Book review # 11. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - Peter H

Categories: books, translation, denmark

Date: 25 April 2008 18:01:29

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow has been sitting on my shelf of "must-reads" for about 5 years. I finally got round to reading it this month. It is not a quick read; 410 pages in squint-size print but strangely absorbing.

The basic plot revolves around Smilla, half-Dane, half-Greenlander, who has an innate affinity with snow on account of her heritage, suspecting that her young neighbour, Isaiah, was murdered. It looks as if he fell from the roof of the snow-covered apartment block but Smilla believes that he was forced to jump/fall based on the tracks he left in the snow. She sets out to prove this is the case - but it turns out that the police aren't interested and as she pieces things together she finds she is involved in a convoluted web of intrigue. Everyone seems to be in cahoots with everyone else and Smilla is entirely isolated. There isn't a real sense of conclusion in a conventional sense i.e. with all the ends tied up and all the baddies sitting in prison, but I suppose from Smilla's point of view, certain issues are resolved and scores are settled. Perhaps this is an acceptable sense of justice in Greenland, I don't know; perhaps it's just acceptable to this character - who is certainly an unusual woman!

I found it fascinating that Peter Høeg, the author, was able to write so convincingly from the point of view of a woman and a Greenlander. He obviously knows huge amounts about Greenland, the uneasiness of relations between Danes and Greenlanders (who are/were part of the Danish empire), snow and lots of technical stuff to do with ships.

The novel has been translated into English twice. Once as Miss Smilla's Sense of Snow - the US version and again as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - the UK version. It is not clear to me why there were two translations but apparently the US version was modified for the UK market [but not entirely localised as we call it in the business as I noticed a few Americanisms dotted around which struck me as odd as similar things were Anglicised at other points of the text making the Americanisms more obvious]. Apparently [and this may explain the aforegoing], some modifications were made to the UK version of the text by the author and publisher which the translator did not agree with and asked for her name to be removed from the text.*

I'm sometimes asked if I translate literature. I sometimes wish I did, but on this occasion, I was glad I don't get faced with passages like these: "Then frazil ice is formed, grease ice and pancake ice, whose plates freeze together into floes.... In the distance is hiku, the permanent ice, the continent of frozen sea, which we are sailing alongside... The surface of the ice floes is a wasteland of ivuniq, packs of ice foreced upwards by the current and the collision of the plates; of maniilaq, ice knolls; and of apuhiniq, snow which the wind has compressed into hard barricades."

There were other passages about boats which Ben Nimmo and his phrasebook [see post of 19 April] would have been crushed by. I just about kept up with fore, aft and starboard but was beginning to feel out of my depth on other nautical terms!

* I think I may understand something of the translator's frustration here. I have produced texts in the past after hours of slaving only to have a non-native speaker insist on their translation which is not an improvement. A translation becomes your "baby" and it's not easy, after all that loving care of gestation and birth, to hand it over to someone else who does not understand its cute little characteristics and quirks that you have nurtured or lovingly corrected.