His spectacles reflected only my window, its curtains and my rubber plant 
Michael Hofmann
- Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by Paul Britten Austin
- The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg, translated by Eva Claeson
None for forty years, then two in 14 months. Not London buses, but English translations – in this instance, of books by the Swedish novelist Hjalmar Söderberg (1869-1941). The Serious Game would appear to be a translation of a novel that was first published in Swedish in 1912 and has not previously appeared in English; Doctor Glas is a reissue of a 1963 version of the 1905 original, with the addition of an admiring preface by Margaret Atwood. A play, Gertrud, was filmed by Carl Dreyer; Doctor Glas has also been filmed; I don’t quite understand why these books and others of his – Martin Birck’s Youth, from 1901, and castigated, on its appearance, for being ‘pornographic’ – haven’t been a continuous part of our literary landscape. But perhaps the requisite mixture of courtesy and curiosity no longer exists? Paul Binding’s Babel Guide to Scandinavian Fiction in Translation describes Söderberg as ‘one of the very greatest Swedish writers, disgracefully little known in the English-speaking world’. The second part of the sentence seems almost to follow from the first.
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Michael Hofmann’s translation of Irmgard Keun’s novel Child of All Nations is out from Penguin this month. His Selected Poems are out from Faber.
Other articles by this contributor:
Slowly/Swiftly · Michael Hofmann praises James Schuyler
His Own Prophet · Read Robert Lowell!
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