I was in two minds about this picture, but I think it fits. I took it on the ferry home from Stockholm. Behind the book, you can glimpse the old royal centre of the self-styled “capital of Scandinavia.” That phrase got my back up on the Visit Stockholm website, until I remembered that Finns are Nordic, but not Scandinavian. How would I have felt if I was Sámi?
This book will tell you how.
A fat verse novel. Does it sound gripping enough to read on a cruise, or political enough to shake you out of your complacency, or beautiful enough to linger on? Ædnan was all three.
Sámi author and art scholar Linnea Axelsson wrote Ædnan in Swedish (Albert Bonniers Förlag 2018). While I did take it out of the local library to have a look, I soon realised that I was going to find reading it in Swedish far too slow going to do it justice. It was the 2018 August Prize winner, after all. I could have tracked down Kaija Aaltonen’s Finnish translation Ædnan – maa meissä (Kieletär Inari 2022), subtitled “the land/earth within us.” (The title means both these, and “mother.”) Instead, I waited till I got to the UK to buy Saskia Vogel’s English translation, Ædnan – An Epic (Pushkin Press 2024; you can read Vogel interviewing Axelsson on Words Without Borders).
There it was, turned cover facing out in the new hardbacks section at the entrance to Foyles. This book was looking epic, making waves.
As it well it might.
In almost haiku-like three-line fragments, through the members of one family and community, Ædnan spans a century of Sámi history.
Very soon, I was hearing the voices of the people whose land, earth, and mothers were taken from them. The story weaves in and out, overlaps, flashes forward and back, but the voices are clear. And strong.
My initial frustration with the Swedish echoed with far more force in the characters forced to learn it in school. This frustration echoed again and the mother whose daughter spoke better Northern Sámi than she did, because she’d lost it again. Language loss, the power and pain and rage that goes with that, are something I grew up knowing about, in Wales. Axelsson tells it well. Here, the mother tongue and the mother earth are lost together. And the people turn to find them again, to take them back.
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
Leave a comment