The importance of translating Karen Blixen’s novel The African Farm from Danish

Abstract

The importance of a new translation of Karen Blixen’s The African Farm is based on two factors: the book has never been translated from Danish (although the Danish version differs from the English version), and existing translations of the English version contain a number of inaccuracies. Karen Blixen’s book The African Farm was published in English in the UK in 1937 under the title Out of Africa. In the same year, Karen Blixen published the Danish text of the book under the title Den afrikanske farm. This book is not the only example of Karen Blixen’s own translations from English into Danish, as she also translated some of her short stories after their first publication in English. It is still a controversial issue whether her translations may be considered “copies” of the original works or they should be regarded as recreations in Danish. This article presents a comparative analysis of the English and the Danish texts of The African Farm which confirms that we are talking about two different versions of the work, since while creating the Danish text, Karen Blixen used several transformations: transpositions, substitutions, additions and omissions. The notion of “transformation” in this article implies a very wide range of modifications. The author makes significant changes to the original text. The result is a new text with quite a number of differences from English; the text that awaits translation from Danish. Out of Africa has been translated from English into Russian twice. The translations by experienced translators make a significant contribution to the history of literary contacts between Denmark and Russia; however, they contain a number of errors due to misunderstanding of Danish and African realities, as well as disregard for the specific situation. Translation of the Danish version of The African Farm is necessary not only because the Danish version has never been translated into Russian, but also because it would allow for the explication of some themes important for Karen Blixen that were “lost” in the translations from English. The present study does not presuppose consideration of literary aspects. It involves only differences between the Danish and the English versions of the novel, as well as the analysis of existing translations from English.