May-Brit Akerholt first heard that Norwegian writer Jon Fosse had won this year’s Nobel prize in literature like many of us: on the news. As one of Fosse’s two Norwegian-to-English translators, she was thrilled. But when the Swedish Academy, the body that gives out the honour each year, called her at her home in Australia’s Blue Mountains to ask if she would translate his acceptance speech and attend the ceremony in Stockholm, she was so honoured that she began to weep. “I cried. I was speechless,” she says. “I danced to Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions.”
Akerholt, a Norwegian Australian grandmother of four, has been translating the 64-year-old’s works into English for 25 years. Her signature appears on 34 of his plays, three books of poetry, two novels and his essays. When Fosse gave his speech in Stockholm on Thursday, Akerholt was there. “The invitation to take part in the celebrations of Jon’s awards feels as if my work is also acknowledged,” she says. “I’ll never experience something like this again.”
The world where Akerholt translates Fosse’s texts is far away from the fabled glamour of the Nobel festivities. She migrated to Australia with her family in 1975 and settled in the small Blue Mountains town of Springwood. There’s a certain providence in the family’s decision to move to the blue gum-canopied town: early European explorers camped there on their expeditions through the region. Akerholt now divides her time between Norway and Australia. “When I’m in Norway, I feel Norwegian and when I’m in Australia, I feel Australian.”
Her desk overlooks a miniature forest of blue gums, and her expeditions are measured in words, not mountains. There, she lives with the voices of the writers she translates and the works they create. “Is it too much to say they become your companions?” she asks.
In Australia, Akerholt is perhaps best known for her work as a dramaturg and translator of Ibsen for the Sydney Theatre Company and Belvoir Street, working with the country’s best, including Neil Armfield, Aubrey Mellor, Jim Sharman, Judy Davis and Geoffrey Rush.
Fosse, the most performed Norwegian playwright since Ibsen, is the first Norwegian Nobel laureate in almost a century. After publishing his first novel, Red, Black, in 1983, Fosse was known almost exclusively as a playwright, but is also recognised for his seven-volume novel Septology, a narrative written in a single sentence. He’s also a committed teacher who has been instrumental in inspiring the next generation of Norwegian writers, Karl Ove Knausgård among them.
Akerholt was thrilled but not surprised when Fosse won the Nobel. “He’s been nominated twice and won countless awards including the Norwegian Ibsen award. It’s so deserved, he’s a major international author whose work spans all genres. He’s instilled enormous national pride in the country.”
Akerholt began translating Fosse’s work in the early 2000s. For the first 15 years, author and translator had little to do with each other: Akerholt worked autonomously, a process some other translators might find challenging, while Fosse is known as a man of reserve. He rarely accepts interviews and, when he does, prefers to discuss the aesthetics of writing. They finally met in Norway through the Fosse Foundation, an organisation dedicated to his work, and since have become trusted friends.
Fosse’s Nobel win has given her an opportunity to reflect on the art of translation – a craft that’s gathered more attention and even minor celebrity prestige after the success of authors such as Italy’s Elena Ferrante (translated to English by Ann Goldstein) and Knausgård (translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken).
“I reject the term translator,” Akerholt says. “I create a new version of a piece of literature as if it is written in the new language but truthful to the original.” Her work benefits from her being not only bilingual, but also bicultural she says. “You must have a full understanding of the original language and the culture it comes from.”
Fosse’s style is unique and challenging. He won the Nobel “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. His plays – whose characters usually have generic names such as Man, the Woman, Mother, Child – are not action driven. The texts are introspective. They focus on a character’s internal struggles. Often aligned with the style of Samuel Beckett, Fosse’s minimalist, stripped-down vocabulary relies on repetition, musicality and orchestrated silences. He once said he does not see his characters as people but feels them as a kind of sound. So how does Ackerholt translate sound and silence into a new language?
“You have to find an equivalent language in English – yes with different sounds, vowels, consonants and syllables, but they must have the same effect. That is you must transfer, rather than translate, the original voice to the new language.”
Akerholt is now translating texts by two other Norwegian writers, Arne Lygre and Fredrik Brattberg, and believes her work is a contribution to authors’ legacies. “The works we call masterpieces survive centuries,” she says. “Why is Ibsen, a writer from a small Nordic country, the most performed playwright in the world after Shakespeare? Why is Fosse produced across the globe? It’s exciting but also scary to know that you are trying to create a masterpiece in another language.”
