Looking for Scandinavia along the Rio de la Plata

The case of the missing literature

BY CHRISTIAN KUPCHIK

I could tell straight away that this was not going to be an easy case, but work is scarce these days. Trying to earn a living as a literary detective – what´s more, in a country that is going through the worst economic crisis in living memory – is no walk in the park; you expose yourself to despair and other dangers, both in the aesthetic and the purely physical sense; your life is at stake. Infidelity has always paid better.
So there I was in my dimly lit office reading some boring poems by Trakl when The Client (who shall remain nameless for his own safety) appeared out of nowhere. Myself, I would have preferred a young Lauren Bacall, but the summer was hellish and anyone who could give me a job would have to do. The heat left no room for idle chit-chat and we went straight to the point, fuelled by what was left of the martinis. The Client wanted to know what had become of Nordic literature along the Rio de la Plata. He hadn´t heard from it for a while and had a bad feeling about it, considering that kidnappings were rife anyway. I explained to him that both Argentina and Uruguay were well known for their energetic defence of European culture even at the expense of their native ones, and that it seemed unlikely to me that anything bad could have happened to Nordic literature. The Client wasn´t buying it: ‘Okay, so you tell me where I can find it.’ After a silence which I tried hard not to drag out too much, we swiftly agreed on the conditions for the job and I agreed to start investigations straight away. It was my first step into the unknown.
Since the data in my files were pretty skimpy, I decided to check with some reliable sources of mine, people who had worked for years in the publishing companies which had successively been taken over and gradually merged with the big multinational publishing giants. In Rio de la Plata, almost all the publishers belong either to the Spanish Planeta group or to Bertelsmann, a German publishing group. My sources, no longer in management positions – the management now consists of marketing types with only the vaguest idea of what ‘literature´ even means – are seasoned veterans of the publishing trade, with a perfect encyclopaedic perspective, a relic of the time when Buenos Aires was the publishing centre of the Spanish-speaking world. And that time continued well into the 1970s, until well after the death of General Franco.
The first answers I got were frustrating to say the least. Everyone exclaimed, almost in unison and grinning sheepishly: ‘Of course it exists: Bergman.’ I pointed out to them with some vehemence that Bergman did films, not literature. My sources looked at me despondently and said it didn´t make any difference. In the regional imagination, the culture of the Nordic countries was reduced to Bergman, which was as it should be as he encompasses all things, including theatre and literature. I was just about to have a fit when somebody took pity on me and said I should look into theatre some more; Ibsen and Strindberg were still popular. It was true; plays such as Et dukkehjem (A Doll´s House) and Fadren (The Father) were constantly performed in new productions in the lively entertainment industry of Buenos Aires. And as if that wasn´t enough, there were moderately successful plays by native writers with titles such as Finlandia or Copenhague (which is still on). However, I was painfully aware that the evidence was too weak to give to the Client. There had to be more. A haggard, prematurely greying man suggested that I should do an inventory of la Casa Nobel. You could usually find something there.
No sooner said than done. The manager reluctantly unearthed what they had by the Nordic Nobel Prize Laureates. Some (but not a lot) of Selma Lagerlöf, some Lagerkvist, next to nothing (and in ancient editions) by Laxness, Martinson, Sillanpää. I punched the wall in despair. It just wasn´t true. The manager approached cautiously, asking what was wrong. When I told him about my predicament he suggested I should buy him a brandy. It turned out to be three brandies, despite the heat. When he had drained the last one, he advised me to look through the old stuff published by Tor. The name rang a bell. It was an old publishing company, which operated from the 1930s to the 1950s in Buenos Aires, and it had published most of Knut Hamsun´s work, amongst other things. The books were in a small format, intended as ‘popular editions´; the translations were clumsy and the covers cheap and garish. But these small books, the manager assured me, had been absolutely crucial for at least two of the foremost authors in the region: Roberto Arlt from Argentina and Juan Carlos Onetti from Uruguay. ‘All right,’ I thought to myself, ‘at least it´s something.’ Hamsun it was. I bought the manager another three brandies and he wandered off in a daze, humming a gloomy tango which lamented the award that Borges never won despite all he did for Nordic literature. It was another clue.
I jumped into my Beetle and drove hell for leather to Borges´s ‘cathedral´ to find out about ‘all´ he had done for Nordic literature. I explained my mission to the Great Widow and she offered with oriental charm to reveal to me the closely guarded secrets of the Great Master. I was about to be disappointed again. Apart from an essay and a poem dedicated to Swedenborg, and a mention here and there of some Nordic cultural icons, Borges´s contribution was largely limited to one book: Literaturas Germánicas Medievales. Half a book, actually, as the first half was all about English and German literature. The other half was about the Edda, however, both the younger and the elder, and some of the sagas, not just Icelandic but also Danish – he was well versed in the Saxo Grammaticus version of the Gesta Danorum from the late 12th century. Borges was fascinated above all by the work of Snorri Sturluson. But that appears to be more of an exotic curiosity than a real literary opportunity.
Then I remembered an interview I once conducted with the old Shaman. At the time, I had found the connection he made somewhat tenuous (which tended to apply to many of Borges´s opinions). According to Borges, Longfellow had borrowed both metrics and certain motifs for his epic poem about the life of the North American Indians, The Song of Hiawatha, from the Kalevala by Elias Lönnroth (who in turn figured in one of Borges´s stories). I tried to find similar connections with local literature, but no luck. Although there are a couple of good translations of the Kalevala, its influence has evaporated from the Rio de la Plata without a trace. Not even the University was interested any more. I was beginning to get a bad feeling. I went over my notes and it was clear that something wasn´t right. The client´s suspicions were justified, I was beginning to believe myself that something bad could have happened to Nordic literature in these remote regions. I had just decided to try a different approach when someone hit me on the head with the force of the hammer of Tor (the ancient god, not the defunct publishing company) and made me see the midnight sun.
I woke up in a white room and a big eye spoke to me: ‘Tall, blond, with one black shoe,’ it kept repeating. ‘That´s it,’ I thought. In autumn ´92, Swedish poet Bruno K Öijer showed up in Buenos Aires without warning. He was on his way home from Chile. First, however, Bruno wanted to deposit some of his poetry along the ‘world´s widest river´. A venue was booked in all haste, press releases were sent out, and his poems translated into Spanish. I was an accomplice in this, more out of loyalty to poetry than out of any confidence in the actual show. I just couldn´t imagine that anyone would come to listen to an unknown poet read poems in a foreign language nobody understood. Bruno had a completely different view of the thing, however, and he even asked me to translate a few extra poems as ‘encores´. The main newspapers in town ran news items about him and when the time came, the poetry reading was an unexpected and seldom repeated success. The room proved too small. There were, indeed, encores. There were even groupies who treated Öijer as if he were Jagger. However, I could not find any published poems by Bruno.
But I could sense that I had somehow found the key. Poets are always more restless, I thought. With the exception of the occasional article with poems by some well-known Danish poets of the 1980s (Michael Strunge, Pia Tafdrup, Morti Vizki, Søren Ulrik Thomsen, Thomas Boberg, Nina Malinowski, F.P. Jac), there were no clues. Boberg had even been in Buenos Aires in ´95, at the book fair, but there were no written records. I tried to look for the foremost Swedish poets in the same generation: not a trace of Anders Olson, Ulf Eriksson, Katarina Frostenson, Ann Jäderlund or Magnus Jacobsson. Somebody gave a nod of recognition to the name Lukas Moodysson; his films had a certain renown among film students. I realized with dismay that even the big names, such as Sonnevi and Tranströmer, are not properly represented. There is only one anthology by Gunnar Ekelöf and that is more than twenty years old. The situation is the same for Norwegian and Icelandic literature. The only exception is an anthology from 1969 of twelve Finnish poets (from Diktonius to Saarikoski), compiled by Matti Rossi. That can still be found in second-hand bookshops. A meagre result, as meagre as it was one-sided.
I had reached a dead end, exhausted by heat and frustration. At that moment, Providence sent the near-transparent apparition of Redondo to my side. Redondo is one of the very last rebels in the trenches of poetry. I told him the whole story. ‘Do you know why? ’ he said with a smile of divine grace. ‘We poets are very nearly a clan of ghosts. We barely know each other around here, and you expect us to know people from the other side of the world. We should, of course we should; there´s a lot of things we should. Still, if you want to find out about Nordic literature, you should go back to the multinational clues. We live in a globalized world, after all.’
‘We do, indeed,’ I said to myself when I had thanked Redondo, who was now a mere streak in the air. But some are more globalized than others.
The Beetle took me to Calle Santa Fe, a former cinema which has been turned into a temple of books, of sorts. To this profane temple, everyone flocks in search of the title which will deliver them in a time of perdition. Among the high shelves of new-age baroque, I managed to find X, one of the country´s most prominent booksellers. I had barely had time to explain my problem to him before he did a quick sweep of the shelves, bringing back some books. ‘They´re all very popular, they sell well and they have a good reputation.’ ‘Having a good reputation´ means that something isn´t trash. The three emblematic names represented three countries: Jostein Gaarder, Peter Høeg and, the most recent acquisition, Henning Mankell. That´s right. All three authors highly respected and selling in big editions. Now why didn´t I think of them? I took the Beetle and went off in search of more clues. And I found some, too. In the 1980s, Karen Blixen was discovered by the local reading public, and in the 1990s, Henrik Stangerup was read reasonably widely. Persistence will also reveal traces of Torgny Lindgren, Gudbergur Bergson, Thorvald Steen and some others.
Reality had one more surprise in store for me, however. I found that the number of Nordic writers who have been translated into Spanish is much greater than those who are actually known here. The reason for this is that most of the writers in question are now published in Spain and they no longer reach Rio de la Plata since the devaluation of the peso in December 2001. The headquarters of the multinational publishing companies only export books by writers who are one hundred per cent sure to sell, although sometimes the price barely exceeds production costs. So that in the final analysis, the Client was not totally wrong: Nordic literature is in fact held hostage (like so many others) and the ransom is still unknown. In order to free it from captivity, you would have to go to Madrid.

Christian Kupchik is a writer, translator and editor living in Buenos Aires

Translated from Oscar Hemer´s Swedish translation by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow