Suppose I were to invoke the following: an indigenous nomadic people brutally colonized by a nation of settlers, resulting in the (almost) total destruction of a language, a culture, and a way of life. What place am I referring to? You’d hardly think of Europe. Outside of Scandinavia, even not terribly far away, down on the European continental mainland, it remains obscure: the fact that Swedes and Norwegians have their own version of this story, familiar to U.S. and Canadian cultures from other contexts.

In the lands at the far north of the Nordic peninsula, a semi-nomadic people called the Sámi, reindeer herders and fishermen, lived for centuries in relative harmony with the Scandinavians. But in the late 19th century, as Swedes and Norwegians became ever hungrier to exploit the northernmost lands and their new nations embraced the pan-European vogue for social engineering and ideologies of cultural supremacy, the Scandinavian governments began to institute “Scandinavization” policies aimed at the forcible assimilation of the Sámi people. Swedes and Norwegians imposed their languages and effectively banned Sámi culture, particularly in the school system. The story’s culmination, again, is familiar: the “success” of such policies was all too great. A mere hundred years later, by the late twentieth century, few Sámi still knew their ancestors’ language; few had developed their ancestors’ unique skills, and the legacy of millenia went irrecoverably lost. 

This ill-perceived corner of European history is the first reason to read Saskia Vogel’s translation of Linnea Axelsson’s award-winning, luminous novel in verse, Aednan. Winner of Sweden’s most prestigious literary award, the August Prize, in 2018, and recently shortlisted for the US-American National Book Award for Translated Literature, Aednan is the weaving of a polyvocal Sámi epic spanning the decades from 1910 to 1980, following four generations of Sámi people. Through the oblique lens of Axelsson’s terse poetry (the author is herself Sámi-Swedish), we first encounter the family of Ristin and Ber-Joná, reindeer herders who cannot move their herds freely any longer, because of the new border that has recently been drawn between Norway and Sweden (the union of Sweden and Norway was only dissolved in 1905: this border was new). Later, as the century wears on, we also meet the families of Lise and Sandra. Through these figures, we come into contact with the forced re-settlements of the 1920s; the racial-biological body-measurements and other types of quasi-Nazi “science” that took the Sámi people as its guinea pigs; the boarding schools where Sámi children were taken to be “Scandinavized”; and finally the legal fight between the Sámi people and the Swedish state, the reclaiming of Sámi land by the Sámi, and the Sámi demand for reparations.

But this interesting story is not the only reason to read Knopf’s newly published English-language edition of Aednan. A reason to seek out this book somewhat closer to home is that it is a stunning display of translational virtuosity on the part of Saskia Vogel. She has pulled off a type of high-wire act: a demonstration of such a precise listening ear tuned to the Swedish, and such a cunning intelligence in her creative efforts with the English, that the two works—Axelsson’s and Vogel’s—seem to stand side by side, friends, in a sense—friends on nearly equal footing, a feeling that one develops about a translation only in rare instances. I could take any passage of text to show you what I mean—to show you in particular the attuned aesthetic sense Vogel has displayed in developing a distinct, intentional, highly palpated diction for her translation of the book, with a self-assured vocabulary that matches the poetic sophistication of the source text. Again, any passage of text would suffice to show it, but let’s take something from the beginning. This is a point when Ristin and Ber-Joná are arguing about their weaker son, Nila: 

You can’t take 

a weakling like that 

into the fells

-

Someone like that is left 

in our lodgings

or boards with the Swede

on his farms

-

Quarrel’s sneer

was spread 

across 

our faces

-

People stood back

silence lay in our hut

The use of ‘fell’ (“hill or stretch of high moorland”) to translate the fjäll of the original Swedish is an obvious choice, seen in one light. The two words mean the same thing, as well as sharing a common root and even sounding similar to one another. But on another level, it is a bold, self-assured move: the word is not common in English. I suspect many English-speakers who know the word do not know that they know it (could not generate this definition in a game of Scrabble, say) and to use it here displays a beautiful absence of condescension to the anglo reader—an admirable faith in the English language’s deep memory. The singular “Swede,” too, is an example of the same artistry: this singular at a moment where we would usually expect a plural is a finely tuned invocation of the Swedish text, a stylistic peculiarity that has a subtle yet deep effect when it crosses over into the new language, even as it might easily have been jettisoned with the cynicism typical of a less seasoned translator. 

By the time I came to the end of Vogel’s translation, I had a feeling similar to the one that came at the end of Axelsson’s Swedish text. I felt I had been witness to an extraordinary feat of sustained concentration—the execution of something difficult, unflaggingly, over the course of more than 400 pages. I felt the passage of the Sámi people across a landscape, and all the while absorbed the energies exuded by any highly developed adroitness or mastery. 

Honed fingers that felt

the family mark

cut into the reindeer’s ear

“Honed” is the translation Vogel has chosen here for a Swedish word we don’t have in English: lyhörd. It is an adjective that can mean “keen,” “attentive,” or “sensitive to,” but it is more frequently used to indicate that a substance conducts sound very well. For example, a wall that is lyhörd is a wall through which you can hear your neighbors. Some claim that it is also the word that best sums up what Swedish society most valorizes in an individual: someone who is lyhörd means someone tuned in, someone who understands without needing any explanation, someone who does not take up much space herself. So perhaps we might use the word to qualify a translation, as well, perhaps we might say: Saskia Vogel’s translation is lyhörd – it feels, it knows, it conducts sound effortlessly, in the same sense that Axelsson uses the word to qualify “fingers that felt.” Alternatively, perhaps we might say, with equal truth, her translation is “honed.”