by Hans De Roos
Twain, 1893 Twain, Mark (Clemens Langhorn). The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories. London: Chatto & Windus, 1893. Here quoted from the first Canadian edition: Toronto: The Musson Book Company Ltd, n.d.
Twain/Fishkin, 2006 Twain, Mark (Clemens Langhorn). Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts, edited by Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. California University Press, 2006.
Twain/Leary, 1969 Leary, Lewis, ed. Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893-1909. California University Press, 1969.
Warren, 2003 Warren, Louis. Buffalo Bill Meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker and the Wild West Roots of the Vampire Myth. Presentation at Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 2003.
Warren, 2005 Warren, Louis. Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
“Waters,” 1863 “Waters.” Autobiography of an English Detective. London: Maxwell, 1863.
West, 1991 West, Trevor. The Bold Collegians: The Development of Sport in Trinity College, Dublin. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991.
ONLINE SOURCES
Finishing this translation and research project within a year would not have been possible without the help of the Internet. This goes for the textual basis itself—the facsimiles of Fjallkonan and the purchase of copies of the first edition—as well as for the initial communication with the National and University Library of Iceland, the Reykjavik City Library, with Ásgeir Jónsson and the various Icelandic archives I consulted. The same applies for the cooperation with my co-authors Dacre Stoker and John Edgar Browning in the US, with my co-editor Lounette Loubser in South Africa and with all Icelandic volunteers who participated in this network—parts of the text being worked on in Munich, Bremen, New York, Reykjavik and Paris, in Denmark and Saudi Arabia simultaneously. Furthermore, the use of online dictionaries—snara.is, ordabók.is, dict.cc, en.wiktionary.org, leo.org—and the inflection database of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies considerably sped up the translation process. For all kinds of background questions, I not only consulted Wikipedia—which cannot be praised enough—but also dozens of other web pages, dealing with such various subjects such as the glass-harmonica, Napoleon’s love letters, Scandinavian folklore, the Whitechapel murders, daylight hours in Transylvania and Iceland, political riots, evolution theory, aristocratic titles, lunar phases, etc. In order not to inflate the footnotes any further, I have abstained from quoting sources for every snippet of information. Should any of this information prove to be inaccurate, the responsibility remains with me.
1 McNally and Florescu, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces (1989), p 233, and In Search of Dracula (revised edition, 1994), p. 85.
2 The Westminster Review vol 81, 1864, pg 117.
3 Magnússon, The Saga Library. Vol. VI, 1905, p. ix.
1 In Iceland, the second part of a name is not a family name but a patronymic. Therefore, Icelanders would expect to be referred to by their given name, in this case Valdimar.
2 The Icelandic letter “þorn” (“Þ” or “þ”) can be transliterated as “Th” or “th”; the letter “eð” (“Д or “ð”) as “D” or “d.”
3 Norðanfara appeared 1862-1885. Ísafold was founded in 1876, as the voice of the Icelandic Independence Movement, headed by Jón Sigurðsson (1811-1879), publisher of Ný félagsrit (since 1841) and President of the Icelandic Literary Society. Björn Jónsson was its president from 1884-1894.
4 Founded in 1877 as a primary school, it became a lower secondary school in 1882, when Valdimar worked there.
5 The poet Bjarni Thorarensen first used the word around 1810, in his work Eldgamla Ísafold. The character quickly became popular in poetry and in 1866 was depicted for the first time by Johann Baptist Zwecke, as a frontispiece for the last volume of Icelandic Legends (London: Long-mans, Green, and Co., 1866).
6 For the political programme of Fjallkonan, see its issue of 12 January 1899, pp. 1f.
7 See Lifið í Reykjavik—Næpan og Helgi sæm in Alþýðublaðið of 11 August 1969, p. 8.
8 Letter to Walt Whitman dated Dublin, 18 February 1872, in the Walt Whitman Archive.
9 Terry, 1909, p. 182.
10 See especially Belford, 1996, and Murray, 2004.
11 From Reykjavík of 26 April 1902, p. 2.
12 An expression used in the obituary on the front page of Fjallkonan of 25 April 1902, probably authored by Bríet.
13 First appearing in 1891. For a history of the Icelandic printing press and the publication of Icelandic sagas, see Ólafsson, 2002. See also Haugen, 1992, p. 343. The effect of the introduction of the printing press by Gutenberg, making the copying of manuscripts by hand superfluous, was delayed in Iceland. The Icelandic Catholic Church and later the Lutheran State Church, controlled by the Danish King, used to have the monopoly of printing, until in 1773, the first independent press was founded on Hrappsey. In 1795, it was bought by the Educational Society led by Magnús Stephensen (1762-1833), who thus had a monopoly on printing secular books. Kristjánsson obviously saw a gap in the market and had some of his saga books printed with an initial print run of 4,000 copies. See Magnússon, 2010, pp. 157ff., Karlsson, 2000, p. 172, and Jakobsson & Halfdanarson, 2016, p. 215.
14 See Valdimar’s advertisement for his expert services in Fjallkonan of 28 March 1888, p. 39.
15 See Valdimar’s advertisements in Fjallkonan of 10 and 23 November 1900, both on p. 4.
16 In 1900, Iceland’s currency was the new Danish Crown, introduced in 1875. The value of 2,480 new Danish Crowns was equivalent to that of one kg of fine gold. A million crowns would thus be worth the price of 403 kg fine gold, today approximately 13 million Euros or 14 Million USD. One Crown would thus be equivalent to 1.30 Euro or 1.40 USD (Status: 23 January 2016). As the prices of gold, Euros and Dollars are fluctuating every day, you may want to check the most recent equivalent on www.goldprice.org.
17 See Fjallkonan of 13 November 1895, front page.
18 Sæmundsson, 2004, p. 142.
19 See letter of Clemens of 4 March 1894 to Henry H. Rogers, in Twain/Leary, 1969, p. 40.
20 Skal, 2004, p. 33f. In 1896, the purchasing power of £600 was equivalent to the purchasing power of £62,000 today (status per January 2016).
21 Stoker, 1906, Vol. II, Chapter LXXII, p. 322.
22 Twain’s own publishing company Charles L. Webster & Co. failed the same year.
23 For decades, the publication of Dracula was surrounded by the myth that the novel had only received a “mixed response” from the critics. As John Edgar Browning recently found out, however, the majority of the 230 reviews and responses he was able to locate turned out to be outright positive.
24 Email correspondence with David Skal of 29 December 2013.
25 From Nokkur orð um bókmentir vorar, in Skírnir, 1 December 1906, p. 344 and p. 346. In 1934, the same Benedikt Björnsson was the translator for Slunginn þjófur, og aðrar sögur (A Cunning Thief and Other Stories), by Edgar Allan Poe. In fact, none of the five stories was written by Poe; all were taken from the 1865 novel Mrs. Carew by the British author Amelia B. Edwards. See Eysteinsson, 2014, p. 105f. So much for Björnsson’s enrichment of Icelandic literature.
26 The Danish government obstructed free trade with the UK, Iceland’s nearest trade partner; independence from Denmark would boost the import/export traffic with the UK.
27 See announcement on the front page of Fjallkonan of 13 January 1900.
28 I only know of about 20 surviving copies worldwide, of which four copies are in private hands; two of them in mine.
29 From Í túninu heima, part I, Reykjavík: Helgafell, 1975, p. 208. In an excerpt from Og arin liða (1984), published in Lesbók Morgunblaðsins of 7 January 1984, pp. 4-7, Halldór called Makt Myrkranna “one of the best Icelandic novels imported from abroad.”
30 In Pabbi, mamma og börn (an article about family life and raising children) in Alþýðublaðið of 8 December 1974, p. 4, an unnamed father reported that he once spent a whole weekend read
ing Dracula to his children, “not Makt Myrkranna but Dracula, complete and unabridged.” In her article Blóðþyrstir Berserkir in Lesbók Morgunblaðsins of 21 April 2001, pp. 10f., Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir acknowledged that Makt Myrkranna was rather a modification than a translation of Stoker’s novel.
31 See Haining, 1987, and Leatherdale, 1998 b.
32 Leatherdale, 1998 a, p. 389, fn. 99, asks if Mina’s night dress, after she was forced to drink Dracula’s blood, was ripped or pulled up, but even this vague possibility is immediately redressed by Van Helsing, drawing a coverlet over her body.
33 More than Dracula, Makt Myrkranna employs the concept of a split personality or “subliminal self,” as observed by hypnotists and psychic researchers of that time, or as described in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886): the Count only threatens Harker when he is “not himself.”
34 The way Professor Van Helsing kills the three vampire ladies at Castle Dracula could be understood as an allusion to the Ripper’s methods, but in England, no one was informed about Van Helsing’s measures in Transylvania and therefore, they cannot have caused “repugnance” in the London public.
35 Spicer, n.d. (minor spelling errors corrected). See also Gordon, 2002, p. 35: “The old sacking was made of a common, coarse canvas.” Rainham is a suburb in the East of London, 22 km east of Charing Cross.
36 In the novel itself, the Count’s story hinting at Napoleon’s jealousy also suggests Stoker’s personal contribution: Irving loved to talk about Napoleon and from 1894 till 1898, Stoker was intensely involved in preparing the production of Madame Sâns-Gene; he was also familiar with the novelized version by Lepelletier, expressly discussing the love affairs of Joséphine de Beauharnais with the handsome lieutenant Hippolyte Charles.
37 “Saint Amand”: Holy Love; “Rubiano”: Ruby; “Morton”: Death. “Koromezzo” is probably derived from the Hungarian town Körösmez (French: “Koromez”) in the Carpathian Mountains, 125 km north of Bistritz, with a population of approx. 9,000 around 1900 (Purfleet: approx. 7,000; Bistritz and Whitby: approx. 12,000; Exeter approx. 35,000). See also footnote on Prince Koromezzo in Part II, Chapter 14, The Evening Party.
38 Coleman, 1904, Vol. I, p. 326.
39 For the Taaffe family and the double wedding, see Debrett, 1840, p. 712 and p. 813; Burke, 1832, Vol. II, pp. 516-518; Burke, 1869, pp. 1089f. Antonia was a daughter of Antal Amadé de Várkony and thus the first cousin of Thaddaeus, the only son of Antal’s brother Ferenc and the last male descendant of the Amadé Varkony line. Lodge, 1832, p. 387, mentions 1790 as Antonia’s birth year. In musical history, Thaddaeus is known for sponsoring the young Franz Liszt (later befriended by Henry Irving) and Heinrich Marschner, composer of the opera Der Vampyr (1828).
40 Mary Singleton often met with artists around James Abbott Whistler; Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker also belonged to this group.
41 Collected essays, published as a book in 1878.
42 See The Standard of 25 January 1894, p. 5, reporting on the wedding.
43 Intriguingly, in December 1892 Professor Max Müller’s son Wilhelm Max Müller also left for Constantinople as an attaché—see Müller, 1902, Vol. II, p. 289. In summer 1893, before the Curries arrived there, the Müllers visited Constantinople to see their son. They were received by the Sultan; Mrs. Müller later published her Letters from Constantinople with Longmans, Green & Co., London/New York, 1897. See also the article The Turk’s Town in The New York Times of 10 April 1897.
44 At the end of Makt Myrkranna, for example, Seward turns mad and dies. But the preface mentions him as a friend of the author, in present tense. The hint in the preface about the Thames Torso Murders almost runs empty, as the novel barely fleshes it out. The preface states that the remarkable foreigners played a dazzling role in London “for many seasons on end” (also incorrectly translated in Dalby’s text), but this cannot apply to the Count himself, who arrived in London in August and was terminated by the end of October/start of November of the same year.
45 We know that Stoker lived at Leonard Terrace at that time. But Stoker was a master at camouflaging real addresses and replacing them by fake denominations; this applies to every single key address in Dracula. The use of a long dash already indicates that the novelist’s private address should not be disclosed under this preface; the use of “Street” may have been part of this cover-up. Moreover, Stoker may have written this preface at his office at the Lyceum Theatre, located at 21 Wellington Street. An even simpler explanation would be that the Icelandic language does not know the use of “Terrace” to signify a street; it merely uses “stræti” or “stígur” for streets in a town, “gata” for other streets lined with houses, and “vegur” or “braut” for paths or roads without houses. The Icelandic equivalents for “terrace” refer to the banks of a river or stream (“árhjalli” or “malarhjalli”), or to an elevated garden terrace (“verönd,” cf. German “Veranda”). For an Icelandic translator, it thus would be logical to translate “––––– Terrace” as “–––––stræti,” what in the retranslation to English results in “––––– Street.”
46 Denmark ratified the Berne Convention in June 1903, but Iceland was not included in this treaty—see Le droit d’auteur, Paris, of 15 July 1903, p. 73. Iceland as an independent state ratified the Convention in 1947. Already on 8 May 1893, Denmark signed a bilateral copyright treaty with the US, but it is unclear if this treaty included Iceland.
47 The third Icelandic edition was published by Bókafélagið, Reykjavík. The text was based on the 1950 edition by Hogni, which shows small deviations from the original text. Ásgeir Jónsson wrote an afterword—the first (Icelandic) text clearly stating the differences between Makt Myrkranna and Dracula. In this afterword, however, Ásgeir expressly left it to other researchers to find more about the nature of Stoker’s and Valdimar’s cooperation. The purpose of my research was to fill this gap.
48 Email from Ásgeir Jónsson of 1 February 2014.
49 In January 2016, I discussed this issue again with leading translation experts from the University of Iceland, the University of Reykjavík and the Arní Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. With various linguistic arguments, the participants in this debate convincingly supported Ásgeir Jónsson’s opinion.
50 Allen, 1997, p. 296 mentions a banquet hosted by the Governor on 1 September. The Advertiser (Adelaide) of 9 October 1903, p. 4, wrote: “Mr. Hall Caine was present on August 26 at the Parliamentary dinner at the close of the session of the Iceland Alþing as a guest of the Governor of that island.” This is probably more accurate: Ísafold of 26 August 1903, p. 223, reported that the 1903 Alþing “was closed today at 5 p.m., after passing the budget.” See also The Pittsburg Press of 3 October 1903.
51 In 1884: Edward Mills And George Benton: A Tale (1880). In 1885: The Man Who Fought Cats, published by John C. Hotten in Practical Jokes with Artemus Ward (1872). In 1886: How Hyde Lost His Ranch, from Chapter 34 of Roughing It (1872).
52 Blucher’s Disastrous Dinner, from Chapter 5 of The Innocents Abroad, in Fjallkonan of 20 September 1893.
53 Miljónarseðillinn started in Fjallkonan of 17 February 1894 and ran until 8 May of that year (pages 27-75).
54 The 1891 Census shows that by that year, the Stokers had already moved from Cheyne Walk to 17 St. Leonard’s Terrace. In 1897, they moved to Nr. 18 (see chronology in Browning, 2012, pp. 318f.). Twain lived at 23 Tedworth Square.
55 Twain/Fishkin, 2006, p. 229, various footnotes. Like Makt Myrkranna, Is He Dead is a “forgotten work,” which only recently received fresh attention through Shelley Fishkin’s efforts to republish and stage the play.
56 Twain was a good friend of Professor Willard Fiske of Cornell University, who visited Iceland in 1879 and remained in contact with its leading intellectuals and newspaper publishers, Thorsteinsson, Jónsson and Ásmundsson included.
57 Palladino even managed to let two examiners, who were supposed to hold her hands for control, hold hands together, so tha
t her own hands were free.
58 1886, with Edmund Guerny and Frank Podmore.
59 Stoker and Irving knew Dufferin already since July 1892 at the latest, when Irving was made Doctor of Literature honoris causa at Trinity College, Dublin, and Dufferin formally proposed a toast to Irving during the subsequent banquet. See Stoker, 1907, p. 394.
60 Stoker, 1907, pp. 395f. In the 1906 two-volume edition: Vol, II, p. 248.
61 Still other links can be found if we start mapping the personal networks connecting London with Reykjavík. I plan to publish these results in a separate paper.
62 The idea of Count Dracula personally leading such group rituals only showed up in the Dracula films of the 1960s and 70s, e.g. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) with Christopher Lee. The Count as the leader of a larger group of vampires can be found (as a parody) in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967, Roman Polanski) and in Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989, Anthony Hickox).
1 Fjallkonan was the name of the newspaper owned and edited by Valdimar Ásmundsson. The Icelandic version of Dracula appeared here as a serialization from 13 January 1900 until 20 March 1901.
2 As discussed in the Introduction to this book, Stoker’s preface is the only part of Makt Myrkranna that has been translated before. The first translation was commissioned and published by Richard Dalby in A Bram Stoker Omnibus (1986), and reproduced in Bram Stoker Journal #5 (1993). It gave rise to manifold speculations about a possible link between Dracula, the Ripper Murders, and the life of Bram Stoker. A second translation by Sylvia Sigurdson was commissioned by Dracula expert and book collector Robert Eighteen-Bisang in Canada in 2004. It was published in Storey, 2012. Because most Dracula experts are familiar with the Dalby translation, the following notes will highlight the most important differences between his translation and mine.