“Moomins in English Dress”: British Translations of the Moomin Series

Abstract

A veritable Moomin mania is currently sweeping the United Kingdom, with a proliferation of soft toys, stationery, board books, and comic strips available in bookshops across the country. New translations of Tove Jansson’s work for an adult audience continue to emerge on a regular basis, alongside the recent appearances of Puffin gift-edition hardbacks of the Moomin novels and retranslations of her three Moomin picture books. The series is now an indisputably well-established global phenomenon, and the British translations have played a vital part in making these books widely available across the international literary community (Warburton, “Tretti ar pa Schildts”). This article presents a chronological and descriptive overview of the history of Jansson’s works in British translation, and as such falls into the field of publishing and book history. Little is known about the history of this publishing gamble by London-based firm Ernest Benn, who persevered unwaveringly in their commitment to the series at a time when Tove Jansson was an entirely unknown Finnish author with no established reputation or record of commercial success within the English-speaking publishing world. Conversely, such is her standing now in the United Kingdom that Jansson’s obituary featured prominently in major British broadsheet newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph on her death in June 2001. British researchers have shown little sustained interest in the world of Tove Jansson, despite the fact that the Moomin series has been in continual print since 1950 when the first title in English made its debut. Ironically, there has been slightly more academic interest demonstrated in the United States where the series has had an extremely patchy publishing history since the appearance of The Happy Moomins by Bobbs-Merrill in 1952, with the complete series only available for the first time in the 1970s as