Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1984, pp. 213-19.
Abstract
Willa Cather's immigrant characters, almost a literary anomaly at the time she created them, earned her widespread critical and popular acclaim, not least in the Scandinavian countries, a market she was already eager to explore at the beginning of her literary career. Sweden, the first Scandinavian country to "discover" her books, issued more translations of Cather fiction than any other European country. In fact, Sweden was ten years ahead of any other Scandinavian country in publishing the translation of a Cather novel (see table). This article will investigate the publication and reception of Willa Cather's books in Sweden, compare that treatment with Cather translations in other Scandinavian countries, and also compare Cather's reception in Sweden with that of some of her best-known American contemporaries.
Although Eva Mahoney of the Sunday (Omaha) World-Herald was guilty of considerable exaggeration when in 1921 she maintained that "now all Miss Cather's books have been translated into the Scandinavian," the Swedish translations of O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark whetted the Scandinavian appetite for more Cather. As the 1920s drew to a close, her reputation grew slowly but steadily. Her friend George Seibel was probably guilty of considerably less exaggeration than was Eva Mahoney when he recalled "mentioning her name in the Gyldendal Boghandel in Copenhagen, and being received almost like an ambassador from an Empress."
Willa Cather was introduced to the Scandinavian reading public by the Swede August Brunius, one of the most influential critics of the time. He wrote a full-page introduction to her work in a prestigious Swedish weekly in 1918, a year before the first translation appeared on the Swedish market. Later critics and literary historians have given Brunius credit for causing Sweden to be the first foreign country to publish a Cather novel in translation.
It is not surprising that Brunius's article should have stirred a Swedish publisher into action. It argues persuasively for Willa Cather's artistic distinction as well as for her rare ability to depict Swedish characters "with real insight and art as Swedes, viewed with a calm sympathetic eye by an artist who knows them and takes an interest in them. The case is so rare for us that it merits close study." The Swedish characters that Brunius, like most other Swedish critics, deemed closest to a mythical Swedish prototype are women, notably the strong and enterprising farm woman Alexandra Bergson in O Pioneers! and her artistic counterpart, the opera singer Thea Kronborg in The Song of the Lark. Brunius ends his article by declaring that "Willa Sibert Cather deserves to be read by Swedes not only because she has written about Swedes, but just as much because she is an artist who has something important to tell us."
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln