Swedish Pygmalion

The first summer we were in Sweden I posted about the oddity of seeing West Side Story in Swedish during Kulturkalaset. What struck me then was that everyone was white and blond (I still contend this is a bizarre choice), but there was more to it than that. Must have been because I keep thinking about it. If I think that the translation, casting and removal from the cultural context did the play a disservice, then think what the Russians might think of an American staging of a Chekhov play (egads!) or the French about a Kansas high school's revival of The Misanthrope (quel horreur!). Call me dense, but I'd never given much thought to how much you miss of what the foreign playwright or author meant and was when the language changes AND you don't have a good sense of the cultural context. On the flip side, I suppose we non-native speakers give the piece new life viewing it with our own cultural maps. The original idea in the piece of art makes connections to our own lives and can transcend language (is that possible??), and maybe that is the power of art.

Anyway, I didn't quite mean to get into all THAT artsy nonsense, but I saw a piece in the paper today about a Swedish staging of Shaw's Pygmalion and the difficulty of figuring out how to translate Eliza Doolittle's cockney dialect into Swedish and it reminded me of that earlier post. The dialect IS Eliza before her transformation and when you hear it and know so much about her (even more true if you are actually British, not just English-speaking), so how on earth do you translate that and make it work in supposedly classless Sweden?

The accent the actress apparently decided on was based on a suburbs-Skånska (Skåne is in southern Sweden and the accent is, er, unique) that she tweaked to sound like nothing that actually exists. She basically created her own language. If I had any hope of understanding said suburbs-Skånska I'd love to go check it out. Sadly, the only Skånska I can vaguely understand is that of creepy Anna Anka (she's the Swedish personal trainer who married singer Paul Anka and is now infamous in Sweden after appearing in a ridiculous reality show called Swedish Hollywood Wives), and that's not saying much.