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I know, both from reading about it and from personal experience, that the process of translating texts is far more complex than just making a literal word-for-word translation. Especially when translating prose literature, you have to pay attention to all the subtleties of both languages, often not literally translating words, sentences and expressions, but finding some similar wordings that makes the meaning of the text understandable to the reader. And I imagine that translating poetry and songs is even more difficult, when you have to fit the translation into a specific meter, and often also make it rhyme, and still retain the original meaning somehow. All of which is to say: I have a great deal of respect for translators, and am usually willing to accept their choices. Sometimes I even admire their clever solutions to difficult translation problems. However, I recently came across a translation of a song where I thought that the translator took too much of a liberty when it came to one particular line.

I had borrowed a copy of The EU Songbook, published in 2024, which contains the lyrics to various famous songs from each member state of the European Union, both in their respective original languages, and translated into English. I was obviously especially curious about the songs from my home country, Sweden, and how they might have been translated. Overall, I was pleased with the translations, thinking that they’re very well made and retain the meaning of the lyrics, while still fitting into the song melodies.

There was one song, however, where I disagree with the decision of the translator: “Uti vår hage” (“In our meadow”), translated by Fred Lane (some of the songs in the book have previous translations, but this one was made specifically for this book). The song is a folk song first written down in the 1880s, and it’s a love song in which various flowers growing in a summer meadow are listed, with the singer offering to pick them, tie them into a crown and give to their love, who is, of course, more beautiful than all those flowers. You can listen to it in Swedish here, and I believe that it’s a lovely song to listen to even if you don’t understand the lyrics:

Now, I don’t have any problem with the translator changing the names of the specific flowers in the translation, I think that’s a liberty he can take in order to make the lyrics fit in with the melody and make it rhyme, while still retaining the meaning and message of the song. The problem I have is with one particular line in the last verse. Here’s the Swedish lyrics to that verse:

Uti vår hage finns blommor och bär.

Kom hjärtansfröjd!

Men utav alla du kärast mig är!

If I were to make a literal translation of those lines, without worrying about meter and rhyming, it would be something like this:

In our meadow there’s flowers and berries.

Come joy of heart!

But out of all of them, I love you the most!

However, this is Fred Lane’s translation:

In our meadow, the flowers they bloom

Oh, come, lad’s love!

We’ll be together, a bride and a groom!

“Hjärtansfröjd”, literally translated to “joy of heart” is the common Swedish name of the plant lemon balm, but in this case it of course has a double meaning. I can accept that the translator decided to change it to “Lad’s love”, a common English name for Artemisia abrotanum, also known as “southern wormwood”, since it fits with the meter and retains the loving double meaning. However, I don’t like the translation of the last line, “We’ll be together, a bride and a groom”.

The thing is, nowhere in the original Swedish lyrics is the gender of the singer, or of the person they’re singing to, specified. It’s a gender neutral love song, and that’s part of why I like it. I’d be willing to let “Lad’s love” slide (I don’t know if there’s any other flower/plant/herb with “love” in the name that could fit the lyrics), but I think that there surely must be some better way to translate that last line, to keep it closer to the spirit of the original. Fred Lane has translated some of the other Swedish songs in the book as well, and he’s clearly a talented translator. I have no complaints of the rest of his work in the book, aside from this one particular line, where he suddenly seems to let some personal bias shine through.