#Makt Myrkranna

[doctorloup]

So I found an English translation of Icelandic Dracula

This shit is truly unhinged. I've just got to the point where Dracula is straight up saying it's unclassy for a noble Transylvanian to get mad when his hot cousin wife takes a himbo peasant lover because these things should be expected, you know?

Also apparently I still hear all written Dracula dialogue in @bullshotuk's voice in my head.

[emeraldspiral]

If you enjoyed those Dracula Daily emails last year, you ought to check out The Power of Darkness aka the Icelandic translation that's actually a rewrite translated back into English. It's a very interesting compare and contrast. It basically takes the first part of the original where Johnathan is trapped in Dracula's castle, and expands on that to make it the entire plot.

[bumps-in-the-night]

My girlfriend got me Icelandic Dracula, I’m so excited!!!

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

The speed with which scholars jumped to the conclusion that Stoker had a hand in writing Powers of Darkness really shows how desperate they are for proofs that Dracula actually is or might have been that exciting vampire story that they want it to be, and that there must be some catch about Bram Stoker making him and his book not what they seem. The same drive, I think, is behind other dubious theories taking root so quickly. What if Stoker had syphilis? What if he cheated on his wife with sex workers? What if he was a closeted gay man? What if he based Dracula on Vlad III? Or Henry Irving? Or Oscar Wilde? It's like people are terribly bored with the text and are desperately clinging to any opportunity to spice it up.

And the thing is, Powers of Darkness does in some ways feel like a better vampire story, even though it really tones down the presence of vampirism. One of the main problems I have with Stoker's novel is that it's just not very good as a vampire story, specifically. And I think a lot of vampire fans feel it too, often without being able to articulate it, and it's one of the main reasons why it underwent so many distortions in the public consciousness.

[stromuprisahat]

... As the maps they make in Transylvania cannot be compared to those created for the War Office* back home in England, I could not locate Castle Dracula on any of them. ... * ... In Dracula this sentence reads: “I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps.” In fact, the military maps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including Transylvania, were highly detailed, but not available to the public.

Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula (Bram Stoker, Valdimar Ásmundsson, Hans Corneel De Roos)

Let that sink in.

Military maps at the end of 19th century were highly detailed- therefore it took a lot of time for them to be made-, and they were "not available to the public". If an army won't let even their own unauthorised citizens view them, how likely is it that their loss would be simply handwaved, especially in middle of a conflict?!

There should've been an inquiry. None of the cartographers present should've left the camp, hell, why weren't they immediately taken into custody?!

I've written it before, and I'll keep asking- if Alina has such awful issues being discriminated to the point, when she wasn't even fed, how the hell is she allowed anywhere near the skiff after this? Her unit should be no. 1 suspect in sabotage of war effort, she herself volunteered to "help" right after the deed was discovered... how does suddenly nobody suspect her of being a Shu spy?!

[atundratoadstool]

Do you know what the most recent research has said on the whole Dracula/Mörkrets Makter/Makt Myrkranna authorship and authenticity?

As many people have no doubt noted, I'm a little behind both regarding Dracula Daily this year and as regards the state of Dracula scholarship in general. I have not, to my great regret, managed to finish any of the translations of Mörkrets Makter that have come out, and I'm unsure as to a lot of what has been done since its discovery. I know that a lot of De Roos' initial speculations regarding Stoker's involvement in Makt Myrkranna clearly haven't panned out following the discovery of the Swedish text, and while I've read Clive Bloom's own speculations that there is some link between Stoker and the enigmatic A---e, I didn't find any of his proposals so compelling that I was immediately convinced of them.

[cowplantblues]

Since I did Dracula Daily last year (obviously I am rereading this year though), I have decided to read all the unauthorized translations of Dracula this year for comparison. Right now I’m in the beginning of Makt Myrkranna which is the 1901 Icelandic translation which is so far not TOO far from the source material? Except this hot countess who has appeared to monologue at Tom Harker. I’m liking her though.

[luminouslumity]

I remember waiting and waiting for the translation to come out back in the day, only for the release date to keep getting delayed, so the story behind this book never fails to make me laugh!

[sparots]

As my two Dracula readings are progressing, the true fun starts.

On one hand we have Jonathan Harker, terrified of Dracula, convinced the count isn't dead and clinging to his one life line of his love for Mina.

On the other we have Thomas Harker who looks at every woman's chest and is not interested in his Wilma fiancee at all, and would rather look at portraits with an insane old man

[vickyvicarious]

TIL that the Icelandic/Swedish translation of Dracula 'Powers of Darkness' (which is actually more like a fanfiction in the end) has Jonathan Harker renamed into "Thomas Harker". This is decades before Nosferatu, and it wasn't known in Germany, yet Murnau renamed Jonathan into "Thomas Hutter".

Just thought that it was a funny two nickels situation!

Yeah, it's true! I never thought about them both being named Thomas instead. I mean, it made sense for Makt Myrkranna to rename Jonathan, since he really wasn't the same character anymore with all the 'license' taken. (It wasn't the same story, fully an adaptational spinoff rather than just a translation.) And of course Murnau had to rename everyone for don't-sue-me reasons (plus again, they aren't exactly the same characters... though a lot closer). But that IS an amusing coincidence!

...Hang on. I just went to go check my copy of Dracula In Istanbul* to see if he has a roughly equivalent name there too, but alas that is where our streak is broken. In that one he's Azmi Bey.

*1928 Turkish rewritten version where Dracula's specifically Vlad the Impaler and everyone else is mostly Turkish; an interesting read that among other more important things also includes Azmi specifically mentioning "my interest in sports and gymnastics will profit me" to make his wall-climbing skill sound more plausible, which somehow always cracks me up.

[flightyquinn]

Honestly, the best part of this remains where they stop just short of saying outright that the rewrite is better than the original.

I know this has been passed around before, but here it is again. It's worth a read, too.

[astriiformes]

I know at this point people are vaguely familiar with Makt Myrkranna, the Icelandic Dracula "translation" whose plot differs significantly from the original, but I finally got my hands on an annotated English version of it from a local used bookstore and I just want to say, for those who may not be aware. What the heck.

The author was apparently a big fan of the portion of the novel where Jonathan is trapped in Dracula's castle, because he made it significantly longer. But even more noticeably, once it's over, the novel abruptly transitions to third person, losing the epistolary format and then... just... speedruns (some of) the rest of the plot of Dracula like it doesn't even matter. Apparently the latter section goes through a 93% reduction in word count. It's so bizarre and also such terrible writing. I still can't believe this is real.

[mediaevalmusereads]

Powers of Darkness: the Lost Version of Dracula. By Bram Stoker and Valdimar Ásmundsson (trans. Hans Corneel de Roos). Overlook Duckworth, 2016.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: horror, 19th/20th century literature

Series: N/A

Summary: Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery: In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Ásmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker’s world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, “Powers of Darkness”), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was published in Iceland in 1901 but remained undiscovered outside of the country until 1986, when Dracula scholarship was astonished by the discovery of Stoker’s preface to the book. However, no one looked beyond the preface and deeper into Ásmundsson’s story.

In 2014, literary researcher Hans de Roos dove into the full text of Makt Myrkranna, only to discover that Ásmundsson hadn’t merely translated Dracula but had penned an entirely new version of the story, with all new characters and a totally re-worked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and perhaps even more suspenseful than Stoker’s Dracula. Incredibly, Makt Myrkranna has never been translated or even read outside of Iceland until now.

Powers of Darkness presents the first ever translation into English of Stoker and Ásmundsson’s Makt Myrkranna. With marginal annotations by de Roos providing readers with fascinating historical, cultural, and literary context; a foreword by Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew and bestselling author; and an afterword by Dracula scholar John Edgar Browning, Powers of Darkness will amaze and entertain legions of fans of Gothic literature, horror, and vampire fiction.

***Full review below.***

Content Warnings: blood, racism

Because this book is a late 19th/early 20th century work of literature, I'm going to structure my review a little different from normal.

I first became aware that there was an "Icelandic version" of Dracula a few years ago. Hearing that it contained a different plot, different characters, and various allusions to Norse-Icelandic folklore, I was excited to read it and compare it to Stoker's novel. And boy, did this story take me on a wild ride.

I won't spoil the plot for anyone who wishes to discover how different (or similar) it is to Dracula, so instead, I'll focus on the edition by de Roos.

Overall, I found this edition to be fairly accessible for a casual reader yet it involved enough supplementary materials to satisfy someone with a more academic interest in the work. de Roos's introduction clearly laid out the relationship between Dracula and Powers of Darkness, and I found the diagrams of the castle to be very helpful. As for the text itself, I don't read a lot of Icelandic, so I can't speak to the quality of the translation, but I appreciated the notes in which de Roos explains his choices.

I also really loved the page layouts in this volume. I love a book with big, beautiful margins that leave enough space for me to make my own annotations, and I appreciated that the "footnotes" weren't at the bottom of the page, but just to the right or left to the text so I didn't have to move my eyes very far. Granted, this layout did mean that there was a lot of wasted space, so this edition will probably best serve those who will be writing directly on the page.

Overall, I award this book 4 stars because it was a wacky reading experience, made all the more engaging by de Roos's introduction and informational annotations. The only thing preventing me from giving it a full 5 stars is my subjective enjoyment of the text itself; I found part 2 to be rather awkward, and the descriptions of the "ape-like" people reeked of 19th century racism (though de Roos points this out). Still, if you're interested in Dracula and its legacy, you'd do well to pick up this book, though if you're doing serious scholarship, you should probably find an Icelandic language version too.

[scarlet-came-back-wrong]

It's ironic that there is more a century and very little similarity between Powers of Darkness and The Carpathian Assignment, and yet both books spend a lot of time saying "hmm, I think cops would have sorted the whole Dracula thing out, yay cops." Which makes them way too self-congratulatory for my taste.

[stromuprisahat]

Literary demotion of Vlad Dracul

[olderthannetfic]

On the topic of translations that differ substantially from their (supposed) original source:

The whole Dracula → Mörkrets makter → Makt Myrkranna story is a rollercoaster. Is it an adaptation posing as a translation? Is is based on an early draft? Is is plagiarism? I of course have no clue but I like checking up on it every few years to see where the consensus is at now.

Wikipedia links for summary and because of their nice collection of sources.

--

Amazing.