#valdimar asmundsson

[only-when-i-write]

The Icelandic translation of Dracula is more like a free interpretation of the story. The Count doesn’t share his place with three hungry vampire girls for one. Instead he, well, kind of practiced human sacrifices with friends underground.

»She was dead. The crowd went berserk upon seeing the blood flow from the wound. The Count went to the girls body, dipped his hands in the blood, and splattered it all over himself.«

So, choose your fighter I guess. The child stealing Count from »Dracula« who murders women via wolves OR the bathing in blood for fun and keeping scared girls in his castle Count from »Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness)«

They are both equally charming in an ultimate villain kind of way.

[weirdpolis]

@threecandleslit tag: #wait what happened with the icelandic translation

Ah, yes. I've read this once as a trivia on a tumblr post, but alas profesor Van Helsing would not have been pleased with me for not doing more research, therefore allow me do some googling...

It appears that, Dracula was first published in Iceland in 1901 as Makt Myrkranna (Powers of Darkness) translated by Valdimar Asmundsson. For a long time no one bothered to compare the Icelandic text with the Original, until in 2014 Hans Corneel de Roos did so, and it turns they differ significantly.

As he noted, the text written by Asmundsson "was shorter and had different structure, many of the characters had different names. There was more emphasis on sexuality than in the English version. It's written in more concise, punchy style, and each scene adds progress to the plot"

There are new characters added to the story, some have changed backstories, some others end up with different fate. The narrative style switches from epistolary to omniscient narrator. Harker's stay at Dracula castle takes up like 80% of the entire novel lenght, and he has more "adventures" there, etc.

Here's the Wikipedia entry, which delves deeper into the differencies, if you fancy checking it so.

Icelandic version has been translated back onto English, and is now available as "Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula" by Valdimar Asmundsson and Bram Stoker. (Goodreads link)

Now, shall we also talk about the Swedish translation from 1899 which appeared as a serial in a newspaper... (Wikipedia link)

The further we get in the Dracula Daily, and the more I realize all of the discrepancies between the Original Text and every single one of its adaptations, the more I think there must be some weird vampire quirk at work here. Some spell, or a curse, that prevents the faithfull translation of the orignal story. Some combination of "Vampires don't have reflections in the mirrors, and their likeness cannot be captured on film or photograph" and "victims cannot speak directly about the Vampire because they are put under their spell or under trance". I have not yet figured out all the details of how this peculiar vampire quirk works, and wheter the wild mistranslation of the "Dracula" onto Islandic language also occured under this spell, but you must agree with me, that it's weird it happened this many times.

[mediaevalmusereads]

2023 Reading Wrap-Up: the Good, the Bad, and the Meh

Below is a list of books that I read in 2023. I’ve sorted them into 3 categories: the good (books I loved), the bad (books I didn’t like), and the meh (books I thought were just ok). Other than these categories, the books aren’t listed in any special order or ranking.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

The Good

The Beautifu Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Civilizations by Laurent Binet

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel

Baking Yesteryear by B. Dylan Hollis

Powers of Darkness by Valdimar Asmundsson

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

Say Yes to the Marquess by Tessa Dare

Romancing the Duke by Tessa Dare

A Night to Surrender by Tessa Dare

The Square of Sevens by Laura Robinson-Shepherd

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn

Unlocked by Courtney Milan

Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

If We Were Villains by ML Rio

Under the Eye of Power by Colin Dickey

Proof By Seduction by Courtney Milan

Our Hideous Progeny by CE McGill

Bea Wulf by Zach Weinersmith

Hen Fever by Olivia Waite

The Ruin of Gabriel Ashleigh by KJ Charles

Lord Dashwood Missed Out by Tessa Dare

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa Dare

A Lady by Midnight by Tessa Dare

A Rogue's Rules for Seduction by Eva Leigh

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Perfume by Patrick Suskind

Affective Medievalism by Thomas Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg

A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

Kent State by Derf Backderf

Anti-Christ by Mernard McGinn

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The Meh

The Nothing Man by Katherine Ryan Howard

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

A Christmas Bride by Mary Balogh

A True Account by Katherine Howe

The Disenchantment by Celia Bell

Hazardous Spirits by Anbara Salam

The Wallflower Wager by Tessa Dare

Penguin's Poems for Love by Laura Barber

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

Marry Me By Midnight by Felicia Grossman

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Trial By Desire by Courtney Milan

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin

Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

Beauty and the Blacksmith by Tessa Dare

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Weyward by Emilia Hart

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio de Maria

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sara MacLean

How the Wallflower Was Won by Eva Leigh

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

Erotic Medievalisms by Elan Justice Pavlinich

Hit Me With Your Best Scot by Suzanne Enoch

Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins

Prize for the Fire by Rilla Askew

Bisclavret by KL Noone

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay

A Natural History of the Romance Novel by Pamela Regis

The Bad

A Love By Design by Elizabeth Everett

Mr. Malcolm's List by Suzanne Allain

A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Finding Meaning by David Kessler

Do You Want to Start a Scandal by Tessa Dare

The Prince of Prohibition by Marilyn Marks

The Heiress Hunt by Joanna Shupe

The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie by Jennifer Ashley

[pendulum-motion]

i have started reading powers of darkness, that one book that is the result of when valdimar asmundsson was asked to translate dracula to icelandic but just decided to do his own thing instead (which bram stoker might have known and approved of??)

it has been a little while since i properly read dracula for comparison; please excuse that.

so. important events and changes in rough chronological order. like, for posterity.

jonathan’s name is now thomas. there is no real reason for the change but it helps distinguish between the two, i guess.

thomas is notably more aware of the story he’s in than jonathan was. he keeps thinking that the count frightens him and is “not entirely sane” and straight-up realizes that drac’s going for the throat-chomp during the whole mirror thing. he still doesn’t do anything about it though. that wouldn’t be very lawyerly.

wilhelmina has been shortened to ‘wilma’ instead of ‘mina’.

the paprika hendl has been moved from the town to dracula’s castle, and causes absolutely no queer dreams.

additional castle residents have been given some more significant roles. the newly added staff have not done much, but one of the lady vamps showed up for a little chat. thomas was really into it.

apparently the lady vamp isn’t willing to put in even a little bit of effort to disguise her vampiness or identity, so drac has to make up a story about how she’s just role-playing her own great-grandmother. for fun.

there are now significantly more bat scenes. they are just showing up and hanging out. this is important because it shows us that

thomas HATES bats. this seemed reasonable at first because sure, they’re wild animals, you’d want them to stay out of the house, but then he turns to dracula, looks the count dead in the eye, and says that the air was “swarming with bats, the most disgusting creatures I know”, and that “one of these vile things managed to get in through the window”. sick burn.

dracula fires back by calling the common people “the worst earthworms, who have only lived a day’s life” and “parasites [that] lack guts”.

that’s as far as i got. more epic put-downs to come, i guess.

[motsimages]

Just so you know: there is an Icelandic version of Dracula that is NOT like the original Dracula. It is supposedly a translation, but it is actually kind of fanfiction?

So, like there was this guy, Valdimar, who got his Sweedish newspapers by ship, and translated things from them. One of the things he translated was the Dracula episodes. Until he stopped receiving them and then he published only small abstract things of what happened in London.

The Sweedish version has just been found and is been translated into English because the Icelandic, once translated into English, was a very big what the fuck. First, because it is a mess. Second, because it's not the same story. But third: because it actually fits some first drafts of Bram's Dracula.

People in Iceland only knew of their version up until recently. All this was discovered, probably, because two researchers of Dracula spoke about the novel only to realise they were different novels. They are now all intrigued as to how a Sweedish newspaper got the rights for a book that clearly was not the final published version.

The Icelandic version is called The Powers of Darkness, the translator is Valdimar Asmundsson. It has been translated into English, and as far as I know, into Spanish too. It is not good, but it is so much fun.

[atundratoadstool]

A Brief Guide to Early Literary Dracula AUs

One of the coolest things about being a Dracula fan in the 2010s is all the recent publication of materials shedding light on all of the really bonkers alternate Draculas that either nearly became Dracula itself or spun off from the original 1897 text. So yeah... here’s a rundown of the three weird psuedo-canonical AUs that this fin de siecle vampire novel just sort of... comes with.

Stoker's Notes/Typescript/"Dracula's Guest"

Bram's notes for Dracula indicate that he worked on the novel for at least seven years, that it went through many substantial changes in its plot and cast, and that he had a lot of completely metal ideas that either fate, his editors, or his slender grip on good taste did not permit to appear in the final novel. Some of these things appear in fragmentary form in the typescript for Dracula. Some of them got recycled into a short story later published as "Dracula's Guest." Some of them only appear scrawled in Stoker's atrocious handwriting on the various papers collected at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia.

Highlights:

Things initially were going to take place in Styria and the villain's name was going to be Count Wampyr.

Arthur doesn't exist and Jack/Lucy is canon.

Jonathan Harker has a "shrewd, skeptical sister."

There's a third heroine named Kate Reed (or Kate Lee) who is school chums with Lucy and Mina and apparently helps to spread the flow of gossip about Lucy and her curly-hair beau going to St. James concerts.

There's a painter named Francis who probably discovers that the Count (in addition to having no reflection and showing up as a skeleton in photographs) cannot even be painted.

Other unused characters include a philosophic historian, a paranormal investigator, and a pair of deaf/mute servants in the Count's employ.

The Count has a secret chamber where everything is blood red, and it's apparently really scary.

Quincey might be a professional inventor named Brutus Marix. He also might go to Transylvania in the middle of the book. Also, he just might SAVE THE DAY DURING THE FINAL BATTLE BY OPENING FIRE WITH AN EARLY FORERUNNER TO THE MACHINE GUN.

There appear to have been werewolves planned.

Jack has a spooky party at his house where everyone has to tell a ghost story like they're living it up at the Villa Diodati. Dracula shows up and is the thirteenth guest at this super goth affair and presumably tells the spookiest story of all.

Jonathan spends three chapters/100 pages doing all sorts of crazy stuff that happens before what we now think of a Chapter 1 of Dracula. These shenanigans include encountering the Count pretending to be dead in a Munich leichenhaus, going to see a performance of The Flying Dutchman, and doing all that incredibly spooky stuff in "Dracula's Guest" where he has adventures with wolf friends on Walpurgisnacht.

Castle Dracula sinks into the earth in a VOLCANIC EXPLOSION after Dracula dies.

There is also mention of Dracula FLYING out of his coffin into the air during the final confrontation and the Brides getting taken out by chance BOLTS OF LIGHTNING. 

Seriously. We have legitimate evidence that were we but in the true and righteous timeline, Dracula would have ended with lightning bolts and machine guns going off in an aerial vampire battle before a volcano explodes.

Makt Myrkranna (AKA Powers of Darkness AKA Icelandic Bootleg Porno Dracula)

So a few years after Dracula was published, it appears that somebody in Sweden ripped it off, made it much much more Hammer Horror, and published it as their own thing called Mörkrets Makter (Powers of Darkness). Then, after that, Valdimar Ásmundsson in Iceland ripped that off and republished it as his own thing called Makt Myrkranna (...also Powers of Darkness). This latter work just got translated into English in 2017, and there's been intense speculation as to whether or not whomever originally wrote this thing had anything to do with Bram Stoker and his early drafts for the novel, given that it is headed by a preface that is controversially claimed to have been written by Bram, himself. 

Highlights:

The first four chapters of the book (the ones everyone tends to really like) are now massively massively expanded, and Jonathan Harker (now named Thomas) gets to spend much more time exploring the castle, trying to escape, having the Count tell him creepy sexual anecdotes, and watching busty women get murdered.

The three women in the castle have been condensed into one woman, who seems to be the Count's vampiric, incesty bride/cousin/whatever and whose death involved her being locked in a bedroom with her lover until he went mad and threw himself out a window.

Instead of finding a secret room of boxes with dirt in them, Jonathan Thomas finds a secret ritual orgymurder room where primordial ape men engage in forbidden revels while the Count bites hypnotized virgins to death.

Everything that is not in the massively expanded castle section is barely sketched out summaries of lots and lots of wacky things happening with no real explanation (apparently these portions were treated with more detail in at least one version of Mörkrets Makter, but that's not available in English yet).

Lucy (now Lucia) becomes a vampire, but she is never staked, and her plot is never really resolved. Arthur, convinced she is alive after people watch her get back up from being dead, orders that people leave out some blankets and snacks for her (very considerate), and then that thread just sort of ends.

Renfield doesn't exist. Jack sort of makes up for this gap in the novel's tragically dead madmen quota by going mad and dying himself.

Said going mad and dying is facilitated by him attending one two many freaky mesmerism parties at Carfax with the Count's posse of debauched, anarchist, international conspirator, orgymurder cultist noblemen. 

Then like... a mysterious violinist shows up at his asylum and the next thing you know, the Count & Co. have taken over the joint, Quincey has to pretend to go crazy to infiltrate, and the entire place burns down. 

There is actually some sort of police investigation into all of the many many many illegal things going on. After Van Helsing knifes Dracula to death, Quincey takes the fall for him, but the investigators don't end up taking him to trial.

Kazıklı Voyvoda (AKA Impaling Voivode AKA Dracula in Istanbul AKA Turkish Nationalist Propaganda Bootleg Dracula)

Taking a cue from Ásmundsson and whomever the Mörkrets Makter guy is (or not...), Turkish author Ali Rıza Seyfi wrote his own pirated version of Dracula and published it as his own work in 1928. Unlike the Makt Mykrannaverse, the world of Kazıklı Voyvoda is fairly faithful to the original text... save that the action is transposed from London to Istanbul, the events of the story now postdates the Turkish War of Independence, and the entire cast (Dracula excepted) is now very Turkish and very fond of waxing eloquent about their immense national pride in being very Turkish.

Highlights:

Dracula is explicitly identified as being Vlad III, and he is a marauding terrible foreign menace from the exotic West, persecuting the good Eastern folk of Istanbul just as he historically persecuted and impaled their ancestors before them. Anyone who has ever read and enjoyed any academic essay on Dracula and the colonial gaze may begin to salivate uncontrollably.

Forty-seven years before Salem’s Lot, Seyfi establishes that pretty much any religious symbol works on a vampire if you believe in it, and everyone throughout the text waves around charms made out of suras of the Koran and such to great effect.

Azmi (Jonathan) gets the tiniest scraps of expanded backstory in which we learn about his childhood predisposition towards fainting and the existence of his pious mother who took him to saints’ shrines in the hopes he might faint less.

Güzin (Mina) is no longer one of Dracula’s victims (unlike in the 1953 film adaptation of this book). She is, however, still an incredibly hardcore researcher nerd who makes sure to tell her fiance all sorts of cool Vlad III history facts.

Turan (Arthur), Afif (Jack), and Özdemir (Quincey) all served together during the war and became bros that way instead of just being three guys who went on crazy globetrotting adventures together before all independently deciding to propose to the same girl. 

Resuhȋ (Van Helsing) makes sure to drop a line reminding everyone of that time they all did blood tests and found out their blood types are compatible... you know... just in case anybody in this post-blood-typing era might be doing a bunch of blood transfusions and worrying about fatal hemolytic reactions.

[housedraculesti]

Author: Bram Stoker; Valdimar Asamundsson Title: Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula Series: - Genre: Horror Literature, Gothic Literature Pages: 320 Rate: 4/5 | Goodreads

I set myself a small but not easy task. I want to read one book of Dracula every month this year. And I've started this challenge real well too, with, seemingly, the lost version of Bram Stoker's "Dracula". For he had to edit and censor his for England of those times. But he didn't have to send the edited version to every other publisher abroad, apparently. So, places like Iceland got something different from what our copies might be.

About: The book is not ground-breakingly different. The essence is exactly the same. Except that here, after a very, very long debate by translators and whoever else at the start, we get different proportions, and slightly differently toned characters. For instance, while we had a fairly short visit at Dracula's castle, or at least a short description, for it wasn't all that short for Harker, and then a longer story of the hunt for Dracula in England, here we got the opposite. Most of the book is purely Harker roaming about Dracula's castle, realizing he's a prisoner, and that he really, really likes Dracula's niece. The rest of the book is told very quickly, in meager little chapters, and not in the already familiar diary form. As for differences in characters, Dracula is a bit more blunt, and fairly more sexual being, not at all timid with his words or compliments. Others got some alterations too, but due to lack of interaction with them, since there virtually was no continuation after Harker fled the castle, I've nothing to tell other than what translators at the beginning told.

Mine: At the start of the book the translators will tell you high and mighty what this book is supposed to be, how it's different, how different are the characters, their interactions among themselves. After a long debate, they come to a conclusion that this is: a) a rewriting by Icelandic translator; b) a blessed by Stoker rewriting by Icelandic translator; c) the original that Bram Stoker wrote, but couldn't publish. In my humble opinion, they spoke too much to serve us what they served. If this is not word-to-word translation, and is instead an abbreviation, for I honestly tell you, at the end we're told "and then Dracula came, roamed around, and those guys killed him" rephrasing, then I'm more than a little bit upset. And then, if it is an uncut gem, fully translated book, then it is marvelously bad. Either way, it seems, I'm not very happy.

If you like Dracula the way I do, both the historical figure who might have inspired Stoker, and the myth, the legend, Count Dracula the Vampire, then you should read this book, no matter what. And Dacre Stoker's works too, mostly for his own speeches in them. This is also the reason I give this book a 4 out of 5, no less. For otherwise, if you are not a fan, this is not worth that high of a score, no.

[theshadowbastard]

I want to read this

[future-crab]

It occurred to me recently that the person who translated Powers of Darkness (the rogue Icelandic translation of Dracula) back into English had the opportunity to be the funniest person alive.

[music-movies-mayhem]

In an alternate timeline tumblr users just recently finished a chronological reading of Valdimar Asmundsson's seminal classic Powers of Darkness

[teacuphuman09]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/19/icelandic-dracula-bram-stoker-translator-powers-of-darkness-valdimir-asmundsson-makt-myrkranna

[fifth-dimensional]

[Image description: Tweet by ihmerst that says, “Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic and it took over 100 years for anyone to point out he just made a fanfic-rewrite of what he wanted the story to be.”

The tweet is followed by a photo of a page of a book, which says, “In 1901 Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Ásmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna, this Icelandic version was unnoticed outside the country until 1986, when Dracula scholars discovered Stoker’s original preface to the book. It was not until 2014, however, that noted Dracula scholar Hans Corneel de Roos realized that Ásmundsson hadn’t merely translated Dracula but had, rather, penned an entirely new version of the story, with some all-new characters and a re-worked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and rivals the original in terms of suspense. Powers of Darkness marks the first ever translation into English of Makt Myrkranna.” End description.]

Well now I DEFINITELY need to learn Icelandic.

[chrisbrecheenwritingaboutwriting]

Transcription

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Image: a tweet containing a photograph of a page of a book

Rio @ Re:Mind

@ihmerst

Someone translated Dracula into Icelandic and it took over 100 years for anyone to point out he just made a fanfic-rewrite of what he wanted the story to be.

[Photograph of a page of a book, the introduction]

In 1901 Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar

Asmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker's Omo classic novel, Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna, this Icelandic version was unnoticed outside the country until 1986, when Dracula scholars discovered Stoker's original preface to the book. It was not until 2014, however, that noted Dracula scholar Hans Corneel de Roos realized that Ásmundsson hadn't merely translated Dracula but had, rather, penned an entirely new version of the story, with some all-new characters and a re-worked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and rivals the original in terms of suspense.

Powers of Darkness marks the first ever translation into English of Makt Myrkranna. This volume

[themstheferatus]

Me trying to figure out how valdimar asmundsson is gonna pull this all together in 20 minutes

[guillermoloren]

"Los poderes de la oscuridad", de Bram Stoker y Valdimar Asmundsson

“Los poderes de la oscuridad”, de Bram Stoker y Valdimar Asmundsson

«La versión perdida de Drácula, que Bram Stoker reescribió con el primer traductor de la obra y a la vez editor en Islandia.» .

El pasado lunes, 20 de noviembre reseñé uno de los libros más entretenidos que he leído últimamente. Me refiero a Vampiros, una recopilación excelente en edición de Rosa Samper y Óscar Sáenz. Pues bien, esta vez le toca el turno al vampiro más conocido, el creado por Bra…

[motsimages]

Bf has asked me to tell you some vital context about why Dracula goes down a wall like a lizard out of the blue and I comply because it relates to the Icelandic Dracula (our favourite kind of Dracula).

So... In the version you all know and love, he just goes down a wall because why the fuck not. He doesn't seem to be going anywhere or doing anything other than just using a wall instead of the stairs. I guess it is a scene to add on the disturbing nature of Dracula but that is it.

However, if we read the Icelandic translation of the Sweedish version that seems to be based of original drafts by Bram Stoker (I know, a mouthful all this), we know why he does that, where is he going and what is his plan.

First of all, the castle seem to have some kind of ledge, so while it is weird that he uses the wall to move, it's less weird.

Second: he has stolen Thomas Harker's* clothes and Thomas's documents. Thomas doesn't know this yet, but he will discover it (too late, too clumsily because Thomas, the Icelandic Jonathan, is a complete idiot, you just can't imagine how silly he is).

His plan, as we learn later, is to dress up as Thomas (and he goes down the wall wearing Tom's clothes), go to places dress as him, pretending to be him, along with a gang (of gypsies, if I'm not mistaken, this version is also the burial place of sensitivity readers for so many things) so that whatever trouble (theft and murder mainly) they cause is placed on Thomas's head.

Not only there are 3 letters as proof that he left indeed and was in different places but people would have seen someone looking like Thomasdoing things in said places.

In the Icelandic version this is a complete mess, but it is the kind of foreshadowing/discovery that, when well written, makes you shit your pants. It's not the case, though.

*As you may have guessed, Jonathan in the Icelandic version is called Thomas