‘Powers of Darkness’ offers an Icelander’s take on ‘Dracula’ – Chicago Tribune

For sheer notoriety, no Victorian novel beats Bram Stoker's "Dracula." Every modern-day iteration of a vampire owes a debt to Stoker's creation, giving it something of the proprietary eponymity of Kleenex or Xerox.

Thanks to Tod Browning's 1931 film and a host of adaptations since, most know Dracula's name without having read the book, but those who do read it often become devotees. To embark on the lengthy 1897 novel is to be struck with its enduring weirdness, its uneven and excessive storytelling, its sentimental prudishness accompanied by an almost hysterical eroticism. The secret to its sticking power may lie in its form; told through letters, journals, transcripts, newspaper articles and the occasional ship log, the storytelling is often fragmentary, long-winded and redundant. Yet these very weaknesses lend the story the hard-to-shake-off feeling of rumor, whispers of doom traveling through the grapevine. At once immersively long and naggingly open-ended, it is riddled with holes that readers have delighted in filling in.

RELATED: TRENDING LIFE & STYLE NEWS THIS HOUR

It is in this spirit that one of the earliest adaptations of "Dracula," the Icelandic "Makt Myrkranna" of 1901, comes to us for the first time in English translation by Hans Corneel de Roos, under the title, "Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula." "Powers of Darkness" began its life as an extremely freehanded Icelandic translation serialized by journalist Valdimar Asmundsson in the newspaper Fjallkonan, but contains enough completely new and reimagined material to be called an adaptation. It reads like something in between a rough translation and a tale recreated from memory, and little enough is known of Stoker's involvement with the translation that this may, in fact, be exactly what it is. However, as de Roos and Dacre Stoker (a descendant of Bram), point out in their introductions, some of the plot differences appear to reflect Stoker's own early notes for the novel, suggesting Stoker may have collaborated on the translation, perhaps even helping to create the alternate or "lost version" promised by the title.

A few new plot elements are especially promising. There's a lady vampire, for one thing, a suspiciously Icelandic-looking blonde who's probably the long-ago-murdered Mrs. Dracula. Her seduction of the English solicitor Thomas Harker (Jonathan Harker in Stoker's original) replaces the taunting of a nameless trio of female vampires in Stoker's version and adds significant bulk to the opening section of the book, in which Harker is imprisoned in Dracula's castle.

It's the Count himself, however, whose character changes the most in Asmundsson's text. As in Stoker's original, Dracula is using Harker to plan his big move to London. But rather than laying low in London, as in the original, Asmundsson's Dracula becomes quite the man about town, visiting female victims Lucy and Wilma (Mina Harker in the original) and throwing parties for a global conspiracy of the rich and powerful who plan to overthrow democracy and instill a rule of bloodlust by the strong over the weak. The Count cites Social Darwinist philosophy as his justification, lecturing Harker on his inborn right to crush commoners under his boot. If this wrinkle has a certain resonance today, also consider that Asmundsson's Dracula is a lazy aristocrat, outsourcing most of his bloodsucking to ape-like worshippers who do the dirty work of sacrificing nude virgins in subterranean caverns while he only watches, licking his lips lustfully. (The racist imagery in these passages makes it obvious that 19th-century writers were as susceptible to Social Darwinism as they were troubled by it.)

It's bizarre and somewhat thrilling to come across these passages interposed among the more familiar scenes. But if they did come from Stoker's preliminary sketches, it's easy to see why they were cut. By 1897, scenes of ritual human sacrifice would have been old hat to readers of H. Rider Haggard, and Mrs. Dracula has an air of recycled Keats, by way of Wilkie Collins. These scenes ultimately damage the specificity and freshness of "Dracula."

More damning though easily attributable to double-translation is the fact that the language of "The Powers of Darkness" has lost the fluid, animal sensuality that makes Stoker's original so startling even today. Here, to refresh your memory, is Jonathan Harker's encounter with a female vampire in Dracula: "The fair girl went on her knees, and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth." The corresponding scene in "Powers of Darkness" is both clunkier and more abstract: "I could see that she'd sank down on her knees by the bench on which I sat. Then unbroken blackness surrounded me. ... I could still feel her soft feminine arms wrap around me; her breath on my face and her lips pressing to my throat."

Most disappointing to readers of the original will be Asmundsson's reduction of everything that comes after Harker's imprisonment to a scant 40 pages of summary. Probably dictated by the expediencies of serialization, this fast wrap-up means that many characters, including the delightfully eccentric vampire-hunter Van Helsing, are all glossed over. Renfield is gone.

Yet for all this, "Powers of Darkness" does intrigue, if only by adding layers of hearsay to the original. It's as if one more set of transcripts had been found, rumoring a new world order in which our problems are much, much bigger than one rogue count.

Amy Gentry is the author of "Good as Gone."

'Powers of Darkness'

By Bram Stoker and Valdimar Asmundsson, Overlook, 320 pages, $29.95

Read the original:
'Powers of Darkness' offers an Icelander's take on 'Dracula' - Chicago Tribune

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero