The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I took this one on a recent extended family vacation, thinking it would provide an entertaining distraction when needed. Several of my relatives, upon seeing the book in my hand, commented on how much they had liked it, and how “good” it was.

It was not good.

It’s fine, I guess. But I suspect that it suffers from a number of translation errors, seeing how it was first published in Swedish and under an entirely different title -- Men Who Hate Women.

Here’s my favorite.

“Yes,” Blomkvist said without hesitation. “Martin was dafter than a syphilitic polecat -- where do I get these metaphors from? -- but he confessed to all the crimes he had committed.”

Dafter than a syphilitic polecat. At first, I thought that perhaps that was something like a Swedish idiom -- something that made some kind of sense in that original language and its cultural context -- but which had no accurate or meaningful English translation. You know something like “he’s batting a thousand” translated into a language without baseball as its cultural content. Because “dafter than a syphilitic polecat” doesn’t mean anything in English, at least it doesn’t mean anything that any random group of English speakers could agree on.

But then there’s that parenthetical comment. Where do I get these metaphors from? Parenthetical but not in parentheses, simply set off with em dashes, as if the character actually said these words out loud, bracketed by a pair of vocal pauses. Maybe he did? The character is, of course, an author, and evidently based on Stieg Larsson himself. Therefore this seems to me like another of those tiresome situations in which an author is writing not to impress a reader but, frankly, to impress himself. 

So, it’s not a translation issue. It’s just bad writing.

And then there’s this:

Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor -- there had been no time for any fine polishing -- but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice.

This, of course, is not narratively written about the book the reader is reading, it is written about the book that Blomkvist ends that book by writing, but it might as well have been written about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, since it seems that sum that work up pretty well.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.