"There's a certain Slant of light" in Swedish

"There's a certain Slant of light": Swedish, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Yiddish

There's a certain Slant of light,Winter Afternoons—That oppresses, like the HeftOf Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—We can find no scar,But internal difference,Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it—Any—'Tis the Seal Despair—An imperial afflictionSent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—Shadows—hold their breath—When it goes, 'tis like the DistanceOn the look of Death—

(P258)

Ljuset har ett sätt att falla	There's a certain Slant of light,
sena vinterdar—	Winter Afternoons—
som liksom tunga kyrkvalv	That oppresses, like the Heft
lämnar olust kvar—	Of Cathedral Tunes—
Det ger ett himmelskt styng—	Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
utan art såret syns,	We can find no scar,
bara en inre splittring	But internal difference,
där begreppen firms—	Where the Meanings, are—
Ingen kan lära ut—alls—	None may teach it—Any—
hur förtvivlan präglar—	'Tis the Seal Despair—
det är en smitta ur luften	An imperial affliction
som allt belägrar—	Sent us of the Air—
När den kommer lyssnar naturen—	When it comes, the Landscape listens—
skuggor—bidar tyst—	Shadows—hold their breath—
när den går är det som om Döden	When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
gett ännu en frist—	On the look of Death—

There's a certain Slant of light" is one of the most frequently translated Dickinson poems in Swedish. Between 1949 and 1993 no less than five translations have appeared (including the one above) in collections of Dickinson's poetry, journals, and anthologies. Faced with that abundance, a translator would normally hesitate before attempting a new translation. However, when embarking on my own translation project in 1991, I found that the centrality of the poem in the Dickinson canon and the relative failure of previous translations to capture the subtleties of meaning and tone would make the attempt at a new translation both challenging and worthwhile. In the end, if I may add one more personal note, my work on this particular poem would also prove crucial to my attempt at finding a suitable "voice" for Dickinson in Swedish; it came to direct my approach to Dickinson's poetry in general.

At an initial cursory glance, there is not much in this poem that would make it obviously difficult to translate into Swedish. On the contrary, the state of mind it explores and the nature observation with which it starts—the sharply slanting light on a cold winter afternoon—would seem familiar to a Swedish reader of poetry. The most obvious superficial translation difficulty would be the common one when attempting metrically faithful translations: finding suitable rhyme words and stress patterns without distorting the sense of the poem. In this respect, there would only be minor things to differentiate Swedish and English linguistically (e.g. the Swedish use of a suffix rather than an article to mark the determinate form of a noun: luften ("the air")); i. e., a Swedish and an English translator would face approximately the same kind of linguistic decisions. However, when analyzing my own translation, I realize that I have tended to make verbs rather than nouns rhyme, which might indicate a general preference. Although I have no figures with which to back up such an assertion, it would seem to me that a consistent rhyming on nouns has a tendency to lead to rather contrived word choices in Swedish (as some of the previous translations of this poem prove).

More profoundly, however, when really trying to get to grips with the verbal texture of the poem, problems of a different order start to appear. A powerful sense of disintegration in the poem, operating both on a thematic and a lexical level, becomes apparent, and the translator is faced with the alternatives of either driving home a certain reading of this amazingly open-ended poem or to try to preserve its openness and ambiguity. As I see it, most of...