Carl
von Linné – or Linnaeus as the world outside Sweden remembers him
– was what we would now call a “control-freak”. And like all
control-freaks, he was often frustrated by the unwillingness of
people, animals and the natural world in general to do as they were
told. Even as a boy, he would order his younger siblings around:
“Follow
me! Do as I do! … Copy me! Say after me! …”
But
his brothers and sisters would go about their business unheeding.
The
future taxonomist’s curiosity about the natural world had started
at a young age:
“Earlier,
there was another, smaller garden and a boy’s passionate interest
in plants.
“What’s
that called?” “What’s that called?”
Carl
walked in that garden with his father.
“What’s
that?” “What’s that?”
His
father, pleased by the boy’s thirst for knowledge but tired of his
forgetfulness, spoke harshly to him and issued a threat: that he
would never again tell the boy the names of the plants if he forgot
them after they had once been named.”
Now,
the little boy is a professor at Uppsala where, God-like, he names
the flora and fauna and everything in Creation and tells his
students, the “disciples”, that nothing has changed and nothing
new has developed since God created the world. But his students bring
him strange hybrids they have found on their nature walks, and his
uneducated gardener has insights into Nature that leave Linnæus at a
loss for words:
“The
gardener points to a tree.
“A
pine,” says Linnæus.
The
gardener points to another tree.
“A
spruce,” says Linnæus.
The
gardener points to another tree, which resembles a pine and resembles
a spruce.
Linnæus
tries to see if the tree is a pine or a spruce.
It’s
an intermediate form. Linnæus is silent, unwilling to discuss this
with a gardener. Such things are uncertain.
The
gardener asks if the pine and the spruce haven’t interbred.
“Like
a horse and a donkey make a mule.”
The
gardener likes to sit in the garden on hot days and make music on his
rather unusual stringed instrument. His friends simply enjoy the
music, but Linnæus the taxonomist is tortured by the need to
classify, to name:
“When
the sounds reach Linnæus’s window, he usually comes down and asks
the gardener to tell him how the instrument came into his possession
and how the sounding-board comes to have seventeen strings.
Linnæus
also usually asks the gardener after a little while to explain how
the relationship between the melody strings and the drones is to be
understood and why the latter cannot be shortened.
After
a while, Linnæus also usually asks whether the instrument is called
a zither or a dulcimer …”
Linnæus
plants a Siberian garden, which attracts the unwelcome attentions of
a neighbour’s goats. He has a stone wall built round it, but the
goats vault it at night. He runs down in his night-things with a whip
and chases them away, but when he is back in bed he hears them in the
garden again:
“Late
August. The goats seem to relish the Siberian peony and the Siberian
aster. At night the Siberian garden is full of goats.”
He
dispatches his “disciples” around the world with instructions to
send him samples of all the exotic flora and fauna they encounter.
Only Rolander comes back, ill and spitting blood, with news of his
fellow-students and their various fates:
“Sparschuh?
Fell downstairs, dead. Wetterman? Burnt to death. Grufberg? Cut his
throat with a razor, dead. Baeckner? Died of fever in Paris …
Gisler? Mad, murdered three people. Edvall? Buried in Canton …
Björnståhl? Died of plague at Litocoro, Greece. Lundborg? Drowned.
Salomon? Drowned. Luut? Drowned. Wennerberg? Drowned. Söderberg?
Drowned.”
Finally,
Linnæus is felled by a mystery illness resembling a stroke and, with
dreadful irony, the supremely articulate and knowledgeable scientist
who tried to name and define the created world is reduced to an
incoherent wreck:
“Yet
Lövberg understands. Linnæus has his own words in place of the
usual ones. He has forgotten all the usual ones, one after the other.
… First, the nouns. Monandria
and Tetradynamia,
gone. Buttons, buttonholes, waistcoats, gone. Weasel, fish, knife,
cheese – gone. … Now Linnæus is saying nothing but “To ti! To
ti!”
* *
Linné/Linnæus
is the central character in Magnus Florin’s quirky little novel
Trädgården (The
Garden), which was published in Sweden in 1995. Shortly afterwards I
was commissioned to translate extracts for Swedish
Book Review and the
now defunct cultural magazine Artes
International. I
always assumed that someone would finish the job and that the book
would be published in this country or in the USA, but it hasn’t
happened, so I’ve finished the job myself and shown the translation
to a couple of publishers. One lives in hope!
The
book has had another incarnation, as an opera performed in the
beautiful Drottningholm Palace Theatre – the best-preserved
18th-century
theatre in the world. The palace of Drottningholm, on the island of
that name in Lake Mälar, near Stockholm, is the permanent residence
of the Swedish royal family.
The
author Magnus Florin is a well-known novelist and playwright in
Sweden and also works as chefdramaturg
– roughly, literary director – at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in
Stockholm, a post once held by Ingmar Bergman.
 |
| Magnus Florin |
When
I first translated extracts from this book, back in the 1990s, I felt
a bit handicapped by my ignorance of horticulture, botany and
zoology. However, we now live in the age of Google, God bless it, and
I soon found that Googling an unfamiliar, often dialectal word used
by Florin for some Swedish plant would yield a Latin name which I
could then Google in its turn to get an equivalent English name. I’m
still not exactly a candidate for Gardener’s
Question Time but
my ignorance of horticulture is perhaps not quite so complete as it
was.
While
I wait to hear whether The
Garden will make it
into Britain’s bookshops or not, I’m bracing myself for the next
assignment. IB Tauris have just commissioned me to translate a
brand-new biography of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat
abducted in Hungary at the end of WWII and allegedly imprisoned in
the Soviet Gulag, although the Soviets denied this throughout the
Cold War, poisoning relations with Sweden. The author, Bengt
Jangfeldt, is a specialist in Russian language and culture, and has
had access to hitherto secret KGB files, so his book should be an
interesting read. It hasn’t even appeared in Sweden yet, so IB
Tauris are obviously keen to cash in on any publicity it gets there
when it appears later this year.
I
have already translated several of Bengt’s books, including a
prize-winning biography of Axel Munthe – author of The
Story of San Michele and
supposedly “the most famous Swede of all time” – and more
recently a literary biography of the Russian Futurist poet V. V.
Mayakovsky (still awaiting a British or American publisher).
Being
a translator means being on a permanent learning curve. The Munthe
book taught me more about the island of Capri than I ever expected to
know, and one of the perks of doing the translation was a week’s
free holiday at Easter-time in the Villa San Michele itself, with
spectacular views over the Bay of Naples.
Thanks
to reading and translating the Mayakovsky blockbuster, I became an
overnight authority on the literary culture of the Bolshevik
revolution (most of which I have managed to forget since), and I now
look forward to becoming an instant expert, at least for the duration
of this translation, on the Cold War in the Baltic region.
Harry
D. Watson
