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| 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.
