Table Of Content

I n 1901 Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Ásmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna, this Icelandic version was unnoticed outside the country until 1986, when Dracula scholars discovered Stoker’s original preface to the book. It was not until 2014, however, that noted Dracula scholar Hans Corneel de Roos realized that Ásmundsson hadn’t merely translated Dracula but had, rather, penned an entirely new version of the story, with some all-new characters and a re- worked plot. The resulting narrative is one that is shorter, punchier, more erotic, and rivals the original in terms of suspense. Powers of Darkness marks the first ever translation into English of Makt Myrkranna. This volume includes the translation of the main text of the novel, thorough annotations that mark changes from the original text and other fascinating items of note, an introduction by Hans de Roos, a foreword by Dacre Stoker, an afterword by John Edgar Browning, and numerous illustrations, historical and new, including original illustations by de Roos of Dracula’s castle. Icelandic Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness praised Powers of Darkness as one of the best works of Icelandic literature, drawing inspiration from it in the writing of his Under the Glacier. Stoker’s great grand-nephew Dacre Stoker aptly writes: “The resurrection of Makt Myrkranna illustrates another example of Dracula’s immortality.” Delivering all the dark glamour one expects from a cornerstone of Gothic literature, and drawing inspiration from Nordic sagas and myths, Powers of Darkness is truly a major literary rediscovery and a thrilling and essential new addition to the Dracula canon. Copyright This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2017 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. NEW YORK 141 Wooster Street New York, NY 10012 www.overlookpress.com For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address LONDON 30 Calvin Street London E1 6NW [email protected] www.ducknet.co.uk Translated from the Icelandic, with an Introduction and annotations, copyright © 2016 by Hans Corneel de Roos Foreword copyright © 2016 by Dacre Stoker Afterword © 2016 by John Edgar Browning All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. ISBN: 978-1-4683-1337-6 Dedicated to Petre Tutunea, Pienette Coetzee, Lounette Loubser, Amanda Larasari, Marsha Maramis, Sarah Mawla Syihabuddin, Susannah Schaff, Joyce Georgewill, Aïda El Hani, Andreea and Teo Vechiu, Shantal Jeewon Kim, Shiva Dehghanpour, Dian Risna Saputri and Yofina Pradani, who all volunteered as assistants in my creative studio and over the past three years shared my enthusiasm, my questions and my worries about this book project. CONTENTS COPYRIGHT DEDICATION FOREWORD by Dacre Stoker INTRODUCTION by Hans C. de Roos A ROOM WITH A VIEW: The floor plans of Castle Dracula POWERS OF DARKNESS AUTHOR’S PREFACE PART I CHAPTER ONE PART II CHAPTER ONE: Lucia Western CHAPTER TWO: The Storm in Whitby CHAPTER THREE: From the Logbook CHAPTER FOUR: Baron Székely CHAPTER FIVE: The Tatars CHAPTER SIX: Lucia’s Illness and Death CHAPTER SEVEN: The Search for Thomas Harker CHAPTER EIGHT: A Visit to Castle Dracula CHAPTER NINE: The Nunnery CHAPTER TEN: Thomas and Wilma Find One Another CHAPTER ELEVEN: Returning Home CHAPTER TWELVE: The Professor and Barrington CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The People in Carfax CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Evening Party CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Conspiracy CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Count Killed CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Epilogue AFTERWORD by John Edgar Browning ACKNOWLEDGMENTS REFERENCES ABOUT THE AUTHOR FOREWORD by Dacre Stoker “There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age they may solve only in part.” —BRAM STOKER, Dracula, 1897 I T IS AN HONOR TO WRITE THIS FOREWORD FOR MY FRIEND and travelling companion Hans de Roos, who has bravely delved into the newest of the Dracula mysteries. I remember well the phone conversation in which Hans first told me there were significant textual differences between the English and Icelandic editions of Dracula. Once I realized Makt Myrkranna was not simply an Icelandic translation of Dracula—that this was a unique story—I wondered: How could this go unnoticed for so many years? As I shared my enthusiasm and initial thoughts with De Roos, I was eager to read the English translation of the Icelandic text and begin to make my own sense of this new development. Moreover, I was prompted to reflect anew on the enduring legacy of my great granduncle’s most famous work. I lecture regularly at literary and film events—on the subject of the history and mysteries which surround Dracula—and always find that fans of the novel and of the subgenres it has inspired are genuinely interested in any background information about Bram and the circumstances associated with the novel. Dracula is considered a classic—in part because more than a century after its initial publication, speculative material keeps readers and researchers searching for answers to some of the mysteries surrounding the novel’s origins. The translation of Makt Myrkranna and the uncertainty about the text’s source present more than enough fodder for another generation to wonder and speculate about. With de Roos’s discovery, another significant mystery is added to the list of unresolved questions about Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic. For example, how did 124 pages of author’s notes for Dracula survive such a circuitous journey before finding a home at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum? And where was the one known typescript of Dracula during the years between its arrival in Philadelphia and its eventual possession by Paul Allen of Microsoft fame? It appears that shortly after Dracula’s publication, Bram gave the only known typescript of the novel to Col. Thomas C. Donaldson, Esq. of Philadelphia, a close friend and biographer of Walt Whitman who handled the affairs of many writers. After Whitman’s death, according to his wishes, Donaldson gave Bram the original notes from Whitman’s 1886 lecture on Abraham Lincoln. During one of Bram’s visits with Whitman, the men discussed their mutual interest in Lincoln; Bram later quoted Whitman’s exaggerated personal account of the night Lincoln was shot in his own presentations about Lincoln. Donaldson passed away in 1898, and the next year, Henkel’s sold his extensive collection of manuscripts and letters. Yet it was nearly a century before the Dracula typescript was found in a Pennsylvania barn amongst the Donaldson family possessions. The typescript changed hands a few times, and then in 2002, after being offered with great fanfare by Christie’s, failed to meet the reserve bid and was subsequently bought by Paul Allen. On July 7, 1913, fifteen months after Bram Stoker’s death, Sotheby’s sale of his personal library included a book written by Col. Donaldson and inscribed in 1898 by his son Thomas Blaine Donaldson to Bram, “as a remembrance.” At the same Sotheby’s auction, James Drake, a New York book dealer, purchased lot # 182, 124 pages, “Original Notes and Data for his ‘Dracula’” for the price of two pounds. The “Notes” surfaced again in 1946, pictured in a Life magazine article about rare manuscripts, having been purchased for Scribner’s collection for $500; then in 1970 they were bought by the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia from an antiquarian bookseller, Charles Sessler. It was not until the mid 1970s that—thanks to Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, two Boston College professors—attention shifted to Bram’s preparatory work for Dracula. While researching a famous pamphlet, Dracole Waida, Nuremberg (c.1488), which included a woodcut of Vlad Dracula lll, McNally and Florescu visited the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. To their great surprise, the archivist suggested they might also be interested in Bram Stoker’s research notes for Dracula, which had been purchased by the Museum a few years before and were still in the archives in relative obscurity. Thus, they gained new insight into Bram’s research and writing process, which they referenced in their book The Essential Dracula (1979). However, in another of their works, In Search of Dracula (1972), they drew a close connection between Bram’s Count Dracula and the Wallachian leader Prince Vlad Dracula, essentially transforming Vlad Dracula lll into a vampire—much to the dismay of historians and the Romanian people. Other scholars followed McNally and Florescu, and to this day, a pilgrimage to the Rosenbach provides a unique and important opportunity to form conclusions based on Bram’s source notes. Alternatively, those who are interested can consult the excellent annotated facsimile edition created by scholars Dr. Elizabeth Miller and Robert Eighteen-Bisang in 2008. Unfortunately, apart from the typescript and the notes, Bram left us very little firsthand information about Dracula. In the void, a private family joke relayed by Noel Stoker, Bram’s only son, to Harry Ludlam, author of A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (1962) and My Quest for Bram Stoker (2000), has been quoted over and over as the gospel truth: flippantly, Bram “attributed the genesis of Dracula to a nightmare he had after a surfeit of dressed crab at supper one night.” To date, only one interview given by Bram on the subject of Dracula has been found: written by Jane Stoddard of the British Weekly, it appeared within five weeks of the novel’s publication and spans a mere 896 words. Additionally, there is only one known letter in which Bram discusses Dracula — addressed to former British Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1897, it reveals precious little about Stoker’s personal thoughts on his work, except that he hoped it would “cleanse the mind by pity and terror.” Other than this small reservoir of “canonical texts”—the Donaldson typescript, the Rosenbach notes, the crab joke, the Stoddard interview and the letter to Gladstone—we have only the opinions of others to explain the possible inspirations and motivations behind Bram’s writing. The rediscovery of Makt Myrkranna provides us with new information and new riddles. Unfortunately, we may never know the full details of Bram Stoker’s arrangements with Valdimar Ásmundsson, who transcribed the story to Icelandic and published it in his newspaper, followed by a book edition about six months later. Bram’s 1897 agreement with Archibald Constable, the publisher of Dracula, “does not include any place or country other than the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the British Dependencies (Canada being excepted from such British Dependencies) and the said Author shall be free to license others than the said Publishers to publish the said work …” with no specific mention of translations. The Stoker family no longer has copies of Bram’s publishing contracts, but Bram’s agreement with Archibald Constable clearly left him free to sell Dracula—or any version of Dracula for translation. Until evidence to the contrary is presented, it is safe to say Makt Myrkranna (1900) was among the very first literary translations of Dracula, second only to a Hungarian edition of 1898. The preface to Makt Myrkranna —which surfaced in 1986—is notably different from the preface to the original 1897 Constable edition of Dracula. This Icelandic preface was long assumed by researchers to be the only difference between the two editions; no one noticed the entirely new plot elements and characters waiting to be revealed in the body of the text. It took a devoted researcher like De Roos to organize a team and translate the complicated Icelandic language back into English and uncover this conundrum—one that has been sitting on the shelves in front of many of us for over 100 years. I believe Bram would have loved the irony of this situation. He knew the best place to hide something was in plain sight—just as he hid his vampire Count as another face in the crowded streets of London. Makt Myrkranna was published in 1901; and now, more than 100 years later, we are surprised to learn that it is not at all what we imagined. Additionally, De Roos’s discovery spotlights the translation process, which in the case of this Icelandic edition appears in conjunction with significant differences between the two texts. This begs the question of whether all the other translated editions of Dracula should be examined for major differences as well. While such further comparisons exceed the scope of Hans’s endeavor—certainly of this foreword—and must be addressed by future efforts, the metamorphosis from Dracula to Makt Myrkranna is of particular interest to me. Having had two texts translated for publication in multiple languages, I know from personal experience that literary translation is not simple, and there is a considerable amount of work involved in doing it well. Even today with the accessibility of highly advanced language software, the human element is indispensable to the translation process. It is crucial that the translator understand the genre and the historical time period in which the novel is set. The translator must ensure that the intended meaning, emotion, and atmosphere from the original language survive for the reader of the target language, especially as word-for-word translation of literature is very seldom effective. Poor translations could have affected the work of all but the most determined and diligent authors. In relation to the Dracula novel, the mistranslation of a fifteenth-century poem dramatically changed the poet’s intent and led to a misleading interpretation of Bram’s intentions. In describing the cruel actions of Vlad Dracula III against Saxon traders in Transylvania, Michael Beheim, court poet for Holy Roman Emperor Frederick lll, wrote that Vlad washed his hands in the blood of his enemies. A portion of the poem was translated incorrectly, telling of Vlad dipping his bread into a bowl and drinking the blood of his dead enemies, thus labeling 1 him as a vampire. The poem was later translated within the proper context, the difference between a blood drinking vampire and a bloodthirsty tyrant being very significant. Was Makt Myrkranna the result of translator errors, creative license taken too far, or was this Icelandic edition simply another version of the story that Bram had been working on for years? I certainly lean towards the latter. I believe during the seven years commonly accepted as the span of time Bram worked on Dracula, there was more than one version of the story— multiple drafts, and story lines were added or subtracted. Probably the best-