THERE ARE NO WITCHES

Author: Arne Jarrick
Year: 2017
Publisher: Svante Weylers Bokförlag
Language: Swedish

We are all wrong sometimes even when we are sure we are right. We all make assumptions that turn out to be baseless or draw conclusions that prove inaccurate. Being able to tell right from wrong means being able (and willing) to process and adhere to facts. Unfortunately, I have in recent years, by close observation of the public space, been inevitably guided to the conclusion that the ability (or willingness) to recognise facts as an essential part of an argument is greatly underdeveloped in large portions of our community. More regrettably still, fact resistance has moved from populace to policy.

The rejection of truth is not a new phenomenon. It has been a defining element of postmodern philosophy for decades. In recent years, more and more detailed accounts on how wilful and militant ignorance has permeated the public space have appeared, most notably “Bob Woodward’s “Fear” about the ongoing intellectual collapse of the Trump administration. Swedish writers, scholars, and journalists have, too, produced several volumes on the topic of fact resistance. I have read “Det finns inga häxor” (not available in English but a translation might be “There Are No Witches”) by history professor Arne Jarrick.

Professor Jarrick sets out to examine if Sweden is still a knowledge-based society and if so, what can be done to preserve it. He discusses the role of politics and the importance of a modern educational system, but also popular culture, media, and social sciences.

The book raises many crucial issues and gives a number of interesting references to psychological and social research in the area, such as Brendan Nyhan’s and Jason Reifler’s 2016 experiment that showed a clear correlation between self-esteem and openness to facts. Another interesting study indicated that fighting opinion with facts might be counter-productive as it often triggers an aggressive reaction from the person in the wrong, thus shutting tight any opening to a balanced dialogue. Twitter is extant proof that this observation is accurate.

Despite his noble intentions and plentiful nuggets of valuable information, unfortunately “Det finns inga häxor” is not a particularly well-composed piece of writing. It is obvious that it was written in a hurry and in a state of emotional turmoil. Jarrick is understandably exasperated and appalled. And it shows. He makes sweeping statements and claims, employs truisms, and invokes emotional argumentation. To me, the book sounded more like an uncommonly long letter to the editor than a coherent argument.  

There are several striking weaknesses. For a book that claims to be written in the defence of knowledge, and sets out to discuss the knowledge-based society, it is mind-boggling that it contains only a vague definition of the concept of knowledge, which by the way is placed in the very end of the book. In fact, there is no reference to the large body of epistemological research that predates this book and with which Jarrick has to be at least aware of. The closest to a definition that Jarrick takes us is his statement of fact that “a knife either is or is not sharp” not accounting for the fact that sharpness is very much subjective and thus a poor proxy for an objectively binary relationship and offering no explanation of how knowledge of this fact can be obtained.

Moreover, he seems to possess a remarkably poor understanding of social sciences. In my ears as an anthropologist the whole concept of “cultural evolution” rings off-tune but I will forgive him. He is merely a historian, after all.

Far more problematic is his proposal that knowledge needs to be based on natural observations. In Jarrick’s example, people who claimed knowledge about witches in the past had no actual knowledge because witches did and do not exist. Knowledge about birds, on the other hand, is knowledge because birds exist. I understand what Jarrick is aiming for here and will not discuss this from an existentialist point of view. I will still disagree with his point. If knowledge about manmade cultural phenomena does not constitute knowledge, then theology, linguistics, archaeology, and musicology cannot qualify as knowledge either. I cannot accept that as being a useful slicing of the term.

Further evidence of Jarricks poor understanding of social studies and humanities is found in his complete misunderstanding of Bruno Latour. Jarrick fleetingly, without providing a reference, responds to Latour's article “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects” published in 2000 where Latour provocatively proposes that Ramses II could not have died from tuberculosis because tuberculosis was not discovered until 1882. Jarrick goes as far as saying that he would have called Latour an idiot if he hadn’t promised himself never to call someone an idiot. Incidentally, the idiot here is not Latour. His paper is an exercise in connecting historical events with their own social epoch. Jarrick should have observed that Latour has no problem with saying that “Ramses II died from what we today would call ‘tuberculosis’” and he does not challenge that the germ that killed Ramses II was the organism we now know as Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or in Latours text ‘Koch’s bacillus’). What Latour submits for consideration is that the social construct of tuberculosis that allows us to incorporate it in our cosmos and connect it with the death of the Pharaoh had not taken place in ancient Egypt. One could say that while Robert Koch ‘discovered’ the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, he ‘invented’ the concept of tuberculosis. Jarrick completely fails to see the difference as his vision is clouded by his own whiggish understanding of “cultural evolution”. He is, after all, merely a historian. 

Despite these lacunae in his knowledge of anthropology and metaphysics, he left me with one astonishing insight about knowledge, for which I will be forever in his debt. There is good evidence that the collective accumulation of knowledge about the natural state of things in our surrounding has increased and continues to increase exponentially since the 17^th century. But chances are that the distribution of knowledge has barely increased linearly. If this is true, it would be fair to assume that the gap between the apex of our knowledge as a society and its base is expanding rapidly. What we have created is in effect a tremendous knowledge inequality. It appeared to me, that the difference between what Leonardo da Vinci knew and what an average farmhand knew was smaller than the difference between what Neil deGrasse Tyson knows and what I know.

This makes for a huge imbalance in the access to knowledge but also the ability to assess the level of knowledge. I submit that it was easier for the Duke of Milan to understand the scope of da Vinci’s knowledge than it is for the President of the United States to understand the current research boundaries of modern physics. Look at it this way, if I speak a little Russian, it is easier for me to appreciate the language skills of someone who claims they speak Russian than if I had not spoken any Russian at all. The knowledge gap would have been too wide for me to bridge. When people can no longer properly appreciate the scope of our collective knowledge and grasp the magnitude of their own relative ignorance, they will by necessity overestimate their abilities. To paraphrase Socrates, one has to know a lot to be able to comprehend how little one knows.

A YouGov poll in July this year, asked men whether they thought that they could win a point against Serena Williams. It turned out that the less the respondents knew about tennis, the more confident they were that they would be able to win a point against the best female tennis player in history.

And this, I think is the key to our failure as a knowledge-based society. Our liberal democracy has focused on the *right* to know, but we failed to enforce the *obligation* to know. We have made knowledge available, but we have allowed it to remain optional. We can all claim to be geniuses and none of us needs to accept being called out as ignoramuses.

Sadly, all the self-proclaimed geniuses out there seem to forget Goethe’s famous words “Das erste und letzte was vom Genie gefordert wird ist Wahrheitsliebe”. Consequently, it may very well be so that I am the one who has been wrong throughout this whole review.

LOURDES

Author: Émile Zola

Year: 1962 (1894)

Publisher: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy

Language: Polish (Translator Eligia Bakowska)

“In faith, there is enough light for those who believe, and enough shadows to blind those who don’t”, French mathematician Blaise Pascal resigned. How many of the army of priests, pastors, and preachers that populate our churches, shrines, and temples really believe in the God that they purportedly serve? Their mission is to strengthen the commitment of others to God, but what about their own convictions? And to what extent is the love for God their primary concern?

French realist Émile Zola, toward the end of his life, launched a fierce attack on the Roman Catholic Church across three books, collectively known as the Three Cities Trilogy, each titled after the city in which the story takes place. In the opening volume, “Lourdes” which first saw the light of day in 1894, Zola introduces us to Father Pierre Froment, a reluctant priest struggling with his faith, and his childhood friend and one true love, Marie de Guersaint, who suffers from paralysis. We follow them as two of a multitude of travellers over a five day pilgrimage to the sacred water well in Lourdes, by the vicinity of which the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared before Bernadette Soubirous, and where Marie now hopes for a miracle that will return to her her ability to walk and to Pierre his ability to believe.

On their pilgrimage, Pierre and Marie encounter a diverse universe of people, all more or less loosely connected with the holy site of Lourdes. There is the nobleman who invests all his social prestige into guarding the well, the physician who proudly protests to make independent and objective assessments and documentations of each miracle while failing to notice or pretending not to notice his nonsensical use of evidence, the mother who carries around the remains of her dead infant in her arms refusing to accept that the Holy Mother of God would not hear her prayers, just to mention a few.

Most fascinating of all these characters is perhaps Dr Chaussaigne who is the complete anti-figure of Pierre. While Pierre is a priest who has lost his faith in God in favour of science, Dr Chaussaigne is a physician who, following the death of his wife and children in an epidemic, has lost faith in medicine and attached his hope to seeing his beloved ones again in the afterlife.

Zola based this novel on his own observations during his two visits to Lourdes in 1891 and 1892. His is a crowded, corrupt, putrid, and filthy Lourdes drawing its energy from the naïve beliefs of the infantile and simple minds which have access to no other hope for help or comfort than the possible intervention of an imagined being which embodies all the powers they themselves lack. It is a realist’s study of despair, ignorance, and misery.

It is no secret that Émile Zola was a staunch atheist, and his attempt to expose, as it were, the Catholic Church for the swindle that he perceived it to be is a thing of beauty, elegance, and pathos crafted by the daedal pen of a genius. But it is also a work of anger, animosity, and blind resistance of a warrior. The holy site in Zola’s eyes is not a place of worship but profit maximising enterprise. Traders, handymen, and innkeepers all constitute the industry that the legend has brought to the poor village. But the main beneficiary of the economic activity around the well, however, seems to be the Church itself, through the local monastery dedicated to angrily watching over the cash flow generated by the holy site, much like a modern corporation would furiously protect their trademark brands. “No one can serve two masters” - Matt 6:24. There is no doubt in Zola’s mind that the clergymen in Lourdes have made their choice whom to serve, and it is it not Christ.

Spoiler alert!

So what about the miracles? What about poor devout Marie de Guersaint and miserably sceptical Father Pierre Froment?

St Augustine allegedly said that “faith is to believe what you do not see. The reward of faith is to see what you believe”. There have been many modern examples where faith has expelled seemingly incurable diseases. Psychosomatic physical ailments, handicaps, and diseases are well documented in medical journals (there is even a peer-reviewed journal, “Psychosomatic Medicine”, dedicated to this branch of medicine). There have also been examples of miracles which modern science has until now not been able to explain (Grenholm, “Documenterade mirakler”).

Indeed, Marie de Guersaint is healed. She stands up to walk and dance again. Her legs are strong and her body nimble. As a demonstration of strength, she pushes her wheelchair all the way to the Virgin Mary’s grotto to make a sacrifice of gratitude. Father Pierre’s ailment is of a different kind. His condition does not improve. If anything, he sinks deeper into doubt.

Whether there is a God or not, Zola thus concedes that faith, by any definition, can move mountains. "Go, said Jesus. Your faith has made you whole." - Mark 10:52

SWEDISH HATRED

Author: Gellert Tamas
Year: 2016
Publisher: Natur & Kultur
Language:  Swedish


There is something rotten in the state of Sweden. In fact, there is something rotten in most kingdoms, princedoms, priestdoms, trumpdoms, and other more or less established kakistocracies in the western world. It is eroding democracy, rule of law, and human rights, and ultimately our freedom, prosperity, and way of life.

The rot has many faces. Racism is one and it is the subject chosen by Swedish journalist and writer Gellert Tamas for his book “Det svenska hatet” (not available in English but a simple translation would be “Swedish Hatred”). Tamas has previously written about racism and migration, e.g. “Lasermannen” (“The Laser Man”); an account of a would-be serial killer who shot at people of foreign heritage in the early 90s using a hunting rifle equipped with a laser sight.

By “Det svenska hatet”, Tamas sets out to turn the spotlight to the various movements in modern day Sweden that promote anger and violence. He does this by following the political career of Kent Ekeroth, one of the better known far-right Sweden Democrat party members. Ekeroth, is no doubt an interesting person, and a lot of his activities coincide with - and help to promote - the growth of extremist ideas in Sweden in the past decade. By outlining Ekeroth’s career and putting it in context, Tamas seeks to give us a comprehensive history of neo-Nazi movement in Sweden which he, in turn, helps us locate in the web of global anti-Semitism, fascism, and white supremacy. Ekeroth is portrayed as being the embodiment of the far-right irrationalism, inconsistency and self-depreciation. Born of a Jewish immigrant and growing up with a single mother he joined an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist political party. We learn about his childhood, fascination with role-playing games, shyness around girls, and temper tantrums. We learn about his contributions to the internationalisation of the Sweden Democrat party, his agitation techniques and his infamous “night out with the lads” when three of them arm themselves with steel pipes that they find at a construction site in the middle of the night as makeshift melee weapons in order to punish an elderly drunkard that insulted them at a bar hours earlier while barely being able to stand up straight, and later blame him for attacking them. In the process, we learn about how the Sweden Democrats rise from the ashes of the openly xenophobic Bevara Sverige Svenskt-movement, how it communicates with, and accepts advice, funding, and inspiration from international Nazi sympathisers, how they create disinformation campaigns and use the internet to willingly and knowingly disseminate untruth and propaganda.

Tamas is an exquisite journalist and writer, and his research is solid and comprehensive. His writing is sharp and engaging and constitutes a potent amalgam of logos and pathos. The language used is journalistic rather than literary and some chapters read like columns in a newspaper. 

Even still, it does not take long to realise that he will fail with his ambition. This book is not about Swedish hatred as a whole. It is about a particular kind of hatred: racism. Issues, which are advertised on the book cover, such as Islamic fundamentalism, are reduced to anecdotes and serve as trigger points for the continued narrative of Ekeroth’s life. By focusing on the Sweden Democrats, Tamas seems to argue that the “Swedish” hatred is concentrated to the far-right. In so doing, Tamas inadvertently supports the notion that Islam does not belong to the Swedish society and that Islamic terrorism does not make up part of Sweden of today. As if Islamist haters were not Swedish enough to count as contributors to Swedish hatred. Violence born from class struggle, misogyny, and homophobia is also largely ignored by Tamas.

Furthermore, Tamas falls into the trap that many skilled researchers have fallen into before him: he wants to share ALL his findings. As a consequence, the book is filled with tangents, rabbit holes, and side quests which give no additional value to the investigation of the rise of extremist views. By turning the book into a biography on an individual whom Tamas has appointed the figurehead of Swedish far-right extremism, his research sometimes veers from the declared intention of the book and steers into the territory of the personal and individual, which can by no stretch of the imagination be extended to becoming a universal truth about hatred and racism at large.

It has been clear to me for some time that the world is currently witnessing the end of the straight, white man’s hegemony. The populist upswing in recent years is a reaction to the challenges against a world order that has prevailed for hundreds of years. Patriarchy, heteronormativity, white supremacy, and European cultural centrism have been unquestionable anchor points of Western civilisation which in turn has forced its values on the rest of the world. As the world order is inevitably and irreversibly changing, there is bound to be a reaction. From this perspective, the snowballing disdain for the rule of law, human rights, and equality makes sense. Democracy, voting rights, feminism, and equality were never inherent values of the Western dominion. European world domination was not based on general elections, free press, independent courts and equality between the sexes. These are not accomplishments of the white man. They are rights that had to be conquered and won in conflict with the white man. It follows logic therefore that when the Sweden Democrats and their ilk fight for the ancient world order, these institutions have little to no value. And this is far more dangerous than a band of bibulous bozos armed with steel pipes in the middle of the night.

“Det svenska hatet”, will not convince anybody who is not already aware of the dangers of the far-right wave. By tying his narrative so tightly with the biography of one person, Tamas has also ensured that his book will soon become outdated and irrelevant. Ekeroth is already fading from memory after having been ousted from the party and settled in Hungary. It is quite possible that this book will be banned in Sweden in ten or twenty years. Unless Ekeroth returns to the stage it will not matter much. No one will read it anyway.

NOCTURNES - FIVE STORIES OF MUSIC AND NIGHTFALL

Author: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
Year: 2010 (2009)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (Translator Rose-Marie Nielsen)

For those of you, if indeed there are any, who choose to waste portions of your lives reading my reviews, it may have become apparent that I have somewhat engulfed myself in short stories and novellas in recent times, starting with Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Wall”, through Nicolai Gogol and Thomas Mann only a short while ago. I only recently discovered this format and am finding it increasingly rewarding. It poses a particular challenge to the writers, as it forces them to distil the narrative down to one plot, one message, or one emotion. The subject of today’s review is again a collection of short stories. This time Nobel Prize-winning, British novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2009 collection ”Nocturner” (”Nocturnes – Five Stories of Music and Nightfall”).

This, my friends, is an unparalleled piece of story-telling magic! The collection of five exquisitely crafted stories (with the possible exception of “Malvern Hills” which is the least interesting of them) is a most supreme delight to read. The stories are wrought on the common theme of music. All but one are told from the first-person perspective of skilled but unsuccessful musicians. None of them is about the musicians themselves, but rather told through their observing eyes.

The first story “Schlagersångaren” (The Crooner”) is about an aging Frank Sinatra-like superstar at the dusk of his fame, who asks a young street musician in Venice to accompany him as he sets out to serenade his wife, Lindy, whom he is about to divorce. The second, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, follows a washed-up middle-aged English teacher who is invited to spend time with his vastly more successful friends from college only to realise that the purpose of his visit is for him to help them mend their dilapidated marriage. The third story, “Malvern Hills” is told by a talented but unrecognised singer-songwriter who reluctantly accepts to spend the summer as a helping hand at his sister’s hostel in the mountains. The fourth, “Nocturne” re-introduces us to Lindy from the first story, now freshly divorced and recovering from plastic surgery in a hospital, and recounts her brief friendship with a brilliant but little known saxophonist who is similarly recovering  in the room next to hers. The fifth, and perhaps the most interesting of them, “Cellister” (“The Cellists”), is told by a club musician about a young and ambitious cellist who encounters an elderly woman who claims to be a cello virtuoso and offers to help him polish his performance.

With his trademark low-key but by no means tardy narration technique, Ishiguro gently ushers the reader into the tender haze between the real and the pretended. His five Nocturnes lay bare the impotence of the everyday pretention and charade we deploy in our desperate pursuit to connect with a universe which we have long ceased to understand. By an intricate patchwork of manufactured masks, coatings, coulisses, and smoke screens, Ishiguro’s characters effectively ensnare themselves in a web of vanity they convince themselves is the inescapable reality of life when in fact, it is entirely of their own making. Artists and performers, who make up a category of people who actively seek the attention and accolade of the many, are particularly useful subjects for a study of this sort and Ishiguro, known to be somewhat of an archaeologist into the ruins of the human psyche, certainly makes the most of it. The result is sad, hilarious, and absorbing.

Ishiguro’s choice to make music the centrepiece of his collection is not entirely unexpected. A great lover of jazz music and an accomplished guitarist himself, he must have found the struggles of a musician to be the perfect backdrop for his somewhat melancholic stories. As artists who seek the limelight, his protagonists provide the ideal fusion of act and reality. By their very nature, they embody the conflict that Ishiguro seeks to highlight in this literary quintet. 

"Nocturnes" is hands down the best piece of literature I have read this year and the first book ever that I re-read directly after having finished it the first time. This is how I would aspire to write if I were a writer! I add Ishiguro’s name to Thomas Mann's, Agneta Pleijel's, and José Saramago's in the pantheon of my literary house gods.    

DEATH IN VENICE AND OTHER STORIES

Author: Thomas Mann

Year: 1962 (1902, 1903, 1905, 1912, 1940, 1944)

Publisher: Fischer Bücherei KG

Language: German

My first encounter with Thomas Mann coincided with Gustav von Aschenbach’s first encounter with Tadzio. This was 1998. I was an exchange student in Göttingen and the novella “Der Tod in Venedig” (”Death in Venice”) in its original language was put in front of me by one of my flatmates. I was immediately dazzled by the intensity of Mann’s storytelling genius and his sparse but precise narration technique. Still, the plot provoked consternation in me, in the beginning. What kind of man writes a romanticised story about an elderly artist who falls in love with a teenage boy? But it did not take long before I realised there was something more to the story. Twenty years later, I find it easier albeit far from effortless to penetrate some of the layers of this remarkable and troubling story.

”Der Tod in Venedig” is an account of the famous writer Gustav von Aschenbach and his imminent descent from the pedestal of puritan honour and dignity into the morass of carnal lust and debauchery from which he is barely saved only through his death. The story is certainly partly autobiographic as Aschenbach’s crisis must have been all too familiar to Mann who grew up in the strict social environment of northern Germany and most of his life wrestled with his own homosexuality. But more importantly, at least in my opinion, is Mann’s brush with art in itself. In the guise of the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann portrays an artist who has been completely subdued by moral expectations and the narrow path to social acceptance, to the point of having stopped producing any new output for fear of jeopardising the good name he earned by his existing pieces.

The whole story is filled with symbols of death, long before Aschenbach finally perishes. The first thing that happens in the story is that Aschenbach visits a cemetery. When he arrives in Venice, the gondola that takes him to his hotel is unusual in its pitch black colour resembling a coffin. Also, his very name, Aschenbach meaning ash-brook in German, sounds like an allusion to death and the canals of Venice. Knowing Mann’s fascination with ancient mythology, I even like to think that the brook refers to the river Styx; another symbol of death in the novella.

Still, it is not the biological death of a man that is the main plot of the story. It is the death of an idea. The death of the puritan when confronted with emotions. The defeat of the artificially appropriate artistry when faced with pure and natural beauty. Aschenbach, who becomes increasingly and  irreversibly obsessed with the young boy, in whom he spots immaculate perfection, suddenly regains his creative power but prevented as he is by his moral shackles to harness it and, by necessity rather than by choice, finally crosses the river Styx and takes with him the art that he could have generated, had his pleasure not been forbidden. It is the price of truth. It is non-negotiable.

If in “Death in Venice”, Mann deals with the relationship between art and society, in another short story in the collection, he settles the score with the relationship between art and religion. In ”Gladius Dei”, he lets his protagonist Hieronymous, try to harass a gallery owner into taking down and ultimately burning a painting depicting the Madonna with child, which he finds blasphemous in the way Our Lady’s femininity is depicted. He argues that art should not aim at extolling beauty but that its purpose is only to glorify God. As the confrontation between Hieronymous and the gallery owner unfolds, what began as a modest request to take a certain painting down evolves into a belligerent demand that all the paintings in the gallery be burned. In the end, Hieronymous is unceremoniously tossed out of the gallery having accomplished nothing at all. Art does not take orders from religion.

Mann is careful not to make Hieronymous a formal representative of the Church. He is neither a monk nor a priest nor in any other way formally connected to churchly affairs. He is described as simply a layman zealot and as such represents not the direct challenge by the religious institutions, but by their proxies; society and its moral code. Very much like the challenge Gustav von Aschenbach was faced with.

There are four more novellas and short stories in this compilation: “Tristan”, “Die vertauschten Köpfe” (“The Transposed Heads”), “Schwere Stunde” (“A Weary Hour”), and “Das Gesetz” (“The Tables of the Law”)., all of which except the last I read with great interest and pleasure. “Das Gesetz” is Mann’s interpretation of the Book of Exodus, and I just hands down admit that I had a hard time to understand the purpose of this work. Granted, it paints a more personal and human picture of Moses and his deeds as he led the Israelites out of Egypt and let them conquer the Promised Land, but I was sadly unqualified to discern the deeper meaning of re-telling this well-known story in new words as, in my simple mind, it brought nothing new to my knowledge of the Scripture. I also tried to read it through the prism of art-vs.-society as that seems to be the theme that runs like a thread through all the stories in the book, but still failed. If you who read these words can help me understand, do share!

All in all, these novellas and short stories are for slow and focused reading

THE WORLD WAR

Author: Various
Year: 1938-1939
Publisher: Världskrigets förlag A.B.
Language: Swedish

Imagine that you are a tourist standing on one of the signal towers of the Great Wall of China and looking into the distance following the stretch of the seemingly endless structure as it whirls and turns across hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, forests and plains relentlessly pursuing the horizon. You see the trenches, turrets, gates, edges and fortifications and the further you try to see, the more you have to strain your eyes.

A few kilometres down the wall, a different viator is standing in a different tower but looking in the same direction as you are. His tower is on a different altitude, angle and relative distance from the sector of the wall you were trying to see. To this person, the tower is equally winding and equally endless, but he sees the items that you see from a different perspective. Maybe he can see something that is too far away for you to properly identify. Maybe you can see something that is blocked from his view. You are looking back to the same wall, and see the same portions of it, and yet your observations would differ.

Looking back into the history of mankind is no different. We know things today that those before us did not know. Our preferences and tastes change. Our expectations evolve. And when we are faced with accounts of events from eras that came and went, we are aghast to learn about developments that seemed so easily avoidable and yet crashed down on our forefathers without mercy or recourse. We see things they did not see, and they saw things that are out of view for us.

It is, therefore, a useful exercise to read historical accounts written before our era as seen by observers on a different point on the timeline. Voltaire’s book about Charles XII of Sweden is one such example. “Världskriget” (not available in English but the title translates to “The World War”) is another. In and by itself, it is already a fascinating read, but there is one fact in particular that makes this compilation particularly fascinating. The clue is in the title: it was published in 1938 and 1939, i.e. before they knew that there was going to be a second world war, even ghastlier than the previous one.

I have read the 14 volumes of Världskriget on and off over the course of the last five years and finally finished it in time to celebrate the centenary of the end of the war. It is a comprehensive collection of essays on the most diverse aspects of the First World War. The essays cover all sorts of perspectives on the Great War. They certainly cover the mandatory chapters on the political alliances, the shots in Sarajevo, the mobilisation across Europe and beyond, the diplomatic efforts to stave off the disaster, the troop movements and the battles, and the final capitulation of the defeated Central Powers. But apart from that, they also include more specialised titles such as “The Exploits of the German destroyer S.M.S.‘Emden’”, “Mines and the Use Thereof During the War”, “The Horse During the World War”, “The Irish Uprising of 1916”, “Sanitary Services”, “The Press and the War”, “German/French/British Marching Songs”, “The Rise and Success of National Socialism”, “The New Italy”, “Military Expenses”, “Russian Generals”, “Tetanus”, and “War humour”. Surprisingly, despite several articles on blimps, aviation, and individual feats of valour, not once was Manfred von Richthofen (a.k.a. the Red Baron), the most celebrated fighter pilot of the era, mentioned.

It is, without a doubt, both chilling and awe-inspiring to read the accounts, thoughts, analyses, and arguments of people who had no way of knowing what horrors stood before them. The heroic introduction to the Nazi movement in Germany and the apotheosis of Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini are particularly horrifying.

What saddened me the most was how pundits, politicians, historians, and the general public until the night before the war refused to fully accept the impending calamity. The efforts to downplay, devalue, or ignore the threat and even ridicule those who called for attention to the matter sounds familiar to my 21st-century ears. I am reminded of the myopic misunderstanding that material wealth, trade, and economic development will trump pride and nationalism. I see the naïve hope that rational thought and education will conquer emotions and fear. I recognise the disastrous equation of justice with revenge. Our forefathers did it, and we are doing it again.

Which ultimately leaves me with the disturbing hunch that this is the hamartia that repeatedly prevents us from ever really saying ”farewell” to the past and compels us to repeatedly part with “until we meet again.” 

THE OVERCOAT

Author: Nicolai Gogol
Year: Various (1842)
Publisher: Various
Language: Swedish (Various translators)

Translators are the unsung heroes of literature. Thanks to their efforts and skill, works of literature, poetry, and drama that would remain unknown outside of their original language area, are made available to readers around the globe.  

In order to better understand the importance of translations on the accessibility and comprehensibility of a foreign work of fiction, I decided to look up all translations of Nicolai Gogol’s novella “The Overcoat” (“Шинель” in original) into Swedish. Hans Åkerström’s survey “Bibliografi över rysk skönlitteratur översatt till svenska”, Acta Bibliothecae Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2018, as well as the librarians at the Royal Library in Stockholm and Haninge Kommunbibliotek.

I managed to identify and hunt down seven full versions of the story by the following translators:
“Kappan”; Peterson, Karl Erik; 1889
“Kapprocken”; unknown translator; 1889
“Kappan”; Nilsson, Nils-Åke;  1946
“Kappan”; Andrae, Staffan; 1959
“Överrocken”; Nilsson, Sture; 1985
“Överrocken”; Fält, Erik; 1993
“Kappan”; Lindgren, Stefan; 2010

There seem to be two basic approaches to translations: source-oriented and target-oriented. Simply put, it is the difference between bringing the reader to the text or the text to the reader.

Notably, the two translations from 1889 are not from the Russian original but from German and French translations and seem to have been done independently as demonstrated by their completely different vocabulary and syntax. The first Swedish translation directly from Gogol’s Russian was Nils-Åke Nilsson’s work. After that, only Staffan Andrae seems to have reached for a non-Russian (German in his case) source as the vantage point for his work.

Most of the translations seem to gravitate toward target-orientation. Russian terms such as currency (копеечными/kopeechnymi), a well-known statue (Фальконетова монумента/Falkonetova monumenta), and civil servants’ titles (капитан-исправник/kapitan-ispravnik) are consistently modified by the translators to make sense to the foreign reader. Also, many sentences are routinely re-arranged in order to make them easier on the Swedish eye. Having said that, I observe that over time, the translations become increasingly accurate and increasingly source-oriented.

Two items stand out in this regard. Staffan Andrae’s translation effectively does away with all gogolian flavour and chops the text up to short and poignant phrases in contrast to Gogol’s winding phrases. Erik Fält’s, on the other hand, preserves the both the vocabulary and the idiosyncratic syntax of Nicolai Gogol and seems to be the most loyal to the source. As an example, a sentence in the Russian original, which contains 210 words separated by 37 commas, 3 hyphens, and 3 semi-colons, but only one period in the very end is offered in a similar single-sentence format by Fält (13 commas, 3 hyphens, and 3 semi-colons) and Lindgren (21 commas, 3 hyphens), but a whopping 15 sentences by Staffan Andrae (a mere 5 commas).  

What is interesting is that, although the post-1946 translations often differ significantly from one another, they all seem to connect to Nilsson’s. Unusual concepts that were first introduced by Nilsson routinely re-appear in at least one of the subsequent translations whereas virtually none have been carried over to the more modern translations from the 19^th century versions. Nilsson seems therefore to have set a standard for The Overcoat in the Swedish language. His is also the most widely reproduced translation in new editions issued by a number of publishers. Furthermore, a Swedish schoolbook (“Enhvar sin egen lärare”) from 1893 as well as a news article from 1926, mention the novella as “Kapprocken” without any further explanation which indicates to me that in this era the book was widely known to the general public under that title. Nilsson called his translation “Kappan” which today is the generally accepted name, despite some translators’ choice to apply the title “Överrocken”. This further strengthens my conclusion that Nilsson’s translation should be considered the benchmark for Gogol’s story in Sweden.