The Wonderful Adventure of Nils Holgersson

Penguin’s publicity people are a self-obsessed and careless bunch, as we saw recently in the Kitty-in-Boots shambles.  Now they are at it again: ignorantly claiming in their puff for this book that it is by ‘Scandinavia’s Beatrix Potter’, puffing (justly) Coralie Bickford-Smith as the designer of the book’s binding, but not mentioning its illustrator anywhere, and claiming that ‘it’s high time for [this beloved children’s classic] to be well-known in the UK’. Such desperate efforts to convince may be typical in these days when marketing trumps all, but had the drafters of the puff had any knowledge of what they were talking about (or been readers of BfK) they would have known that a new translation of Nils by Peter Graves had been published in 2013 by Norvik Press (noticed here in issue 198). And if they had consulted that work, they might have been able to inform potential buyers that Lagerlðf’s story is complete in two volumes and not one.  Even then, it is difficult to thank them for what they see as their restorative efforts. Norgrén’s translation is by no means so fluent as Graves’s and – most culpably – his editors have chosen to lop off the last four chapters of the volume, hopelessly wrecking Lagerlöf’s beautifully managed conclusion.