Posts in Category: 2010
Crusoe as we know him and love him
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe has been on my bookshelf for as long as I have been able to read. When I was a kid I got a children’s version in Faroese from my book club which I faithfully read, and as an adult I bought a copy in the original language, also faithfully reading. And yet, the two situations could not have been farther apart.
As a little girl, what I read was a story of a man trapped on an island, fighting off cannibals and saving a friend whom he named Friday. It was a wonderful and adventurous tale that left me adventurous, ready to pack my suitcase and leaving my parents for the sea life and hoping for a shipwreck on a deserted sunny island. I mean, how hard can it be when you are ingenious by heart like Crusoe? And so I grew up thinking Robinson was a merry, brave and carefree man.
Fast forward to age 27. Scene: I am studying comparative literature now and we are at my translation studies elective. We are discussing literary translation and the problems and choices that come along with being a translator. For my exams I have chosen my trusted friend Crusoe as an example of the very interesting shift that comes with translating an 18.century Enlightenment novel (which some would call the first novel in the history of literature) into a Danish children’s book. And so I buy a copy of the original as it was written back in the days, and borrow 2 children’s versions in Danish for comparison.
The funny thing about reading Robinson Crusoe when you are respectively 10 and 27 is that a lot of growing up happens in the mean time 🙂 At 27 I am baffled over the complexity of the character Crusoe, truly an individualist at heart. And a struggling one at that. He is definitely not all rainbows and sunsets and heroically saving the day and life of a fellow man. No, no, no. Before the shipwreck Robinson Crusoe is a wretched soul who has spent his youth squandering his possibilities away, not respecting his parents and living it up, as we could say. And the ‘blink of an eye’ moment I had perceived his stay on the island to be at age 10, was actually a loooooong time filled with sickness, hard toiling and dangerous situations that leave Crusoe not so much a hero as a survivor.
When I wrote my paper on the translation and transposition of 18. century Crusoe to 20.-21.century children’s literature, I concluded that a lot of depth had been lost in this transaction, and it was questionable if Crusoe, as Defoe had written him, was stilted by the act. I still feel that it is a very interesting question. The grown-up version deals with huge themes of religious piety, colonization, master-slave relationship and the individual as a free agent. This is all very much watered down in the children’s version.
When you think about children’s books in the genre fantasy and adventure, Crusoe almost always creeps up as example par excellence (well, back in my days, today it’s probably more likely to be Twilight by infinity and Harry Potter, god bless them). But when you compare the two – Crusoe for adults, and Crusoe for children – it’s so obvious that the adjustments that are taken to convert the story to children is so encroaching upon the thematics of the text that it renders it flawed. I was, to say the least, baffled when I read Robinson as an adult, because the image I had had of him as a child and the storyline + a given morale was completely different from the one I could put in a historical and literary context as an adult.
Having said that, the memory of my suitcase and the adventurous dreams Robinson inspired in me, still brings me to the conclusion, that as a child I knew and loved a story of a man called Robinson Crusoe who climbed coconut trees and built huts on a deserted island far away. And as a child I couldn’t care less that the adults had to read Crusoe as someone who was a product of the historical waves of an increasingly individualistic society, deeply frustrated, borderline certifiable and alone on an island.
Literary hit or bust
Sometimes when you defy your inner voice it can be incredibly rewarding. And sometimes its just the opposite…. and sometimes it’s a mix of both! 🙂
Example A: Me.
I go to the library on a regular basis. Sometimes its a quickie, when I return books or pick them up, making sure not to look over at the quick-loan-suggestion-shelf and resisting the urge, nay commanding my legs not to walk up to the first floor to literary nirvana. Because I really don’t have time to indulge my good ‘bad habit’. I have responsibilities! But the other day I defied both defense mechanisms and went over to the quick-shelf AND walked the stairs up to the first floor. Initial result: 5 books in various sizes, huge smile, ecstasy (those who get a kick out of buying something, anything, will know exactly what I mean). Digested realization process: panic, nervous smile, performance anxiety (what the hell was I thinking?!! I already have 2 loans at home! When people see them on my coffee table they will go “ooohh-aaahhh, you read THAT much”, and I’ll have to go “yeah, pfff, of course, no prob, it’s a passion”, while 007-silently vamoosing over to the computer and hauling a summary of each and every book, just in case somebody asks. And it’s not cool to return a book without reading it!! what’s the point then?!)
Various library books
Ensuing scene: I start on one book, realizing it’s not really me. How do I know? I fell asleep in my chair. Alright, next one: even worse, it does nothing for me, it’s about a guy who decides to go hermit and picking up a long lost love for painting by doing a mural in his new establishment; a lighthouse! Yawn, zzzzzz…
Conclusion: I have decided to just let go of these two books and hope the next 5 will be better. Not so much panicky anymore, because really, is it that serious? It’s a book. But yes; in a way it is! I checked out Hildegard by Anne-Lise Marstrand Jørgensen a couple of weeks ago, and only had 50 pages to go when time was up and I had to return it. And now I will never know how it ended!!
Sub-conclusion: I have to stop being Mrs. Goody Two Shoes and just defy return deadlines (even though that really goes against my deep faith in the whole library ideology, I just can’t do it).
All in all, the risk of loaning books in bonanza mode is not counterbalanced by the enlightenment these books could offer. To top it off, I had a temporary memory loss vis-a-vis the many books on my table at home and bought 2 books that I just have to read immediately: Baldursdóttir’s “Karitas uden titel” (Karitas without title) and Wassmo’s “Et glas mælk, tak” (A glass of milk please).
Wassmo and Baldursdóttir
I give up trying to understand myself and my compulsive desire to drown in books. I feel like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his coins (fact: I want a tank of books I can swim in!)
If anyone has a good tip on how to center oneself a bit more, or a good mantra to stay focused when in a library, drop me a few lines.
Tunu – Eastern Greenland turns its back on you!
I’ve just spent a couple of days in the company of Kim Leine’s Greenlanders as seen and narrated through his book Tunu. Let me just say from the get-go; I did not like it. In short, Tunu is about the inhabitants of a village in Eastern Greenland (Tunu is Eastern Greenland, and means back). At the start of the novel a young male nurse from Denmark has just arrived to the village, and so goes the merry-go-round of funsies and death.
Tunu
When I borrowed it from the library I guess I was hoping that this novel would present a different experience, or point-of-view of Greenland than has been the case with so many accounts and narrations so often before. But it’s like hearing the same old, tired rantings about women and nature, and how the female sex is in a special symbiosis with nature, how the lunar cycle and my period are in sync, yadi-yadi-yah! Only here we have a whole nation destined to live out nature’s raw state of flux, leaving the people helpless and unable to function the way every other European does (because that’s what they are supposed to ultimately); in modern rational society. Not that they really mind this deficit as Leine narrates them. It’s such an easy solution to a “problem”. It seems to me that Leine really wanted to tell a story about a people who were still in contact with nature, but when I read it I just experienced drippings of sentimental Euro-centric Other-fascination, and deep down a resignation with the fact that these people were never going to be understood/explained, so just live with it. I didn’t feel like Leine went the distance himself and met his subjects halfway. Or maybe I’m just being a tad judgmental, after all, Leine did spend 15 years in Eastern Greenland, I went there for half a month!
If I can try to point to a specific point of irritation I would say that Leine is too busy getting every single person in the village down on paper, individualized in order to show the heterogeneous population, that he ends up painting a picture of a lump of people who are never really characters, but types. And these types stand for the different types of Greenland that the young male nurse experiences in Eastern Greenland. There are the drunken men, the strong, rough women who will boink every single man they meet, the uneducated ones who think that every sniffle can be cured with penicillin, the neglected children and the Dane. And it especially pisses me off that the old story about a man going crazy as a direct result of female callousness and inconsiderate behavior is being thrusted down my throat here. The Greenlandic women are so emotionally stumped, whereas the soft 30-something Danish Modernity Himself cannot help fall in love with each and every one – and to top it off let’s throw in the worthy-of-a-couch-and-Freud-psychoanalysis-theme that is; a 15 year old for him to fall in love with.
So just to sum it up: I think he could have done with half of this sorry cast and then really dug into the mud of it all. Because there is no law that says Greenland can’t be fascinating without one being stamped as a colonial twit Mr. Know-it-all. But somewhere along the line, it would be nice if one could be critical without the pointed moral finger that scolds the child (in this case; Greenlanders) and puts a Gordian knot around them, saying “you simply don’t understand what to do in a modern society” and “living in symbiotic state with nature must be soooo cool”.
I don’t know what I am supposed to do with this kind of thinking, it isn’t helpful to me. There are moments of Tunu that could be really good, but no scene or person seems to get the time to settle down, Leine is on a mission! And it is a shame, truly.
Darling River by Stridsberg
I have just spent the day with Stridsberg’s newest addition to Swedish contemporary literature, Darling River.
Me, engulfed in Darling River
Make no mistake, this is no fuddy duddy, school girl crush, chic-lit reading, as the Danish cover might have you believe (and this is not a critique of the cover at all, I love it for the very reason it plays with childishness and pink, blurry tones). This is hard core abandonment, wrapped in sexual frustration, topped with a language that crashes into the reader’s imagination, leaving it sore and a little less happy. Yet again (as with Drömfakulteten) Stridsberg’s language and composition is thorough and crisp. The novels’ subtitle is ‘Variations of Dolores’, and is both an homage to Nabokov’s Lolita (Stridsberg’s point of inspiration) and a variety of females in different acts of life – mother, child, animal, used, abused, terminated, dead. She has divided the novel into five main sections: Destiny, Time, The Mirror, The Sickness, The Loneliness, and within these, different variations of Dolores try to survive and search for some remote sign of intimacy.
Dolores (or Lo) and her father spend their nights driving around in his Jaguar, him looking for prostitutes, her going off with full grown men down by Darling River, both of them trying to fill the void Dolores’ mother left when she packed her white suitcases and left a stranger, a house where she can find nothing, and her child. He feeds Lo sweets, cigarettes and alcohol and waits in the distance for her to complete her ‘business’ with men she calls brothers, whom she feels empathy towards because they try to buy absolution with undersized dresses and tears. She lives of the affection they give her in return for her body, and when her body changes, their visits lessen until one day there is no one left but her father. This child, that never was a child and never could grow out of being a child, is left sick, overeating on sweets, and lacking the one thing she has craved more than anything.
The novel is brutal to say the least, and it is not just from the obvious fact that we are dealing with a child who is being abused, who lives a distorted child’s life, and has lost all contact with reality, but also because reality itself seems to be a misplaced term. The language performs in a way to conjure up an image of distortion. My schematized reading has been put to a test as these characters fade in and out of each other. I have to be honest, some of the times it doesn’t seem to matter if I am reading about one Dolores or another, it is the language, the pictures it invokes, that touches me. Nature and woman is bleeding, everything is pus and sickly, and it translates onto the pages and punches you in the face.
It is worth your while.
Lucie by Amalie Skram
Woe is me, the pain and degradation in 19th century women’s literature! The anger, frustration and solitude!!
I just spent the last couple of days reading a book by Amalie Skram called ‘Lucie’. Recalling some of the passages still sends shivers down my spine. It is a story of society, marriage and the bonds that are being put on both sexes (but in all honestly, it’s mostly women who bear the heavier judgmental shackles).
- Lucie by Amalie Skram
Lucie is what you may call a fallen woman, one who has let herself be romanced into a relationship before marriage that results in a child who dies at an early age. In the beginning of the novel she manages so fortunately to marry up in society to a Mr. Theodor Gerner, attorney. And while optimists would have liked this to be a happy-go-lucky situation for our girl here, she soon finds out that marrying Gerner is not all sunshine and cream cakes, far from it. Instead of putting her past behind them, Gerner ends up being a jealous husband who sees it as his role as a man and husband to educate, save and punish Lucie like an ill-behaved child who has had her hand too many a time in the man-jar.
If only she would not stand up to him, answering rudely like this morning. Resentment flushed his face red. This had to be dealt with in all strictness, uprooted; she had to learn, once and for all, that this was not proper behavior. Was this the kind of gratitude she owed him? No, she had to apologize, he would not tolerate being berated by her. He would make her aware of what she had done. Of course, he would forgive her, but first she had to be punished resoundingly.
And the worst part is that Lucie initially bows to his dictatorship and jealous behavior, because she really is in love and feels grateful. As time goes by though, she is more and more disappointed and grows depressed, because no matter how she carries herself at dinner parties or other social gatherings, she can expect a scolding from her loving husband. And Theodor is torn between loving his wife and being angry at her ill mannered temperament. The relationship grows sick, and the novel really is breathtakingly good at exploring the psychological terror of a mismatched relationship:
… and the palpitations she got when she heard him coming home, or when she just sat there waiting for him. In the end she had thought that she saw ghosts in the corners and black shadows everywhere, creeping around her. And when he sat there silently it was like his silence whooshed in her ears and filled her with fear. Oh, the kind that made her want to kill herself out of sheer fear. And it was not until she went to him, crawling on her knees, begging and crying like a madman, that he pardoned her. It was always like that. Not until then did her pardon her. Oh how he had broken her – he was strong, the fellow, and he would not budge. Not even if his life depended on it would he budge. Now he had gotten what he wanted; she was on tenterhooks all the time and was so afraid of him that she would shiver all over simply if he looked at her. He had succeeded in civilizing her, and he probably thought it was all well and done with, because now he was merciful and gentle with her. If only he knew how angry and bitter she was with him. Every once in a while she thought that she desired to kill him just to get back at him. She wished to God she had never known or seen him.
Both Theodor and Lucie are victims of societal norms that destroy both of them. She hopes for a leg up in society, to be respectable, liked, loved and feel secure. He hopes for love, properness and the chance to reform a ‘lost’ soul. Whatever their reasons for marrying are, the novel makes a model of a critique in Scandinavia in the 1880’s that has become known as ‘sædelighedsfejden’ – a battle of morality against the contemporary society that held women in a prudish role, repressing their desires to express/live their sexuality and granting a free-pass for men to do and go as they pleased, in and out of wedlock. It is a strife within a society built up on double standards. Many others like Amalie Skram voiced their critique in letters, novels, plays and art, amongst which probably the most famous is Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, who set up the play ‘Et dukkehjem’ in 1879 in Copenhagen.
Lucie is an important piece of literature in the sense that the voice of a societal outcast is being portrayed, taken out in to public and given a voice. Even though her situation is dramatic and tragic to the core and pessimism is dripping off the pages, it also offers some insight and a chance to say, ‘this must be changed, the outrageous situation is not viable in our society’. And hopefully, this will continue to stir people’s minds, make them think and, most importantly, act.
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