Origen, Schleiermacher to Barth and beyond to various feminist theologians, laying out the relevant arguments in a sympathetic manner even if he will then go on to argue against, or beyond, them. The philosophers and theorists I am more familiar with are all on display here as well, and more, covering both hermeneutic and radical phenomenologies (ie, from Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty to Derrida and Marion), as well as various “post-phenomenological” thinkers, from Foucault to Butler (and we also find many other disciplines represented, from psychoanalysis to cultural anthropology–but look, my fingers are getting tired so let’s stop there…). I find Ola’s presentations of these various, often very difficult, philosophies to be quite clear and helpful–well, OK, it is still philosophy and theory, and you will struggle to work through a tenth of the book if you don’t even have a reasonable sense of who Heidegger (for example) is, so I can’t recommend it as a gift for your ten year old niece–maybe wait till she’s finished college, though you will have to suggest she take Philosophy, or English, or Communications, Feminist Studies, something along those lines. Even better, I’m still looking for a teaching position for the Fall and would be happy to tutor the whole family. Look, we’ve already got a textbook…

Well, that was a bit of a ramble. I’ll close by thanking Mark Safstrom for sending Eerdmans my name when they were looking for a translator, former editor-in-chief at Eerdmans Jon Pott, who entrusted me with this job, James Ernest who took over for Jon as I was finishing up the translation, and especially Ola, who wrote this fine and fascinating book and who was so essential in his help with my revisions–I was very grateful for his willingness to spend so much time on a project that was otherwise almost a decade in his past, and I dearly hope the final result does some degree of justice to the original.

Carl

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