Gunnel Vallquist, born 19 June 1918 in Stockholm. Writer, translator. She was elected to the Swedish Academy on 1 April 1982 and admitted on 20 December 1982. Vallquist succeeded the writer Anders Österling to Chair number 13. She was awarded the title of professor in 1981.
Gunnel Vallquist’s religious insight matured towards the end of her teens. “It was school instruction in Christianity that through its solid disinformation aroused my interest in Catholicism”, she recalls in her memoirs Katolska läroår (1995; ‘Catholic apprenticeship’). She received her basic religious schooling with the Dominicans in Stockholm and converted to Catholicism in 1939. She improved her knowledge of the French-Catholic tradition simultaneously with studying Romance languages, literary history and Nordic languages at Uppsala University.
After her M.A. degree at Uppsala in 1946 she set out for Europe and remained in France for ten years, first in Paris, then in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. “Being able to live in French surroundings had long been something I’d longed for, hoped for and prepared for. Both intellectually and culturally I was largely formed by French thought and French literature, but the strongest impressions were the religious ones; it was in French Catholicism I felt at home.” She describes the nature of French Catholicism in the following terms: theological clarity, demands for truth, sober style, liturgical purity and “a certain hardness, a sharpness in demands and criticism, which agreed all too well with traits of my own”.
Already during her time at Uppsala, Vallquist had started writing in the Catholic journal Credo, and through the writer Sven Stolpe, who lived in Paris, she started writing literary criticism in Bonniers Litterära Magasin and translating French literature for Albert Bonnier’s publishing house. In 1950 Gunnel Vallquist started her great project of translating Marcel Proust’s suite of novels À la recherche du temps perdu (‘Remembrance of things past’), a life project that was to continue until 1980, cover seven volumes and thousands of pages, and to undergo a major review for re-publication during the 1990s. Her version of À la recherche du temps perdu is counted one of the foremost translations into Swedish of the twentieth century.
Soon she also started writing daily criticism of French literature, first in the national daily Dagens Nyheter and then, starting in 1952, in Svenska Dagbladet. Parallel with the translating and the literary criticism she also devoted herself to informing the public about the Catholic church, which was frequently subjected to one-sided description. The following decades were spent generally in a spirit of ecumenical endeavour.
In 1955 Vallquist moved to Rome, in connection with the fourth “Congress for peace and Christian culture”, arranged by the Mayor of Florence, the pugnacious radical Christian Democrat Giorgio La Pira, “the St Francis of our time”, about whom within a few years she wrote a biography: Giogio La Pira – Borgmästare och profet (1957; ‘Giorgio La Pira – Mayor and prophet’). In the previous year her first book had appeared, the collected essays Något att leva för (‘Something to live for’), which include both literary essays – on writers such as T. S. Eliot, Claudel, Bernanos – and more generally Christian “moral essays” on e.g. Christianity and tolerance, humility and compassion. What holds them together is the particular Vallquistian style, which is already exhibiting the features that will make her writing distinctive during the third quarter of the Swedish twentieth century: a strict, bare, exact, sober style schooled in French essayistic writing.
The year before her return to Sweden, 1958, Vallquist’s third book was published. This was the more literary essay collection Ett bländande mörker (‘A dazzling darkness’); still with French Catholic writers at the centre, but the long and insightful title essay on Albert Camus and William Faulkner demonstrates that her range was greater than this. And it became even clearer in the following year’s book Till dess dagen gryr (‘Till day dawns’), dedicated to Birgitta Trotzig, in which a new style asserted itself. The subtitle is “Notes 1950–1958”, but the short, concise, glass-clear text fragments bear scant resemblance to a diary. Rather, this is an aphoristic way of writing: “The difficulty of explaining to non-Catholics what from the outside must seem a life of submitting to people who one thinks are acting wrongly …” But above all it is about burning, ardent fragments: “Being Christian: allowing oneself of be consumed, becoming inflammable”.
This was an intensively productive time in Gunnel Vallquist’s life. The next year, 1960, Vägar till Gud (‘Roads to God’) appeared, with a number of essays on, among other things, Jewish suffering and, in 1961, Den oförstådda kärleken (‘The ununderstood love’) which is largely about non-religious authors who deal with the great issues of life: Butor, Sarraute, Beckett, Sartre, Lagerkvist. After the fine Helgonens svar (1963; ‘The saints’ answer’) Vallquist spent four autumns in Rome to report from the revolutionary Second Vatican Council, in the four-volume Dagbok från Rom (1964–66; ‘Roman diary’) in which she portrays this historical event day-by-day. This was followed by Kyrkor i uppbrott (1968; ‘Churches breaking up’), a report on church development after the Council; it is based on documentary visits to seven European countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
The next volume of essays did not come until 1975. This was Följeslagare (‘Companions’), which tackles fairly long essays on writers such as Solzjenitsyn, Böll and Patrick White. The book ends with a reprint of her short text on the trials of a Proust translator from BLM 1966, which in turn concludes with the significant words that the translator “lives with the growing awareness that the task is beyond one’s capability and that the result, despite all one’s pains, is marred by the imperfection that marks even our most honest endeavours and finally makes our life what it is: an uncompleted attempt, a disappointed expectation, a suspicion not verified – in a word a promise that can never be fulfilled in this world”.
During this period, 1973–80, Gunnel Vallquist was active in the Bible Commission – but resigned since she considered the new translation of the New Testament to be “unrhythmical and flat” and generally unsuitable as a Church bible. In 1976 she became an honorary doctor of theology at Lund University. In 1983, shortly after her election to the Swedish Academy, Vallquist followed her aphoristic trail from Till dess dagen gryr in the little poetic book Steg på vägen (‘Steps along the way’). In 1987 her insightful biography of the writer Helena Nyblom (1843–1926) was published in the Svenska Akademiens minnesteckningar (‘The Swedish Academy Memoirs’) series. She initiated and wrote the foreword to Den gamla psalmboken (‘The old Book of Psalms’, a selection from the Swedish books of psalms of 1695, 1819 and 1937) which appeared in 2001 in the Academy’s series of Swedish classics.
A broad selection of Gunnel Vallquist’s texts, entitled simply Texter i urval, was published on her ninetieth birthday on 19 June 2008. In three parts reflecting the areas in which she has chiefly moved – culture, the Church and faith – the reader has abundant examples of Vallquist’s pure, thoroughly considered and restrained style and of themes such as European cultural life, the development of the Church and the pilgrim nature of the Christian faith. The thirty-six texts cover the period 1949-2005 and include a unique series of articles published in connection with the five papal accessions she has experienced. This is a Festschrift that is a book of thoughts rather than a proper Festschrift, with thoughts of considerable depth from over half a century.
Jan Arnald
(Translated by Tim Crosfield)