Bremer on the London Literary Map and a New English Translation of “Miss Fredrika”, by Sarah Death
För att läsa texten på svenska i översättning av Lena Schultz, klicka här.
I am a literary translator from Swedish to English living in Kent, England. I wrote my doctoral thesis on Fredrika Bremer and Elin Wägner in the 1980s and have been a member of Årstasällskapet since its early days. I have been working on two Bremer-related projects recently that my fellow members may be interested to hear about.
A few months ago, I compiled an entry for Fredrika Bremer for the interactive European Literary Map of London project developed by the European Institute at UCL in London. For centuries, writers have come to London from across Europe and beyond – as honoured guests and anonymous outsiders; tourists and refugees; students and wanderers. Their encounters with the city leave a mark: on the writer, on their work and, sometimes, on London itself. Lost and Found: A European Literary Map of London is an interactive map uncovers these literary traces, revealing London and a Europe of the imagination. Each entry features the original text, its English translation and some further information about the book and the writer. New authors continue to be added, and the map can be explored by theme, by language and by free word search.
The Swedish writers featured on the map are currently a small but varied group ranging from Anna Johanna Grill (Resedagbok från England, 1788) via Erik Gustaf Geijer (Minnen, 1834) to Susanna Alakoski (Londonflickan, 2021). I noticed that Bremer’s reportage of her trip to London in 1851 had not been included and thought that it really should be, so I offered to choose an extract and translate it afresh. England om hösten 1851 (England in the autumn of 1851) was originally written in instalments and some of them were published in the Swedish national press in Aftonbladet. English translations appeared in Sharpe’s London Magazine and in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in New York. The Swedish version was later published in book form, but not until 1922. The reports from London came about because Bremer spent several weeks there in 1851 on her way back from her extended stay in the New World. Landing at Liverpool docks, she visited factories, workshops, schools and charitable projects in northern cities before timing her journey to the capital so that she could visit the closing week of the Great Exhibition. In London and surrounding counties, she made social calls and many further study visits, staying with colleagues, friends and collaborators including her long-term translator, Mary Howitt.
Rereading her account for the first time in many years, I found the striking image of all the trains crowded with Great Exhibition visitors converging on London in the evening gloom, and that seemed the ideal text to select for the Map project. I thought it was high time for a new translation into English, too, so I set to work. The Bremer entry has now been added to the Map. Here is the text in both languages:
“Samma afton som jag kom till London kommo omkring femtio à sextiotusen personer dit på de olika järnvägarna. Det var sista veckan av den stora utställningen i Kristallpalatset, och alla som icke hade sett den ännu och alla som ville se den ännu en gång skyndade att begagna denna sista vecka, varefter den skulle slutas. Järnvägstågen hunno med möda komma undan varandra denna afton, så manga vore de och så tätt följde de på varandra. Flera gånger måste tåget i vilket jag satt stanna under vägen, varnat av röda ljus, lika ett par glödande ögon, framföre på järnbanan och av röda ljus uppe på de elektriska telegrafstängerna vid den, vilka betydde “fara”. När de glödande ögonen försvunno och de röda ljusen i luften förbyttes i gröna, kunde vi åter föra fram. Men först två timmar efter den vanliga tiden kommo vi till London, det stora, fulla, brusande, nu mer än någonsin överfulla, livfulla, brusande London.”
“The evening I came to London, between fifty and sixty thousand other people converged on the city by means of the various railway lines. It was the last week of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, and everyone who had not yet seen it and everyone who wanted to see it again made haste to profit from this final week, at the end of which it would close. The railway trains found it hard to make their way among so many others that evening, so numerous were they and so close together on the line. The train in which I was travelling had to stop repeatedly on its journey, alerted by red lights like pairs of glowing eyes, ahead of them on the railway track and by red lights up on the electric telegraph poles alongside it, which meant “danger”. When the glowing eyes disappeared and the red lights up in the air changed to green, we could proceed. But it was two hours later than expected by the time we reached London, vast, teeming, roaring London, now more overcrowded, lively and turbulent than ever.”
From Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys, Part 2, by Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank. Printed in London in 1851 by David Bogue.
My second recent Bremer-related project is a translation of Selma Lagerlöf’s “Mamsell Fredrika”, the much-loved story of Fredrika’s last days, which is a regular feature at Årstasällskapet’s concert in Österhaninge church in December every year. My translation is the first new English version since Pauline Bancroft Flach’s original English version more than a century ago (Invisible Links, Doubleday, Page & Company, Garden City New York, 1917).
For this project we were a team of experienced, prize-winning translators. Peter Graves, Linda Schenck and I have known each other for a long time and have collaborated on many Lagerlöf projects in the past. We divided the work between us, tackling three stories each. It was an enormously enjoyable collaboration. The translators were involved from the start in in the selection of texts for the anthology, which is intended for teaching purposes as well as for the general reader and was designed to include a range of different genres and periods of Lagerlöf’s life. I was eager to include this story, not only because of my earlier Bremer research interests but also because it so imaginatively combines many elements. It is a hymn to Årsta slott; it is an affectionate tribute to Bremer’s life and work; it is a sampler of all the indignities suffered in society by ageing spinsters of Bremer’s era; and it is a wonderfully evocative piece of writing that transforms Bremer’s final days into an extravagant romantic adventure. Like many of Lagerlöf’s stories, it has a Christmastide setting. It opens with impressive panache as the scene is set and we meet the leading man, Death himself:
“Det var julnatt, en riktig julnatt. Trollen lyfte upp berghällarna på höga guldpelare och firade midvinterfest. […] Utanför slottet ljöd i natten en käck fanfar. Döden hade satt upp sig på gångare grå och ridit fram till slottsporten. Hans vida scharlakanskappa och hattens stolta plym vajade för nattvinden.”
“It was one Christmas night, a proper Yule night. The trolls raised the rock platforms on tall gold pillars and held their midwinter festival. […] Outside the manor, a lively fanfare rang out. Death had mounted his grey steed and come riding up to the front gate. His wide scarlet coat and the proud plume in his hat streamed out in the night-time wind.”
The pieces in our anthology come with notes, or at least, some of them do; the purely fictional stories needed scarcely any factual explanation. By contrast, I provided “Miss Fredrika” with comprehensive notes because of the biographical nature of the text. They will seem superfluous to Bremer devotees, but I am sure they will be appreciated by students and other English-language readers not familiar with Bremer’s life and work. The book also has a very informative introduction by Bremer scholar Bjarne Thorup Thomsen of Edinburgh University.
The full list of the nine texts can be found in our blogpost: norvikpress.com/2025/06/27/announcing-our-latest-title-a-kaleidoscope-of-stories/
There is more detail about the Norvik Press “Lagerlöf in English” series here: https://norvikpress.com/2023/02/22/the-lagerlof-in-english-series-updates/
The cover design below is by Essi Viitanen and Elettra Carbone.
