Rereading Anne of Green Gables for the First Time

Abstract

Pleasure Reading

When I was nine, my grandmother gave me Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel Rilla of Ingleside in Swedish translation. I loved it and read it over and over again, but I did not realize that it was part of a series. Later on, I came across the first book, Anne of Green Gables, in my mother's bookcase. This too was a Swedish translation. I read the novel and the following two books in the series and realized along the way that Anne was Rilla's mother. Ever since, I have counted myself a kindred spirit of Anne, the little orphan girl who moved in with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert at Green Gables on Prince Edward Island in the late nineteenth century.

Last summer, more than three decades after I discovered Anne of Green Gables, I read the novel for the first time in English. Through the years, Montgomery has been one of the writers I have read and reread in English, but never Anne of Green Gables. As a result, the version I read as a child, which is actually a revision of the first Swedish translation, has been the text against which I have measured every other version, including Kevin Sullivan's televised miniseries from 1985.

When the first Swedish translator of Anne of Green Gables, Karin Lidforss Jensen, was given the task in June 1909, it was stressed that the novel should be published in time for the Christmas sales that same year.¹ The Swedish version of the novel was part of a youth series at the publishing house Gleerups, and the novel was shortened and adapted to the perceived needs and interests of its target audience.² Jensen met the deadline, and the novel was published in December 1909,³ making it the first translation of Anne of Green Gables.⁴ The reviews of the novel, as well as of Jensen's translation, were predominantly positive.⁵

In her article "Don't Be Too Upset with Your Unchivalrous Publisher," Åsa Warnqvist presents an overview of the various Swedish translations of Montgomery's works. In addition to Jensen's translation, two more translations of Anne of Green Gables were made, in 1941 and 1962. Neither of these translations remains in print and Jensen's translation is still the standard. In fact, rather than replacing this translation, over the years, it has been revised three times, by Britt G. Hallqvist in 1955 and Christina Westman in 1991 and 2018.⁶ However, these revisions have focused mainly on modernizing the language, and the many cuts and changes Jensen made still stand.⁷ As Cornelia Rémi points out, the fact that Jensen's translation has been revised rather than replaced, essentially treating it as an original text, suggests the status this translation has gained over time.⁸ Since Swedish readers have come to know Anne through Jensen, there has been little demand for a more faithful translation that might change beloved aspects of the novel. According to Susan Bassnett, new translations of an already translated text run the risk of being unfavorably compared with the previous one. When we reread a literary work years after having read it for the first time, we might experience it differently and consider this to be a result of our having changed, perhaps becoming more experienced. However, if we read a new translation of a work, we tend to compare it to the previous translation and view any differences as deviations from the true text, that is, the previous translation.⁹ It is not strange, then, that the first Swedish translation of Anne of Green Gables has acquired canonical status, especially since many readers first met Anne in a copy handed down by an older family member, like their mother or grandmother.¹⁰ Not only does this mean that many readers, like me, read a quite old copy of the novel; it also means that new readers become acquainted with Anne through older readers, who know how the plot should run.

Reading Anne of Green Gables in English for the first time, I found myself reflecting on what it means to read a literary work in translation, not least since the Swedish translation is so familiar to me. All the differences between the Swedish and English versions—and there turn out to be quite a few—come as a surprise. Why does Jensen occasionally change the school subjects in her translation? History becomes geography and algebra is replaced with German verbs for no apparent reason. It seems unnecessary. One of the most unexpected differences is that there is actually more of Anne as a teenager in the English version. As Rémi notes, it was mainly in the latter parts, which follow Anne into young adulthood, that cuts were made, and they give the novel a different emphasis.¹¹ Thus, when reading this very familiar novel, I experienced the joy of getting bonus material, the way you can watch scenes cut from your favorite movie on DVD. I did not know, for example, that Matthew actually tried to buy Anne's dress himself, before asking their neighbor Rachel Lynde for help.

Rémi shows that Jensen combined foreignizing and domesticating strategies in her translation. For example, she kept the names of the characters, even those that were hard to pronounce for Swedes, such as Blythe, and some of the place names (Avonlea and Carmody, for example).¹² The names made up by Anne herself, such as Lover's Lane and Lake of Shining Waters, however, were changed completely. Jensen also made changes in the descriptions of nature, turning a Canadian garden into a Swedish one,¹³ and adjusting the eating habits of the characters. Rather than drinking tea, a beverage rarely offered on a Swedish farm at the time, the characters drink coffee.¹⁴ Some of the changes in food, however, seem not so much for domesticating the narrative for a Swedish readership as for didactic reasons. For example, when Mrs. Barry offers a feast consisting of pound cake, fruit cake, and doughnuts, Jensen has added some dishes, including anchovies and eggs, seemingly to make the meal more nutritious, as well as Swedish.¹⁵

Reading Jensen's translation (or rather a revised version of her translation) more than a century after it was made, the fact that her text was designed to meet the needs and expectations of a specific historical moment is obvious. In The Translator's Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti contends that "translation is not an untroubled communication of a foreign text, but an interpretation that is always limited by its address to specific audiences and by the cultural or institutional situations where the translated text is intended to circulate and function."¹⁶ Indeed, Jensen's translation reflects her era's expectations for children's books and, as a result, many of the changes she made appear exotic for a modern-day reader. I would not serve my young children coffee, but they do occasionally drink tea. A domesticating move in Jensen's time might become a foreignizing one today.

For me, one of the most surprising—and disappointing—differences between the Swedish translation and the original occurs in the magic moment when Anne is given her very first fancy dress, which she has dreamed about but not even dared to hope for. It is a beautiful shade of moss green, and I can still envision Anne's lovely red hair against the green dress. In the English version, however, it is brown. Brown!? When I discovered this disturbing fact, I remembered my surprise at seeing Anne wear a blue dress in Sullivan's miniseries, which I assumed at the time was a sloppy mistake on his part. While it would make a certain amount of sense to wonder why Jensen changed the color of the dress from brown to green, I am more provoked (perhaps childishly) by the fact that Montgomery did not make the dress green to begin with. In my mind, it remains green.¹⁷

Jensen's more serious intervention in the original story is the buttressing of adult authority at Anne's expense. For example, in the Swedish version Miss Stacy calls Anne a birdbrain for concocting tales that end up scaring her.¹⁸ A reader in the early twentieth century might have found the teacher's condescension reassuring, but today I prefer the English version in which Miss Stacy is more respectful, telling Anne that she "went the wrong way about it."¹⁹ The additions and changes made by Jensen highlight the freedom often taken with translations of children's books, where faithfulness to the original sometimes takes a backseat to the didactic message the story was meant to deliver.²⁰

For the well read, one of the obvious differences between the original Anne of Green Gables and the Swedish translation is the absence in the latter of references to other literary works. Like many readers, I was, and still am, taken with Anne's language, her way with words. Reading the novel in Swedish as a child, however, I did not grasp that she is often quoting or paraphrasing other texts. In fact, oftentimes, in the Swedish version, she is not. According to Rémi, on a few occasions, Jensen found a Swedish quotation to replace the English one, but often, the intertextual references are simply missing.²¹ For ten-year-old me reading the novel for the first time, this absence did not matter. I was still impressed by Anne's beautiful way of speaking and I gave her full credit, as I think most readers of the English version do today, unless they are reading an annotated edition. Most of these interspersed references are to works that are no longer generally known. As an adult reader, however, I find that the extensive use of intertextual references creates additional layers of meaning in the novel. For a reader of the Swedish version, these layers are lost, since Anne's way with words remains what I found it to be thirty-five years ago, impressive and humorous but with no added opportunities for interpretation. In replacing the intertextual references with flowery language and big words, quaint language spoken by a precocious girl, the Swedish translation of Anne of Green Gables is decidedly more one-dimensional.

At the same time, although it is easy to assume that changes made in a source text are always reductive and problematic and, thus, that a translation inevitably is a more or less pale copy of the original, this is not necessarily the case. Viewing these changes as mere distortions would be to miss the complexity of the transformation that takes place when a text is translated into another language. As Maria Nikolajeva points out, changes are sometimes necessary for a text to deliver a similar reading experience in the target language as it does in the source language. Retaining a "foreign" detail from the original (like serving tea instead of coffee), might distract readers who end up focusing on the exotic detail and miss other, perhaps more crucial, aspects of the narrative.²² The changes made in the Swedish translation of Anne of Green Gables might be considered reductive in that some parts are actually missing. It is also disturbing that in some instances, as identified by Rémi, Jensen portrays Anne as being more childish, silly even, compared to the English version.²³ However, if a translation may sometimes entail a loss, or limitation, of meaning, the possibilities offered by the target language can also invite new meaning and add other layers to the reading. Venuti describes translation as "the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text with a text that is intelligible to the translating-language reader."²⁴ While acknowledging the reduction of meaning that is a result of this erasure, or smoothing over, he also points out that this process opens up the possibility of "an exorbitant gain of other possibilities specific to the translating language."²⁵ One example of an "exorbitant gain" occurs in a pivotal scene early in Anne of Green Gables. As she arrives at the farm, Anne asks Marilla to spell her name with an e because that will make the name seem more romantic (albeit not as romantic as Cordelia, Anne's favorite name). For Swedish readers, Anne's insistence on spelling her name with an e takes on a different and, to my mind, more profound meaning. In English, the final e in Anne is silent so that it does not make any difference in how the name is pronounced, even if it might, as Anne points out, make it seem more distinguished. While Anne can be pronounced with a silent e in Swedish as well, many Swedish readers pronounce the e, not least since it is so important to Anne. For me, both as a child and today, this is how you can tell a reader (and lover) of the novel from someone who has not read it (or at least not in the right spirit). In fact, I view it as a way of identifying kindred spirits. In other words, even if the potential irony of the original text is lost (the fact that the e cannot actually be heard), in the Swedish version, Anne's insistence on spelling her name with an e takes on an added meaning as it works as an entrance ticket to a club—those of us who have read and appreciate the novel know to pronounce her name "Ann-e." In this case, then, the possibilities offered by the Swedish language actually reinforce the overall message of the novel in a way that is not possible in English.

As the case of the Swedish Anne of Green Gables shows, translated works follow their own trajectories, sometimes changing but also enhancing the original narrative. Translated texts meet readers on their own terms, and these readers make these texts their own. As she has recounted many times, the well-known author of children's books Astrid Lindgren read Anne of Green Gables in Swedish as a child. Gabriella Åhmansson, among others, has pointed out that there are many similarities between Anne and Lindgren's most famous character, Pippi Longstocking—not just the color of their hair and their clothes (those worn by Anne when she arrives at Green Gables) but also their mutual love of words.²⁶ Pippi Longstocking is arguably Sweden's most famous literary figure, and she is also a strong (pun intended) example of the futility of organizing literary works into separate compartments based on their country of origin. Anne Shirley, as portrayed in the Swedish translation, was one inspiration for Pippi. Pippi, in her turn, has been translated into numerous languages, often with extensive changes to the text.²⁷ Bassnett calls for opening up the term "translation" beyond its conventional definition, which is limited to a "transaction between a source and a target text." Instead, she suggests, translation should be viewed as "movement between and across."²⁸ As both Pippi and Anne of Green Gables show, literary texts travel, both across space and through time, and during that process they change.²⁹ The target text is not the end of the journey, whatever the word "target" might imply; rather, it is a journey all its own.

Reading Anne of Green Gables in English and then returning to the Swedish version that I have read so many times before, I find myself reflecting not on the differences but on how lucky I am to get both. The final e in Anne, Ann-e, adds another layer to the novel and, in addition, an extratextual dimension, since it has the potential of offering access to a community of kindred spirits. This community is not limited by barriers of language or borders of nations. It is open to anyone willing to enter the magic realm of words and be enchanted by it, just like Anne—and me.