Paul Britten Austin (April 5, 1922 – July 25, 2005[1]) was an English author, translator, broadcaster, administrator, and scholar of Swedish literature. He was born in Dawlish, South Devon, England. He was educated at Winchester College. In 1951, he married novelist Margareta Bergman, sister of film director Ingmar Bergman; they lived in Stockholm, where he worked for Radio Sweden as head of English-language broadcasting. He directed the Swedish Tourist Office in London between 1957 and 1968, at the same time working on his book on Carl Michael Bellman.
His parents were the writers Frederick B.A. King and Mildred King. Britten was employed by Swedish Radio's international investment program from 1948 to 1957 and at the Swedish Tourist Association's office in London from 1957 to 1968.[2]
Contents |
Paul Britten Austin is best known for his work on Sweden’s bard, eighteenth century singer and poet Carl Michael Bellman - the first full biography of Bellman in any language, and for his fine translations of some sixty works of famous Swedish writers into English. Britten Austin was awarded the North Star for the dissemination of Swedish literature in English translation. The Swedish Academy awarded Britten Austin their special prize for his Bellman book, and its interpretation prize in 1979.
In the Foreword to his life of Bellman, Britten Austin explains: "This book was born on the spur of a moment - the moment when I realised that .. there is not, and apparently never has been, a book on Bellman in English. What, the greatest of all song-writers, in any language, unknown? Such a gap in general knowledge, I felt, had to be immediately repaired; and although the draughty and unsprung carriages of British Railways, commuting on 'staggering wheel' between Victoria and Haywards Heath, are certainly not the best place to cudgel one's brain for rhymes or to elucidate eighteenth-century Swedish texts, the work was immediately put in hand."[3]
Britten Austin argues that Bellman is unique in being a great poet, in setting all his work to music, and in being "as great on the page as when he is sung". He comments on the extreme difficulty of making poetry accessible in another language. Verse translation into the original metre is necessary, he argues, "because the virtuosity of Bellman's verse-structures, wedding his poems to their melodies, is itself the source of much of their dramatic effect." Britten Austin saw Bellman as an "infinitely loveable and brilliant genius of the Rococo, whose earthy humanity, not unlike Burns', blends so exquisitely with the graces of his artificial age."[4] It is clear that Britten Austin admired and sought in his own way to emulate the many-talented Bellman.
Alongside his career and his other writings, Britten Austin spent 25 years working on his detailed three-volume eyewitness-only account of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. He explains he is "profoundly skeptical of historians." He felt "the more readable they are, the less historically reliable", so instead he chose "to invent nothing, hardly even a phrase" but instead to "resurrect them - in their own words". Britten Austin takes "160 people of the many thousands who made up the Grande Armée". "I thought, and without any impertinent comments of my own (after all I wasn't there), I might be able to reconstitute, as authentically as ever can be done, six months of vanished time." To achieve this "Naturally I have had to take my thousands of vivid fragments, longer or shorter, snip them and put them together in what I came to think of as a 'marching order', and generally help the reader not to go astray." The result is a uniquely detailed report from the front.[5]
The Life and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman, Genius of the Swedish Rococo. Allhem, Malmö; American-Scandinavian Foundation, New York; 1967.
1812: Napoleon's Invasion of Russia. Greenhill Books, 2000. (Originally published in three volumes: The March on Moscow, Napoleon in Moscow, The Great Retreat.)
Gustaf Fröding: His Life and Poetry. 1986.
On Being Swedish: Reflections Towards a Better Understanding of the Swedish Character. 1968.
The Swedes: How They Live and Work.
The Organ Maker's Wife, (a novel), 1981.
The Locked Room, by Sjöwall and Wahlöö (Original title: Det slutna rummet). Pantheon Books, 1973.
Doctor Glas, by Hjalmar Söderberg. Little, Brown and Co., 1963. Reissued with introduction by Margaret Atwood, Harvill, 2003.
Autobiography of Evert Taube, I Come From a Raging Sea (Original title: Jag kommer av ett brusand' hav). 1967.
Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman, By Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima. Simon and Schuster, 1973.
A History of the Swedish People, by Vilhelm Moberg. Two volumes. 2005.