The Stories We Inherit: Lars Saabye Christensen and Sanda Tomescu Baciu on MY CHINESE GRANDMOTHER, interviewed by Gabriela Mocan

Lars Saabye Christensen is one of the defining voices of contemporary Nordic literature and a much-loved author in his native Norway. Best known for his highly acclaimed novels Beatles, The Half Brother and Echoes of the City, his work moves fluidly between fiction and poetry, between intimate coming-of-age narratives, social observation and imaginative writing. His dual cultural inheritance, being born to a Norwegian father and a Danish mother, situates him within a broader Scandinavian setting. His books are both deeply local – rooted in personal geographies – and broadly European in their concern with how individual lives are shaped by time, culture, and memory. Widely translated and internationally recognised, he has received numerous major awards including the Brage Prize – Norway’s most prestigious lifetime literary honour, the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the Critics’ Prize, and the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize. His work has inspired stage and film adaptations and continues to resonate across generations for its lyrical style, wit, and emotional depth.

I had the opportunity to meet him during one of his visits to Cluj-Napoca, Romania, at an event occasioned by the launch of Sanda Tomescu Baciu’s masterful Romanian translation of his novel My Chinese Grandmother, published by Casa Cărții de Știință. Their conversation stayed with me long after the event, prompting me to explore further the layers of this hybrid narrative and the dialogue between the voices it embodies.

As a graduate of Norwegian Language and Literature at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, the evening held particular significance. My engagement with Norwegian literature was shaped, to a considerable extent, by the teaching and scholarly work of Sanda Tomescu Baciu, whose longstanding commitment to promoting Norwegian language, literature, and culture in Romania has made a remarkable contribution to the field. Revisiting Christensen’s work in this context provided a valuable opportunity not only to reflect on the novel’s complexities, but also to witness the dialogue between author and translator that has helped bring his work to Romanian readers.

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Gabriela Mocan: A memorable book in many ways, My Chinese Grandmother is written in an autobiographical vein, yet it moves beyond the conventions of traditional autobiography. At its emotional core is your paternal grandmother, whose presence is signalled in the title and sought throughout the narrative. Given your work across multiple genres, did poetry feel like the most intuitive medium for portraying her?

Lars Saabye Christensen: Yes, I think poetry was already present in the language when I began writing about my grandmother. From the very beginning, as I worked on this text – whether we call it a novel or something else – it became something deeply intimate. That intimacy is partly shaped by the poetic language. I started out as a poet, and I’ve continued writing poetry ever since, so I naturally carry that sensibility into my prose. But poetry is not just about language, it’s also a way of seeing, a perspective. So yes, it is, in many ways, a very poetic text.

GM: What led you to your grandmother, among all the other members of your family?

LSC: I experienced our relationship as something very special. She was very loving, and yet she carried many secrets. I didn’t know very much about her. Even long after her death, she continued to inhabit my thoughts and imagination. My grandfather was a ship captain, often away at sea, and she remained in the background, waiting. I found myself drawn to that space, to what remains unseen. I wanted, in some way, to enter that darkness and make the invisible visible. It may sound strange but I felt a need to shed light on her and, through that, perhaps also on myself. In the end, there may be a light we both could share.

GM: Your paternal grandfather arrived in Hong Kong in 1906, at the height of British colonial power. Soon after, he was joined by your grandmother, their sea voyage feeling like a true leap into the unknown. In tracing a family portrait that quietly intersects with Britain’s imperial history, what might UK readers discover in it today? And, more broadly, at a time when every destination is pre-digested, what can your grandparents’ journey tell us about all we may have lost in the way we engage with other cultures?

LSC: Of course, my grandparents were part of European imperialism and Danish colonialism, regardless of how they may have understood their own place within it. They lived privileged lives: they had servants, a grand mansion, dogs, and clubs they could attend. Yet they were not aristocrats. They came from ordinary backgrounds; their parents were fishermen and craftsmen. They belonged to a Western colonial structure, but they were individuals with their own lives. Perhaps this duality is what I am trying to write about. Their journey to Hong Kong was, quite literally, a voyage into the unknown, and not without danger. I am fascinated by the distances, by the inaccessibility of the world, by the feeling of being out of reach. Today, we travel with a very different mindset, so to speak.

GM: You draw on letters, photographs, official documents and oral testimonies to reconstruct your family history, embarking on an almost ethnographic investigation. In autobiographical writing of this kind, questions of responsibility, ethics, and authority inevitably arise. Did you find this project difficult in that sense? How did you balance archival evidence and imagination in shaping the narrative, and which of the two ultimately prevailed?

LSC: It’s extremely difficult. You have to make choices all the time. In the end you must be truthful but, at the same time, you must allow yourself to be personal. Not private, but personal. It’s your interpretation, your way of seeing. I try to bring all of this together – my vision, my memories, and others’ perspectives – into something larger. My own perspective expands when I incorporate the voices of others, while still trying to remain faithful to their experiences.

GM: You describe the story as a “Chinese box” that doesn’t quite reveal what you expect. Did you design the narrative structure, or did it emerge organically from all that couldn’t be accessed in the family archives?

LSC: I decided that I should only use the materials I actually had in my possession: letters, newspapers, postcards, photographs, maps, and, of course, my own memory. The narrative emerged from those sources. I like to see what happens. I do not necessarily know what I am going to find. Perhaps, in searching for my grandmother, I ended up discovering a portrait of myself.

GM: Your work often returns to time, memory, and shifting perspective. Did this book change the way you think about generational distance?

LSC: I also hope that writing a novel or a poem will change something in me. Perhaps the distance between my grandmother (and the time she belonged to) and myself has become shorter. I remember her through the eyes of the child I once was but I write about her as the old man I am today.

GM: If you could entrust your own life story to another writer, past or present, who would you choose?

LSC: I would choose a close friend of mine, one of Norway’s finest poets. He knows me pretty well and has a very strange sense of humour. I think that’s important. He is no longer among us – his name is Jan Jakob Tønseth and he is a very good classical poet.

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On giving Romanian Voice for My Chinese Grandmother: in dialogue with translator Sanda Tomescu Baciu

Sanda Tomescu Baciu is a leading figure in Romanian Scandinavian studies and a dedicated promoter of Norwegian literature abroad. Her connection with Norway began in 1976, when she spent four years there on a scholarship in Nordic studies. At Babeș‑Bolyai University in Cluj, she built the foundation of Nordic studies, launching the BA in Norwegian Language and Literature (1991), the Library of Nordic Studies (1997), the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature (2001), and the doctoral programme in Nordic Literatures and Culture (2010). An award-winning translator, she brought Norwegian classics and contemporary voices to Romanian readers, including works by Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Maja Lunde and Lars Saabye Christensen. A former member of the International Ibsen Committee and Knight of the 1st Class of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit (2003), she has shaped generations of scholars and translators, securing a lasting place for Norwegian language and literature in Romania’s cultural landscape.
The publication of My Chinese Grandmother in Romanian brought together two creative acts: the writing of the novel and its re-creation in another language. Following my conversation with Lars Saabye Christensen, I invited Sanda Tomescu Baciu to reflect not only on the joys and challenges of translating Christensen’s distinctive style, but also on the broader role of translation in shaping literary encounters across languages and cultures.

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Gabriela Mocan: I’d like to start by asking about your path into translation. You’ve translated several works by Norwegian authors into Romanian, from an anthology of short stories covering a century of Norwegian writing (1905–2005) to major works such as Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees, Henrik Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Knut Hamsun’s Children of the Age, and three novels by Lars Saabye Christensen, including My Chinese Grandmother. How did your journey as a translator begin?

Sanda Tomescu Baciu: It began in the 1980s with Lars Saabye Christensen’s The Beatles. It’s one of the author’s early masterpieces, not about the band but about a generation of young people in Norway. Through their story, the book reflects Norwegian history and culture up until 1972, when Norway voted against joining the Common Market. That was the first book I translated, and later I had the pleasure of meeting the author and inviting him to Romania.

GM: In 1991, you laid the groundwork for Norwegian studies at Babeș‑Bolyai University in Cluj, at a time when Nordic languages were not taught elsewhere in Romania. How has your extensive academic experience influenced the way you approach and think about translation?

STB: I would say that my work as a literary translator has influenced my career teaching Norwegian language and literature in Romania. I had been translating Norwegian and Scandinavian literature long before I started teaching. Translating Norwegian literature made me well aware that direct translations from Norwegian into Romanian can be successful mainly with a good command of Norwegian and a deep understanding of Norway’s culture. This is why, when mapping out the curriculum for the Norwegian studies at BBU, I saw the necessity of introducing a course on literary translation already at BA level. Later, at MA level, I initiated a new course, “Translation and Interculturality”, where students learn and take responsibility for translating Norwegian literature for publishing houses. The challenge has been taken up with great interest and curiosity by MA students and together we have developed translation projects. So, in the end, I would say that the influence has gone both ways, between translating and teaching. Since 2020, after the pandemic, four or five volumes translated by my MA students were published in the Nordica collection at Casa Cărții de Știință Publishing House, featuring authors like Jan Wiese, Erlend Loe and Kathrine Nedrejord.

GM: What drew you back to Lars Saabye Christensen for a third time and what makes My Chinese Grandmother stand apart from his other writing?

STB: My Chinese Grandmother belongs to his mature period. It blends personal family history with a broader historical context, especially the transition from wind-powered ships to steam power. It’s both intimate and global, moving between past and present, exploring identity, migration, and cultural encounters.

GM: As a translator, you develop a close connection to the texts you work on. What was it that drew you to this book?

STB: I’m drawn to books I can identify with. The grandmother’s courage was very compelling. But I also discovered a world unfamiliar to me – life at sea, navigation, winds. Coming from a place without direct access to the sea, this was fascinating. It became an imaginative and historical journey for me.

GM: What challenges did you encounter in translating this particular book and how did you resolve them? It is worth mentioning that this book was translated mainly from Norwegian but also from Danish.

STB: One major challenge was shifting between modern language and older forms, especially in Danish documents. Some texts used formal or archaic constructions, and even abbreviations that neither I nor the author immediately understood. But we worked through them together.

GM: Why do you think this book is relevant today, especially in a world shaped by migration and shifting identities?

STB: It helps us understand the present through the past. The grandmother’s journey from Denmark to Hong Kong was incredibly bold for her time. The author later retraces her steps, but in a modern world where constant connectivity changes the experience of travel. The book highlights what we may have lost – privacy, solitude, and the ability to disappear into experience.

GM: Finally, if you had to pitch this book to a publisher, how would you describe it?

STB: I would say this is not a conventional novel but that’s precisely its strength. It blends history, memory, and imagination in a unique way. It explores themes of identity, courage, and the role of women, especially those who remained invisible. It’s a book that opens new literary spaces and offers something deeply enriching, both artistically and historically.

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Dr. Gabriela Mocan is a creative producer, curator and author working at the intersection of literature, cultural narratives and the arts. She is Head of Literature and the Arts at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London and a Lecturer at Babeș-Bolyai University. Her work explores themes of identity, memory, migration, and cross-cultural dialogue through both creative and scholarly projects.