(Not) Translating the Incomprehensible: Defamiliarizing Science, Technology, and Science Fiction in Harry Martinson’s Aniara

Abstract

In 1956, the Swedish author Harry Martinson published the epic poem Aniara: En revy om människan i tid och rum (“Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space,” English translations in 1963, 1991, and 1999). This chapter examines the literary techniques that Martinson uses to suggest the irrepresentability of both modern astrophysics and nuclear violence. The chapter focuses on a selection of individual poems and compares the 1963 translation of Aniara by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert, and the 1999 translation by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg. Using Lawrence Venuti’s distinction between domesticating and foreignizing translations, the chapter argues that the 1999 translation foreignizes space and nuclear violence, similar to how Martinson suggests the irrepresentability of modern astrophysics and nuclear violence in the original Swedish, while the 1963 translation tends to domesticate the poem. Despite the poem’s obvious science fiction (SF) themes, the reception of Aniara has wavered on whether to actually classify it as SF. Using Simon Spiegel’s distinction between diegetic estrangement and defamiliarization in SF, the chapter argues that some elements in Aniara diverge from common characteristics of Anglo-American SF, making the poem not only a defamiliarization of science and technology, but of SF as well.