Visit theallusionist.org/draculae2 to listen to this episode and for more information about it
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, am trying to find the way out of language’s big spooky castle.
Happy World Dracula Day for all who celebrate! This is episode 2 of Draculae, the miniseries about the mystery-laden Icelandic and Swedish versions of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Listen to Draculae episode 1 before this, to get a synopsis of what each of these books is about, and what this miniseries is about. To recap: my husband sent me the following meme: “Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic, and it took over 100 years for anyone to point out he just made a fanfic rewrite of what he wanted the story to be.”
But there’s more. Oh, there’s more! And the big plotline difference between the original Bram Stoker-flavour Dracula and the Scandi ones is that in the former, the big danger is that Dracula will vamp all the nice ladies and leaving none for the human men; whereas in the latter, Dracula is at the centre of an international eugenicist conspiracy to put the elites back on top. Far more scary!
Remember, there are transcripts of all the episodes on theallusionist.org - there’s a tab at the top that will take you to them, and also each episode has its own post on the main page of the website, and the transcripts are linked from those too.
On with the show.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: I have always been very interested in books and reading.
My name is Ásgeir Jónsson. I am now the current central bank owner of the Icelandic Central Bank. I come from the northern part of Iceland. My father was a farmer, and I come from a farm. I had trouble learning to read and I was only able to learn to read when I was 8 or 9, and that is because I see the words as pictures really, not as individual letters. I was growing up at a farm, and there were no other kids to play with at my age. My parents, they did not own a television either. My grandfather and my grandmother, they lived next house to my parents, and they had a house full of books; so I would go to them to read books. And these would be old books, on various subjects. I had no friends and no kids to play with, but I had this house full of books; so I would go there and I would read basically everything.
HZ: Did your grandparents have a copy of Dracula?
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: No, they did not. That is something that I found later.
HZ: Ásgeir went on to become a collector of books, and one day, in a bookshop run by a 90-year-old priest, he found Makt Myrkranna which translates to ‘Powers of Darkness’ in English, the book of the version of Dracula that had been written and serialised from 1900 to 1901 in the newspaper Fjallkonan by its founder and editor Valdimar Ásmundsson.
HZ: What did you think of Makt Myrkranna when you read it? Is it good?
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Yes, I think so. It is very different from the Dracula that we know. First of all, it is a more political thing. Dracula is discussing socialism and anarchism. And he seems to be preparing a revolution, which in many ways is similar ideas that you would later see with Fascism and Nazism, where he basically says that the powerful should dominate the weaker. And secondly, it is much more graphic. You have a much greater number of female vampires, and you have a much more graphic scenes of sex and violence that Count Dracula is actually taking part in.
HZ: And he talks about bosoms a lot as well.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Yes, absolutely. So it's a kind of a totally different version. The thinking here in Iceland was that the translator basically bungled up the translation. This book was used in courses teaching literature to show how translators basically failed when translating.
HZ: Yes, it’s just a big oopsie when you add new characters and plots. But actually, the translation process in Iceland wasn’t just to render the text into the Icelandic language. Translations were not so much literal as liberal.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: In our language, in our tradition, it is quite common that in our history that you have writers that translate books and they usually take a very strong license to change them, to basically rewrite them.
HZ: Why do you think that is?
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Icelanders, we take our language very seriously. Icelandic is a very archaic language; it has been unchanged now for 1000 years. So usually we think it is more important that the books are rewritten so they read as being truly Icelandic, rather than being exactly as the original author wrote it. So this was quite common; and it was also quite common that you have writers, established writers, that they would translate works, and they would reshape the novel that they were translating. It’s the tradition in this country that translators would usually take a great liberty when they would translate. And different to other countries, we did not really have maybe a separate class of people that would translate. Usually all of the great writers in the language, they would also translate. And that is true of our best-known writers in the 19th and 20th century: they were also translating books.
HZ: And while doing these translations/rewrites, the writers would make those books more Icelandic in style.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: And they would not worry about any copyright or licensing or anything like that, because no one would really pay any notice to Iceland – who would be thinking what we were doing here? So I'm basically saying most of the great masterpieces of Western literature have been translated by writers in Iceland and the translations are very liberal.
HZ: Oh, so what Valdimar supposedly bungled wasn’t a direct translation, he just didn't make Makt Myrkranna into something that was considered good. The one review the story got, in 1906 - five years after the serialisation was complete - stated: "for the largest part it is worthless rubbish and sometimes even worse than worthless, completely devoid of poetry and beauty and far removed from any psychological truth... That story would have been better left unwritten, and I cannot see that such nonsense has enriched our literature."
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: When it was published at the time, around 1900, it was not thought to be very good literature. People thought it was almost like trash, kind of vulgar. And people said that Valdimar was just publishing this to sell copies of his paper. It was kind of a cheap thing for him to do.
HZ: Other newspaper editors in Reykjavik would even make fun of Valdimar.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: They would all make fun of Valdimar, because he was not educated, and not as classy as the other ones were. So publishing a novel like Makt Myrkranna with its graphic content was, they would have thought as being very typical for Valdimar and for his uneducated ways and uncivilized ways.
HZ: So uncivilized that he taught himself several languages, and he wrote an Icelandic grammar book that was used widely in teaching, AND he advised the Alþingi, the Icelandic parliament, on the ancient Icelandic texts in which he was an expert.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Yes, yes. He was a very very smart man.
HZ: And not everybody thought Makt Myrkranna was trash - Icelandic author Halldór Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, thought it was great.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: He was very fond of Makt Myrkranna. And he said that Valdimar had made the book much better than the original Dracula. Halldór Laxness later says that he is one of the best writers of his generation. But things are cruel, as you know.
HZ: Makt Myrkranna was published in book form in 1901. Then the following year, Valdimar died suddenly, aged just 49.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: He died, and his wife, she basically had to sell the paper very soon. But she became very active in women’s rights politics. Valdimar's son Héðinn became one of the leaders of the socialist party in the 20th century in this country. And so this is a very well-known family in this country, and very literate family, now.
HZ: And he left us this mystery to be interested in.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Yes. Yes. As I started to read the book carefully myself, I found various things which I thought was very unlikely that Valdimar would know things about London – the book talks about Jack the Ripper, for example, unsolved crime London.
HZ: Valdimar never went to the UK. Nor, in Ásgeir's opinion, did he have time to unearth information about crimes there.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Valdimar, he is from a very humble beginning: he was self taught; he was not able to go to school. He basically had this newspaper, and he was struggling to keep himself afloat. So it was very unlikely that he would waste time finding all these kind of things to write into the books. He was always just trying to scrape by. He didn't have much money.
HZ: Like Bram Stoker, Valdimar Ásmundsson did not get rich from Dracula. And, following in that tradition: in 2011, Ásgeir decided to get Makt Myrkranna republished.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: I personally have published a number of books, most of them on economics, on history; I published two books in English on the Icelandic financial collapse.
HZ: Vampire content seemed like an easy sell!
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Vampires were popular in popular culture. And at the time, you had Twilight; you had also these computer games with vampires. So I was able to meet this publisher, and I was able to convince him that he could make some money republishing this book. He really thought that teenage girls would buy this book. But that did not happen. Even though vampires, they were very popular, the book did not become very popular. It did not sell well and my publisher was very angry, he said that he had basically lost money on me and I had basically tricked him into publishing this.
HZ: It's not your fault.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: No. So this is the story. I got no money, no fame for this! But I’m very happy that it is now out there.
HZ: And what then happened is that the Dutch scholar Hans Corneel de Roos came across Makt Myrkranna. He was working on an article for the Journal of Dracula Studies about the preface to Makt Myrkranna, which had purportedly been written by Bram Stoker but probably had nothing to do with him – more on that anon.
At this point in time, Makt Myrkranna had never been available in English; however an English translation of just the preface had been published in 1986, in The Bram Stoker Omnibus by Richard Dalby. While writing his paper about the preface, Hans wanted to check some things in the original Icelandic, even though it is a language he doesn't speak. So in late 2013, he wrote to the Reykjavik City Library, and they sent him a facsimile.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: And because I was stuck with some sentence, I had this absurd idea to just type one of the lines in Icelandic into the Google search mask. And then what popped up was the Icelandic newspaper archive. There, they store scans of all the newspapers since 1600-something.
HZ: Wow.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: And there was an article or a text in a newspaper called Fyallkonan, of January 1900. And the same preface was reproduced, and after it, the whole story followed in this little newspaper. I just grabbed some lines, put them into the Google translator, and then I came across characters and events that were not part of the original Dracula. There was a Count Székely; there was a policeman, Barrington, and another policeman, Tellett, that were doing investigations, things that don't happen in Dracula – there's no police detective at all in Dracula. And, the story ended in a very short way, still in England; I could see that. So it was not the long end of Dracula with the flit to Europe and the Orient Express and all that.
HZ: And then waiting for ages for him to turn up.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: Waiting for ages - but especially the new characters told me that the story had been modified, renovated, so to say, and that there were original elements in the Icelandic story that were not part of Dracula. Now, if it was just be abridged, you wouldn't introduce new characters. You would condense it, but not put in new elements and new stories and new events. The canonical theory was it was an abridged translation. All the big Dracula scholars up till 2014, they listed it as in translation, because no one had read the book. No one had looked into the text.
HZ: And nobody had looked at the two books next to each other on the shelf and wondered why one is three times thicker than the other when they're meant to be the same story? Nobody? Anyway. Thus it was that, more than 110 years after the publication of Makt Myrkranna, Hans realised it was not a direct translation of Dracula, nor an abridgement, but a significantly altered version of the story.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: I was flabbergasted. And I was also very excited. And then I was decided: I must translate it – but it is so difficult.
HZ: Yes, particularly difficult considering Hans didn't speak Icelandic.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: The Google translator at that time also spewed out a lot of nonsense. And that's when I came to the idea of asking Iceland native speakers for help.
HZ: Were they happy to provide help?
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: Yes.
HZ: That's nice.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: It was amazing. There were 26 people who volunteered. I split up the whole text in 26 pieces, and I sent them two or three pages, because the book is not so very long in Icelandic. And after two or three weeks, they sent me back their materials. I studied it together with, Iceland dictionaries and then the tables of conjugation and all of that, to check it if it was right. There were some things I did not understand, or I thought, okay, it is a bit strange. I made my notes, I sent it back again to the people, at least three rounds to come up with a text that was, halfway understandable and complete story.
And then there were still some riddles, of course, that no one understood because it was old fashioned Icelandic. And I looked that up in old dictionaries, or, again, I looked for the same phrase in Icelandic newspapers of that time. And then from the context, you can often understand what's meant. And then it was the job to make it proper English, literary English, because I'm Dutch, so for me, English is a foreign language. I think English is one of the most difficult languages in the end. You learn it very early and very quick; and then there are so many things that are illogical in English.
HZ: Yep. It's truly infuriating.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: It's infuriating. Doesn't make sense; words that are written the same don't rhyme... I still am looking up phrases in Google to know if they're correct. And my English is, is academic already, so I don't know how other people manage to write a text in English. But I think we have a very good result, but it took three years to get the whole thing translated.
HZ: At any point during that three years, where did you think, "Ah, I can't be bothered"?
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: No, no, no, I was hooked, I was so fascinated – and I like mysteries, I like riddles. So especially if the Icelandic has some kind of phrase that no one can translate, I dig into it. Let's find out! Let’s look in some newspaper of 1895, if you can find it.
HZ: One of the people helping Hans with this endeavour was Ásgeir Jónsson, who sent him a copy of the republished Makt Myrkranna, and also shared his knowledge about the text.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: And he really helped me with his ideas about the origin and the background. He could see that the Icelandic was a bit weird, so to say; not really Icelandic in all aspects. And he came up also with knowledge that this preface had been translated from another language.
HZ: Which was a hint for the next revelation about this story. In 2017, Hans published the English translation of Valdimar Ásmundsson’s Makt Myrkranna as a book titled Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula. And shortly after, he heard from the Swedish editor and critic Rickard Berghorn, who told him that Makt Myrkranna was a version of Mörkrets makter, an extended Swedish riff on Dracula that had been serialised in Swedish newspapers from 1899 to 1900, written by someone known only as A—e.
Back then, it was pretty common for Iceland's newspapers to take stories from publications in other parts of Scandinavia, and print them in Icelandic.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: The original Swedish text makes references to European culture, especially to romantic operas. And Ásmundsson had taken that and replaced it with references to the Icelandic sagas, because he was also a specialist for that.
HZ: It makes sense that he would change it for his audience since he is got to sell newspapers.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: Yeah. And especially in Icelandic, they are very, very, attentive about their culture and their language. I think the strategy of newspapers in that time generally was to publish this feuilleton, these serialised novels from popular writers, just to bind readers to the newspaper, because they wanted to read the story. So, these serialised novels were a motivation to buy subscription. And that's of course what the newspaper owner wanted. He didn't want people to buy it maybe once a week at the kiosk, wanted them to pay for a subscription that would stabilise, of course, the economics of his newspaper.
HZ: Ásgeir Jónsson's assumption is that Valdimar either got the story directly from Sweden, or it came to him via England, because he used to sell Icelandic books and artefacts to England.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: I think Valdimar got interested in this novel because it is very political. Dracula, he has these ideas that the strong should dominate the weaker; that he is trying to establish a society in Europe of basically strong people; he hates democracy. It is my guess, knowing Valdimar, that the political aspects of the book are probably the reason for why he got very interested in it. Valdimar was very political himself; he was a socialist, he is the first one to write about Darwin, the evolution of species; and Dracula talks a lot about Darwin, the survival of the fittest.
HZ: The Swedish Powers of Darkness is around 300,000 words long - six times the length of Valdimar's version.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: The paper that Valdimar was publishing was only like four pages, so he did not have much space. So it sounds to me very likely that he just took the most interesting part of the story and cut the rest out.
HZ: It’s a good idea, just taking the good bits.
ÁSGEIR JÓNSSON: Absolutely! Just taking the good bits, where you are in the castle, there’s a lot of violence and things happening.
HZ: It's also quite possible that the sudden efficiency of Makt Myrkranna’s storytelling happened because when they used to serialise fiction in a newspaper and circulation dips, the author has got to do something to pique the readers' interest again. When I was an English undergrad, one of the lecture series was about the effect of serialisation upon a Victorian novel, and, well, if you're reading one and suddenly a character falls down a flight of stairs to their death, that'll probably be because the author needed to shift more units.
At the time Mörkrets makter appeared, in 1899, it was pretty normal that a Swedish adaptation could depart quite significantly from the source material, because Sweden didn't sign up to participate in international copyright – the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works – until 1904.
HANS CORNEEL DE ROOS: So they were completely free, legally free, just to snap any novel from the continent and use it for whatever they wanted. There was no protection for the authors.
WILL TRIMBLE: More people are always going to think that the Icelandic was the crazy version of Dracula and are not going to understand that there was the Swedish original that was almost twice as long as Dracula. In some places it is rambling. In some places it's perhaps repetitive. I wonder if this was just like, you know, you write six pages and send it to the newspaper office, and they get cast in print like almost immediately.
HZ: It's easier to keep copies now and then just, search for what you did by word than it was then. If you're thinking, “I can't remember if I already wrote about him going down to the castle dungeon and seeing a scary creature,” Now, you could easily check whether you'd already written that.
WILL TRIMBLE: I suspect that there are some stylistic consequences of appearing four pages every day in the newspaper.
HZ: This is Will Trimble, who in 2022 published an English translation of the Swedish version of Powers of Darkness, Mörkrets makter.
HZ: Do you remember how you first came across this book?
WILL TRIMBLE: Almost certainly I was, scrolling one of the infinite feed platforms and encountered the meme that said, "Hey, look, Icelandic, Dracula, was completely different from the original and no one noticed for a hundred years."
HZ: He got memed too! Like I did! The power of the meme!!
WILL TRIMBLE: I do not think that meme will ever die. And that particular meme is completely accurate: it's very different from the original, and no one noticed for a hundred years. So I found it from the meme. I ordered a copy of the Icelandic book by Hans de Roos. I read it and, wow, this is great – wait, there's a Swedish original? I wonder what the Swedish original says! A tiny bit of investigation finds the Swedish original on the internet, like pages of the newspaper can be found on Swedish library websites. I start trying to feed it into Google Translate, and, well, I just need to get all 600 pages and then digitise all the Swedish text and then feed that into Google, pieces at a time. So it started out as a data collecting project that kind of spun into a literary project.
HZ: Does that happen to you often?
WILL TRIMBLE: No, I suspect this will be the only time.
HZ: And once Will had started, there were exciting surprises.
WILL TRIMBLE: At first, I was just feeding it into Google Translate to see what there was to see, and there was this 190,000 word ending in Swedish that was not represented appropriately in the Icelandic.
HZ: Yes, after Thomas Harker escapes Dracula/Draculitz's castle, the Icelandic version skips through the rest of the story like a blow by blow review on Goodreads; whereas the Swedish version comes up with a load more story that is longer than the entirety of Bram Stoker's original. Certainly a hint that there is more to discover here.
Now, it is important to state that when Will was tinkering with the text, the Swedish writer Rickard Berghorn had already written an English translation of Mörkrets makter, but its publication was delayed substantially by the COVID pandemic, and Will didn't want to wait that long to find out what happens.
WILL TRIMBLE: If his translation had been published a year earlier, two years earlier, my translation would not exist. It was driven by impatience.
HZ: How's your Swedish?
WILL TRIMBLE: Not a single word. Yeah, no; I hired Swedish speakers to correct the spelling and punctuation. Turns out the spelling conventions in 1899 in Swedish were considerably different; so much that the editors that I hired, the proofreaders that I hired, were pulling their hair out for these like old-style spellings.
HZ: After tidying up the Swedish text, it was time to translate.
WILL TRIMBLE: I fed into robot translators. I did as much editing as I could. I gave it to a Swedish speaker, to effect the translation. And then I had human editors edit it for English style.
It's a little bit rambling and one of my English speaking editors wasn't quite enchanted by the Victorian era enough, because she wanted to edit out details of turning left and turning right and the geography of the castle, and wanted to edit out the hooves striking flint on the road. Riding in carriages was so dusty, you would have specialised clothing. and were expected to visit the washroom to wash your hands and face after coming out of a carriage because they were filthy because the roads were filthy.
HZ: Travel was really hard. But you resisted her preferences to edit that out.
WILL TRIMBLE: One of my editors was trying to turn it into a contemporary novel, and I didn't let that happen.
HZ: I feel like if there were things that I was going to edit out, they might be more about like racism than carriage logistics.
WILL TRIMBLE: Although, there's xenophobia, there's racism, there's the overall continental invasion theme that our country is going to be overrun by foreigners, that you can't disentangle from the Dracula story.
HZ: So when you finally got to read this book, after putting in all this effort to get an English version of it, what did you think of it?
WILL TRIMBLE: The Swedish version is a gem. It has these details of the world before electrification. It has these concerns that people had at the turn of the century about the decline of society. And it has management of a monster story that in some places exceeds the storytelling of the source material.
Partly I'm looking at it because it is a piece of artwork from a lost world that I will only ever know through art. These people are not with us anymore. The world that they lived in was different from ours. My personality drives me to technology differences. Bram Stoker liked little technological toys, and mentions them a lot. The Swedish translator A—e isn't as enchanted by the technology; the technology mentions just don't get transmitted, and that's fine. The technology that we end up playing with most is what? There's a bicycle? The same newspapers had ads for bicycles. Which shop you need to go to buy a bicycle in Stockholm was available in the same issues that were serialising powers of darkness.
HZ: Do you think there were any commercial pressures on the writer to include sponsored bicycle content?
WILL TRIMBLE: No, no, no. I think this was a literary project, and he knows what it's for. It's to sell newspapers, because selling newspapers is how you sell classified ads. The newspaper is putting fiction in their papers because their audience likes it and because they believe it will help them sell newspapers.
HZ: While the technology was mostly retro, some of the book was timeless.
WILL TRIMBLE: There's one passage in which he opens the newspaper and sees it looks like the world is going to pieces. The easier way to explain that is, oh, this is the end of the century anxiety, end of the century discourse, is the way that the world is falling apart at the end of 1899. Really different from the way that the world is falling apart at all the other times that we think that the world is falling apart! But it gives you a handle to talk about it.
HZ: it certainly felt like a very current book when I read it last year.
WILL TRIMBLE: What if the monster is fascism? By making the vampire threaten the entire world order, that raises the stakes, rather than merely being a kind of vicious serial killer. The Powers of Darkness Draculitz is significantly less supernatural than the one in Dracula. And the fact that the actions that he takes are political, it seemed like a more frightening book foretelling fascism in 2025 than it was, when I translated it in 2021. I keep like double checking the date on here when there are, you know, really is 1899. Okay. Just checking because,
HZ: Hmm,
WILL TRIMBLE: you know, it, it talks about fascism decades before the rise of fascism. And I guess the people writing the people writing monster stories in 1899 are really not different from the people reading monster stories in the 21st century.
HZ: That’s Will Trimble, and in this episode you also heard from Ásgeir Jónsson and Hans Corneel de Roos. Go to theallusionist.org/draculae2 for more information about this episode and the transcript. And brace yourself for the next installment of the series.
The legends of the Allusioverse, that is the people who are paying supporters of the podcast via theallusionist.org/donate, had a heads-up a few months ago that I was working on this whole thing – some even read Dracula and Makt Myrkranna and Mörkrets makter to prepare, although this is non-compulsory homework, and I will say that although now I am glad to have read them all, I wasn’t particularly pleased about it at the time. But join me for spoilers about future Allusionist projects, as well as bonus written content about each episode, livestreams where I read relaxingly from my collection of retro reference books, and the company of the Allusioverse Discord community. Plus you’re helping fund the ongoing existence of this show. Climb aboard at theallusionist.org/donate, where you can also sign up for a free account just to receive the odd email about Allusional stuff.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
vorlage, noun, 1a: Skiing. A position in which the skier leans forward without lifting the heels from the skis. b. In plural: skiing trousers. 2. An original version of a manuscript from which a copy is produced.
That was a second act twist, after all the skiing definitions.
Try using ‘vorlage’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by singer and composer Martin Austwick; hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and Bandcamp.
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