The Death of Imagination

One way or another, I'm done with Bron/Broen after this season. The departure of Kim Bodnia already made Season 3 a tougher sell, and the decline in the writing is helping not at all. Or maybe this was the standard in the first seasons as well and I didn't notice because of the novelty of the setting and the storytelling. Either way, the seams are showing and the payoffs are declining. This time around, the crimes seem more arbitrary, the villains more dumb, and the police response more implausible (not least of all because they're no longer newbies at dealing with a threat on this scale). At least the interplay between Helin and Bodnia is still there and they didn't have to jump through too many hoops to justify them being paired up again. Bodnia is on record as being dissatisfied with the direction they took his character in, which has me piqued to see whether I'll agree with him or not.

So, yeah, we're into full-scale winter Scandimania again. I didn't wait until the end of the Lagerlöf to begin the Laxness, which despite being set in the 18th century is strongly redolent of the old sagas. (Much more so than Gösta Berlings saga, ironically, which despite the title is full absolutely to bursting with pure 19th-century Romanticism.) The Old Man suggested I read it in tandem with Njáls saga (which it's already referenced two or three times in the first twenty pages) for a proper intertextual reading experience, but I may just return to The Kreutzer Sonata for the nonce. Or pick up something else entirely. (I did dip into Torgny Lindgren's Klingsor the other day but I'm not sure I have the stamina for even a short novel entirely in Swedish.)

Okay, det må vara att Bron/Broen börjar irritera mig på vägnar av den osannolika tillfälligheter och cliffhanger. Däremot har det än regelmässiga portioner av en skjortlös Kim Bodnia, så jag ska fortsätta att titta på det. Också lärde jag mig idag, vad biksemad är, så jag kan inte säga, det är inte lärorik.

LOG "smiled" (Swedish); LOG "lied" (German)
What I Read: "Kyrkoherden log."
What I Understood: "The parson lied[*]."
What It Means: "The parson smiled."

[*] When I realised "lied" didn't fit the context, I went with "laughed" instead and was satisfied with that until I actually got around to looking the verb up.

Last month I stopped in front of the Swedish American Museum on Clark Street to check out their sale books. There wasn't a wide range of titles in Swedish and the number I felt myself likely to tackle was smaller still. For a dollar I picked up När hela socknen brann ("When the whole parish burned"), a young adult book ("en bok för alla UNGDOMAR") featuring a 13 year-old protagonist with the same given name as me and set in Värmland during the invasion of Norwegian Governor-General Hannibal Sehested. (Yeah, didn't say anything to me either.) To be honest, it's been tougher going than I expected. I find it surprising (and more than a little frustrating) that I can still run across short simple sentences where I don't recognise a single content word.

It's always gratifying to see a translator do a competent job of handling a bit of wordplay. I'm reading a Swedish translation of an American detective novel (which would be a surreal enough experience even if it weren't set in an alternative New York City with all the names changed). Granted, it's not so challenging with a pair of languages which share as many cognates as Swedish and English, but it can still be tricky.

We have a scene where several officers are listening to a surveillance tape trying to puzzle out the identity of an assailant. One of them is struck by the apparent contradiction of the line, "Håll där, lägg av nu, du slår ju ihjäl henne!" ("Hold there, leave off, you're beating her to death!") until he realises that the first bit is not a shouted command but the surname "Holder". After I finally puzzled this out, it took only a moment to conclude that the original juxtaposition was probably "Hold her, let her go".

The novel, incidentally, is from about the midpoint of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series--early enough, it seems, that he feels he needs to stop and explain bits of police detective work (such as how to match bullets and casings to the gun which shot them) that I think post-CSI readers consider common knowledge. A bit tedious as exposition, perhaps, but excellent when it comes to building vocabulary.

Apropos of which, the level of the language is pretty ideal for where I am right now. Full of common colloquialisms, but not overly slangy. That is, the antiquated McKay's I picked up cheap lacks many of them, but they're easy enough to find online, either in the Lexin Dictionary or, failing that, the Swedish Wiktionary.

After one week, I'm already about two-thirds of the way through. Perhaps I'll stop in to the little bookstore on Belmont and pick up the other one on the shelf. It was a sad selection--three or four Swedish books--but still better than I've found so far anywhere else. I wouldn't mind picking up something a bit more literary, but at my current level, I'd be overwhelmed if it were anything more than a short story.

Jag har nyligen tänkt att jag skulle tycker om att ta en resa på Sverige, men jag känner inte någon som bor där. Utan kanske jag gör det. Det är att säga, jag kände någon där en gång i tiden, men jag betvivlar jag kunde hitta honom igen.

Han heter Johan (inte för många av dessa i Skandinavien) och vi lärde känna oss i Berlin, på den berlinska björnföreningens årssamlingen. Han var där med annan svensk, hans vän Sam. Sam var den klipske, medan Johan var, jag tror, hindrad av sin otillräcklig språkkännedom. Han talade lite engelska och mindre tyska. Sam brukade översatta för honom roliga deler av samtalen.

Till följd, jag ansåg honom inte mycket lockande. Jag vill inte därmed säga att han inte lockade mig, men jag var upp över öronen med en ännu större tyske björn--som dock var i ett slutet förhållande. Mitt förhållande med Nuphy var öppet och han ödslade ingen tid--han låg med Sam vid den första visiten på saunan. Men han hängde inte med vid den andra visiten.

Det är gott att jag ännu har en resdagbok från denna tiden. Annars skulle jag minnas att han har överraskat mej i saunan. Men jag skrev att jag har vetat han skulle vara där och jag gruvade mej för det, eftersom jag svärmade bara för en fyllig tysk pappa (som hadde en muskulös italiensk son och inget intresse för mej).

Men på slutet var det inte så obehagligt, snarare sött. När jag har blivit utled på att sitta och lyssna på en långrandig debatt mellom pappan och den tyske björns älskare, då lommade jag i väg till korridorerna, när stötte jag på Johan. "Vad gör du här?" frågade jag. "Leta efter dig!" svarade han.

Och drar jag för ett förhänge över vad hände därefter...

GIFTA "marry" (Swedish); GIFTEN "poison"[*] (German)
What I Read: "Personen under mig vill gifta sig i framtiden."
What I Understood: "The person after me[**] will poison himself in the future."
What It Means: "The person after me will get married in the future."

[*] The usual verb for "to poison" in German is vergiften. Giften derives from the same root but has a more metaphorical meaning. Sich giften is a colloquial expression for "get annoyed".

[**] "The Person After Me" is a language learning game played in some online fora. You make a statement about the person after (or "under" you) and then the next poster states whether this statement applies or not and then makes one of their own.