\New Swedish Books, spring 2019 1
9 Spring 2019 TRANSLATOR'S CHOICE Paul Berf What
books from contemporary literature deserve to be re-discovered? New Swedish Books asks three translators what they think. Could you tell us about a translation that’s particularly close to your heart? – Johannes Anyuru’s second novel A Storm Blew in from Paradise is both a deeply personal and politically topical novel. In it the author traces his Ugandan father’s private history. Describing how he is training to become a fighter pilot in Greece, but how he is unable to return home when Idi Amin seizes political power in Uganda. He sets out on a journey of escape that takes him from a camp in Tanzania to Nairobi and finally to Sweden. – In this story of escape, as thrilling as a detective novel, Anyuru depicts the great loneliness and unsettledness of a person who has lost both his roots and his biggest dream. This amazing story reminds us that behind every refugee, arriving in the 1970s or today, there is a unique personal story. However, the book becomes truly moving and captivating through Anyuru’s impartial and poetic language, loaded to the point of bursting with emotions. A reading experience to blow you away. Which book would you love to translate? – Some of Ellen Mattson’s ten novels could be described as daydream plays in which she creates unique fictional worlds. This is the case in Splendorville. – The novel is set in the 1920s, in a small town bordering on the Sahara desert, where the doctor Maria Esparto lives. An American film company shooting a romantic silent movie in an ‘oriental’ setting enters her life. Doctor Esparto is fascinated by these people and their strong emotions, but finds it difficult to separate their roles with their true identities. Her refusal to see the truth and her desire to believe in the dream culminates in catastrophe. – In the silent movie, with its exaggerated gestures and dramatic facial expressions, Ellen Mattson has found the perfect metaphor for a world where limits are erased. As a reader you are engulfed by the universe created by the author’s imagination in this masterful novel with its dreamlike atmosphere. Paul Berf Translates from Swedish to German, lives in Cologne, Germany. Johannes Anyuru (b. 1979) A Storm Blew in from Paradise, 2012, 248 p. Publisher Norstedts Rights Norstedts Agency, German edition Luchterhand Verlag 2015 Ellen Mattson (b. 1962) Splendorville, 2004, 334 p. Publisher Albert Bonniers Förlag Rights Hedlund Literary Agency