Published: 17 June 2020
©2020 Åsa Warnqvist. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Citation: Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, Vol. 42, 2019 http://dx.doi.org/10.14811/clr.v42i0.495
The world-renowned novels of Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery are subject to a vibrant scholarship worldwide. In Sweden, the stories about Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon have been in print continuously and reached several generations of readers since they were first translated in the beginning and middle of the 20th century. Sweden also produced one of the first major international studies of Montgomery’s writing, Gabriella Åhmansson’s doctoral thesis A Life and It’s Mirrors: A Feminist Reading of L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction (1991). It has been followed by quite a few other Swedish studies. Åhmansson went on to produce a number of articles on the same topic and with the launch of my research project “L.M. Montgomery in Sweden” in 2009, Montgomery’s success in Sweden was explored in several articles connected to the field of sociology of literature. In 2009, Åhmansson and I organized the first international conference on Montgomery’s work outside of Canada. “L.M. Montgomery – Writer of the World” took place at Uppsala University and commemorated the 100 year anniversary of the first publication of the first Anne book in Sweden. Since then, we have also seen a growing interest in Montgomery scholarship among younger scholars.
Despite the large interest in Montgomery’s writing in Sweden and the growing scholarship, few new translations of her novels have seen the light of day. Slightly modified versions of the original Swedish translations are still in print today. As part of this theme, three scholars have looked at the translations of Montgomery’s Anne and Emily stories into Swedish to uncover the translation practices of the translators and publishers, and the outcome of these practices.
In her article, Cornelia Rémi studies the Swedish translations of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), with particular focus on the very first translation, Anne på Grönkulla, made by Karin Jensen in 1909. Laura Leden studies the original Swedish translation of Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon made by Stina Hergin and published in 1955 under the title Emily. Both studies notice significant differences between the source and target texts, a result which highlights the low status of children’s literature and girl’s fiction within the literary system at the time when the original translations were made. The translations were adapted for a younger target audience than Montgomery’s original texts and contain extensive changes and omissions of passages. For instance, content manifesting the female protagonists’ critical thoughts and unconventional behaviour have been altered, as well as references to sexuality and religion. To some extent the translators have also added instructive or educational content.
In the third article, I analyse the translation practices behind the original translations from a sociological perspective. The interactions between the translators and the publishers are explored with the use of an extensive archival material from the publishing house C.W.K. Gleerups. Through analysing correspondence and other archival material, the study shows that the translations were affected both by societal norms and the publishers’ profile and praxis. In line with current research within the field of sociology of translation, the results indicate that the publishers had a high degree of engagement in the translation process and that they to some extent can be regarded as co-translators.
Together, the three articles within the theme show that Montgomery’s success in Sweden lies in the work of translators and publishers who were sensitive to current ideas on what constituted proper and saleable literature for young readers in Sweden. A lot of the changes and omissions can be linked to gender ideology and the view of girls and girls’ reading at the time. Since these versions are still in print, the Swedish readers of Montgomery’s novels still to this day encounter characters – particularly the female protagonists – who are more conventional and have a more limited scope of action than Montgomery originally intended. Both Leden and Rémi call for the need to retranslate Montgomery’s novels into Swedish. A more source text-oriented and less didactic translation which embraces the complexity of the novel could, in Rémi’s words, “revivify the Swedish reception of Anne of Green Gables in a different way: as a book worth reading and loving, with words that matter.”
Åsa Warnqvist
Managing Editor of
Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research and
Research Manager of the Swedish Institute for Children’s Books