Scandinavian crime fiction is for the moment extremely popular all over the world. And so is , more generally, Scandinavian literature. Book lovers in the US, England, Germany, France, Spain and elsewhere still read Ibsen, Strindberg, Andersen, Undset, Hamsun and other wonderful Scandinavian writers. Even some of the more contemporary ones, like Jan Kjaerstad (Kjærstad), Tove Jansson, Morten Ramsland, and so on.
However, it is very sad to notice how poorly the Scandinavian countries manage and market their valuable cultural treasures. I spend a lot of time keeping up with what is happening on the Scandinavian literary scene – seeking to identify new emerging authors, finding new great books, find out which books are being translated into English, and similar tasks. This is not easily done! The Scandinavian countries – all of them! – are extremely lacking when it comes to making things like these visible to the wider world!
I manage to find what I am looking for often, but mostly because I am a native Scandinavian speaker (I do not read Finnish, however, so that is a dark spot on the map for me, and also the country that needs to improve the most). For people that do not speak the language it must be virtually impossible to find out anything whatsoever!
So what I miss is something as simple as a little list of new books, books that are published in other languages, their original and translated titles, accessible in English, for each of the countries, and published on the internet.
This is not a big task! The Scandinavian countries, which each spend hundreds of millions to promote themselves internationally as tourist destinations, should consider spending a tiny sum on something like this. Promoting the literature of the Scandinavian countries – Scandinavian culture – and making it easier to find for people interested in it all over the globe must be good PR for Scandinavia!
And – let it also be noted that the Scandinavian publishing houses and agencies are extremely bad as well! They – or rather some of them – have a little information in English available. But usually very little. And I have yet to see a listing of authors and books translated into English at any of their sites! Do they expect people from the English speaking world to go through every single author listed on their sites to find who has been translated into English?
It is somewhat ironic that the best source I have found for Scandinavian books translated into English is not on any official Swedish or Danish or Norwegian site, nor a Scandinavian publisher’s site, but rather a tiny little spreadsheet in Excel-format, made and updated by some good folks at the University of Rochester!
“Tackar så mycket” to the good folks at Rochester, and shame on you, Scandinavia!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I can only help with crime fiction, I’ve a list of authors/titles that have been translated into English :
http://eurocrime.co.uk/books/books_bib_Scandinavia.html. Part of the reason I set up euro crime was to sort out the correct reading order as so many series are translated out of sequence.
My website at http://skandilit.wordpress.com is an attempt to track every single translation of a Scandinavian literary work into either English or French (from 2008 onwards). I also post them to Twitter at http://twitter.com/SkandiLit (along with other things related to Scandinavian literature).
Karen and Thomas: Thanks to both of you. I will take a look.
Do you have the problems I describe?
PS: I have taken the liberty of adding both sites to my links here. I hope that ok. I am impressed by both of the sites. And very impressed with both the volume and quality of EuroCrime!
I’ll admit, it’s not always easy to find the information, but it’s a labour of love
About 150 Scandinavian translations (not including Finnish) make it to the Canadian market every year, and I figured the best way to keep track of them would be a website that would be useful to others as well.
The Scandinavian countries do help a bit though. For example, the Swedish Institute in Paris has a helpful list:
http://www.si.se/Paris/Francais/Institut-suedois-a-Paris/La-Suede-en-France/Vient-de-paraitre/
and NORLA is somewhat useful: http://www.norla.no/
but yes, I still have to do most of the work myself.
There’s a chap called Denis Ballu in Nantes, France who puts out a book almost every year that lists (and reviews!) every single Scandinavian book and film that comes out in France (including children’s books). In the preface to the 2007 edition he explains that he wrote to a dozen Scandinavian cultural agencies asking for help in compiling his books, and that of the six that bothered to reply, they all said no.
Thanks for the Three Percent spreadsheet link. It is hard to believe that only 348 titles were translated in 2009!
Thomas – thanks again. Very useful!
Philip: The number seems correct to me. It’s a number quite relevant to the discussion about the alleged xenophobia of the American publishing industry, I guess. See also http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2447, which claims that only 3 percent of all books published are translated! Quite shocking, actually.
Being Swedish, I can’t say I’m surprised at the trouble you’re describing. If the Swedish publishers are anything to go by, they really don’t seem to care. Every year they publish a handful of the best-selling titles, and that’s it. All they care about is if a book will sell many copies, not if it’s any good. (One example: Thomas Bodström, a former minister from the government before this one has written ‘mysterys’. Whatever you do, don’t read them. They’re typical examples of books that sell because the author is famous.)
Also, it might be that no one even bothers to find out if people from other countries are interested in reading Swedish literature. Most Swedes prefer literature in English (except for those few best-selling books I mentioned above) and most likely can’t imagine that anyone else might be interested in Swedish literature – except possibly Astrid Lindgren’s books. Of course, they’re wonderful, but there’s so much more.