The Sun Script (Päikesekiri, 2021) is an absorbing work of fiction which ranges across many countries and has a large gallery of fascinating characters, focusing in particular on the adventures of Lily, an Estonian strongwoman loosely modelled on the sumo wrestler Anette Busch (1882-1969), and Tsuneo, an amateur Japanese linguist who is the guardian of a secret cosmic language. The novel combines fast-paced events and high tension with more reflective passages about the possibilities of international understanding and the nature of writing.
Anette Busch (1882-1969)
Rein Raud is an outstanding Estonian writer who has won many awards for his fiction and poetry, as well as being himself a translator. The Sun Script has been translated into several languages.
The novel is translated by Christopher Moseley, a highly experienced translator from Estonian and Latvian, whose translations for Norvik Press include Ilmar Taska’s Pobeda 1946 (2018) and Inga Abele’s The Year The River Froze Twice (2020). This translation of The Sun Script is an exciting addition to Norvik Press’s Baltic titles.
These maps were included in Rein Raud’s original novel Päikesekiri (2021), showing where the action takes place
The Bergen in which Amalie Skram was born and grew up was a bustling cosmopolitan port, with trading links to the rest of Europe and beyond, in many ways a more important centre than the capital Christiania over the other side of the country. From a young age she was allowed to roam freely around the town, observing the characters and settings which were to provide inspiration for some of her best writing. The series of novels known as The People of Hellemyr is largely set in and around Bergen, as the fate of the family is followed through several generations, from subsistence farmers to aspiring middle-class citizens.
Amalie Skram (1846-1905)
Although Bergen has of course grown and changed dramatically since the mid-nineteenth century, a large part of the old town which Amalie knew so well has survived to this day. With its narrow alleyways and steep cobbled streets, wooden merchants’ houses and wharves, it makes it easy to imagine Madam Tosspot and Tippler Tom stumbling drunkenly through the byways or Sivert watching the ships tying up and dreaming of running away to sea.
Port of Bergen, late 19th Century (Bergen University Library Collections)
The first chapters of Two Friends bring together the characters of Oline (Madam Tosspot) and her grandson Sivert, whose shame at his grandmother’s drunkenness drives him as far away from the town as he can go – by ship all the way to Jamaica. But nowhere is far enough away to escape the inherited flaws which he will always carry with him.
Here is a short excerpt from the beginning of the novel, following Sivert and his grandmother in the streets of Bergen:
A fifteen-year-old boy in grey trousers held up by braces over his shoulders with a grey woollen shirt underneath came walking up Øvregaden. He was humming a popular song, marking the beats by stamping his wooden clogs on the sharp cobbles; when the melody demanded it he took a few dance steps. On his head sat a cap with a stiff peak shading his eyes, and under his arm he carried a bundle.
When he caught sight of the crowd up by Smedesmugalmindingen, he stretched out his neck with a look of curiosity in his wide-open eyes, and set off running towards it.
At that moment the knot of people began to move. The circle opened up, and he could see Tippler Tom with something in his hand which he was dragging along the street, and with Oline on his arm, lurching towards him. With a jerk the boy came to a sudden halt. His head sank forwards as if his neck had been broken. His fingers groped irresolutely down his trousers, and he turned round slowly. All at once his back hunched and his whole body seemed to shrink. It looked as if he wanted to leave, but couldn’t move. He stared down as if paralysed at one of his clogs which had fallen off his foot. He could hear the crowd approaching. In a moment it would knock him over if he didn’t move. He stole a glance to each side. Just next to him on the left was Bødkersmuget. Suddenly he bent down, snatched up the clog, took a couple of long unsteady strides over the gutter and the narrow pavement and reached the alley, starting to climb up its steep stone steps.
‘Come along wi’ us, Sivert! Tippler Tom an’ Madam Tosspot’s goin’ t’ Påtholleter sell ‘er skirt for booze!’ a boy’s voice called after him.
John Linnell (1792-1882), after Edward Price (active c.1823-1854), View Across the Fiord from Herrinsholmen, circa 1826-27 from series Seven Views in Norway, etching on paper (UCL Art Museum LDUCS-1456).
Celebrate The European Day of Languages on 26 September by learning a Nordic language!
Did you know that 26 September is The European Day of Languages (EDL)? This celebration was first introduced in 2001 during the European Year of Languages when the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers ultimately decided to make EDL a yearly occurrence. The day is an opportunity to promote multilingualism, linguistic diversity and language learning.
At Norvik Press we are obviously big fans of this yearly celebration and of the many activities organised to draw attention to Europe’s linguistic and cultural diversity. So why not mark the day by learning something new about one of the languages of the Nordic Region?
You can do this, for instance, by exploring The Language and Culture Show and Tell series, a set of free online language tasters and related materials created around objects mostly from UCL Art Collections. In January 2023, the series also became the basis of the UCL Art Museum exhibition called ‘Not Just Words: Learning Languages through Art and Objects’, which one of our Directors, Dr Elettra Carbone, co-curated with Dr Andrea Fredericksen (Curator, UCL Art Museum).
The ‘Not Just Words’ exhibition in the Summer of 2024. Photographer: K. Holst.
The series and the exhibition show how a collection-based approach to language learning can successfully and simultaneously promote the importance of language awareness and the relevance of university collections to academic and non-academic audiences. Many modern languages spoken in the Nordic Region are represented in this series, including Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. We hope you enjoy these resources and wish a happy EDL to all our readers and followers!
Bannlyst is one of Selma Lagerlöf’s most thought-provoking works, and the latest addition to our Lagerlöf in English series, translated by Linda Schenk as Banished.
Lagerlöf was a hugely popular writer in her time, but the publication of Bannlyst in 1918 cost her a great deal of anxiety for two reasons. First of all, she had been suffering from a writer’s block that made it harder for her than usual to be creative and finish her project; and secondly, the theme of her new novel was highly controversial. Because of the time in which this novel was written, namely during World War 1, and the fact that Lagerlöf was a committed pacifist, she wanted to write something to raise the public’s morale. Her aim was to make people aware of the double standard existing in war times that allows killing to be viewed as permissible and let death trump the value of life. War is terrible and should not be glorified. So to make her point, Lagerlöf wrote a story about a polar expedition gone awry and about cannibalism. Is eating a dead man in order to preserve life the worst thing you can do?
Banished is split into three parts, each of which concerns matters of life and death. The first part is about the hero of the story, the explorer Sven Elvesson, and his dilemma as to whether to consume the corpse of his companion or become a corpse himself. His past follows him back to his home village on Grimsön, where he faces judgement and aversion when the truth about what happened during the polar expedition is revealed. The second part of the novel concerns the abusive marriage of the beautiful Sigrun and the local minister Edvard Rhånge. Edvard’s poisonous jealousy is harmful, and Sigrun needs to be cunning and wilful in her struggle for survival and freedom. In the third and final part, the people of Grimsö are forced to open their eyes to reality as they encounter a myriad of dead sailors in the sea after the Battle of Jutland. It is one of the book’s most memorable passages and can be counted among the most powerful literary responses to war in the twentieth century. Read an extract here.
Banished is a thematic heavyweight that unfortunately never seems to lose its relevance. We do not have to look far nowadays to find the glorification of war. Lagerlöf encourages us to take a stand against heinous acts of violence and killing and teaches us that human life is sacrosanct.
Norvik Press is proud to announce the upcoming publication of the English-language version of Ilmar Taska’s Pobeda 1946. This Estonian novel received critical acclaim when it was first published last year. It has already been translated into Finnish, German and Latvian, and Lithuanian and Danish versions are forthcoming. Norvik Press will release Christopher Moseley’s English-language translation, titled Pobeda 1946 – A Car Called Victory, in early spring 2018. Both Norvik Press and the translator have been awarded grants from the TRADUCTA programme, which supports high-quality translations of Estonian works.
Pobeda 1946 is a historical narrative set in Estonia under Soviet occupation. Secrets and mystery dominate – reflecting the covert behaviour of an oppressed people. At the centre of the story there is a young boy, too young to grasp all the things happening in the adult world around him, who unwittingly reveals a family secret to the kind of person in whom you should never confide – a government agent.
Ilmar Taska, the author of Pobeda 1946, is a well-known name in Estonia, but he has also been active beyond the borders of his own country, working in film, theatre and television in the UK and Sweden, amongst others. In addition to producing, directing and writing for the screen, Taska has also ventured into short-story writing in recent years. In 2014, Taska’s novella ‘Pobeda’ won the Estonian literary prize ‘Looming’ in the short-story category, and the following year, his story ‘Apartment to Let’, was included in the prestigious anthology Best European Fiction 2016, edited by Nathaniel Davis. Pobeda 1946 is Taska’s debut novel.
Norvik Press is delighted to introduce Taska’s novel to an English-language audience, especially as the London Book Fair 2018 will be shining a spotlight on Baltic literature. We at Norvik Press are mesmerised by Taska’s book, and will be excited and intrigued to see what other treasures the Baltic region has to offer.
We are happy to announce that Mårbacka has been longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. This novel by Selma Lagerlöf (originally published in 1922) was translated by Sarah Death and published by Norvik Press in 2016. We are thrilled that the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation is shedding light on more female voices, as the new prize aims to increase the translations of female international authors and thus make them more accessible to a British and Irish readership.
If you have not read Mårbacka, it is the story of Lagerlöf’s childhood at their family farm Mårbacka in Värmland. It is a warm and personal pseudo-autobiography; Lagerlöf writes about true stories from her upbringing, but she does so with her recognisable artistic pen. The novel is written in a naïve style as the story unfolds through a young Selma. Nonetheless, it contains a dual complexity because the wiser, more grown-up author lets the reader be aware of things that the child Selma herself cannot know. As Sarah Death puts it in her afterword: ‘In many ways [Lagerlöf’s] portrayal of her childhood in Mårbacka is bathed in a rosy glow, but she hints at the shadows (…).’ This proved to be a recipe for success, and when it was first published, Mårbacka won the heart of the reading audience like none of Lagerlöf’s work had done before.
We at Norvik Press are very happy that Lagerlöf is still a relevant voice. We love her authorship and have published many translations of her works. Our forthcoming titles in the series are The Emperor of Portugallia [Kejsarn av Portugallien] and Banished [Bannlyst].
Norvik Press is proud to announce the upcoming publication of the English-language version of Ilmar Taska’s 
We are happy to announce that Mårbacka has been longlisted for