Gösta Berling's Saga Read online

  Immediately, Selma Lagerlöf was recruited by the ambitious publisher Karl Otto Bonnier and became a luminary of his stable, to the financial advantage of them both. The story collection Osynliga länkar (Invisible Links) appeared at Bonniers in 1894, followed by a new edition of Gösta, acquired from Hellberg, in 1895, the year Selma resigned from her teaching post. In 1897 she moved to Falun, the old mining town in Dalecarlia, a neighboring province to Värmland, and just as rich in local lore; it had a distinctive literary (and supernatural) nimbus because of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale “The Mines at Falun.” Lagerlöf’s younger sister Gerda lived there with her husband, as did a sturdy friend from Landskrona days, Valborg Olander, of whom Sophie Elkan, the traveling companion, was not a little jealous. The year of Lagerlöf’s honorary doctorate at Uppsala, 1907, her aunt Lovisa died, and, for the funeral, Selma returned to Värmland and to look in on Mårbacka, purchasing it in 1910. She transformed it into a profitable farm, run by herself, supported by a large staff. A keen businesswoman, she produced super-healthy oatmeal, labeled “Mårbacka Oats-Power.” Mårbacka attracted so many sightseers and wellwishers that she had trouble finding the peace to write. Greta Garbo tried to drop in on her in the summer of 1935, but she was in the hospital at Karlstad. They met the next year in Stockholm; Lagerlöf’s theatrical adaptation of The Saga of Gösta Berling had had its premiere there in March 1935, to mixed reviews. Only nineteen, Garbo had played the role of Elisabet in Mauritz Stiller’s silent film of 1924, called, in English, The Atonement of Gösta Berling.

  Lagerlöf fell afoul of the Nazi propaganda machine after 1933 for bringing Jewish intellectuals, such as her biographer Walter Berendsohn and the poet Nelly Sachs, to safety in Sweden. When the Soviet Union attacked Finland on November 30, 1939, she hesitated to think of her country going to its neighbor’s aid, lest the Russians retaliate, “a hard fate for old Sweden.” Nevertheless, she gave to the beleaguered Finns all the gold medals she had received over the long course of her career. She died at Mårbacka on March 16, 1940, her sister Gerda at her side. In a last letter to a friend, she told her not to brood so much: “You know that we human beings haven’t been vouchsafed the gift of looking into God’s council chamber.”

  The success and example of The Saga of Gösta Berling may have encouraged Verner von Heidenstam—a future Nobel Prize winner (1916)—to complete Karolinerna (The Charles Men, 1897-98), a double series of carefully wrought novellas centered on Charles XII, the “warrior king” whose extravagant military adventures started the destruction of the Swedish Empire. The ten interconnected novellas of the Norwegian Tryggve Andersen’s I Cancelliraadens Dage (In the Days of the Councillor, 1897), take place in a backwater of the Napoleonic Wars.5 Sigrid Undset’s novels from medieval Norway, collectively called after their heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter, appeared from 1920 on, expanding on a world Lagerlöf had briefly entered in the novellas of Drottningar i Kungahälla (Queens of Kungahälla, 1899). It has been suggested that the sudden fame of Undset, younger by a quarter of a century (and a Nobel Prize winner, 1928), prompted the aging Lagerlöf to embark on her set of novels that move from the age of Charles XII to, principally, the 1830s in Värmland: Löwensköldska ringen (The Ring of the Löwenskölds, 1925); Charlotte Löwensköld (1925); and Anna Svärd (1928). Was envy a creative stimulus here? Long ago, Lagerlöf herself had been the target of envy: Strindberg planned to do a caricature of her as “Tekla Lagerlök” (Laurel-Onion) in his hateful Svarta fanor (Black Banners, 1907), and, never a recipient of the Nobel Prize, he harrumphed that “some people value my dramatic production (forty plays) more highly than the Great Selma’s Novels.” (Did he remember that, in 1887, he had written a very popular novel, Hemsöborna [The People of Hemsö], whose hero, the Värmlander Carlsson, plays a trick on the drunken Pastor Nordström even more drastic than the one Gösta and his fellows play on Captain Lennart?) During Isak Dinesen’s (Karen Blixen’s) years in Africa, authorial envy may again have been at work. Blixen refused to agree that, as the manageress of a coffee farm, she in any way resembled the pipe-smoking majoress. Grabbing an opening provided by an American correspondent, she allowed that great writers, such as “Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, and Lagerlöf, are likely to lose something of their talent in later years,” a thrust at the Löwensköld cycle. Surely, the author of Seven Gothic Tales and Winter’s Tales had learned from Lagerlöf, whose books were on the library shelves at Blixen’s Mbogani House.

  The Saga of Gösta Berling came out in German in 1896, the first of what would be six translations. Marie Herzfeld, the lit erarily acute friend of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, touted it in the climactic essay of Die skandinavische Literatur und ihre Tendenzen (Scandinavian Literature and its Tendencies, 1898): “a mixture of adventure novel, educational novel [bildungsroman, high praise in the German critical vocabulary], and psychological novel.” Thomas Mann quickly became a faithful reader of the author of “the old tale” of Gösta Berling (calling it a Mär, a word suggestive of the Nibelungenlied!). For Rainer Maria Rilke Gösta was “incomparable” and, like Mann, he closely followed Lagerlöf’s production (even trying to read Nils Holgersson in the original Swedish). But he gave up on her in the midst of reading Bannlyst (The Outcast, 1918, strangely called Das Heilige Leben, “The Holy Life,” in German), not grasping that the murderer Lamprecht was still another of Lagerlöf’s arrogant and egotistical specimens of evil, a theme first broached in Sintram and then in the Scots mercenaries’ home invasion and mass-murder of Herr Arnes penningar (Sir Arne’s Hoard, 1903), which was turned into a play, Winterballade, by Gerhart Hauptmann, in the war year 1917. From his Swiss refuge in 1920, Rilke wrote, about Das Heilige Leben: “I was quite cross with this old school marm” and “there’s no depending on Selma Lagerlöf any longer.” Paul Géraldy, the French playwright and master of the bon mot, compared Lagerlöf to Homer; Marguérite Yourcenar, the author of Hadrian’s Memoirs, devoted a major essay to the “conteuse épique,” concluding with praise of the “admirable tales, pure as the unpolluted lakes of Värmland,” and especially one of the paralipomena to Gösta, “A Tale from Halstanäs,” in Osynliga länkar, on the later years of Colonel Beerencreutz. Russia welcomed Iosta Berling with open arms (from 1904 on); the scholar Maria Nikolayeva proposes that Värmland’s estate life seemed immediately familiar to an audience steeped in Turgenev, and Vivi Edström sees a “direct correspondence” between pious Ebba Dohna and Lisaveta Michailovna, who enters a cloister in A Nest of Gentlefolk. (Nikolayeva also wonders if Lagerlöf’s easy switches from the real to the fantastic, as in “Ghost Stories,” rubbed off on Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.) The music historian Alan Mallach has recently claimed that Riccardo Zandonai’s opera I cavalieri di Ekebù (1925), with a libretto by Arturo Rossato, is not an oddity but rather a gem in the “autumn” of Italian verismo. Zandonai-Rossato emphasize the dark side of Lagerlöf’s vision: the villains, Samzelius and Sintram, have much dirty work to do; the majoress, “la Comandante,” is allotted a telling mezzo-soprano part; and the loves of a tormented “Giosta” are reduced to one, a frightened Anna. The orchestration—plenty of bass clarinet, bassoon, and tuba—is heavy, the incessant percussion effects eerie.

  In the Anglophone world, Gösta got several translations from 1898 on, by Pauline Bancroft Flach, Lillie Tudeer, and Robert Bly (a revision of Flach), but has never found a critical champion, or been taken quite seriously. Peter Graves has tracked down Lagerlöf’s reputation in England. Not very apt comparisons have been made with Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, among others. D. H. Lawrence, translating Giovanni Verga’s Mastro Don Gesualdo in Sicily, decided that Verga’s text was “one of the genuine emotional extremes of European literature: just as Selma Lagerlöf or Knut Hamsun may be the other extreme, northwards.” Yet Verga seems “more real than these.” Voices that could have carried weight (Graves names Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf) stayed silent. In the United States, Henry Goddard Leach, for years the head of the American-Scandinavia
n Foundation, wrote an introduction (1918) to a reprint of Lillie Tudeer’s translation (1898), and told how, on a walking tour of Värmland, he discovered that Värmland people were “as blithe today but not so romantic” as their forebears in Gösta Berling’s time. It is profoundly to be hoped that Paul Norlen’s translation will win Selma Lagerlöf’s novel the serious critical attention it deserves.

  GEORGE C. SCHOOLFIELD

  NOTES

  1 Fredman (“Peace-man,” a pun on Latin bellum, “war”), the prostitute Ulla Winblad, the bass-player Father Berg, the wigmaker Mow itz, Corporal Mollberg, and more.

  2 Strindberg used this university-and-cathedral town as the threatening backdrop of his play Påsk (Easter, 1901).

  3 In Anna Svärd, written some thirty-five years after Gösta, Marianne has died after a year of marriage to Adrian. The sometime Knight Sunshine bullies his second wife—who plays to his moods—and five plain daughters. He is drowned trying to save his ne’er-do-well brother’s perky child (from a union with a gypsy woman), and the little girl, a tow-headed charmer, also dies under the ice. (She has been kidnapped by the wrong-headed zealot Karl-Artur Ekenstedt.) Gustava Sinclaire’s affection for her vile-tempered husband, Melchior, can bloom only after he has been felled by a stroke.

  4 Historically, the military men among the cavaliers, Beerencreutz, Fuchs, Kristian, Kristoffer, Örneclou, Ruster, are already discards, leftovers from Sweden’s last continental adventures, in Pomerania and at the Battle of Leipzig (1813), the “Battle of Nations,” where Swedish artillery played a small part in Napoleon’s defeat. Captain Lennart has been involved, like shady Sintram, in the futile little war with Norway of 1814. (That former half of the “Twin Kingdoms of Denmark-Norway” had been bestowed on Sweden by the Treaty of Kiel, and the belligerent Norwegians wanted to be rid of their new “personal union” with the Swedish crown.) Rather ungratefully, Lagerlöf adduces no veterans from the war with Russia of 1808-9, celebrated by Johan Ludvig Runeberg.

  5 Danish rule in Norway, incorporated by the councillor himself, was decaying, as was the Danish-Norwegian official class, amid gaming, drinking, and adultery.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  The Northland Edition of Selma Lagerlöf ’s works (through 1914) appeared in 1917 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page). Single translations of later works, including the three volumes of memoirs, were published by Doubleday from 1924 to 1937. Most monographs on Lagerlöf in English are antiquated: Harry E. Maule’s worshipful Selma Lagerlöf: The Woman, Her Work, Her Message (Doubleday, 1917, 1926); Walter A. Berendsohn’s Selma Lagerlöf, Her Life and Work (Doubleday, 1932), adapted from the German original edition of 1927; Hanna Astrup Larsen’s Selma Lagerlöf (Doubleday, 1936); a chapter on Lagerlöf in Al rik Gustafson’s Six Scandinavian Novelists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940; New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1940). Vivi Edström’s Selma Lagerlöf (Boston: Twayne, 1984) is compact and dependable. “The Scandalous Selma Lagerlöf” by Nils Afzelius, Scandinavica 5 (1966), a reduction and translation of the title essay in his Selma Lagerlöf, den förargelseväckande (Lund: Glerrup, 1969), is strongly to be recommended, as are the helpful articles by Erland Lagerroth, “The Narrative Art of Selma Lagerlöf: Two Problems,” Scandinavian Studies 31 (1961) and “Selma Lagerlöf Research 1900-1964, A Survey and an Orientation,” Scandinavian Studies 37 (1965). For Lars G. Warme’s History of Swedish Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), Susan Brantly spoke of the “importance of history and tradition” in Gösta, and Selma Lagerlöf’s “acute sense of divine providence.” A full life-and-works volume on Selma Lagerlöf in English, taking her copious correspondence and recent scholarship into account, is a desideratum.

  The secondary literature in Swedish is enormous: Vivi Edström’s Gothenburg dissertation of 1960, Livets stigar: Tiden, handlingen och livskänslan i Gösta Berlings saga (The Paths of Life: Time, Action, and Life-Feeling in Gösta Berling’s Saga, with English summary; Stockholm: Norstedt, 1960) is basic, as is her Selma Lagerlöf: Livets vågspel (Life’s Daring Game; Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2002). Henrik Wivel’s Snödrottningen: En bok om Selma Lagerlöf och kärleken (The Snow Queen: A Book about Selma Lagerlöf and Love; Copenhagen: Gad, 1988; Stockholm: Bonniers, 1990), is fascinating because of its effort to uncover “the hidden Selma Lagerlöf.” Two recent and important studies concern themselves with the Swedish reception of Selma Lagerlöf: Lisbeth Stenberg’s En genialisk lek: Kritik och överskridande i Selma Lagerlöfs tidiga författarskap (Genius at Play: Criticism and Transcendence in Selma Lagerlöf’s Early Texts; Gothenburg: Göteborgs universitet, 2001), and Anna Nord lund’s Selma Lagerlöfs underbara resa genom den svenska litteraturhistorien 1891-1996 (The Wonderful Adventures of Selma Lagerlöf Through Swedish Literary History 1891-1996; Stockholm: Östling, 2005), both with English summary.

  Peter Graves’s “The Reception of Selma Lagerlöf in Britain” appeared in Selma Lagerlöf Seen from Abroad / Selma Lagerlöf i utlandsperspektiv, edited by Louise Vinge (Stockholm: Royal Academy of Letters, 1998). Unfortunately, the symposium’s papers included neither a survey of Selma Lagerlöf’s reception in America, nor a thorough exploration of Selma Lagerlöf’s overwhelming popularity in German-speaking countries. (Sibylle Schweitzer’s Selma Lagerlöf: Eine Bibliographie [Marburg: Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, 1900], provided a necessary tool for such an investigation.)

  GEORGE C. SCHOOLFIELD

  A Note on the Translation

  Not one but two English translations of The Saga of Gösta Berling appeared soon after it was first published in Sweden in 1891: a British version by Lillie Tudeer (1898) and an American version by Pauline Bancroft Flach (1898). Both versions have been criticized for omissions large and small, while Tudeer occasionally adds material not found in the original. The eight chapters omitted in Tudeer’s version were reinstated (translated by Velma Swanston Howard) in a 1918 edition of the Tudeer translation published by the American Scandinavian Foundation. Since then, however, no one has attempted a complete, new translation into English. (In 1962 the American poet Robert Bly published an edited version of Flach’s translation.) Among the many challenges in translating Lagerlöf is capturing the various registers in her narrative voice (from deceptively simple to passionately lyrical, with more than an occasional touch of unabashed melodrama). The present translator has tried to convey the author’s distinctive voice in English and produce a narrative that is a pleasure to read—as it is in Swedish.

  I wish to thank Tracey Sands and Sonia Wichmann for reading and commenting on draft versions of the translation; Linnea Donnen for help with weaving terminology; and Tiina Nunnally, Lori Ann Reinhall, and Linda Schenck for helpful suggestions.

  This translation is dedicated to the memory of Göran Tun ström (1937-2000), a fine novelist and a stalwart champion of the works of Selma Lagerlöf.

  PAUL NORLEN

  PROLOGUE

  I. THE MINISTER

  At long last the minister stood in the pulpit.

  The congregation raised their heads. So, there he was after all. The service would not be canceled this Sunday, as it had been the previous Sunday and many Sundays before that.

  The minister was young, tall, slender, and radiantly handsome. If you had set a helmet on his head and hung a sword and breastplate on him, you could have chiseled him in marble and named the image after the most beautiful of the Athenians.

  The minister had the deep eyes of a poet and the firm, rounded chin of a general; everything about him was lovely, fine, expressive, glowing through and through with genius and spiritual life.

  The people in the church felt strangely subdued seeing him like that. They were more accustomed to seeing him stagger out of the inn in the company of merry companions, such as Beerencreutz, the colonel with the ample white mustaches, and the strong Captain Kristian Bergh.

  He had been drinking so excessively that he had not been able to perform his duties for several weeks, and the con
gregation had been compelled to complain about him, first to his dean and then to the bishop and the consistory. Now the bishop had come to the parish to conduct an inquiry. He was sitting in the chancel with a gold cross on his chest, with clergymen from Karlstad and ministers from the neighboring parishes seated around him.

  There was no doubt that the minister’s conduct had exceeded the bounds of what was permitted. At that time, in the 1820s, there was a certain degree of indulgence in matters of drinking, but this man had neglected his office for the sake of drinking, and now he would lose it.

  He stood in the pulpit, waiting, while the last verse of the pulpit hymn was being sung.

  A sense of certainty came over him, as he was standing there, that he had nothing but enemies in the church, enemies in every pew. Among the gentry in the balcony, among the farmers down in the church, enemies among the confirmands in the chancel, nothing but enemies. An enemy was pumping the organ, an enemy played it. He had enemies in the church wardens’ pew. Everyone hated him, everyone—from the little children who were carried into the church, up to the church sexton, a formal and arthritic soldier who had been at the battle of Leipzig.

  The minister would have liked to fall down on his knees and beg them for mercy.

  But the very next moment a dull anger came over him. He remembered well what he had been like a year ago, when he ascended this pulpit for the first time. He was an irreproachable man at that time, and now he was standing there, looking down at the man with the gold cross around his neck who had come there to judge him.