Solvej Balle’s Om udregning af rumfang, published by Pelagraf, won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2022. Then, she’d written three of her seven volumes of speculative fiction in Danish.
Barbara Haveland’s English translation, On the Calculation of Volume, is shortlisted for the International Booker. New Directions got Danish Arts Foundation funding to publish volumes I and II in the US, and this month they are out with Faber in the UK.
Sanna Manninen’s Finnish translation, Tilavuuden laskemisesta III is on my library reserve list. It was published last year, and I’m only eighth in the queue now, so getting it shouldn’t take long. Kosmos has published volumes I-III. Manninen has also translated the brilliant Olga Ravn, another dystopian Dane. But will she translate volumes IV and V? Kosmos doesn’t say so.
This means that while UK readers are opening a shiny new volume I, US readers are polishing off volume II, the Finns are well into volume III — and the Swedes and Norwegians are delving into IV and V. (Ninni Holmqvist translated Om uträkning av omfång into Swedish and Trude Marstein translated Om utregning av romfang into Norwegian; don’t ask me which kind as my search in languages I don’t speak has its limits.) But what about the Danes? As far as I can tell, VI and VII aren’t even written yet!
Somehow, this feels very appropriate, that vols I-V are out now, hot new books that win prizes, in different parts of the world, at the same time.
Because as soon as you start reading, you’ll see that in these short novels, time messes with your head. How the people around you understand it might be very different from what you feel and see. This changes how you experience time and space, money and worldly goods, and crucially, relationships. And however far you travel, you might not be able to cut through that feeling of disconnect.
I’ve absolutely loved the first two volumes and can’t wait for the third. Dear funders, publishers and translators, hurry up and give us non-Scandi readers the fourth, the fifth… Please don’t interview Solvej Balle too much about those upcoming prizes either, we need her writing up to that perfect seventh. As soon as she has time.
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
[…] In the book, time or a clock/watch plays an important role: in Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, time messes with your head. As I wrote when I read it, not winning the Booker can only be good for […]