Swim with those who drown
Few days ago I and my "Warm Light" met a Norwegian couple. Gradually our vacuous exchange of typical routine questions turned into quite interesting discussions. Among other contemporary novels I mentioned my favourite Norwegian author Lars Mytting and his brilliant "The Sixteen Trees of the Somme". They knew the author and all his novels but this one. Well, it was really hard to imagine considering their overall awareness. Something like a little mystery about the mystery novel :-) To make the long story short, we figured it out. And here another mystery begins. The novel was written in Norwegian language. Its original title "Svøm med dem som drukner" translated into English sounds like "Swim with those who drown". Quite a difference, eh :-) Later, after my "Warm Light" departed, I decided to conduct a little search throughout translations.
English: "The Sixteen Trees of the Somme", translated from Norwegian.
French: "Les seize arbres de la Somme", translated from Norwegian original, not from English translation.
Spanish: "Los dieciséis árboles del Somme", also translated from Norwegian.
Dutch: "Els setze arbres del Somme", translated from Norwegian.
Russian: "Шестнадцать деревьев Соммы", and this translation was made from Norwegian as well.
I expected to find "Die sechzehn Bäume der Somme", too. No luck. So I tried "Schwimmen Sie mit denen die ertrinken". No luck either. It seems Germans are still too sensitive to the topic ;-)
Anyways, the question remains open. How come that titles of all the translations have been identically substituted? Why?
I wouldn't have been surprised if only Russians did that. They are big fans of assigning their own titles to translated books and movies. But all of them? I have no faintest clue...
Norwegian original
English
French
Dutch
Russian
Spanish