Philosophical and Translatological Wanderings in Moominvalley

One ambition held by Tove Jansson, the eminent Swedish-speaking Finnish painter and author, was to write not only for children but also for adults. This prompted her to stray ever further from the world of children over the nine volumes of her Moomin saga (1945–1970), weaving an array of compelling intertexts into the fabric of her narratives and thus inviting inexhaustible interpretations. My interpretations in this book are productions of a philosophical-cum-translatological mind stirred by Pippi og Sokrates. Filosofiske vandringer i Astrid Lidgrens verden (Pippi and Socrates: Philosophical Wanderings in the World of Astrid Lindgren) by Norwegian philosophers Jørgen Gaare and Øystein Sjaastad. I read Gaare and Sjaastad’s engaging book quite a while ago, but I still remember thinking of the Moomin series time and again on that occasion. My thoughts would revolve around its multiple references to philosophical, psychological and literary-theoretical concepts and theories. That Jansson herself was an erudite person with versatile interests was made additionally clear to me by her biography penned by Boel Westin. These reading experiences inspired me to bring all these insights and ideas together and combine them with studies on translations of the series, which, though published and re-published in Poland for over fifty years now, have not yet been comprehensively addressed by Polish scholars.

In the first part of this book, entitled ‘Philosophical Wanderings,’ I focus on the explicit and implicit hypotexts whose echoes reverberate in the Moomin saga. Over its ten chapters, we shall hear the voices of Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset, Socrates, Henri Bergson, Parmenides, Edvard Westermarck, Mikhail Bakhtin, Karen Horney, Antoni Kępiński, Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud. My intertextually inflected inquiries will seek to highlight the fact that the Moomin series, despite being traditionally categorised as children’s literature, in fact represents double-address fiction. In exploring these classificatory conundrums, I will refer to an increasingly pronounced tendency in Nordic children’s literature that involves abandoning the notion of the implied reader and embracing the moniker of allålderslitteratur (literature for all ages).

Of course, giving a thought to or presupposing the engagement of adult readers with books explicitly addressed to children is by no means a novelty. Indeed, it has already encouraged multiple theorisations within frameworks as varied as those of ambivalence (Shavit 1986), the tripartite taxonomy of dual, double and single address (Wall 1991), multiple address (O’Sullivan 2005), shadow text (Nodelman 2008) and crossover literature (Beckett 2009, 2012). In my discussion of the ways in which children’s books are made to appeal to readers from outside the primary young readership, I interchangeably employ the terms of double and multiple address.¹ I regard Jansson’s Moomin series as a conspicuous instance of double-address fiction in which the content comprehensible to experienced readers seamlessly merges with elements deliberately designed to cater to children. Though composed decades ago, the Moomin novels are actually a perfect embodiment of tendencies flourishing today and at the same time a useful resource for studying how translators deal with double-address literature.

Hence, in the second part of this book, entitled ‘Translatological Wanderings,’ I examine the Polish translation of selected language issues I believe to be central to the poetics of the Moomin saga. These include anthroponyms, the comic and cuisine-related items, which I discuss in three dedicated chapters. My analyses cover lexemes and phrases as embedded in broader contexts, the identification of translation techniques and semantic and/or formal shifts in an effort to compare the modes of address of the source and the target texts. In conclusion, I bring my findings and insights together and reflect on the implications of multiple address for translation and translation studies.

English makes this study accessible to a broader reading public. I trust that the world is full of Moomin fans who will find things of interest to themselves among my observations and reflections in this book. I look forward to comments and polemics from Moomin scholars, and I encourage translation researchers to explore this gorgeous series in other languages and offer their thoughts on the utility of my analytical model.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was so hugely popular that the decadence and catastrophism of the time cannot possibly be addressed without referencing his treatise The Decline of the West (1918). Spengler’s revered study, which was also known to Tove Jansson (Westin 2018: 184), is a clear hypotext of multiple motifs, episodes and characteristic traits of the protagonists of Comet in Moominland, the second volume of the Moomin saga (1946).² The book’s action unfolds against the background of fears spawned by an approaching comet which threatens to destroy the Earth. What stirs up interest in this tale of unsettling, pre-apocalyptic changes experienced by the planet is how differently its characters respond to the looming danger. Some of them seem to ignore the comet altogether (the Muskrat³), others calculate the time of the catastrophic impact, indifferent to its consequences (professors at the Observatory), and yet others want to find out about outer space, whence the doom is coming (Moomintroll and Sniff), or carry on with their routine-based lives (Moominmamma and Moominpappa).

The course of action is constructed from episodes of the tension-ridden and perilous adventures of Moomintroll and his friends on their way to the Observatory atop the Lonely Mountains. Moomintroll’s parents send him off in the company of Sniff on this expedition with the clear purpose of having the children’s attention diverted from the Muskrat’s menacing and pessimistic visions. Of course, the sequence of adventures has a happy ending as the comet passes by the Earth without hitting it, and the circle of friends and companions is augmented with Snufkin, the Snork Maiden, Snork and the Hemulen. All this is in line with Jansson’s recipe for a good children’s book: ‘Children like scary things; they are captivated by grand disasters, but this has to do with adventure, and not with havoc. (…) Stability will eventually be restored; serene, cosy, interesting and as soothing and refreshed as the calm after a storm. Why not? This is the least that we can give them’ (Jansson 1978: 9). At the same time, the ostensibly simple plot – of what is only superficially a children’s book – carries layer upon layer of meaning that is decipherable by more experienced or, perhaps just more open-minded, readers. The book’s implicit meanings build on Spengler and on the symbolism of the comet as war, the trauma of which is not easily assuaged.

In 1918, Spengler’s The Decline of the West repudiated the traditional perception of history as a set of facts, dates and people lined up in a cause-effect sequence and negated its customary division into antiquity, the Middle Ages and modernity. Instead, Spengler proposed the concept of the course of life, in which spiritual content is actualized in eight high cultures, each having its own prime symbols embodied in its productions (such as art). These cultures are dynamic and evolve in the way nature does: ‘Every culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age’ (Spengler 1926: 107). Crucially, when a culture uses up all its available spiritual resources and is unable to create anything new, it dies and mutates into a civilisation. The spiritual death of a culture is heralded by materialism, the rise of cities, an increasing power of money and irreligion, which means that practical moral reflection is emptied of all metaphysics and grounded on purely rational reasoning (Spengler 1926: 33).

Spengler’s depiction of how culture morphs into civilisation sparks associations with the vision José Ortega y Gasset developed in his celebrated essay ‘The Dehumanization of Art’ (1925),⁴ in which art, along with science, features as the most sensitive barometer of humanity’s attitude to life and thus as a reliable tool for studying social transformations. If until the nineteenth century art pictured the objects it represented in shapes derived from the humans’ lived reality, new art chose to distort reality and abandon its human aspects, in this way espousing dehumanization as an aversion to living forms. As the external world ceased to play its former role, artists turned their eyes to subjective inner worlds.