Self-Translation and Transnational Strategy: The Case of Strindberg’s French Poem Battant les rues toute la journée…

Abstract

Between autumn 1883 and the first days of 1884 August Strindberg, at the beginning of his first long stay abroad (1883–89), wrote the long poem _Sömngångarnätter på vakna dagar_ (Sleepwalking Nights in Broad Daylight), published in 1884. The poem is based on a structural interaction between ‘real’ French and Parisian spaces, where the protagonist and narrator is located at present, and ‘imagined’ Stockholm places loaded with memories, controversies and nostalgia. Later in 1884 the writer would also publish his first texts directly written in French, with the intention of establishing himself as a European, transnational writer, thus gaining symbolic capital he could use in the Nordic and Swedish literary field. My article focuses on a hitherto unpublished fragment of a poem written in French by Strindberg, proposes a diplomatic transcription of it, and considers it within the above-mentioned context. Through a comparison with the Swedish text, the French fragment is assessed as a self-translation of the beginning of the third sequence of _Sömngångarnätter på vakna dagar_, and it is seen as a part of Strindberg’s wider transnational project through French, which involved three different strategies in the years to come: writing original works directly in French; having Swedish original works translated by others; and – as in the case discussed in this article – providing self-translations.