Place and Translation: Perspectives on Geomodernism and Periphery in William Heinesen’s Laterna Magica

This article is about place and translation in William Heinesen’s (1900–1991) last work of fiction, Laterna Magica, a collection of short stories published in 1985. It is one of Heinesen’s many provisional epilogues and his last work of fiction. This time, it turned out to be a definitive literary farewell to his home in Tórshavn, the capital of the Faroe Islands. This last work is framed by a prologue and a provisional epilogue, and its ten short tales are intertwined by a strolling narrator. In his late prose, Heinesen was still deeply preoccupied with motifs concerning Tórshavn that were never more strongly portrayed than in Laterna Magica. The book teems with place names: fictional, half-fictional, and real. This narrative strategy represents an approach to place that mixes fact and fiction. The narrator emphasizes memorable events and persons who are anchored in a cyclic course of life and death, of childhood and old age. Through his collected impressions of life, Tórshavn appears as a place where people live and die. For one last time, the narrator strolls through the alleys of his hometown while reminiscing about his entire life. At the terminus called the Gray Skull Wharf, the Faroese version of the Greek god Charon waits. The stories are a memento mori with death as the driving narrative theme. With death looming as the constant background, Heinesen throws life in stark relief by drawing on a penetrating view of various situations. Death is stripped of its unfamiliarity and is thereby presented as a familiar, recognizable personification of a meaningful “begyndelse og ende” (10) [“beginning and end” (11)].

Translation

One one level, Laterna Magica represents an existential account of grasping the broadest possible meaning of death. However, it is also about the narrator’s moving from an old culture into a new. The goal of this paper is to look at these transitions from an old world to a new from the vantage point of translation. Translation was a cultural obsession for Heinesen, who translated masterpieces of European literature into Faroese, thereby rendering them part of that new literary tradition. According to David Damrosch, “An excellent translation can be seen as an expansive transformation of the original, a concrete manifestation of cultural exchange and a new stage in a work’s life as it moves from its first home out into the world” (66). Heinesen’s writings can be seen as an ambitious project of translating European cultural capital into Faroese cultural capital thus creating a distinctly Faroese version of cosmopolitan European literature. Myths of modern European individualism—Faust, Don Juan, Hamlet, and Robinson Crusoe, for example—all make guest appearances in Heinesen’s fiction. He borrows these figures and recasts them in contrasting ways such that they, having been transplanted, emerge as translated characters (cf. Moberg “Op af historiens grøft” and Moberg “Udfordring fra udkanten”). Explicit connections between the Faroese microworld and a global circulation of European motifs like these work as a “literary contract” or a “literary transfer” (Schöning 9–43), the purpose of which is to recode modernity and modernism.

In Laterna Magica, the narrator bridges the gap between local literature and world literature in his allusions to broadly canonical works. One of the stories, “De stumme gæster” [“The Silent Guests”], is dedicated to two Faroese poets, the brothers J.H.O. Djurhuus and H.A. Djurhuus.¹Laterna Magica also pays its regards to such examples of world literature as the Old Testament, Homeric poems, and Dante’s Commedia, among others (Danish 64, English 73). Moreover, world literature is an explicit model for Laterna Magica in that the stories are inspired by A Thousand and One Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron, in both of which the narrator also postpones death by telling stories. These works serve as unforgettable examples of a certain tragic humor (64). Thus reference to these works is not only an expression of the depth of gratitude to canonical narratives of Western culture, but also an indication of the...