Literary multilingualism in Cora Sandel’s novel “Kranes konditori”

Krane’s Café (1945) is a major novel by the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel (1880-1974). The quality of this work is largely due to the linguistic fabric of the text, as well as the Norwegian and Swedish spoken by the two protagonists throughout. This bilingualism owes itself to the author’s proficiency in both languages and the phenomenon of Scandinavian receptive multilingualism that is particularly strong in Norway. On a broader note, the novel’s literary multilingualism consists in interweaving voices from the town, thereby creating a public space, with a set of compositional and stylistic devices that form part of the development of the modern novel, as highlighted by Bakhtin in his reflections on discourse in the novel and Spitzer’s analysis of free indirect speech. My final focus is on the challenging processes of adaptation of this kind of multilingual novel into a play and of its translations into other languages.