Recent reading

[luzula]

The (unintended) theme of this post is: short story collections by female Swedish SF/F authors.

Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck (2011)
Impressively blurbed by Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville and Karen Joy Fowler, among others. It feels weird to read stories set in Sweden in English. I wish I'd read them in Swedish instead, but I was too lazy to track down her earlier collection in Swedish, and also, it only contained half of the stories. Anyway, this is mostly fantasy. The title story reminds me of Tiptree, with its focus on weird biology and death and reproduction. Others of the stories are more rooted in Sweden, mostly in Jämtland, and in Swedish folk tales. There's a lot of mixing of the human, the mechanical, the animal, the supernatural, often involving reproduction. Also an interesting afterword about her experiences translating her own work into Swedish.

Nordisk fauna by Andrea Lundgren (2018)
Whew, I can read about Swedish things in Swedish. Title means "Nordic Fauna", and indeed many of the stories somehow involve the relationship between humans and animals (or nature in general). The book is borderline realism, and most of the stories only have subtle SF/F aspects. I keep expecting her to live up to that one brilliant SF story that was the first thing I read by her. This book was okay, but alas, did not live up to that story.

Comments

[nonesensed]

I ended up reading Jagannath in English too, and it was a rather interesting experience to read a translation Swedish-to-English by the author herself. Would definitely want to read them in Swedish as well to see what kind of different that would be.

[luzula]

There are places in the text where you could there had been originally just one word (like "mesost") and she had to replace that with a whole phrase describing what it is. It definitely makes for a more intrusive reading experience, if you're Swedish and didn't need that explanation. Plus, the flavor of the language is just different.

[nonesensed]

Oh yeah, it's definitely a different experience than if you're reading it in Swedish. I'm just a sucker for the meta experience of reading something that's been translated, so while I think I'll really enjoy reading the stories in Swedish, the clear translation workarounds like the mesost-one added an extra layer of entertainment for me, rather than being distracting. But to each their own!