NORLA and Are Tjihkkom, Sámi Translator and Publisher

 

Are Tjihkkom, Sámi Translator and Publisher  

Back in the late seventies, relatively few people outside Norway knew much about Norwegian authors other than Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, and Henrik Ibsen. The Norwegian Authors Union decided to create an organization with support from the state’s Ministry of Culture to support the translation of Norwegian literature to other languages. This was NORLA, Norwegian Literature Abroad, and for some years it was a one-woman band with a small office in Oslo. Kristin Brudevoll, the director from 1978 to 2006, turned NORLA into a powerhouse for exporting and publicizing Norwegian literature. Now with a large staff and a central office, NORLA awards grants to publishers to subsidize translations, assists myriad translators develop the skills and contacts for successful careers, and arranges conferences and festivals that promote Norwegian authors in translation.

From the time the publishing house I co-founded, Seal Press in Seattle, began its imprint, Women in Translation, in the early 1980s with titles such as An Everyday Story: Norwegian Women’s Fiction and Tove Ditlevsen’s Early Spring, I’ve worked with NORLA as a translator and editor. I’ve continued to do so through my current publishers, the University of Minnesota Press. I was introduced to the novel, Clearing Out, by Helene Uri through NORLA’s newsletter, Books from Norway, and later went on to translate it. NORLA was also a major funder for the big project of translating Sámi Folktales from the Near and Far Worlds. Because of NORLA, Norwegian books have been translated to around seventy world languages. Every month NORLA posts an interview with a “Translator of the Month,” who could be from Indonesia, Spain, Bulgaria, or Japan.

In December 2025, NORLA’s choice for “Translator of the Month” was Are Tjihkkom, who lives in Drag, Norway. He translates fiction from English, Spanish, Norwegian, and other languages into the minority language of Lule Sámi/ julevsámegiella, which is spoken and read in Nordland county in Norway, especially in Hamarøy Municipality, where it’s one of the official languages. Lule Sámi is also spoken around the Lule River in Sweden, most notably in Jokkmokk/ Jåhkåmåhkke. Along with Jokkmokk, Drag, home to the cultural and educational center, Árran, is a center for the revival of the Lule Sámi language.

Are Tjihkkom is a linguist with a recent bachelor’s degree from the University of Oslo.  At twenty-three he has been translating for a number of years, starting in high school when he began with Alice in Wonderland. He’s translated work by everyone from Virginia Woolf to Gabriel Garcia Márquez. In 2020 he set up his own publishing company, Tjihkkom Almmudahka, and has released a number of books, including Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

In his interview for NORLA, Tjihkkom explained his focus on translations into Lule Sámi:

I grew up with very little Sámi literature. There were only a handful of books available that everyone in my generation (and the generation before me) has read, and new releases were few and far between. I’ve heard people talk about the ‘Sámi agony’ of being required to read certain books regardless of whether you like them or not, just in order to be able to read something in Sámi. That’s less true nowadays than it once was, but there is no reliable producer of literature in Lule Sámi, meaning that books are still in chronically short supply. The need to translate books stemmed from the fact that there is no system that enables translation as predictable and steady work, so I took it upon myself, following in the footsteps of many language workers and translators before me.

For a fascinating exploration of his process in translating a language that was long mainly oral and only standardized in its current form in the 1980s, with “a huge number of words and expressions [that]lack good, well-established equivalents” see the full interview with this gifted linguist in English. 

 

  

 

 

Best Indie Historical Fiction of 2025: Reindeer of Chinese Gardens

Every December, Kirkus Reviews publishes a list of its choices for the one hundred best indie titles in different categories.  I'm really pleased to share the news that Reindeer of Chinese Gardens has been chosen as one of six best indie historical novels in 2025 by Kirkus Reviews. It was an honor earlier in the year to receive a starred review, but this is even better! I'm especially happy because much of the novel is set in Port Townsend and highlights the important histories of newcomers from different countries--Chinese, Norwegian, and Sámi.

 

 

Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra in the Swedish Cultural Canon

 

 Still from The Seventh Seal 

In late August this year the Swedish government published a 300 page document titled A Cultural Canon for Sweden, explaining its rationale and listing one hundred works of art, literature, architecture, and concepts like “Allemansrätten,” the right to explore and enjoy nature on both public and private lands. 

The list, which includes the paintings of Karin and Carl Larsson, the children's book by Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking, and the Seventh Seal by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, has its roots in an agreement between political parties, dating back to 2022, when the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing party, came in second in the popular vote. This party, once considered extreme, but now able to leverage concessions from the traditional parties, made it a priority to create a cultural canon that would distill Swedish culture into a list of works and activities decided upon by a committee appointed by the government. The underlying agenda, many felt, was to limit the concept of Swedishness and exclude the contributions from more recent arrivals to the country; others, especially on the right, felt it would establish criteria for assimilating immigrants by pointing out what they needed to understand about Sweden.

There was push-back from the cultural sector as well as from many Swedish citizens even before the cultural canon was published. A New York Times article from May 26, 2025, quoted Ida Ölmedal, the culture editor of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:

 Most of the culture world is against the idea of a canon. . . . It’s being used as a populist tool to point out what is Swedish and not, and to exclude some people from the concept of Swedishness.”

 “But even if it wasn’t nationalist, it would still be wrong for politicians to point out what is important culture,” Ölmedal added. “We have a proud tradition of the government financing culture without trying to govern culture — and this is an exception.”

Johan Turi

A friend of mine in Stockholm emailed me the report with its list of the 100 items of cultural importance; she pointed out at least one choice that would have been surprising twenty or thirty years ago. That is the inclusion of Johan Turi’s book, Muitalus sámiid birra, published first in a North Sámi-Danish edition in 1910. This title, known in English first as Turi’s Book of Lapland and in its current translation by Thomas A. DuBois as An Account of the Sámi, was first translated to Swedish in 1917 and reissued by a Swedish publisher in 1987. As far as I know, it has been out of print in Sweden for many years. The committee noted in their reason for the choice that “The oral Sami storytelling tradition has been easy to overlook in a writing-oriented culture such as Sweden's,” adding that, “This creates a multifaceted whole that transcends the sharp Western boundary between realism and magic.”

Today, Johan Turi is generally better known in Norway (he was born there) than in Sweden, where he lived in the area around Lake Torneträsk. But that wasn’t always the case. During his lifetime he was famous in Stockholm and around the world, visited by well-known figures of the time. On his eightieth birthday in 1934 he was presented with the king’s medal. Most of his archives are in Sweden, including Nordiska Museum in Stockholm, which holds his artwork and the original notebooks and manuscripts of Muitalus sámiid birra, which he was encouraged to work on by his friend, the Danish artist and ethnographer Emilie Demant Hatt. She  translated his work and acted as the managing editor of the eventual book in 1910. A government agency in Uppsala, the Institute for Language and Folklore (ISOF: Institutet för språk och folkminnen), which studies and collects materials concerning dialects and folklore in Sweden, has recently given more attention to Turi on its website (only in Swedish).

Johan Turi on his 80th birthday

Among the eight other authors of prose works listed in the report are Gosta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöf, Getting Married by August Strindberg, The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg, along with the greatest of all, Pippi Longstocking. These classics make the inclusion of Johan Turi’s remarkable book based on his life as a hunter, herder, artist and writer, even more interesting, especially since Turi takes a critical view of Sweden’s treatment of his people. The Swedish Democrats, with their emphasis on nationalism and barely disguised contempt for Jews, immigrants, and all minorities in Sweden, don’t generally have a positive view of past or contemporary Sámi culture.

So, in spite of the limits of the Cultural Canon of Sweden (as many have complained, “Where’s ABBA?!”), I can only say bravo to the inclusion of Muitalus sámiid birra. It is time.