Recent reading

[luzula]

Kvinnor i väglöst land by Lilian Ryd (1995, only in Swedish)
The title means Women in roadless country (or "wayless land" if you want the English cognates of the Swedish words). It's about women's daily life on small subsistence farms near the mountains in Norrbotten (the county furthest north in Sweden) in the period 1850-1950, and the author has done deep interviews of women in their 90's who still remember this life. It's absolutely fascinating. These women have seen society change so much during their life, and most of them are not that impressed by current society. They all stress that they worked so hard, but that there was also joy in the work, because they were free to plan it themselves, and they also worked for themselves (and their family and nearest neighbors). The author stresses practical details of everyday life such as: what did they do when they had their periods? How did they wash the dishes (wooden dishes are quite different to wash)? How did they sleep? What was it like to only have firelight to work by in the winter? What was courtship and marriage like? What kind of sedge grass do you use as insulation in shoes and how does it feel? Etc.

There are details of technology and agriculture among these people that went back to the bronze age, sometimes even the stone age (there has been a find of a stone age fish net made of spruce root rope with a particular type of knot that is pretty much identical to nets that they used). It's not that these people were isolated--people had come there from southern Sweden, from Norway, there was lots of intermarriage with Sami people, one had an ancestor who was a deserted Russian soldier, etc. And they did always buy some stuff, like salt, and increasingly other wares as modern society progressed, but apparently the methods of subsistence had a lot of continuity anyway. The food was mostly fish, meat (cow, sheep and reindeer), milk, potatoes and barley.

Svenskarna och deras fäder by Karin Bojs and Peter Sjölund (2018, only in Swedish)
A follow-up to Bojs' previous book about the last 54 000 years of European history and how different peoples wandered during that time. This book is about the last 11 000 years of Swedish history specifically, seen through analysis of male Y chromosome lines. Some of it was overlap with the previous book, which I thought was better. But it was a quick and interesting read anyway.

Comments

[andeincascade]

Your books in Swedish always seem fascinating to me. I’m glad you share them even if I can’t read them

[luzula]

Well, I'm glad you appreciate the summaries even though you can't read them! : )

[rushthatspeaks]

I second the above comment, and really wish that first one existed in English.

[antisoppist]

I'd translate it if anyone knows of any publishers likely to publish it!

I have nebulous plans of setting up my own and publishing out of print Scandinavian women's writing in translation but I don't think I am rich enough as you have to pay the rights-holders and the translators.

[luzula]

It would probably be a challenge to translate, because there's some dialect, and lots of specialized words that may be dialect or not, but which refer to details of their life which are different from ours. There's a glossary at the end.

How do translators handle dialect, anyway? Would you choose an English dialect to use instead, or just ignore it, or what?

I salute your ambitions, though!

[antisoppist]

Dialect is tricky. There are dictionaries of historic Swedish online, and with the Blomqvist, she bequeathed her rights to a Foundation and they sent me a book someone had written in Swedish about the dialect in her books. You can also find memoirs and interviews with old people talking about the past. But then once you've worked out what they are talking about (step 1), you have to work out what to do with it in English (step 2). My dad was quite useful for historic farming words in English where the concepts being referred to are similar, but often they aren't because Swedish farming was different.

And then you don't want to put readers off by making it incomprehensible in English either. I read Don Bartlett's translation of Roy Jacobsen's De Usynlige (The Unseen) from Norwegian, which is set on an island in northern Norway, and in that the translator and editors invented a dialect that's a mixture of Scottish and northern English dialects. I found it irritating at first because I kept trying to place it and it didn't quite fit, but once the story grabbed me, it just became atmospheric. But there's been some discussion among translators on whether or not that is the way to go.

[luzula]

Interesting! Inventing a plausible-sounding dialect sounds like a hard thing to do.

[antisoppist]

I translated some of Anni Blomqvist's books about people living on the Åland islands in the nineteenth century and I'd really like to read the first one. Hers are fiction but even the short chunks I did involved a lot of historical research. Is it out of print?

[luzula]

Sadly it does appear to be out or print, or at least it's not on Adlibris. : ( When I check antikvariat.net, there's only one unsold copy for 500 SEK. I got mine at the library, but now I feel an urge to own it...

Fascinating.

[jesse_the_k]

How do you wash wooden plates?

Re: Fascinating.

[luzula]

I've returned the book to the library now, but let's see if I remember. The description was specifically for wooden vessels that you keep milk in. I think you first scrubbed them in cold water, then poured boiling water in and let it cool. Finally you emptied out the water and let them dry completely. The danger was that if there were bits of milk left that went bad, then it would ruin the vessel. Possibly there was also lye involved in some step.

Re: Fascinating.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks

Seems like lye was often involved in the 19th C.

Re: Fascinating.

[luzula]

Yes, there was lots of lye in the book. Lye to wash clothes with, lye to scrub the floor with...