The British taste for “Nordic noir” — or Scandinavian fictional detectives — arguably began in 2008, with the television series Wallander, named after its Swedish protagonist: Inspector Kurt Wallander. Depressive, diabetic and intensely methodical, Henning Mankell’s sleuth, based in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, is highly popular. His dark adventures sell in excess of 30 million copies worldwide, while the television series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh as the detective inspector, is now due to enter its fourth BBC season.
The man responsible for introducing Wallander to the British public was a little-known Yorkshireman with a dry wit and a passion for all things Swedish.
A seasoned translator from Swedish to English, Laurie Thompson would readily admit that he had little background — beyond his own reading — in crime fiction. For most of his working life, he was a lecturer in Swedish at the University of Aberystwyth and later at St David’s University College, Lampeter. Nonetheless, he had an undoubted knack of turning Inspector Kurt Wallander’s gory investigations into plausible English. To ensure accuracy in descriptions of police procedure, for example, Thompson would regularly consult a police inspector.
Starting with The White Lioness (Den Vita Lejoninnan) in 1998, Thompson translated five of the nine Wallander novels, as well as ten of Mankell’s other novels. His skilful touch was soon in demand for other leading authors of Swedish noir and Thompson translated some 50 novels all told, including those written by Håkan Nesser, Åke Edwardson, Åsa Larsson and Mikael Niemi.
As a translator, he was noted for his rigour. The first series of Wallander on British screens was Swedish, and shown on BBC4 with subtitles. Thompson was irritated by the sloppy rendering of Swedish swear-words, and in particular the translation of jävlar a word that literally means “devils” as “f***” at its every appearance. The word’s strength, he said, depended on its context, and in some situations, a more appropriate translation would be “damn”. “The crudest swear words in English usually refer to sexual or bodily functions, whereas references to God and the Devil tend not to be so crude,” Thompson added. “More or less the opposite is true for Swedish.”
Finely attuned to such linguistic subtlety, he relished the challenge offered by translating a novel written in northern Swedish dialect by Mikael Niemi, and another, written in broken Swedish from the perspective of an immigrant, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Thompson built up relationships with most of his authors, saying, “We translators are playing around with their babies after all”.
Nesser was eager to discuss the English translations of his intricate wordplay. He recalls receiving “witty” emails from Thompson “always of short story length, and usually arriving some hours after midnight. Nine out of ten would end with: “Time to put him to bed. Hal E Lujah.” Once, he received a short message after Thompson had asked him for feedback on his translation of the first few chapters of a Nesser novel.
“I had taken it seriously, far too seriously in fact, squeezing English grammar out of my poor Swedish brain until the last drop, pointing out that you could make better use of the -ing form, perhaps choose this adjective instead of that, etcetera, etcetera,” says Nesser. “I didn’t know Laurie at the time, but his response was point blank and only one line long: ‘Håkan, I thought you knew English’.”
In 1992, he was awarded the Royal Order of the Polar Star for his services to Swedish literature and culture. He also edited for nearly 20 years the Swedish Book Review, a 64-page biannual magazine which often carried translations of short stories and fiction — some by his former students.
Laurence Arthur Thompson was born in York in 1938. His father, Leslie, was a typesetter and later a proofreader with the Yorkshire Evening Press, while his mother Madge worked as a sweet packer at the Rowntree’s factory in the city. After school, he was called up for National Service with special intelligence duties at the Ministry of Defence. Given an intensive course in Russian, he completed his first translations: three books on electronics.
From there he went to study German at the University of Manchester, and in 1962 at a student conference in Sonnenberg in the Harz Mountains in Germany he met Birgitta Åkerstedt, who was born in Sweden. They married the following year and in 1966 had a son, Eric, who now runs an IT business in Germany.
In 1965 Thompson took up a post as British Centre lektor in Umeå in northern Sweden, teaching English in schools and evening classes. He then lectured in English at the town’s university. On his return to the UK two years later, he became a lecturer in German and Swedish at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he built up the Swedish department. He is remembered as a hardworking, dedicated teacher, whose gruff exterior masked a fount of kindness. He gave his former pupils hands-on experience of Swedish cultural phenomena such as the celebration of St Lucia (patron saint of light) in early December, including glasses of glögg, a spiced mulled wine drunk in that season in Sweden. “Such celebrations inspired typically Swedish raucous singing,” recalled a former pupil.
Also notorious were Thompson’s language exercises — short Swedish sentences for his pupils to translate. “The sentences could be so ludicrous that the exercise often proved difficult because of outbursts of laughter,” recalls Russell James, a former pupil of Thompson’s.
Thompson sought to impart his own enthusiasm for Swedish to each of his pupils. Once, to explain the difference between the grammar of German and Swedish, he asked a German student about to take up Swedish (six weeks late into term) what “the German grammar shelves” looked like in the library. Entire shelves were given over to German grammar books, she replied. Thompson then held up a single slim volume, saying “For Swedish, all the grammar you need is here,” as he explained that Swedish grammar is simple. Indeed, so concise is the language, that English translations of Swedish novels are often a third longer than the original versions.
A gifted teacher, Thompson was saddened by the closure of the Swedish department at the University of Aberystwyth in 1983, and subsequently that of St David’s University College Lampeter where he had set up the Swedish department. From 1991-1995 he was head of the modern languages department at the university. He took early retirement in 1997, and continued as a part-time lecturer until 2000. He later focused on translation and his range stretched to children’s stories, and a posthumous collection of the late Stieg Larsson’s journalism (The Expo Files, 2012).
Thompson disliked urban life, and enjoyed little more than sitting in his garden in Wales on a summer’s evening, with a “glass of something chilled,” watching red kites soar through the sky.
Until his diagnosis of bowel cancer in 2010, Thompson visited Sweden regularly. He enjoyed cricket, the novels of John le Carré, or Anthony Burgess. Often, he would lead the singing at conference dinners and was a great enthusiast of Christmas as the Swedes celebrate it, starting with putting out an Advent wreath for the four Advent candles on the first Sunday of Advent. This was made of moss his wife brought each year from Sweden. Come Christmas Eve, she would prepare a traditional feast of ham, brawn and cold meats, washed down with Aquavit. Also on offer were pepparkakor, the spiced ginger biscuits whose aroma spreading through the home is for many Swedes the authentic smell of Christmas.
Undeterred by his own sickness, Thompson was determined to keep working and in 2014 he translated Henning Mankell’s cancer diaries. Shortly before his death, he completed work on novels by Mankell and Nesser.
Laurie Thompson, translator, was born on February 26, 1938. He died on June 8, 2015, aged 77
