Brad Harmon

Brad Harmon will continue working on his translation of Finnish author Monika Fagerholm’s seventh novel from 2019, Who Killed Bambi? [Vem dödade Bambi?] from Swedish.

My path to translation feels as winding as it does natural. My very first translations occurred in the context of a year of Old Norse, the first of many “dead” language courses I took while an undergraduate majoring in German, Scandinavian, & Dutch and minoring in Linguistics and Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota. Not the most likely areas for a first-generation student from the farm! While my academic interests have since shifted entirely, this early training was foundational to my work as a translator-writer-scholar (I find it challenging to separate these identities). While on the surface it was a matter of learning sound changes, etymology, grammatical rules and paradigms, what remains to this day is a kind of linguistic intuition. This intuition is always expanding and developing–each text creates its own conditions for translation–but I’m nonetheless grateful for the rigor that my Soviet-trained, octogenarian professor gently yet incessantly enforced as we translated thousands of lines from Old Norse, Old English, Middle High German, and Gothic. Even though it’s a rare instance where I have to dig out an etymological dictionary, an appreciation of the multifaceted depth of any given word lingers.

As I began to move beyond philology proper and into learning all the Scandinavian languages and German–and into the 1900s, now my “main century”–I carried these experiences with me, even into my current gig as a PhD student at Johns Hopkins studying mainly German and Scandinavian Literature and Philosophy. My time spent pulling words apart and stretching my mind around and in between their letters has persisted and influenced what authors I gravitate towards, as a scholar, reader, and translator. I find myself drawn toward works that formally or poetically defamiliarize the world, that dig in underneath the surface of language itself and what it builds via the imagination. All literature is existential to some or another degree, but I find myself attracted to works that bring this to the fore, work that straddles the balance of literature and philosophy. I started grappling with this in my MA thesis on Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson, whose work, when I translate it, reminds me the most of those earlier days of relying on linguistic intuition and etymology, even if her poems require a different mental space than skaldic poetry. If the space of literature is an endless periphery of possibility, then perhaps the space of translation is the many bridges that span in every direction, at every level, in every dimension.

Perhaps that’s why I’m averse to the phrase “lost in translation,” not only because it’s too often used, but because it gives neither the original author nor the translator enough credit. If translation is (re)creation, and creation evolves from possibility, why does mention of translation tend towards depletion rather than discovery? In his words of acceptance upon receiving the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Tomas Tranströmer said “Theoretically we can, to some extent justly, look at poetry translation as an absurdity. But in practice we must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.” To read literature is to be vulnerable, to extend yourself into another world and the world of another. To translate literature, then, must be to be a guide through this marvelous imaginary space that exists alongside the words on the page. Readers depend on it.

Image description:

Brad, a white man with short brown hair and trimmed beard is standing in front of cherry blossom trees. He is wearing a gray sweater and is grinning in towards the camera.