On Wednesday, May 7th 2025, a miniconference, or event, was held to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Manifesto for Education, published by Carl Anders Säfström and Gert Biesta in 2010. The event was absolutely magnificent, organized by my friend and colleague Johannes Rytzler who also played with his jazz trio at intervals throughout the day. Several speakers responsed to the manifesto, often using art, music, poetry or even dancing to facilitate the response.
I made one of the responses, which was a short presentation about my experience of translating the Manifesto into Icelandic some years ago, using some anecdotes from my own educational career as a student. Below, you can see the original and longer draft of this response which was much shorter at the event.
Found in translation – On educational thinking and the rummaging for words
A confession: I was always a mediocre student. Not in the sense that I didn’t manage to get decent grades – the grades were alright; rather, my studies were mediocre. I would try to find any way to avoid exercising any hard work in my studies. I would procrastinate until the last minute and then do a massive amount of work in the late hours with the deadline looming as a sharp blade by my throat. This is, for better or for worse, to a large degree still how I work.
I sometimes imagine what would have become of me if I had actually applied myself in school – I could have become a real-estate agent, a banker or even some sort of a tech–entrepreneur or something completely soulless and without any morals or ethics but with a lot more money.
Anyway! Somewhere around the middle of my work on my Ph.D., I realised that this Manifesto – was being translated into evermore languages. Erik Hjulström, my friend and colleague, had translated into Swedish, but now it existed in Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, and even Mandarin. As I was engulfed in the very important work of trying to finish an article which was vital for my thesis – as well as tasked with the writing of the thesis itself – I was in a desperate need for some procrastination. Hence, I decided to ditch everything I was working on and to start translating the manifesto into Icelandic, my mother tongue. I felt that this was incredibly important, and that I was probably very late in this realization, and thus also started to try to outpace my imaginary competitors I was certain were working hard at translating the manifesto, as if they were locked up in a monastery somewhere in Iceland.
Now, translation is delicate work, something I knew from an early age, as growing up in the 1980’s in Iceland meant that cartoons weren’t dubbed. Therefore, to understand the moral teaching points He-Man would give in the end of each episode meant trying to understand English. This became also increasingly obvious to during one’s schooling. In Iceland, we learned Danish, English, and German or French, and a favourite teaching method among the teachers was to let a student read a paragraph of text and then translate it in front of the whole class and give and immediate verdict on the quality of the translation. Many teens have perspired heavily in front of an incomprehensible text, trying to render its meaning to their classmates whilst flushing in the deepest hues of crimson.
I mentioned before that I was a mediocre student. As evidence for this, I flunked three courses during my upper-secondary education and had to redo them. I flunked the third maths-course – which for researchers on education might be the most relatable thing about this text. I also flunked the first Icelandic course during my first semester, which came as a shock to me as I had been speaking it fluently for years. However, my exam was apparently “riddled with spelling errors” and my creative and, to my mind, innovative interpretation of the poem on the last page of the exam was (as my teacher so diplomatically put it): “wrong”.
I also flunked the third course of German and had to redo it. The teacher I had for my second round was the late Dr. Þorvarður Helgason, an author and actor who used tales of his extensive experience of smoking hashish during his Interrail-journeys in his youth as a tool to relate to his teenage students. As an educator he taught me several things, aside German, which proved to be vital life lessons later on, and thus illustrated educational dimensions of the teacher’s work which extends beyond the curriculum.
Once, for instance, I was deeply involved in an engaging conversation with a classmate. So, when Þorvarður turned to me and said “Gulli, could you flip that for me” (meaning read and translate the next paragraph). I cockily responded “but I‘m talking to her” whereby Þorvarður made an immediate educational evaluation of the situation and said to the guy next to us “OK. Palli, you’re up”.
Another lesson was when I was dreadfully hungover and couldn’t muster the energy to raise my head from the table due to nausea. Þorvarður’s keen eye didn’t miss the corpse in his classroom, and asked “Gulli, are you asleep?” to which I responded “no, hung over”. Again, Þorvarður used the opportunity as an educator and said to this very under-aged 18-year-old at like 9 am on a Thursday: “you should go the pub in the mall across the street and get yourself a Guinness. That will make you right as rain”.
Anyway, I did a first translation of the Manifesto but realising that I am not a philosopher, I got my sister-in-law Elsa Haraldsdóttir – a philosopher proper – to assist me. Thereafter, I sent the manuscript to my parents, both teachers, for corrections of spelling and grammar – as my teacher in Icelandic had so carefully made me understand that I may need such assistance.
My dad, who is by the way the most supportive person to ever walk this earth, asked a key question I hadn’t really reflected upon: “Why are you doing this? Everyone in Iceland reads English”. I responded with a long e-mail explaining the importance of developing an Icelandic vocabulary for educational theory and the importance of dealing with contemporary theoretical developments also in the Icelandic context – but the whole thing was just a lengthy way of saying “because I don’t want to do this other thing…”
We then sent the manuscript to an Icelandic journal, and got the response from the editor: “this is a lot of hard work, and I see how this is of relevance and importance. But… the language…?”
At this juncture, I did a careful assessment and reflection on the time and work we had spent on this project, and came to the conclusion “fuck this”. I promptly archived the bloody thing and forgot about it for a few years.
Here’s another side note. During my teacher education studies, my class had a peculiar way of dealing with texts in other languages. For instance, they would split a book between themselves and translate a chapter each. I usually refused to participate, finding it more effective to read the entire book over the course of a couple of days than to spend a week translating a single chapter from it and then another two weeks trying to decipher the translations from my classmates. An example I remember well is the chapter one of my classmates had translated word for word, never realizing that she had translated the very frequently appearing word “colleagues” into the Icelandic equivalent of “colleges” which made the text very hard to read. Probably just a slip of the finger between lines in the dictionary (a dictionary was a book that functioned like an analogue google-translate in which one could look for words. Such tools were frequently used by people before and shortly after the shift of the last millennia).
Back to the translation: a couple of years go by, and all of the sudden I had finished my Ph.D. and had new important work to avoid doing. Being in a desperate need of a good project to procrastinate with, I dug up the old translation of the manifesto. The time that had passed had also meant that I had a better understanding of the politics of the manifesto and the historical context of ideas its authors belonged to which helped me to realise what the editor had meant with “but… the language”.
We had essentially made the same mistake as my classmate did and translated education with only one of the many words that are of relevance as potential equivalents to education in Icelandic. By ubiquitously using the word “menntun” we had reduced the translation’s potential to capture the essence of the manifesto. Menntun certainly means education, it even has through the work of philosopher Páll Skúlason, a connection to the notion of Bildung. As he pointed ut, menntun has the word “men” built into it and he said, to become educated (menntaður) is therefore to become more of a man – meaning human. The word was nevertheless insufficient on its own.
I went back to Erik Hjulström’s excellent Swedish translation, and his varied translation of the word education with the Swedish words utbildning, bildning, and pedagogik and realised that I had really translated with a limited vocabulary due to my detestation of the psychological connotations of the words “uppeldisfræði” (theory of child rearing). I had disregarded words like “nám”, which translates to study (the word “nám” also has connotations to the word “náma” or mine, i.e., a place to dig for valuables). I had missed words like “fræðsla” or “fræðast” i.e., “informing” or “becoming informed”, which in turn are related to the word “fróðleikur” or wisdom, or becoming “fróð(ur)” or wise.
This time, I had Erik’s translation at hand, and rewrote the whole translation in collaboration with Elsa. We also added a long introduction to the translation about the difficulties of the translation and the choices we had made, and this time the manuscript was accepted directly and published – a mere nine years later
So, what is the message here?
That translation is messy work, requiring more than a basic vocabulary, it also demands an in-depth understanding of the text being translated and its context. It requires time, and sometimes the realisation that you need to finish a conversation before engaging in interpretation. Often, it may even be better to take a long break, have a pint of Guinness, and return to the text later on than to sit head down by your desk, nauseous from your previous actions.
And in any case, one should rummage through all the words available to develop a language of education – especially when everyone can read English.
Gunnlaugur Magnússon 