Assisted Living: A Novel

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Assisted Living is written in Skelleftemål, a dialect found in northern Sweden. This presents the English translator with yet another version of the eternal question: how much of the original text does one try to keep, and how much does one allow to be “lost in translation”? After careful consideration, and a few failed experiments, I decided to translate the book into more or less “good English.” After all, I asked myself, and speaking as an American, what could approximate a Swedish dialect in US English? Should I try to make the book sound “regional”? Should backwoods Swedes talk like stereotypical southern “hicks”? Even if I could pull off an authentic sounding text — no mean feat in itself — why should someone from Sweden sound like they’re from south Texas? (As a Texas native, a Texas drawl was foremost in my mind.) But, no. Translators must always walk that fine line between the original text and their new translation. In creating something new, something will always be lost — and perhaps gained. As Nikanor Teratologen, reviewing the English text, recently put it: “What we have here is a good Luciferan read.”

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