Laurie Thompson: Introducing Stig Dagerman

Stig Dagerman is a Swedish author from the mid-20th century I hadn’t known about before coming across Island of the Doomed, but in talking with that novel’s translator, Laurie Thompson, I learned a bit about Dagerman’s all too brief, nova-like burst of literary excellence—including the daily satirical verses (think along the lines of those short poems Calvin Trillin writs for The Nation) he created for Sweden’s leading newspaper, Arbetaren, right up until the day he killed himself. Now I want to track down more of Dagerman’s work, and fortunately the University of Minnesota Press seems to be making that a bit easier; Island is the second Dagerman book they’ve republished in the last year (after German Autumn). In this essay, Thompson introduces us to Dagerman, and tells us a bit about what makes Island of the Doomed such a remarkable story.

Stig Dagerman was the Wunderkind of the 1940s in Sweden. In his early twenties, between 1945 and 1949, he wrote four novels, half a dozen plays, many short stories and poems, not to mention large numbers of polemical articles and other journalism—all of them very positively received. He seemed to be blessed with an ability to write brilliantly about anything and everything, and to capture the spirit of the age, without apparent effort. Then, for reasons which are still being debated, he found it increasingly difficult to write anything at all. In 1954, he committed suicide at the age of 31, locking himself in his garage and starting the engine of his car: he seemed to change his mind at the last minute, but it was too late. He had frequently written about suicide as an honourable means of quitting this life: and now he had done just that.

Memorably described in one review as “the flying fortress of 1940s attitudes and beliefs”, Island of the Doomed was published in Sweden in 1946. It was received as the ultimate expression of post-war Angst. Following a shipwreck, half a dozen characters are cast away on an impossibly remote island. Instead of trying to find sources of food and drink (one of their number even empties their only container of drinking water), they argue about what image to inscribe onto a rock, so that when their dead bodies are eventually discovered, their rescuers will have an idea of their attitude to life.

Dagerman was a shy, modest young man with a working class background, but widely read and familiar with the literary and psychological theories that dominated Swedish thinking in the post-war years—notably French Existentialism (especially Sartre) and Freudian psychology, but also echoes of Kierkegaard and Heidegger. The human condition is characterized by Angst, life is pointless, but one can make a meaningful gesture by making a moral stand—the image Captain Wilson wants to scratch onto the rock symbolizes the cruel imposition of power over others, whereas Lucas Egmont’s stands for solidarity and peaceful co-existence. In Island of the Doomed, Dagerman bombards the reader with a non-stop flood of imagery coupled with detailed realistic descriptions that sometimes pass over into Surrealism. Close analysis of the imagery shows that he was consistently in complete intellectual control of what he was writing (try for instance charting the imagery that stems originally from the red scars on Lucas Egmont’s back caused by whippings administered by his father—red cord, red sunsets, red seas, red spiders, spiders’ webs shining red, and so on), which is remarkable when one considers the speed with which Dagerman wrote: the final sixty pages or so of the novel were written in a single all-night sitting, to the accompaniment of background music on the radio and an endless supply of strong coffee.

The apparently effortless fluency with which Dagerman wrote has been an inspiration to many more recent Swedish novelists, notably Mikael Niemi and Björn Ranelid. His reputation in the history of Swedish literature is of the young genius blessed with enormous natural talent who produced an astonishing amount of top-class work in the second half of the 1940s, but died tragically early, unable to cope with the awesome implications of his ability.

Personally, I treasure memories of an afternoon in the 1970s spent with Anita Björk, Dagerman’s second wife and one of Sweden’s leading actresses, in her impressive apartment in the Stockholm Old Town. I was invited to sit on a cushion on the floor: she sat on another one, surrounded by books and manuscripts—she was preparing for a radio broadcast on her memories of her husband. Eyes gleaming, she stared into space and no doubt saw Stig’s face smiling down at her as she told me how walking through town or through the countryside with Stig was an unforgettable experience that broadened her understanding of life and inspired her to new heights as an actress. He would maintain a non-stop commentary on things happening round about them, sights and sounds and smells, things she would never normally have noticed, and his descriptions were all the more vivid as a result of the imagery he used on the spur of the moment.

It would be nice to think that Island of the Doomed will have a similar effect on 21st-century readers.

19 February 2012 | in translation |

Marian Schwartz on Getting the Voices Right

Andrei Gelasimov’s Thirst is a short but powerful novel about Kostya, a Russian soldier who, burned beyond recognition in Chechnya, now spends most of his days drinking alone in his apartment, sometimes venturing next door when his neighbor wants to scare her young son into doing what he’s told. Gelasimov’s narrative bounces around in time, from the present day to Kostya’s wartime experiences to his childhood memories, each juxtaposition bringing us closer to understanding him as a character. Marian Schwartz does an excellent job of easing English-language readers through the time shifts and, as she explains in this guest essay, a large part of that lies in giving her translation of Thirst an overall consistency while recognizing the specific demands of each scene.

Gelasimov makes it look so easy. One moment you’ve sat down to Thirst, and the next you look up and time has passed and apparently you’ve swallowed the book whole. Thoughts about what it means to be maimed and images of a refrigerator full of vodka, flashbacks to an exploding APC, and little Nikita’s Superman toy are swirling in your head—and you’re smiling.

That was my experience when I first read Thirst in Russian, and that is precisely the experience I endeavored to capture for my reader. Critical to this was accurately conveying Gelasimov’s subtle depiction of Kostya’s ongoing adaptation to life as a man with no face—a freak—while telling a classic army-buddies-take-a-road-trip story through telling use of the spoken word—the conversations—and the unspoken word—thoughts.

Gelasimov sequences through sections about Kostya’s present—his personal trials, his search with his friends for their missing buddy, his interactions with both his neighbor Olga and her son Nikita and with his estranged father and his new family—and his past, not just the immediate past of his injury in Chechnya but his childhood and the story of his parents’ estrangement and divorce. Space breaks signal each shift, but so do the changes in vocabulary and register. A conversation between Kostya and his friends sounds very different from his conversation with his father, as well it should.

Kostya’s memories of his youth and his mother and father quarreling become impressionistic, and so does the language. He recalls a day at the beach when his father’s wandering eye spurs his mother’s jealousy:

Because those young women were there. And my father was playing with them.

The ball sails over our heads. Smack! A ringing blow. My eyes follow its flight. I hear them laughing. Once more—smack! Again I look up. The ball is turning into the sun, and I have tears streaming from my eyes. I can’t see a thing. Smack! Next to me someone screams, ‘Get out of the water! Come here this instant! What is that you have?’ Smack! ‘Throw that filth out this minute! You’re going to get it!’ Smack! ‘Catch it, catch it!’ Smack! And then two times quickly—smack! smack! But the sound is a little different and very close. ‘Did you get that?’ And in reply a child’s cry. ‘Don’t cry or you’ll get it again.’ Smack! . . .

The paragraph continues with that dual use of “smack”—for the ball and for the child—as we picture the swirl of the beach crowd, to cinematographic effect.

(more…)

19 December 2011 | in translation |