Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation of “Beowulf” forces us to think about what we need to be true about the past, and our access to it.
Tag: Scandinavia
Foucault and the Fictocritics
For at least three decades, starting in the 1970s, Michel Foucault was a phenomenon nearly comparable to the Beatles, or his predecessor on the academic scene, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a history of ...
Bergen, Norway: Discourse and Context
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This past spring I found myself in Bergen, Norway, undertaking an arts residency and ...
The Marshmallow Test
To the extent that a reviewer’s job involves a summary of plot, Stig Sæterbakken’s Self-Control, in translation from Norwegian, offers little challenge. Andreas Feldt has a conversation with his ...
Norwegian Autofiction and the Problem of Kinship
It’s a dark and wet December afternoon in downtown Copenhagen; the appeal of venturing out to listen to Norway’s latest literary star isn’t obvious. But a small collection of people are nonetheless ...
Translating the Architecture of Desire: An Interview with Wallace Shawn
Well over a dozen years in the making, Wallace Shawn’s theatrical collaboration with André Gregory on Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play A Master Builder opened this summer in New York theaters—movie theaters ...
Knausgaard’s Novel Degree Zero
In the early autumn of 1974 three divers working off the coast of Tromøya Island in southern Norway located the remains of an 18th-century Danish wreck. The ship they found, the Fredensborg, sank in ...
Reading Social Democracy in Translation
It wasn’t so long ago that Scandinavia seemed very far away from London and New York. But steady doses of Dogme films and Ikea furniture over the last decades have prepared the way for a swell in the ...