Frans G Bengtsson's Mother Tongue

While in the south of Sweden, I took the opportunity to visit the town of Lund, founded in the year of 990. Many years ago, I studied at the university in town, and each time I am in Sweden, I always try to go to Lund to walk on the old cobblestone streets and to breathe in the atmosphere of the academic learning that seaps through the walls of the houses and buildings. Many of the university’s departments are located in the old buildings in Lund. When I was studying a short stint of Philosophy, the lectures were held in the so called ‘King’s House’ (seen above), close to the University Building. The ‘King’s House’ got its name from the Swedish king Charles the XII, who was said to have ridden his horse up the wooden stairs to the top floor of the building where he had his quarters during the troubled years against the Danes of 1716 to 1718 – or so the legend goes.

During my visit to Lund, I went into the Cathedral and the University Library (above). The library woke up many happy memories when I was studying subjects that interested me greatly, not always subjects that were on the curriculum of a class, I have to confess. So, for example, I wrote a long essay on the 1912 Olympic rowing event after I found old issues of the Olympic News, which was a sport paper published in English for the Olympic Games in Stockholm.

Arriving to the library last week, I saw that a new exhibit was going to open in the lobby, Skånska är mitt modersmål [‘Scanian* is my mother tongue’], an exhibit about my favourite Swedish author, Frans G Bengtsson (1894-1954), who wrote the novel about the Viking Röde Orm, The Long Ships; a novel that has been translated into thirty languages by now.

This was Wednesday, and two days later, Friday the 17 September, the exhibit officially opened. I was there, and so was half of the population of Lund, it seemed. It was so packed with people that it was hard to see what was in the exhibit cases. I briefly talked to Mr. Jan-Erik Malmquist, chairman of the Frans G Bengtsson Society, which was founded 25 years ago this autumn, and Mr. Mikael Lindgren, who, working at the library, was one of the researchers for the exhibit. When I asked him about a special edition of Bengtsson’s Viking novel, the first edition in English, Red Orm, published in 1943 by Scribner in New York, which I could not see in the exhibit, Mr. Lindgren revealed that the library did not have a copy of this rare title and it could therefore not be in the exhibit. Red Orm was translated by June Barrows Mussey and The Long Ships by Michael Meyer.

As it happens, yours truly has two copies of Red Orm. Next time I go to Lund, I will bring one copy along and donate it to the library, or give it to the Bengtsson Society, so they can store it at the library for those researchers who are writing essays or papers on Bengtsson and his famous novel. While Mussey’s translation is not as good as Meyer’s – and Meyer’s is truly brilliant – Mussey’s is not really bad, or at least not as bad as people think.

Last day for the exhibit will be 27 November 2010.

Here are two links to what two local newspapers wrote about the event, Sydsvenskan and Skånskan.

(*Scanian is the dialect spoken in the province of Scania, Skåne, in the south of Sweden.)

New Edition Of 'The Long Ships'

At last, the new edition of The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson is out here in the States.

Bengtsson is my favorite Swedish author, and he was a true man of letters; he wrote poems (sonnets as a matter of fact), essays, book reviews, a biography about the Swedish warrior king Charles the XII, and the two-volume novel The Long Ships, which is about the Viking Röde Orm, or as he is called in the English edition, Red Orm. For anyone interested in this book, its author, and its English translator, Michael Meyer, who performed a brilliant translation (trust me, I have read them both, over and over again...), might like to take a look at an entry I posted on 3 May 2009, ‘A Rowing Room With A View’. It sheds some light on my all-time favorite book, which has some rowing in it, too.

What is really ‘new’ with this edition, which is published by New York Review Books, is an introduction by Michael Chabon, an author who lives in California. I have to confess that I have not read any of his books, but I am thrilled about what he writes in his introduction. Chabon writes that The Long Ships “stands ready, given the chance, to bring lasting pleasure to every single human being on the face of the earth.” Furthermore, he compares Bengtsson, with all rights, to great authors like Dickens, Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Dumas. Chabon continues to state that the reader of this novel comes to regard its author, “as we come to regard any reliable, capable, and congenial companion in the course of any great novel, adventure, or novel of adventure - as a friend for life.” Is that not beautifully written? I am also happy to read Chabon’s worthy tribute to Michael Meyer for his elegant work with the translation, which actually Bengtsson assisted him with.

While Michael Chabon's introduction is superb, I have found some minor ‘errors’ in this edition. First of all, the cover is dreadful! Why on earth are there ‘wings’ on the helmets the Vikings are wearing (‘wings’ are not better than ‘horns’, the latter a terrible historical inaccuracy), and why is there a painted horse or unicorn head in the bow of the Viking boat? Moreover, in the presentation of Bengtsson in the beginning of the book it states that both the British and the American editions of The Long Ships were published in 1955, which is wrong. They were both published in 1954; Bengtsson was able to see these editions before he died in December 1954.

As a matter of fact, I would have handed out some good extra points, if the very first edition in English was mentioned. In 1943, the American publisher Scribner came out with the first volume, with the 'American' title Red Orm. For some unknown reason, the second volume was never even considered by Scribner - their loss!

Other ‘errors’ in the presentation of Bengtsson are the Swedish titles of The Long Ships. Here mentioned are Roede Orm, sjofarare i vaesterled and Roede Orm, hemma och i oesterled. The correct titles are Röde Orm, sjöfarare i västerled och Röde Orm, hemma och i österled – nothing else. It is quiet common, on this side of the pond, to disregard the three extra letters at the end of the Swedish alphabet; after the letter ‘z’ follow the letters ‘å’, ‘ä’ and ‘ö’. Although it might look as an ‘a’ with a circle or two dots, or an ‘o’ with two dots, the circle and the dots are a part of these letters, and not just merely an ‘umlaut’, though the Swedish language does have these sound changes, too, like man [Eng. man] to män [Eng. men].

However, do not let these minor errors stop you from immediately buying Frans G Bengtsson’s The Long Ships. You will not be disappointed, I promise…

Oxford At War

Besides writing articles for some rowing magazines and trying to keep this blog running, the other month I began doing research for a non-rowing related project about my favourite Swedish author, Frans G Bengtsson, and his wonderful two-volume novel The Long Ships (1941; 1945; Eng. ed. 1954), and its English translator, Michael Meyer.

In October 1939, Meyer went up to Oxford to read English at Christ Church. He simply picked Oxford because his nanny had cheered on Oxford in the annual Boat Race.

Meyer would become a well-known translator of August Strindberg’s and Henrik Ibsen’s works, but at Oxford he had his mind set to become a poet. He sent off a poem to the university’s literary magazine, Cherwell. He soon got a reply from the magazine’s editor, Keith Douglas (to the left), that his little piece was accepted for publication. Douglas, who was a dashing-looking fellow, quickly made Meyer a sub-editor for Cherwell. Meyer agreed to this, although he sometimes found Douglas a difficult person. But there was no question about Douglas’s ability to write poems.

After Keith Douglas left Oxford in the summer of 1940, he immediately joined the Army, and handed over the editorship of Cherwell to Meyer. A year later, when Michael Meyer and his friend and fellow poet, Sidney Keyes, edited and published Eight Oxford Poets, some of Keith Douglas’s poems were included. Among them, Meyer especially liked ‘Canoe’ as, Meyer would later write, it “perfectly captures the atmosphere of Oxford around the time France fell” (in June, 1940).

And, yes I know, a canoe is not a rowing boat, but I would like to publish it here:

Well, I am thinking this must be my last
summer, but cannot lose even a part
of pleasure in the old-fashioned art
of idleness. I cannot stand aghast

at whatever doom hovers in the background
while grass and buildings and the somnolent river
who know they are allowed to last for ever
exchange between them the whole subdued sound

of this hot time. What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle, and I will hear
and come another evening, when this boat

travels with you alone towards Iffley:
as you lie looking up for thunder again,
this cool touch does not betoken rain;
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly.

Douglas’s battle experience during the North African Campaign, from 1942 to 1943, was posthumously published in 1946, Alamein to Zem Zem, which was a prose account with poems and his own drawings. Captain Keith Douglas was killed on 9 June 1944 in France, three days after he had participated in the invasion of Normandy.

A Rowing Room With A View

One of Sweden's most famous authors, Frans G. Bengtsson, wrote in one of his essays: "... for if a man is to live happily he must have water to look at..."

My study has only one window, facing east towards the Mystic River. It is not a grand view; if you would like to see the water, you have to stand by the window and peer above the rooftops and through the branches of the trees belonging to the neighbours. And if there are few or no leaves on the branches you can catch a glimpse of the river. Again, maybe not a great view, but knowing that the river is there, makes all the difference...

It is in this study - by the rest of the family called "The Rowing Room" - I write my entries to this blog and other pieces on rowing. It is not strange that my family has given the room that name as I am surrounded by "rowing stuff" there: rowing posters, rowing books, rowing magazines, and some few pieces of rowing memorabilia, etc. It is also here on the bookshelves that I keep my books by Frans G. Bengtsson.

Bengtsson was born in 1894 and was a poet, essayist, critic, and novelist - a true man of letters. Nowadays, Bengtsson is best remembered for his Viking novel about Röde Orm (Röde Orm, two volumes 1941 and 1945), which was given the title The Long Ships when it came out in an English edition in 1954, the same year Bengtsson died. And let it be said at once, the translation by Michael Meyer is brilliant. Michael Meyer (1921-2000), an Oxford poet and one-title novelist (The End of the Corridor; 1951), was asked to translate Bengtsson's Viking novel. Many other English translators had refused to translate it, as, Meyer writes in his witty essay "Frans G. Bengtsson to his translator", the "money offered was so pitifully low, ten shillings [...] a page." But Meyer decided to have a go at it, and the Swedish author, who had a degree in English, promised to check Meyer's translation. The result is luminous. If you decide to only read one Swedish novel in your lifetime, The Long Ships has to be it!

I had the great pleasure to meet Michael Meyer at a lecture and dinner given by the "Frans G. Bengtsson Society" in Lund, Sweden in September 1995. It was the most funny and enjoyable lecture and dinner party I have ever attended. Two years later, in a small pamphlet printed by the society, Michael Meyer had his essay "Frans G. Bengtsson to his translator" published, together with a piece about Bengtsson and the Scottish author Eric Linklater written by - I am honoured to say - yours truly. After translating Bengtsson's book, Meyer would later translate plays by Strindberg and Ibsen, and also write highly praised biographies about these two Scandinavian playwrights. Meyer would also write a couple of plays himself. If you are interested in Meyer and the London theatre life in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, do read his very entertaining autobiography Not Prince Hamlet - Literary and Theatrical Memoirs (1989).

It is not a coincidence that Chris Dodd mentions The Long Ships in his The Story of World Rowing (1992) as the Vikings were known to both sail and row their mighty ships. In The Long Ships Röde Orm and his friends are taken as slaves to row one of the Caliph's ships. At this hard time at the oar, Bengtsson writes,

"In his old age, Orm used to say that this period in his life was lengthy to endure, but brief to tell of, for one day resembled another, so that, in a sense, it was as though time was standing still for them. But there were signs to remind him that time was, in fact, passing; and one of these was his beard. When he first became a slave, he was the only one among them so young as to be beardless; but before long, his beard began to grow, becoming redder even than his hair, and in time it grew so long that it swept the handle of his oar as he bowed himself over his stroke. Longer than that it could not grow, for the sweep of his oar curtailed its length; and of all the methods of trimming one's beard, he would say, that was the last that he would choose."

After Orm and his men have managed to escape and are back home on the Nordic waters, they are invited to celebrate Yule at King Harald Bluetooth's court. Here King Harald calls them to drink ale, but asks Orm and his friend Toke to compose a poem each about their drink. Toke, who has not tasted better ale for many years, empties his vessel with delight and thereafter declares with strong voice:

"Thirsting I rowed for many a year,
And thirsting I did good slaughter.
All praise to thee, Gorm's gracious heir!
Thou knowest my favourite water!"

I have earlier written an article about Frans G. Bengtsson, Vikings and how my old rowing coach, Tore Persson, at my rowing club in Malmö, Sweden, ended up in a Hollywood movie by Kirk Douglas, The Vikings. If you would like to read the article, please click here.