Month: January 2022

The story in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1987) has been told and retold many times, with innumerable adaptations and reimaginings. But what is perhaps the earliest of these only came to light recently: The 1901 Icelandic “translation” of Dracula is no translation at all, but a completely different story! It shares the basic premise and indeed many scenes with the monumental classic of the vampire genre, but Makt Myrkranna—as the Icelandic translation was called, which translates to “Powers of Darkness”—features brand new characters, unfamiliar scenes, and even an entirely different motivation and modus operandi for the infamous Count.

But is Makt Myrkranna an enterprising translator’s attempt to exert his own creative license over Stoker’s story, or is it merely based on an earlier draft of Dracula than the one that eventually made it to print? Literary scholar Hans Corneel de Roos puzzled over this question when he first discovered the unique nature of the Icelandic text in 2014. And now you can explore this question for yourself with the first ever English translation of the Icelandic version of Dracula, complete with scholarly annotations and other supplementary materials. Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula, translated from the Icelandic and annotated by de Roos, came out in 2017. The publishers were actually kind enough to send me a copy back when it first came out, but—relatively new to blogging at the time and intimidated by the intensive scholarly approach and the sheer size of the hardcover—I put it on the back burner and never quite got around to reading it. (Apologies!) But now, as part of my resolution to read more of the books festering away on my shelves, I finally picked it up again—and I wish I hadn’t waited! Powers of Darkness is a truly interesting story both in its own right and in regard to its tangled history with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I would recommend it to hardcore Dracula scholars and casual Gothic literature enthusiasts alike. Continue reading Review of Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula