Pippi Långstrump

by Astrid Lindgren

1

Hardcover

About the author

Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren, née Ericsson, (1907 - 2002) was a Swedish children's book author and screenwriter, whose many titles were translated into 85 languages and published in more than 100 countries. She has sold roughly 165 million copies worldwide. Today, she is most remembered for writing the Pippi Longstocking books, as well as the Karlsson-on-the-Roof book series.

Awards:
Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing (1958)

Reviews

[Landis Duffett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine if English had escaped its fate of being colonized by the legal, political, and martial lexicons of Norman French and had emerged instead into the modern era with its Anglo-Saxon core fully intact (imagine if we still used words like "thole" and "sough"), only now pieced together as needed, and sometimes even on the fly, to convey more abstract concepts. Imagine, too, a language that is much more of what linguists quite counterintuitively call "analytic" than English, which means less (not more) reliant on strict syntactic rules. Imagine, too, a language that is much more "isolating" (less bound to complex morphological conjugations and declensions) than German. But none of that creates a picture. The Swedish language is all about pictures. It's hard to compare Swedish to other languages for colorfulness and tactility. Swedish is rolling down a hill in the country under a blue sky and on the mud, grass getting in your mouth. It is creative shortcuts and bumpy trails that route around and under but never directly across the sprawling interstates of sometimes incorporeal academic English and ponderous hegemonic German. Reading the Swedish of Astrid Lindgren is to take all of those routes on a long return to summer childhood days of splashing through cool water in ditches (a good Swedish word, btw) and getting one's clothes muddy and wet, but returning home in the silence of a barely glimmering and transfixing twilight.

"Hon höjde amarna mot kvällshimlen, och medan ett regn av gnistor föll över henne skrek hon högt: 'En sån rolig, rolig, rolig eldsvåda!' " (She raised her arms towards the evening sky, and as a rain of sparks fell over her she cried out loudly, "What a fun, fun, fun fire!")

"...det var bra nog mörkt i Pippis trädgård, och de gamla träden som just höll på att tappa sina sista blad susade så dystert." (...it was downright dark in Pippis yard, and the old trees that had just dropped their last leaves soughed so gloomily.)