Translated fiction has always had a place in the hearts of English readers. Victor Hugo and Fyodor Dostoyevsky spring to mind, titans of literature who wrote novels that also serve well as bricks, and more modern authors like Haruki Murakami and Han Kang have been spotlighted in every bookshop I enter. Like many other avid readers, it pains me that I will never be able to read all the books in the world, and like slightly fewer but even more avid readers, it equally pains me that I will never be able to read many works in their original language.

I have found that, when reading fiction originally written in a different language to my own, I enjoy the moments where the sentence structure or language used feels unfamiliar. I like the pause that comes after, the briefest second where I wonder if I read that right, if I skipped over a comma or a connective by accident, or if I put the emphasis on the wrong part of the sentence. I like reading it again and realising that no, I had not erred, but neither had the text. When you read a lot, sometimes the words and sentences and paragraphs can feel repetitive, predictable. The beauty of translated fiction is that it is not predictable. It is English, but still not quite your language. Martin Birck’s Youth is beautiful in this way. Of course, a Swede may point out that it is all perfectly normal, and that it’s English that is odd. Alas, I cannot speak or read Swedish, therefore I must rely on the translators who work hard to ensure the feeling of a story is not lost in trying to communicate the meaning, and enjoy the oddness as I perceive it.

Martin Birck’s Youth, written by renowned Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg and published in 1901, is a novella centred around the years of Martin Birck up to the age of thirty. It is an introspective, calmly told story, split into three acts featuring three stages of Martin’s life: his childhood and teen years, his entrance into adulthood and early twenties, and his experience as a thirty-year-old who’s shed his youthful vigour.

Act One, titled ‘The Old Street’, opens with apple-picking. Quaint, simple, innocent. There are children of all ages and adults of all ages, and Söderberg provides snapshots into Martin’s childhood which are full of sunshine, piano-playing, and family time. The blunt hits of reality – a family member commits suicide, Martin is told he will soon be starting school for the first time – gradually accumulate up to the point he is growing up, and almost a man. These things which hold such importance to a child – his jumping jacks toy, for example – cease their relevance to Martin, who becomes overwhelmed with learning. School, exams, and playground politics turn him into a man; those teen years are bloody and confusing, featuring fistfights with the local rowdies and a creeping doubt for God and faith that distress his poor mother.

Söderberg’s message with Martin’s unexpected maturity is that the world is largely not what you want it to be. If childhood is apple-picking and mum playing piano when you come home on a sunny afternoon, then adulthood is the apples turning rotten and the piano turning into a dusty ornament. If childhood is life, adulthood is death. Or so Martin seems to feel.

Act Two is titled ‘The White Cap’, and the reader meets Martin as he finishes school and steps out into the world as an adult. Martin’s longing to be a poet drives his thoughts, but his actions are driven by the necessity of earning a living, so he takes up a repetitive job checking ledgers in a government office. It is in this act that Söderberg pushes Martin’s core feeling to the forefront: the strain of real life against the strain of dreaming. Martin’s heart is in poetry, in the beauty of women, but he hates everything he writes and he only sleeps with prostitutes, and has no motivation to have a family and career-oriented life  his peers choose. Many artists can relate to this struggle – hopefully without the visits to prostitutes – for it is a struggle a person of little means inevitably experiences. Martin’s life becomes stagnant, torn as he is between reality and dreams, and nothing changes while the years pass by.

In Act Three, titled ‘The Winter Night’, Martin is thirty. He works the same job, living in a small apartment with a woman who he loves but is not married to. She works for a living and they are relatively happy together. I say relatively, for there are many unspoken stipulations of their agreement. They will not marry, because Martin is too poor to afford a ring or to provide the life expected for a husband and wife.  Therefore, every time they sleep together there is a risk  she could get pregnant out of wedlock. Söderberg allows the reader a glimpse into the woman’s pain, worries, and her immense shame surrounding sexual intimacy stemming from  the way she was raised, and contrasts this to Martin’s upbringing,  which taught him to perceive sex as a victory. They attend the theatre together in secret, hiding behind a screen, listening to rather than witnessing the tragedy of Hamlet unfold on stage. A film of shame covers their relationship, and yet they love each other. It may not be the fresh-faced, innocent love Martin had imagined when he looked at the beautiful young ladies walking past him on the street, but it is real and poignant; “he was drinking in everything… from this one spring”¹.

Martin’s life could easily be perceived as one of tragedy; a young boy, full of hope for his future, is slowly broken down by nihilism. Maturity leads to losing his faith in Christian God, his love for poetry, and his romanticisation of the world around him. Söderberg keenly captures an artist’s despair when confronted with life, and offers no comfort to the reader or an answer to happiness. And yet, from the very first chapter of this novella, Martin is a boy who does not mind being on the edge of things. He feels inherently separate from other people - alone. It’s another curse for an artist, perhaps, or Martin is simply one of many people who cannot align themselves with the traditional path society lays out before them. Time stands still for Martin and there is no disputing that the weight of longing for a more beautiful reality  wears him down. And yet, in the end, he doesn’t stand alone at the edge.