Until 2013, seventeen leather-bound diaries lived in a wicker laundry basket at Astrid Lindgren’s familiar home address, 46 Dalagatan in Stockholm. The diaries cover the years 1939–45. Her own name for them was ‘The War Diaries’ and they are now accessible to the public for the first time. The diaries bulged with press cuttings, pasted in between Lindgren’s handwritten entries. She refers now and then to the time it has taken her to save newspapers and magazines, sift through them and select items to cut out for pasting into her note-books, but it was a task she set herself and she carried it through to the end, the number of cuttings increasing with every passing wartime year. In her preface to the Swedish edition, Kerstin Ekman, another eminent Swedish writer, expresses her admiration for Lindgren’s unusual resolve:

War diaries were kept by general staffs and units out in the field. Their operational maps, battle accounts and observations would form the foundation of future history writing. It is striking to think of this 32-year-old mother of two and office-worker taking on the same sort of task with such seriousness. But only for herself, to try to understand what was going on.

The Swedish edition includes facsimiles of quite a number of the two-page diary spreads featuring pasted-in newspaper cuttings. Here and there in this edition the reader will come across references to such accompanying cuttings and Pushkin Press has asked me to provide an explanatory note wherever one is necessary.

Astrid Lindgren’s own comments are in round brackets, whereas square brackets indicate clarifications added by the Swedish editors, with a few additions for this English-language edition, to provide a little more background information for a non-Swedish readership.

The ambition was to retain the overall character of the original, but dates and abbreviations have been harmonized. Biographical names have been corrected and some place names have been put into English. Where the original work was in English, or in long lists of Swedish works, book and film titles have also been rendered in English.

Then as now, Swedes often use ‘England’ as shorthand for any part of the British Isles, and that is Lindgren’s practice throughout her diaries. It seemed less jarring to render this as ‘Britain’ in the English-language edition.

 

SARAH DEATH