And here she is two years later: But it’s an artist that I want to be, a woman artist, and not a pen-wielding lady. . . . Furthermore, marriage makes most women stupid, or they dilute their demands on life, on their husband, and on themselves so much that they can scarcely be counted as human, or they become uncomprehending, vulgar, coarse, or unhappy.
Yes, my dear Dea, I certainly hope you will take great joy and comfort from this edifying epistle. I’m keeping one consolation for my own use: I will!
I will hold my head high, I will not buckle under.
I will not commit suicide—will not waste my talents. If I have any, I will also find them and use them. I will be whatever I can be.
While Kristin Lavransdatter is firmly rooted in a specific place and era—southern and central Norway in the first half of the fourteenth century—I suspect for most American readers the story has always been set in some misted Long Ago and Far Away. The medieval historian may find in it a careful account of political maneuvering and uncertainty, but the shifting intrigues following, say, the death of King Haakon (who reigned from 1299 to 1319) are likely to feel impossibly remote to the general reader. The trilogy’s earlier translation, by Charles Archer, may also have worked to deracinate the plot from its historical grounding. Archer’s many archaisms (“Yet did he look in his coarse homely clothing more high-born than many a knight,” “he had wrought scathe to the maidenhood of her spirit”) encourage us to transplant the plot into a realm detached from time, some enchanted Arthurian landscape of gallant knights and comely maidens.
Nunnally’s translation redirects our attention. The florid constructions and whimsical quaintnesses have dropped away, and Undset emerges as a writer of spare vigor. Nunnally unquestionably brings us closer to the heart of the book than Archer did. While I have a lingering fondness for the Archer translation—he was the museum guide who first led me to the tapestry—on the grounds of lucidity and authenticity the nod must go to Nunnally, who has surely done as much as anyone in recent years to bring Nordic literature to this country. (She has translated, with fluency and grace, Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Peter H?eg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow.) If Archer’s translation scanted the trilogy’s treatment of medieval history, it may thereby have encouraged comparisons to figures less remote in time. Readers may have found in the trilogy’s headstrong and often self-destructive heroine a distant cousin to Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharpe and Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. In Erlend and Kristin’s ill-starred but unstoppable love affair, they may have detected a kinship with Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff and Cathy. But Kristin Lavransdatter has a dimension these other books rarely aspired to: an encompassing religiosity. Only in the third volume does it grow apparent that the trilogy registers a gradual but inevitable repudiation of the flesh. The appetites of the young girl who lost her virginity in a brothel grow distant and Kristin finally winds up in a nunnery, ministering to others with extraordinary courage and selflessness during a sort of hallucinatory apocalypse—the arrival of the Black Death, which some historians estimate may have wiped out at least half the country’s population.
The growing call of religion renders richly ambiguous the culminating events of Kristin’s life. One might view the trilogy as an accelerating accretion of tragedies, as Kristin’s poor abandoned suitor, Simon, whose love for her is hopeless and perpetual, goes to his deathbed with his faithfulness largely unnoticed or misunderstood by Kristin; as her marriage founders and she loses Erlend to a spear; as illness and blindness and plague pluck her children from her, one by one. The story might also be viewed as the record of a long, hard-won, noble victory, as the passionate teenager who brooks no curbs on her desires, recklessly sowing pain and destruction in the process, decades later renounces the decaying kingdom of the flesh for the indestructible domain of the spirit.
Undset owed an incalculable debt to the anonymous Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth century, as she was the first to acknowledge. When she was ten, she fell under the spell of the longest and perhaps greatest of them, Njal’s Saga, whose elaborate chronicling of violent and implacable feuds overwhelmed her young imagination; she later declared this the “most important turning point in my life.” Kristin Lavransdatter reflects many of the signature traits of the sagas: a matter-of-fact abruptness when unexpected catastrophe supervenes; a tendency to view characters externally, with only occasional ventures into the inner workings of their minds; a wry stoicism in the face of life’s merciless cruelty (Undset notes about Kristin’s mother, who lost her three sons in infancy: “People thought she took the deaths of her children unreasonably hard”); a fondness for characters prone to lengthy brooding silences finally punctuated by shattering admissions, as when Kristin’s mother stuns her husband by announcing, “I’m talking about the fact that I wasn’t a maiden when I became your wife,” or when she declares, “I’ve always known, Kristin, that you’ve never been very fond of me.”
A particular poignancy attends the reading of very long novels, especially those which, for all their undeniable charms, you’re unlikely to read again. Weeks, even months of your internal life are given over to some new cast of characters, who vaporize when the book is closed.
A few such novels may escape this tinge of melancholy. I felt little of it while reading for the first time Don Quixote or David Copperfield or Vanity Fair or In Search of Lost Time, since I never doubted I’d one day return to them. But it’s the fate of most long books never to be revisited. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get around to rereading John Hersey’s The Call, though it’s the only novel I’ve ever read that convincingly situated me in China, or Shimazaki To-son’s Before the Dawn, even if it deposited me deep in rural Japan during the Meiji restoration, or Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia, although parting from its imaginary Thoreauvian country was a little like leaving the land of the lotos-eaters.
Doubtless many of those readers who adored Kristin Lavransdatter in its original translation never got around to rereading it, and the story faded into a distant glimmering. If the trilogy’s plot embodies an ultimate stripping away of worldly concerns, as Kristin moves slowly but steadily from bodily to spiritual priorities, in readers’ memories a counterpart sort of paring may take place. Again, for most readers, the book’s political machinations—King Haakon and all the rest—probably fled the memory in rapid order, as did any strong feelings about Undset as a prose stylist. What lingered was a feeling of having been transported; what lingered was enchantment. Each time a woman approached me to say, “I once read that book,” she was responding to a literary gratitude so durable it insisted on being expressed to a stranger.
What was another world has now found its way into another world: Nunnally’s new translation, with its cleaner motivations and phrasing, its nuanced balancing of the blunt and the taciturn. Throughout all the tribulations of her life, Kristin winds up being not merely a survivor but an explorer: her hardy soul is on a pilgrimage. It’s heartening to think of a new generation of readers following Kristin’s explorations, and in the process amassing memories so rich they might induce a stranger to approach a stranger and say, “I once read that book.”
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION