Translation errors and oddities in LTROI - a compilation

[Siggdalos]

I recently bought the ebook version of the English translation of LTROI so that I'd be able to post accurate English quotes from the book and see in what ways Anglophone readers' understanding of the story might differ from my own. I also wanted to compare the Swedish and English versions and post about cases where I think the English version changes the understanding of a scene, as well as cultural elements that were lost in translation.

Most of these have been discussed extensively on this forum over the years, but a lot of those discussions took place many years ago, and as far as I could find no one ever made a thread compiling all of the known differences in a single place. I therefore figure there might be some interest in a thread where I list all of the cases I noticed. I'll try to avoid getting long-winded on topics that have already been discussed to death in the past (e.g. Eli's pronouns).

I should preface this by saying that I'm aware translation can be difficult and I don't mean to imply that Ebba Segerberg did a sloppy job. For the most part, it's a well-made translation that flows well and captures the spirit of the original. It's just that there are some places where I think she didn't quite hit the mark. Of course, most of these are unlikely to matter to the average reader, and of course these are all going to be based on my opinion; others who've read both the original and the translation might disagree with my nitpicks. Some of these (especially ones related to formatting) could also be quirks of the ebook version that are not present in printed versions. If so, feel free to point them out (along with any other things I miss or get wrong along the way!).

For simplicity's sake, I'll refer to JAL's Swedish original as LDRKI and Segerberg's translation as simply LTROI. Another thing: LDRKI uses »guillemets« as quotation marks, while LTROI uses ‘apostrophes’. I'll preserve this trait when quoting the two versions, because why not.

Opening

To Mia, my Mia

Something that isn't apparent in English is that this dedication to Mia Ajvide at the start of the novel is a nod to the Astrid Lindgren book Mio, min Mio, whose title literally means "Mio, my Mio". In English, the book is known as Mio, My Son, so the intertextual reference is lost. Hardly the fault of the LTROI translation, but still worth a mention.

The Location: Blackeberg

In LDRKI, this part is simply titled Platsen ("The Location"), and the lone word "Blackeberg" is instead the first sentence of the novel. Like so:

Blackeberg.
Man tänker kanske kokosbollar, tänker kanske knark.

"Blackeberg. Maybe you think of kokosbollar, maybe you think of drugs." I'm not sure why it was moved from the opening paragraph to the title.

Kokosbollar, or "coconut-frosted cookies" as they're called in LTROI, are not actually cookies but a type of small and very popular ball-shaped pastry covered in shredded coconut (kokos). Blackeberg used to be known for a factory where these pastries were made and sold, owned by the company Lincals Konfektyr and located on Ibsengatan (on the outer circle surrounding the inner apartment circle where O&E lived). The company were among the first people to move into Blackeberg in 1951, but they left the place in 2015; here is a news article about it in a local paper.

They are probably singing something. The Internationale, perhaps. Or ‘We Come Unto Jerusalem’, depending on their predilection.

The latter song is Se, vi gå upp till Jerusalem, a psalm composed in 1906 that's sung during lent.

It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror.

"How free they were from the ghosts and terror of history" would've been a better match for the meaning of the original sentence (hur fri man var från historiens hemsökelser och skräck).

He was the one who had moved them in. The man and his daughter.

In LDRKI, the latter sentence is Mannen och flickan ("The man and the girl"). A small distinction, since they're called father and daughter earlier in the same section, but still.

PART ONE: Lucky is he who has such a friend

The title (Swedish: Lycklig den som har en sådan vän) is a line from Bamse's theme song, making it the first of many Bamse references in JAL's bibliography.

Wednesday 21 October 1981

Norrköping would have been nicer.

This should read "Norrköping had been nicer". "Would have been nicer" incorrectly implies that E&H haven't lived there before, which is contradicted by the rest of the chapter.

‘Do you think I would expose you to this if there was another way?’

"Expose" is a strange translation for utsätta. I would've used "subject".

Finally he slipped a bag of chewy Swedish Cars between his stomach and pants; went to the checkout and paid for a lollipop.

LTROI omits that the lollipop Oskar buys is of the candy brand Dumle.

An almost complete collection of the series Goosebumps, here and there augmented by a Goosebumps anthology.

This is one of the more well-known translation errors, since it introduces an anachronism that isn't present in the original. In LDRKI, Oskar collects Kalla kårar (a 1971-1984 series collecting horror fiction from many different authors translated into Swedish), not Goosebumps (the American children's book series solely written by R. L. Stine starting in 1992). Kalla kårar is a Swedish expression for feeling a chill out of fear and is roughly synonymous with gåshud ("goose skin"), which in turn is the counterpart of the English word "goosebumps". Stine's Goosebumps was given the name Kalla kårar when it was translated to Swedish (I guess the translators weren't concerned about reusing the name of an existing series), which probably played a part in this error.

No wonder he had been afraid of that man. What he had done was no less than rob him of a treasure.

In LDRKI, Oskar thinks of the deal with the Kalla kårar collector as inget mindre än att lura trollet på dess skatt ("nothing less than robbing the troll of its treasure"). Trolls are known for hoarding treasure in Scandinavian folklore. I'm not sure how familiar this reference would be to most international readers, so changing it to something more generic was probably a good call.

A lot of screams for so little wool, said the man who sheared the pig.

Literal translation of the Swedish proverb Mycket skrik för lite ull, sa han som klippte grisen, meaning a lot of work for little payoff.

Thursday 22 October

In LDRKI, the chapters told from Oskar's point of view mostly refer to his mother as simply "mum" (mamma), the way Oskar himself would refer to her in his thoughts and speech. In LTROI, the text instead calls her "his mum" or "his mother" in most cases. It's the same thing with most mentions of his father (pappa in LDRKI, "his dad" in LTROI), and with other characters who think about their parents. An example, with my translation in brackets:

Mamma omfamnade honom klumpigt och tryckte sin blöta kind mot hans. [Mum hugged him clumsily and pressed her wet cheek against his.]

Compared to the official translation:

His mother hugged him clumsily and pressed her wet cheek against him.

I feel that this is an unnecessary change that creates a little bit more of a distance between the characters and the reader.

‘All that violent stuff you read isn’t good for you.’

In LDKRI, Oskar's mum specifically calls out the horror he reads, not just "violent stuff": Det är inte bra för dig med all skräck och allt sånt där som du läser, "It isn't good for you with all that horror and all that kind of stuff you read".

They had stashed their bounty in the unused storeroom across from the basement storage area that was their meeting place.

They actually stored it in the bomb shelter (skyddsrummet), the same place where Tommy later fights Håkan. Not sure why it turned into "storeroom" here when "shelter" is what the room is called in the rest of the book.

And not let Lasse handle any selling since he was ... a little slow, as his mum put it.

LDRKI simply says morsan, which can mean either "mum" (as in Tommy's mother) or literally "the mum" (as in Lasse's mother), making it ambiguous as to who is calling Lasse slow. Based on the context, I interpret the original to mean Tommy's mother, not Lasse's.

She was almost as tall as he was, but much thinner.

In LDRKI, Eli is described as nästan precis lika lång som Oskar, "almost exactly as tall as". I believe leaving out the word "exactly" changes the sentence to imply that Eli is slightly shorter than Oskar while the original doesn't specify if he's shorter or taller, but I could be mistaken on the first part.

‘What makes you think I’d want to be friends with you? You must be pretty stupid.’
[...]
‘What did you say?’
[...]
‘You must be stupid ... to say something like that.’
‘Oh, I am, am I?’

In LDRKI, Oskar says Tror du jag vill bli vän med dig, då? Du är ju dum i huvudet, as in, he doesn't want to be friends with Eli because Eli is stupid. In LTROI it seems more like he's calling Eli stupid for thinking that Oskar wants to be friends in the first place. It should be added that dum can mean either "stupid" or "mean", while dum i huvudet means "stupid in the head".

"Oh, I am, am I?" also comes across to me as a lot angrier and more confrontational compared to Eli's reply in LDRKI, a neutral Är jag det?, which simply means "Am I?".

‘Aren’t you cold?’

The original (Fryser du inte?) works better with Eli's reply (Jag har väl glömt hur man gör, "I guess I've forgotten how to") since frysa ("to feel cold") is a verb, while "cold" is an adjective. "Don't you feel cold?" would've been a more literal translation and would've worked better in this context since it preserves the verb usage.

To be continued.
EDIT 2021-09-08: Added italics to some of the quoted parts to match the book. Removed one note that I felt was irrelevant.

[gkmoberg1]

In my second reading of this I'm comparing the versions as you have done.

I have to agree about the '‘Oh, I am, am I?’ ; this seems overdone as it gives Eli an aggressive tone. In the German translation ('So finster die Nacht') it follows the Swedish with simply "Bin ich?" .

»Du bist doch dumm ... wenn du so etwas sagst.«
»Bin ich?«
»Ja.«
»Dann entschuldige bitte. Aber es ist so.«

Perhaps the English phrasing is influenced by how Eli exits the scene. He opens the door to the building hard enough that it hits the wall stop (metallknoppen i botton) and bounces back shut. JAL is dropping hints throughout the scene, including in this exit, that Eli is different. Oskar picks up on a few. Yet why would Eli open the door so strongly? It could be interpreted that he is flustered or upset. And if so, then where does that come from? I can see how that could lead to the »Är jag det?« being strengthened to "Oh, I am, am I?"

[Siggdalos]

Oh, I for sure think he was upset when he exited the scene. In my reading, though, that's due to Oskar unintentionally reminding him that he can't feel cold and perhaps causing him to think back to the time before he got infected, based on how it causes him to make a face "like an old woman about to cry" and then immediately turn around and leave without saying another word. He seems pretty nonchalant up until that point, even when Oskar calls him dum.

[gkmoberg1]

Pool Eli. He initiated the encounter. He was willing to reveal himself, likely in the interest of talking to somebody not only his age but as well somebody other than Håkan. But then things don't go well, steadily. First Eli gets called dumb, although I don't think rattles him. Next he is told he smells bad, which probably doesn't help. And then he doesn't feel the cold. Pretty quickly, the scene moves to his being repeatedly prodded that he doesn't know how to fit in. That's pretty tough for him to handle.

Well, anyway, looking forward to your next part!

[Siggdalos]

Friday 23 October

The single room of Gert’s commuter apartment ...

LDRKI says that the apartment belonged to someone named Åke. This name is only mentioned once in the novel—Håkan's memories in this chapter otherwise only refer to the same Gert, Torgny, and Ove mentioned in LTROI—so JAL probably made a mistake and meant to refer to Ove when he wrote "Åke". Either way, it makes sense to fix it in the translation.

He could borrow The Queen’s Diadem by Almquist, before he performed his good deed.

"Almquist" is a misspelling of Almqvist.

Håkan's conversations with the pimp and the boy occur in English in LDRKI as well, so their dialogue is mostly identical in both versions. Some changes were still made in LTROI, like replacing the pimp's first line—"Fire?"—with "Got a light?", changing the sentence "How?" to "How young?", and altering some punctuation.

Two of the obscene wall scribbles Håkan sees in the library bathroom consist of untranslatable wordplay, and were therefore replaced entirely in LTROI. Here are the originals, with their literal translations:
Hellre en bollkalle i kanalen än en kall balle i analen.—"Better a ball boy in the channel than a cold penis in the anal [sic]."
Livet är underbart med underlivet bart.—"Life is wonderful with the genitalia bare."

He narrowed his eyes, tried to imagine the boy’s gestures so they more closely resembled his beloved.

"Gestures" is an out-of-place word. "Features" would've been the correct translation of anletsdrag.

Granted, Oskar had never seen a real-life drug addict but that man looked sick.

LDRKI implies that Oskar has seen drug addicts before, and what he notices is instead Håkan's age: Oskar hade visserligen aldrig sett en så gammal knarkare, men han såg ju helt sjuk ut, "Oskar had admittedly never seen such an old junkie, but he looked completely sick".

‘What do you know about how it is for me?’

In LDRKI, the first word of this line (Vad, "What") is in italics to show that Eli emphasizes the word. There are a number of other cases where italicized words and lines lose their italics in the translation, but I haven't mentioned them so far because their meaning isn't changed. In this case I think it does make a difference, since it's one of few cases this early in the story where Eli's speech displays genuine emotion (in this case anger at Håkan's presumptiveness) instead of his usual indifference.

‘Maybe you’ve had others who have helped you who have been ... better at this than me. Have you?’
‘Yes.’

Instead of replying straight away like he does here, LDRKI's Eli shows hesitation about answering Håkan's question:

»Du kanske haft andra som hjälpt dig, som varit ... duktigare än jag.« [Maybe you've had others who've helped you, who've been ... better than me.]
»...«
»Har du haft det?« [Have you?]
»Ja.« [Yes.]

Everyone except Karlsson who’s at home watching the TV quiz show ‘Nutcrackers’ and just as well.

The Swedish name of the show (which was music-themed) is Notknäckarna, a pun on not ("note", such as musical notes) and nötknäckarna ("the nutcrackers"). "Notecrackers" would've been a fine translation that preserves the pun while still sounding similar.

The Gurkin got cirrhosis of the liver and died of an internal haemorrhage.

In Swedish he's called Gurkan ("The Cucumber"), possibly a pun on "Gurra" (a nickname for the name Gustav/Gustaf). I was puzzled when I first read the translation of his name, but apparently the word "gurkin" does exist as an alternate spelling of "gherkin", which in turn is a type of cucumber, so... fair enough.

‘Looks like a conservative politician to me, guys.’

In LDRKI, Jocke says moderat politiker ("moderate politician"), referring to the conservative Moderate Party. Gösta Bohman and Ulf Adelsohn, the politicians the gang talk about later in the same scene, were successive leaders of the party.

Oskar was torn.

A mistranslation of Oskar slet sig, which literally means "Oskar tore himself [away]" and is used to mean exiting a conversation with someone who wants to carry on talking and not let you leave. Granted, "Oskar was torn" is an accurate description of how he feels in this scene.

‘You here again?’
[...]
‘You again.’

In LDRKI Eli asks Är du här igen? ("Are you here again?") and Oskar replies Är du här igen? ("Are you here again?"), which I would say sounds less hostile than "You again".

The conversation between E&H at the end of the chapter is significantly different. I think it's easiest to show if I first quote the whole of the LDRKI version, once again with my own translation in brackets, and then LTROI's version.

»Var har du varit?« [Where have you been?]
»Ute.« [Out.]
»Du är full.« [You're drunk.]
»Ja.« [Yes.]
»Vi sa att du skulle sluta med det där.« [We said you'd stop doing that.]
»Du sa. Vad är det där?« [You said. What's that?]
»Ett pussel. Det är inte bra att du—« [A puzzle. It isn't good that you—]
»Var har du fått det ifrån?« [Where did you get it from?]
»Lånat. Håkan, du måste—« [Borrowed it. Håkan, you have to—]
»Av vem då?« [From who?]
»...«1
»Håkan. Gör inte så här.« [Håkan. Don't act like this.]
»Gör mig lycklig, då.« [Make me happy, then.]
»Vad vill du jag ska göra?« [What do you want me to do?]
»Låt mig röra vid dig.« [Let me touch you.]
»Ja. På ett villkor.« [Yes. On one condition.]
»Nej. Nä, nä. Då får det vara.« [No. Nah, nah. Then forget about it.]
»I morgon. Du måste.« [Tomorrow. You have to.]
»Nej. Inte en gång till. Vadå »lånat«? Du lånar väl aldrig nånting. Vad är det för nåt?« [No. Not one more time. What do you mean, »borrowed«? You never borrow anything. What is it?]
»Ett pussel.« [A puzzle.]
»Har du inte nog med pussel? Du bryr dig mer om dina pussel än vad du bryr dig om mig. Pussel. Puss. Pussel. Vem har du fått det av? VEM HAR DU FÅTT DET AV, frågar jag!« [Don't you have enough puzzles? You care more about your puzzles than you care about me. Puzzle. Puss. Puzzle. Who did you get it from? WHO DID YOU GET IT FROM, I'm asking!]
»Håkan, sluta.« [Håkan, stop it.]
---
»Jag är så jävla olycklig.« [I'm so damn miserable.]
»Hjälp mig. En gång till. Sen är jag stark nog att klara mig själv.« [Help me. One more time. Then I'll be strong enough to get by on my own.]
»Ja, det är just det.« [Yes, that's the thing.]
»Du vill inte att jag ska klara mig själv.« [You don't want me to get by on my own.]
---
»Vad ska du med mig till. Sen då?« [What are you going to have me around for. Afterwards?]
»Jag älskar dig.« [I love you.]
»Det gör du inte alls det.« [No, you don't.]
»Jo. På sätt och vis.« [Yes I do. In a way.]
»Nåt sånt finns inte. Antingen så älskar man eller så älskar man inte.« [There is no such thing. You either love or you don't.]
»Är det så?« [Is that so?]
»Ja.« [Yes.]
»Då vet jag inte.« [In that case I don't know.]

1 This silence is positioned as an Eli line, but Eli clearly also speaks the next line, so JAL probably messed up and intended this to be a paragraph break (---) rather than a line of dialogue. I'm reproducing it here the way it's presented in the novel, though.

‘Where have you been?’
‘Out.’
‘You’re drunk.’
‘Yes.’
‘We agreed you wouldn’t do this any more.’
‘You agreed. What’s that?’
‘A puzzle. You know it isn’t good for you—’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘Borrowed it. Håkan, you have to—’
‘Borrowed — from who?’
‘Håkan. Don’t be like this.’
‘Make me happy, then.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Let me touch you.’
‘All right, but on one condition.’
‘No. No, no. Not that.’
‘Tomorrow. You have to.’
‘No. Not one more time. What do you mean, “borrowed”? You never borrow anything. What is it anyway?’
‘A puzzle.’
‘Don’t you have enough puzzles? You care more about your puzzles than you do about me. Puzzles. Cuddles. Puzzles. Who gave it to you. Who gave it to you? I said!’
‘Håkan, stop it.’
‘What do you need me for anyway?’
‘I love you.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Yes. In a way.’
‘There is no such thing. You either love someone or you don't.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case I have to think about it.’

As you can see, an entire midsection of the conversation—where Eli talks about how he'll be able to survive on his own—as well as the paragraph breaks indicating passage of time are left out of LTROI entirely! Instead the dialogue skips straight from ‘Håkan, stop it’ to ‘What do you need me for anyway?’. I have to imagine that this is a mistake and not an intentional omission.
Some additional comments:

‘Puzzles. Cuddles. Puzzles.’

LDRKI uses a similar wordplay with pussel ("puzzles") and puss ("peck, light kiss").

‘In that case I have to think about it.’

This is a significant mistranslation. In LDRKI, Eli says Då vet jag inte ("In that case I don't know"). "I have to think about it" makes him seem more manipulative in his relation to Håkan, as though he's leading Håkan on and saying "I might change my mind later". I could be reading too much into it, though.

Saturday 24 October

Tommy walked by outside the building, stopped when he saw Oskar.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’

In LDRKI, Tommy and Oskar greet each other in this scene with the word tja, which in the rest of LTROI is translated as "hey there" (more on that below). When substituting a specific Swedish phrase with a specific English phrase, it should be done consistently. Gah.

Especially in this case, since Tommy saying tja to Oskar and the latter replying in kind probably influenced his decision to try and appear cool and mature by saying the same thing to Eli a few hours later. Speaking of which...

‘Hey there.’
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
He was never in his life going to say ‘Hey there’ to someone ever again. It sounded incredibly stupid.

I am not at all a fan of "hey there" as a substitution for tja. The latter is a (fairly) modern, youthful, informal greeting; it's a word Eli is unlikely to be familiar with before this point, which to me makes his adoption of it later in the book (and film) more endearing. The same can't be said of "hey there", in my opinion, especially as "hey there" is also used as the translation for various other greeting phrases spoken by adult characters in other parts of the book; Morgan saying hallå to Larry in Thursday 5 November, Erik saying hej du to Oskar in Saturday 7 November, and Larry saying hallå to Lacke in Monday 9 November all turn into "hey there" in LTROI, whereas tja is only used by the child and teen characters in LDRKI. In my English-language fan fiction I tend to translate tja as "sup", which I think better captures the word's level of informality, but I'm open to suggestions for other options.

‘I’m twelve.’
‘Twelve!’
For crying out loud. She was probably younger than he was, since he was going to turn thirteen in a month.

The choice of "For crying out loud" here is a bit puzzling to me. LDRKI uses Klang och jubel; klang means "clang, chime" like the sound of a bell, while jubel means "cheering, jubilation", and put together it's an idiom roughly meaning "great celebration and joy". In other words, Oskar is internally rejoicing over the fact that Eli is (more or less) the same age as him. "For crying out loud", on the other hand, is only really used to express annoyance and exasperation, if my understanding of the phrase is correct.

The girl seemed suddenly restless. Her gaze flitted around as if she was looking for something, something she couldn’t find.

LTROI omits the rather important part "looking for something in her memory": Hennes blick flackade fram och tillbaka som om hon sökte efter någonting i minnet, något hon inte kunde hitta.

Karlsson was so boring he made the clocks stop [...]

Similar to Håkan's aforementioned thoughts about pig-shearing, this is a near-literal translation of the expression så tråkig att klockorna stannar. I can't think of any similar expressions in English.

Jocke grabbed her head and tried to pull it away from him but it was like trying to tear a fresh branch from a birch tree with your bare hands.

LDRKI compares Eli's grip not to a branch but to a björkticka (birch bracket), which I think is a more fitting description of the way he is stuck to Jocke.

He wished he could vibrate himself through the wall, like Lightning, the superhero.

"Lightning" is a mistranslation of Blixten, the Swedish name for the Flash (back when American superhero names were still translated to Swedish; nowadays they're usually just referred to by their English names).

Håkan closed his eyes and breathed slowly in and out to calm himself and to stop the impulse to get up and run far, far away from all this.

LDRKI describes his impulse as one of wanting to springa därifrån, bort från ... det där ("run away from there, away from... that [thing]"), which I feel has a slightly different meaning than "run far, far away from all this". I interpret the former to mean he only wants to escape the current situation and Jocke's corpse, while the latter could be taken to mean he wants to bail out of his life with Eli altogether.

A few stars twinkled in the water.

When it comes to preserving the text's literal meaning, this sentence—the last sentence of Part One—is close enough to the Swedish version. There is something else that's lost in translation, though, and that's that in LDRKI, Part One, Three, and Five all end with the word stjärnor ("stars"). In one of his first posts to this forum, JAL confirmed that this is a subtle homage to Dante's Divine Comedy, whose three parts all similarly end with stelle ("stars"). In the English translation, this trait is only preserved in the ending of Part Three.
I definitely don't blame Segerberg for not catching this when making the translation. It's not something that a reader is likely to notice unless they already know about it, and John himself only pointed it out some five years after the book's Swedish release. (AFAIK, anyway. Maybe he mentioned it in interviews before that.) However, if I were to rearrange the text so the Comedy reference is preserved, I think I would represent the Swedish sentence:

I vattenytan speglades några stjärnor.

... with something like this:

In the water he could see the reflections of a few stars.

As for the ending of Part Five, I'll get to it later in the thread.

PART TWO: The Humiliation

This part's Swedish title—Kränkning—has something of a double meaning. It can both mean to insult, disrespect, or humiliate someone (like the whipping of Oskar), but is also used for when a country's military infringes on another country's borders (like the Whiskey on the rocks incident that kicks off this part of the book). Indeed, the opening of this part describes how the submarine gives Sweden as a nation a sense of kränkning. LTROI represents this with the word "violated", even though the title is translated as "humiliation".

But he, whose heart a skogsrå steals
it never will recover
His soul will long for moonlight dreams
and no mere mortal lover ...
VIKTOR RYDBERG, ‘SKOGSRÅET’

This is not a complaint, I actually want to commend this translation. Like I wrote at the start, LTROI is a pretty good translation overall, but it might be time to mention a concrete example of this instead of just picking apart the negatives. As far as I can tell, this rendition of Skogsrået is unique to Segerberg's LTROI, and it manages to preserve (almost) the exact same beauty and meaning as the original while also keeping (almost) the same structure and 2 out of 4 rhyming lines. Good stuff. (Something fun I found while researching is that this translation of the poem is brought up in a 2009 newsletter by the Viktor Rydberg Society, where they noted how its inclusion in LTROI would likely result in Rydberg's poetry getting more international attention. Note that they got the translator's name wrong, though: Segerstam instead of Segerberg.)
Anyway, back to complaining.

Every man in the western suburbs who resembled the phantom picture was subjected to long, scrutinising looks.

"Phantom picture" seems to be a bit of Swenglish. Fantombild is the Swedish word for facial composite pictures, but as far as I can find, "phantom" is not used in this context in English. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Wednesday 28 October

There once was a German, a Russian and a Bellman — or so the joke went.

See Bellman jokes on Wikipedia.

Oskar. That’s ... Oskar.

LDRKI draws out the second mention of the name, making it more clownlike (I guess): Det där är ... Oooskar.

Better to have a little shit in the corners than a clean hell.

Literal translation of the proverb Bättre [med] lite skit i hörnen än [med] ett rent helvete. The original is an untranslatable pun: while helvete means "hell", ren can mean both "clean" and "complete, utter". In other words, rent helvete can mean either "clean hell" or "utter mess". I'll admit that I'd personally never even thought of the former meaning until I looked up the expression for this post.

What do you do anyway? To make people like you?

The original line (Hur gör man egentligen? För att få nån att tycka om en?) is more accurately translated as "What do you do anyway? To make someone like you?", which I think has a pretty different implication from wanting "people" in general to like you.

With her other hand she touched his wound and that strange thing happened. Someone else, someone much older, harder, became visible under her skin.

LDRKI doesn't say "became visible under her skin" but rather "pressed against the inside of her skin": Någon annan, en mycket äldre, hårdare människa pressade sig fram mot insidan av hennes hud.

‘That will be amusing,’ she said.
‘You mean fun?’
‘Yes. Fun. Fun.’

The words used in LDRKI, represented here by "amusing" and "fun", are roligt and jättekul respectively. I would say that roligt has pretty much the exact same meaning and level of (in)formality as the English word "fun". Kul is a slightly more informal synonym, with the prefix jätte- meaning "really", i.e. "super fun". Turning roligt into "amusing" causes Eli's line to sound much more archaic.

‘You’re a little strange, you know that?’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, but it’s OK.’
‘You’ll have to show me what to do, in that case. Not to be strange.’

LDRKI's Oskar calls Eli knäpp, "nutty, weird, a little crazy". "Weird" would've been a fine translation, but "strange" sounds too formal IMO.

EDIT 2021-09-09: Corrected the meaning of a word (see metoo's post).
EDIT 2021-10-07: Added a section about the lost Divine Comedy reference.

[metoo]

Hellre en bollkalle i kanalen än en kall balle i analen.—"Better a ball boy in the channel than a cold testicle in the anal [sic]."

In this context "balle" actually means penis...

More about the greeting "tja":
Tja is a shortened form of "tjena" ...
... which is a shortened form of "tjenare" ...
... which is the Stockholm dialect pronunciation of "tjänare"...
... which is a shortened form of the archaic greeting phrase "er ödmjuke tjänare".
Tjänare is Swedish for servant, thus "er ödmjuke tjänare" would translate to "your humble servant".

Notable is that Bellman used the word "tjenare" in one of his songs in 1775, thus Eli might have been familiar with that version!

[Siggdalos]

Hellre en bollkalle i kanalen än en kall balle i analen.—"Better a ball boy in the channel than a cold testicle in the anal [sic]."

In this context "balle" actually means penis...

I see, I was only familiar with the other meaning and the Scanian one. Thanks for the correction.

[danielmann861]

Interesting choices made in translation.

I've been dabbling in Japanese translation for 8 years or so now and always amazed to see how stuff gets translated back and forward. So this is kind of interesting to me not speaking Swedish and all. Have often wondered how hard it would be to learn Swedish though? I mean learned Japanese to some effect so how hard could Swedish be? Would be fun to read JAL's books in their original language some day.

[metoo]

Well, only you can tell how hard it would be for you...

That said, Swedish is a germanic language like English, so you will have a lot for free thanks to that.

Here is an American youtuber who lives in Sweden and has learnt Swedish:

.
Here's a Brit (this particular video is in Swedish, but most of his other videos are in English):

.
Here's another American giving her view on the subject:

.
Finally, a video by a linguist about the Swedish language:

[Siggdalos]

A concern I have is that I'm wondering if I'm posting too much of the text from the novel for it to count as fair use. Maybe I should try to reduce the amount of direct quotes.