Our friend Dave Lull sent me a link to this article from Literary Hub. It’s about the work of Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse (whose Septology I reviewed for Ad Fontes). What particularly interests me about this article is that it’s written by a woman who has translated Fosse’s plays into “American” English.

I was particularly struck by the fact that Sarah Cameron Sunde, the author of the article, deals in particular with a translation issue on which I have views of my own. And her views are the opposite of mine. The difference hangs on how to translate a simple, two-letter word: “Ja.” (It means yes.) She writes:

One such word that appears again and again (over 150 times, in fact) in Natta Syng Sine Songar is “ja”—I had noticed that this repetition was missing in the British translation, and instead the translator had chosen to replace each “ja” with what he thought it meant in each given moment—which often meant “yes” and sometimes deleting it entirely, when it seemed like filler word. But the repetition felt critical to me for several reasons: 1) the everyday quality of the word as it is spoken, not written, 2) the way this “ja” could function to build tension between live performers, 3) and how it unites the characters despite the vast space between them.

In my Ad Fontes review of Septology (which was generally favorable to the translation by Damion Searls) I criticized his repeated use of the word “yes” to translate “ja” in the text. My own view is that the Norwegian “ja” serves multiple purposes in Fosse’s Nynorsk dialect. It can stand for “Well,” or “All right,” or “I don’t know,” plus a host of other expressions. For that reason, I felt it ought to be translated with several different everyday interjections. Sunde translates it “yeh” in every case, in her work. Perhaps that’s a good choice in the context of theatrical production, but I question it.

Nevertheless, Sunde’s article is an insightful and interesting one.