No longer lost in translation
A few years ago when I couldn't stop talking about Halldor Laxness's Icelandic masterpiece, ''Independent People" (Vintage, paperback, $15), a friend of mine recommended ''Kristin Lavransdatter," a trilogy by the Norwegian writer, Sigrid Undset. I got a translation from the 1920s out of the library -- though noting, with a professional reader's dismay, that the book was well over 1,000 pages long. In any event, its length was neither here nor there as I couldn't get farther than 50 pages into its dishearteningly affected prose.
The first character to open her mouth set the tone: ''methought I must needs have a sight of her. But you must take the cap from her head; they say she hath such bonny hair." Set in 14th-century Norway, the story continued in a relentlessly faux archaic manner until I finally bailed out at ''within the house all spoke of well-being, and the customs of the house were seemly, following the ways of great folks' houses in the South." This, I decided, was a book to save for the nursing home years or a stretch in prison. As I later discovered, my friend had read it on a long airplane journey, which amounts to the same thing.
A couple of months ago I read that the book had been newly translated, this time by Tiina Nunnally. Well, now we were talking. I had recently read Nunnally's translation of Hans Christian Andersen's ''Fairy Tales" (Viking, $27.95) and found that her brisk, clean English made the stories as sharply scary and wondrously weird as they had seemed when I was very young and tolerant of stuffy, pretentious prose. I compared her version with the ancient text of my youth -- which I had once tried, unsuccessfully, to foist upon my own children -- and saw clearly what mildewed bombazine it was.
So I returned to ''Kristin Lavransdatter" (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, paperback, $25). In her translator's note Nunnally says that the earlier English translators had, in fact, imposed the archaic style I found so off-putting and that Undset actually wrote ''in a straightforward, almost plain style." Compare Nunnally's rendition of the passages quoted above. In her hands, the novel's first speaker says, ''I thought I'd have a look at her. You must take off her cap. They say she has such fair hair." And the next passage takes an equally forthright approach: ''Inside the buildings everything looked prosperous, and the customs of the house were as courtly as those of the gentry in the south of the country." Gone are the cobwebs and must; restored are cleanliness and simplicity. And revealed to me at last was an astonishing work of psychological complexity: the 1,124-page story of a 14th-century woman's journey through ''the perilous and beautiful world."
The scenes of nature, in its cold, northern immensity, are terrifying and exhilarating, and intrinsic to the fierce Scandinavian soul potently etched in this novel: ''For those who were waiting for the redemption of spring, it seemed as if it would never come. The days grew long and bright, and the valley lay in a haze of thawing snow while the sun shone. But frost was still in the air, and the heat had no power. At night it froze hard; great cracking sounds came from the ice, a rumbling issued from the mountains, and the wolves howled and the foxes yipped all the way down in the village, as if it were midwinter. . . . Kristin went out on such a day, when the water was trickling in the furrows of the road and the snow glistened like silver across the fields. Facing the sun, the snowdrifts had become hollowed out so that the delicate ice lattice of the crusted snow broke with the gentle ring of silver when she pressed her foot against it. But wherever there was the slightest shadow, the air was sharp with frost and the snow was hard."
As in the natural world portrayed here with such brilliance, the life depicted in these pages is one in which opposites have abrupt proximity, reverses occur quite suddenly: love turns to hate, joy to guilt, freedom to bondage, present to past, life to death. The tension between the contrasting demands of society and individual desire surges through the novel. ''All my days," Kristin muses toward the end of her life, ''I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path." But in this society, one whose preservation rests on inheritance (and, perforce, ''the honor of women), individual acts of will or passion have greater import and are more wildly dangerous than in ours. Indeed, from adolescence on, Kristin risks becoming an outcast: She is seduced by a reckless maverick while betrothed to another man; meets her lover in a house of ill repute; breaks her engagement; and conceives a child out of wedlock. Kristin's soul is riven by the stark despair of guilt and the burning emotion of love, as when she contemplates the juxtaposition of sin and purity attendant upon her first baby: ''Conceived in sin. Carried under her hard, evil heart. Pulled out of her sin-tainted body, so pure, so healthy, so inexpressibly lovely and fresh and innocent. This undeserved beneficence broke her heart in two; crushed with remorse she lay there with tears welling up out of her soul like blood from a mortal wound."
Though Kristin is married before the baby's birth, her child's illicit conception is always ready for summoning not only by her conscience, but by hostile neighbors, for this is a society whose ligaments are memory and the past never disappears. Even Christianity, which is fundamental to this 14th-century world, has not completely erased the old pagan beliefs. Their reemergence in times of peril, when Christian prayers and rites have apparently failed, is a powerful and frightening element.
This is a big, big novel without a single boring page. Nothing is perfunctory, nothing routine. The story twists and turns and doubles back, taking on greater and greater range and profundity. Undset magnificently depicts the huge force of nature, the power of social pressure, and the deepening over the years of Kristin's consciousness and an attendant proto-existential loneliness. The novel is also gloriously rich in material detail and in its portrayal of life in a vanished time and distant place. Thanks to Nunnally, we can partake of this vision in all its intoxicating clarity. If ever there was a story designed for getting through the winter, especially the bleak and barren plod of January and February, this surely is it.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net. 
