Our Translation Notes series invites literary translators to describe the process of bringing a text into English, or to offer perspectives on global literatures from which they translate. In this installment, K.E. Semmel writes about translating the work of Simon Fruelund including the recently published novel The World and Varvara (Spuyten Duyvil).
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Stirring the pot: Albrecht Dürer, Bob Dylan, and Simon Fruelund
When I was a boy, I was fascinated by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), particularly his darker works like “The Four Horseman” from his series The Apocalypse, his astonishing vision of Revelation. My father owned a book about him, one of those gargantuan coffee table tomes that are way too big to fit anywhere neatly. It lived an awkward life on a small bookshelf along with other volumes on the lives of the world’s great artists. I would haul it down from time to time, slide it from its cardboard sleeve, and gape at its pages the way other kids might comics. Like any good coffee table book, a lot of text filled the thick, heavy pages, but I was there for the images, not the words. What made the book so intriguing was the inclusion of sketches Dürer made as he was developing his art—his drafts, in other words.
I was in elementary school then, and I wasn’t a very good student. When given an assignment by a teacher, particularly a writing assignment, I would race to jot down my jumbled thoughts in a rat’s nest of scribbled, barely legible ink smears (one teacher remarked that I wrote like a serial killer) and quickly turn it in. Until I found this Dürer book, it had never occurred to me that artists and writers stacked sketch after sketch or draft after draft until they finally figured out what they wanted to say.
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In college, years later, I got hooked on the music of Bob Dylan, really hooked. I would listen to his albums one after the other, drawn to his lyrics and his voice, and I went to as many of his concerts as I could afford. His development from folksinger to rock star to Christian zealot and back again fascinated me, especially when Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 was issued as a boxed set in 1991. Hearing some of his old classics reworked in new ways—or more accurately, listening to him figure out what he wanted his songs to be, at least in that moment—was another kind of revelation. And thanks to music critics and Dylan scholars like Paul Williams and his three-part series Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, I also began to understand that, though they were temporally distant by nearly 500 years, Dürer and Dylan shared at least one significant similarity as artists. Whether it was searching for “that thin, that wild mercury sound, metallic and bright gold” (Dylan) or mathematical principles of the human body (Dürer), they were constantly doing what I call stirring the pot; they were mixing their influences together, they were evolving.
Over time, the notion that artists must continually evolve became my guiding ethos, and I became especially attracted to those artists who found innovative ways to explore and express their vision across their career. It wasn’t enough to write or do the same thing over and over again. I wanted to see change. I wanted to see how far an artist could bend their vision, and in what different forms they could reimagine it. For me, that meant diving deeply into the work of James Joyce, it meant listening to the many sounds of Miles Davis or Nick Cave, and it meant gobbling up Joyce Carol Oates’ stories. Oates has an astonishing ability to capture a multitude of voices (and genres) in her work.
So by the time I discovered the fiction of Danish writer Simon Fruelund, I was ready for his transformations.
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In his native Denmark, Simon Fruelund is known for his spare and precise and wholly original style. With each successive book since his debut story collection Milk and Other Stories (1997), published in English in my translation in 2013 by the indie press SFWP, Fruelund has altered that style to shape his material. Though Milk shares its DNA with American writers Ernest Hemingway and especially Raymond Carver, whom Fruelund translated into Danish, his fiction has diverged from this genetic line in exciting ways, evolving from the neo-realist to the experimental and producing work that’s much more akin to that of David Markson, Jenny Offill, or William Gass. Imagine James Joyce’s evolution from Dubliners to Ulysses and you get a sense of the change, though Fruelund’s work is much less gassy and bloated, never venturing beyond novella length.
In his more recent fiction, such as Civil Twilight, Panamericana, and The World and Varvara, which Spuyten Duyvil recently published in the U.S. in my translation, anything resembling narrative plot is multi-layered, incrementally textured by what may on the surface seem inconsequential details but which gradually accrue to form a broader picture, panning in and then out on brief moments in his numerous characters’ lives. Like Dürer and Dylan, Fruelund is constantly stirring the pot.
Take Civil Twilight, his 2006 novella that was also published in my translation in 2013 (but will be re-released by Spuyten Duyvil in 2024). Unlike Milk and Other Stories, where time is crunched into minutes and hours, Civil Twilight depicts one thousand years in a tiny geographic location near Copenhagen. And it does so in a deceptively simple way that takes you inside the lives of ordinary people on an ordinary street—the fictional Dante’s Avenue—in an ordinary place. And yet, it’s an extraordinary little book, with the narrative gliding from house to house and revealing brief glimpses of the people who live there without ever circling back to them, much like the 1990 Richard Linklater film Slacker. The short sections read at first glance like disconnected observations; once they are linked together, however, they become a 113-piece jigsaw puzzle showing a unique view of a Copenhagen suburb.
Perhaps the book speaks to me because I was a mailman in Denmark for two years. As a mailman, I knew nothing about anyone whose mail I delivered except names on an envelope. What connected them? What was their story? In Civil Twilight, Fruelund imagines answers to such questions. When it was first published in Denmark, the book spent time on the bestseller list, proving that Fruelund’s “little novel” had connected with readers. Fruelund’s fiction is characterized by its subtle, ironic humor and playfulness. Deceptively simple though it may seem on the surface, translating the nuances can be difficult.
His latest book in English, The World and Varvara, was first published in Denmark in 2009. It marries narrative and plot to the pointillist, non-plot-driven style Fruelund perfected in Civil Twilight; call it a continuation, a refinement. The story follows a young writer named Pelle, who is hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of an eccentric 79 ½-year-old actress named Varvara Eng. The book is to be published when Varvara turns 80, and Pelle has only 8 weeks to finish the manuscript. Pelle is not the most disciplined writer, and he gets easily distracted from his task by his mounting bills, his poet girlfriend, and Varvara’s old lover, the diamond trader Knud who occasionally hires him as a courier to fly to exotic places under shady pretenses. Pelle is, you see, constantly strapped for cash.
At the same time, a young woman photographer named Knirke and a male anthropologist travel the globe interviewing expat Danes for a series of newspaper articles. Though these sections are braided with the main narrative, their connection to it is tenuous until Pelle becomes romantically involved with Knirke. When Knirke and the anthropologist are arrested in China for allegedly gambling on cricket fights, Pelle flies (with Knud’s financial assistance) to Beijing to get her out of prison and the narrative picks up steam, becoming almost (but hardly) a thriller. Needless to say, with all these distractions, the slight manuscript that Pelle turns in is not what his publisher expects or wants.
I’ve worked on The World and Varvara, off and on, for more than a decade, believing wholeheartedly in Fruelund’s voice and vision and wanting more Americans to read him. All translators have their pet projects, making time between other translations or jobs to nudge their favorite pages along. In 2016, I was lucky enough to be awarded a literary translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to help me push Varvara across the finish line—and yet it took another seven years to reach this moment, when readers can hold a copy of the book in their hands. What thrills me about Fruelund’s fiction—what keeps me coming back to it time and again—is what draws me to Albrecht Dürer, Bob Dylan, and so many other artists. It’s that sense of an artist constantly in motion, searching for a new way of seeing a thing made.
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K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ontario Review, Lithub, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Southern Review, Washington Post, and elsewhere. His debut novel, The Book of Losman, will be published in October 2024 (SFWP). His translations include novels by, among others, Naja Marie Aidt, Karin Fossum, Simon Fruelund, and Jussi Adler Olsen. His newest translation, The World and Varvara, by Danish author Simon Fruelund, is now available, and he can be heard reading from it for Translators Aloud. He is a former Literary Translation Fellow from the National Endowment for the Arts. Find him online at kesemmel.com.