Dracula or Draculitz?

: Translational Forgery and Bram

Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula

Katy Brundan, Melanie Jones, Benjamin Mier-Cruz

Victorian Review, Volume 45, Number 2, Fall 2019, pp. 293-306 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vcr.2019.0060

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/757842

[ Access provided at 14 Jul 2020 14:03 GMT from University of Exeter ]

 Dracula or Draculitz?: Translational Forgery
and Bram Stoker’s “Lost Version” of Dracula
K at y B ru n da n, M e l a n i e Jon e s, a n d
Ben ja m i n M i er- Cru z

T he body of vampire literature—much like the body of the vampire him-

or herself—is subject to a certain degree of fraudulence and imposture.
At the end of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Jonathan Harker reveals that “in all
the mass of material of  which the record is composed, there is hardly one
authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting” (326), a revelation
that suggests the vampire’s representation is dominated first by mechani-
cal reproduction and second by inauthenticity. Dracula’s participation in an
“inauthentic” archive drives this article, as we argue that the technologies of
monstrosity we associate with the literary vampire—those relating to bodily
and technological reproduction—have long been intimately bound to the
textual practices of fraud and literary piracy. The specific forms of textual
fraud we examine here reach their apotheosis in the fraudulent translations
of Dracula published in Sweden and Iceland very shortly after the appearance
of Stoker’s novel.
Until very recently, critics and biographers assumed that the 1901 Icelandic
translation of Dracula was connected to Stoker’s archive through documents
now lost to time.1 Since 1986, when Richard Dalby first translated into
English the signed preface to Valdimar Ásmundsson’s Makt myrkranna, the
Icelandic version has been seen as evidence of Stoker’s collaboration or
blessing of the text’s significant changes. In 2017, researcher Hans Corneel
de Roos published a translation of Makt myrkranna as Powers of Darkness, hail-
ing the text as Stoker’s “lost” work. De Roos speculated that the translator
may have been “working from a proto-version of Dracula that Stoker never
worked out to the end” or from a draft “based on the notes Stoker made
from March 1890 on” (Introduction 23–24). Meanwhile, Dacre Stoker, Bram
Stoker’s great-grandnephew, and a notable researcher, insisted that Stoker
must have “orchestrated” the “significant” Icelandic changes (10). Such con-
fidence was short-lived, for researchers soon uncovered not only a source
for the Icelandic version, but evidence of literary fraud.
In fact, the Icelandic version is an abridged translation of the earlier
Swedish Mörkrets makter (Powers of Darkness), a version of Dracula translated by
A-e, which appeared in 1899, a discovery made by Rickard Berghon. Although
both Nordic translations claim on their title pages to be “a novel by Bram

Victorian Review 45: 293–306

© 2020 Victorian Studies Association of  Western Canada
 victorian review  • Volume 45 Number 2
Stoker” and include a preface by “B.S.,” their connection to Stoker is tenu-
ous at best. Just a year after publishing his Powers of Darkness, de Roos discov-
ered that passages from the preface had been lifted from the memoirs of
a Swedish priest. Rather than being “authorized” versions of Dracula, both
translations bear the hallmarks of  “artful piracy” (de Roos, “Was the Preface”
25). But these fraudulent translations of Dracula are not the anomalies they
appear at first glance. Far from being aberrations—glitches in the other-
wise smooth surface of Dracula’s textual transmission—these translations, we
argue, epitomize the nineteenth century’s urge to produce and disseminate
vampire fiction through various forms of fraudulent textual practices.
The Swedish version, with its forged preface, has been examined by
very few researchers but forms a particular focus of the latter half of this
article as we consider how nineteenth-century vampire literature—with
its fraudulently creative translations—invites us to reread the relationship
between translation, authorship, authenticity, and the archive. As research
has recast the Nordic texts as translational forgeries, this article takes a
closer look at textual fraud in relation to vampire literature, a genre closely
tied to evolving notions of textual (in)authenticity. If in Dracula, “[h]orror
arises not because Dracula destroys bodies but because he appropriates and
transforms them” (Arata 630), the same transformational and appropriating
forces appear at the level of textual construction and transmission. We argue
that, upon closer examination, Dracula’s extended archival strata, as well as
its diegetic surface, reveal a “monstrous” allegiance to literary piracy, forgery,
and misused translations.
Turning first to Stoker’s novel, we note that many important criti-
cal studies have traced Dracula’s preoccupation with textual reproduction.
For Rebecca A. Pope, Dracula is a “parasitic and appropriating genre,” as
Mina’s insistent typewriting drives the novel’s exorbitant reproduction of
voices, genres, and the paraphernalia of mass culture (199). Under the self-­
consuming logic of Dracula’s “vampiric” typewriting (Wicke 492), notions
of truth and authenticity are disrupted. Memorably, Harker admits that
the vampire hunters “could hardly ask any one” to accept Mina’s typewrit-
ten documents as “proofs of so wild a story” (Dracula 326–27). According
to Caryn Radick, the novel’s focus on unverifiable “proofs” strikes at the
heart of the archive’s notion of authenticity. In Dracula, Stoker “questions
the trustworthiness of records by demonstrating the many ways they can
be compromised” (Radick 504). In this reading, the novel problematizes
the foundational practices of the archive—authentication and verification—
the same practices, incidentally, that are used to identify forgery. Even as
philologists in the nineteenth century were urgently practising techniques
to identify fraudulent texts, forgeries regularly surfaced in scholarly arenas
throughout Europe, often relating to translated texts and newly discovered
“archival” material (Bak et al. x).

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The authority of the archive—like that of the work of art—traditionally

rested on veneration of the “unique existence” of the original, a phenome-
non Walter Benjamin analyzes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(220). But in the diegetic world of Dracula, the archive’s power derives not
from originals (which Dracula has burned) but from copies, in recognition
that the modern world’s authority is no longer vested in the notion of a
single or authentic original. Mina’s knack for archiving everything from
newspaper cuttings to memos implicates Dracula in what Thomas Richards
terms the “imperial archive.” Although adept at manipulating the world
of officialdom, Stoker’s vampire finds himself out-thwarted by “an impe-
rial archive . . . an empire in which all transport entails the production of
data” (Richards 62). In Richards’s reading, the colonial uprising signified by
Dracula’s depredations is defeated by the tools of modern textual reproduc-
tive labour, from Harker’s “polyglot dictionary” to “manifold” typewritten
duplication (Dracula 13, 198).
Yet something is missing from these accounts. The new archival economy
that eventually thwarts the vampire in Dracula produces its own kind of
falsification and fraudulence. As cultural historian Darren Wershler-Henry
notes after examining Dracula’s preoccupation with typewriting, “[t]he real-
ity of the relationship between typewriting and truth is that typewriting,
like anything else that can be read, can also be forged” (185). A modern
culture that relies on mass-produced documents ushers in a new preoc-
cupation with fraud: a practice that mechanical reproduction makes both
less detectable and more likely to spread. It is perhaps no coincidence that
the vampire’s insidious form of reproduction became associated with pat-
terns of textual fraud. In the nineteenth century, the insatiable demand for
vampiric fiction tacitly encouraged fraudulent translation, literary imposture
or misattribution, and copious borrowing. Meanwhile, the literary vampire
showcased fraudulent techniques at the diegetic level. Dracula, for example,
“operates almost exclusively by means of impersonation and falsification”
while turning his victims into false simulacra of their original selves (Butler
108). Furthermore, by locating fraud within official discourse, as Dracula does,
Stoker channels a deeper questioning of textual authority.
In Dracula, the “language of information” used by the vampire-hunters to
fight the vampire is itself deliberately falsified (Richards 62). Van Helsing
explains how the doctors resort to constructing their own fraudulent
document:

I came to speak about the certificate of death. If we do not act

properly and wisely, there may be an inquest, and that paper
would have to be produced. . . . I know, and you know, and
the other doctor who attended her knows, that Mrs. Westenra
had disease of the heart, and we can certify that she died of it.

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Let us fill up the certificate at once, and I shall take it myself to
the registrar and go on to the undertaker. (Dracula 137)

The truth of Mrs. Westenra’s death—which occurs when Dracula sends a

wolf to leap through Lucy’s window during the night—is “wisely” concealed
by a certificate that claims Lucy’s mother died in unremarkable circum-
stances, “by misadventure in falling from bed” (253). This false document
is passed to various dignitaries (the registrar, the undertaker) in the official
circulation of its fraudulent narrative. The vampire-hunters’ willingness to
wield forged documents mimics Dracula’s own fraudulent circulation of
texts. The Count forces Harker to write post-dated letters falsely stating that
his work is done and that he has “left the castle and arrived at Bistritz”—a
future Harker fears he will never see (44). These fraudulent letters enter
postal circulation, the identity of their true “author” undetectable to the
ordinary reader. Only the brevity of Harker’s note makes Mina, the novel’s
most perceptive reader, “uneasy” about him (72). In effect, the doctors’
official falsification is actually more convincing than Dracula’s handwritten
ruse—and potentially more threatening.
Textual fraud was not simply a curiosity that emerged in the pages of
popular fiction. As Monica F. Cohen details in Pirating Fictions: Ownership and
Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (2018), nineteenth-century popular
culture was awash with plagiarism, pirated editions, unauthorized transla-
tions, and unapproved stage adaptations. Writers laboured under very lim-
ited copyright protection until the mid-nineteenth century; in 1842, British
copyright law was made more robust and extended to art, drama, and music.
In spite of this, the proliferation of unauthorized copies across different
media plagued many artists; an opera singer even found her voice covertly
recorded on a phonograph and threatened legal action, as Raj Shah points out
(428). The proliferation of phonograph narratives in Stoker’s Dracula points,
then, to more than just a preoccupation with mechanical reproduction: it
underlines the lack of authorization in making such copies in the first place.
The novel is intent on drawing our attention both to textual inauthenticity
and to the lack of authorization in producing copies, the phonograph being
a particularly brand new example of an archiving device.
As Dr. Seward records his voice on the dying Lucy’s phonograph cylin-
ders (obviously without permission), he authors a displacement of identity
that Dracula himself would be proud to have accomplished. Seward insists,
“I shall take this cylinder with me, and then I can complete my entry on
Lucy’s phonograph” (Dracula 130). In the place of Lucy’s own phonograph
diary, Seward records his narrative denouncing the “Thing” she has become
(190). In so doing, Seward does not acknowledge that he has displaced Lucy’s
words or translated her experience into the overheated discourse of sexual
condemnation. But his medical drawer filled with rows of  “hollow cylinders
of metal covered with dark wax” offers telling proof, tangibly evoking the

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reinscription of male control over Lucy’s bodily and textual archive that
she is powerless to prevent (196). The overlaying of Steward’s voice onto
Lucy’s phonograph thus produces a technological vampirism that enacts its
own “colonization of the body” (Arata 630). The novel’s representation of
the official archive is thus one marked by a distinct lack of authorization in
terms of securing permission to record and retain.
While Stoker’s protagonists create inauthentic simulacra and reproduce
without permission, Stoker himself took advantage of unauthorized repro-
duction in constructing Dracula. From his early notes, we know that Stoker
originally planned to imitate J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) by set-
ting Dracula in Austrian Styria. But he stumbled instead upon an anonymous
vampire tale set in Transylvania, which helped redirect the novel’s setting
toward eastern Europe. Like Dracula, “The Mysterious Stranger” (1854) fea-
tures an older, aristocratic vampire with “piercing” grey eyes and a sallow
complexion who lives in a castle in the wolf-infested Carpathians (14). The
very anonymity of  “The Mysterious Stranger” seems to have invited borrow-
ing, which Stoker promptly did. The tale’s exact origins eluded researchers
for decades, but we now know it is an unauthorized translation of Karl
von Wachsmann’s Der Fremde (The Stranger), first published in his collection
Erzählungen und Novellen (1844).
In closely modelling the early portion of Dracula on an anonymous,
pirated translation of a German story, Stoker created new textual life from
a translated text whose ties to the original author had been severed. This
example demonstrates how nineteenth-century mass culture’s parasitic
consumption—­­­a mirror of the vampire’s own insatiable appetite—­depended
in part on translational practices. Stoker’s unauthorized reproduction makes
him complicit in the archive’s suppression of the German author respon-
sible for many details of Dracula’s character, from the vampire’s “repul-
sive” but magnetic manner to his waving the wolf pack away with a hand
(“Mysterious Stranger” 14). Nor is this the only instance of  borrowing
in Dracula. Raj Shah is among those to document the striking similarities
between descriptions of Dracula’s castle and descriptions in Jules Verne’s
novel La Château des Carpathes (1893), for example (432–33). The fact that this
fictional borrowing occurred from other European languages reminds us
that vampire literature owes much of its construction to the unauthorized
reproduction of literary texts across national boundaries.
Stoker was noticeably less keen to offer his own work up to unauthor-
ized pilfering. Given the notoriety of unauthorized stage adaptations, Stoker
made sure to stage a “perfunctory” dramatized reading of Dracula a few
weeks before the novel was published to establish stage copyright (Skal
365). By 1886, copyright had entered a more modern phase with the inter-
national protections conveyed by the Berne Convention for the Protection
of Literary and  Artistic Works. This agreement also covered adaptations and
translations, which up until then had been largely free of regulation. But the

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Berne Convention still did not offer comprehensive protection since many
countries, including Sweden and Iceland, were not part of the agreement.
Neither was Hungary, which also published an unauthorized translation,
Drakula: Angol regény (Dracula: An English Novel), in 1898, just a year after Dracula’s
English publication. These countries could translate texts with impunity and
appear to have availed themselves quite liberally of this liberal approach to
authorial ethics.
If we acknowledge that Dracula would not have been written in its current
form without the pirated translation of  Wachsmann’s tale, silently inserted
into the text’s body, it is also evident that the early translations of Dracula fit
a pattern in which lack of copyright protection helped create and spread
nineteenth-century vampire literature. As Erik Butler explores, the recycling
of vampire texts by “cunning manipulators of the market” (93) coincided
with the rise of the “vampire-impostor” (107). John Polidori’s tale The Vampyre
(1819)—which features the first such impostor—was the subject of numer-
ous unauthorized translations and re-translations, producing a plethora of
plays, operas, and fiction in French, English, Italian, German, and Swedish.2
The first edition of the tale was even falsely published under Lord Byron’s
name, against both parties’ wishes. The misattribution proved so compelling
it was repeated and amplified through the story’s many translations. Without
the textual sleight of hand that connected Byron to the “seductive” vampire
Lord Ruthven (Polidori 57), the tale would have been unlikely to generate
such stunning popularity in Europe. In turn, Dion Boucicault’s 1852 version
of the tale, The Vampire (later rewritten as The Phantom), nods to vampire texts’
participation in an economy of unauthorized reproduction. Eschewing more
common methods of identifying the vampire, Boucicault’s play uncovers the
monster through his tendency to commit document “forgery” (Boucicault
23). In the play, a forged will incongruously reproduces a hundred-year-old
signature on a modern piece of paper, linking the vampire-impostor to the
dead Alan Raby. As a melodrama, the play must draw a line between the
fraudulent archive (the forged will) and the truth of the vampire’s identity,
hiding in plain sight in the modern world. If we consider the evidence of
this play, at some level the Victorian era appears to have associated vampirism
with textual forgery and the problems of verifying an authentic identity.
By the 1870s, the penchant of the authors of vampire literature to plagia-
rize each other’s plots, words, and settings had become an object of satire.
Robert Reece’s satirical play The Vampire (1872) depicts its monster, another
Alan Raby, as “an Irish writer of gothic penny dreadfuls who attempts to steal
plots from lady novelists” (Stuart 166). Similar texts appeared in France.3
The author of the vampire novel Carmilla proves the point since Le Fanu was
“audacious . . . [in] the act of literary borrowing” (McCormack 149). While
Le Fanu often built on others’ folklore and ghost stories to craft new tales,
this borrowing occurred even across his own works. Just as Carmilla appears
compelled to re-enact the overturned carriage scene with different victims,

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Le Fanu lifts this same carriage scene from an earlier story, “The Room in
the Dragon Volant,” in an act of self-plagiarism.
According to Robert Macfarlane’s Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality
in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007), notions of plagiarism and originality
underwent a reappraisal during the Victorian era. In the second half of the
nineteenth century, “unoriginality—understood as the inventive reuse of the
words of others—came increasingly to be discerned as an authentic form of
creativity” (Macfarlane 8). In this pragmatic approach, which subtly shifts
the definition of “authentic,” the writer is seen more as an “assimilator and
transformer” than as the creative genius of the Romantic era (Macfarlane
8). Translators, of course, were denied the privilege of being considered
“creators,” even as the translators of vampire literature offered significant
creative variants in their work. Dracula’s privileging of the “inauthentic” sug-
gests that Macfarlane has a point. But if textual fraud is portrayed as both
necessary and “monstrous” in vampire literature, what might this suggest?
Did vampire literature embrace a newly “authentic form of creativity” in the
shape of unauthorized reproduction, or did it register certain reservations?
Evidently, Dracula and its predecessors display anxiety over both unauthorized
reproduction and the ease with which one’s identity can be misappropriated
and false information circulated. Aside from the forged letters, for example,
Dracula impersonates Harker in order to spread a false trail of his move-
ments. Dracula’s creation of  Lucy as a terrifyingly “voluptuous” vampire who
circulates as the subject of sensational news reports (Dracula 146) suggests
a fundamental disquiet with the techniques of unauthorized reproduction.
Even the vampire-hunters’ own use of falsified documents is hardly reas-
suring. Dracula’s revelling in the inventio of recombination is thus tempered by
representing its fraudulent possibilities as distinctly monstrous.4
If plagiarism and unauthorized translation had become the norm for
vampire literature—potentially as part of a “creative” pragmatism—was any
kind of textual fraud particularly frowned upon in relation to these texts?
The answer to this question brings us to pseudotranslation, a category of
textual deception seen as particularly threatening because it donned the garb
of authenticity. In this situation, the “translator” creates a plausible original
where no such text exists. Prosper Mérimée was branded an “impostor, liar,
[and] deceiver” (qtd. in Darcos 54; our translation) for La Guzla (1827), his
collection of ballads and vampire tales supposedly translated from the Serbian
and presented with authentic-looking footnotes. Like James Macpherson,
with his fabricated translations of his own Ossian poems, Mérimée passed
off his own creative work as a genuine translation of vampire-inflected
folk literature for archival posterity. The outpouring against these authors
reminds us that fraudulent translations are taken so seriously because their
falsified sources disrupt at the deepest level literary, archival, and academic
conventions. As Nick Groom states, forgery acts as “an impostor—or even a
parasite” in its obfuscation of the original (16). The “lost” version of Dracula,

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appearing at the very end of the nineteenth century, caps nearly a century in
which “parasitic” forms of textual imposture abound in vampire literature,
complete with their own fraudulent garb of authenticity.
*    *    *
In 2017, de Roos published an English translation of the Icelandic Makt
myrkranna as Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula. But de Roos’s adept
archival research soon revealed that a paragraph in the preface was in fact
plagiarized from the memoirs of a Swedish priest—a somewhat incongru-
ous source text but consistent with the ethos of patching together vampire
texts from previously published material. According to de Roos, it “would
have been a severe—possibly criminal—act of fraud for anyone else but
Stoker to sign [the preface] that way” (Introduction 39). But this is precisely
what appears to have happened. The probability of fraud puts a question
mark under previous scholarship that assumed Stoker’s authorship of the
Icelandic preface, with its reference to “the infamous murders of Jack the
Ripper” (de Roos, Powers of Darkness 62). Carol Margaret Davison, for example,
uses this preface to support her argument that Stoker’s Dracula refers to the
Ripper murders, claiming that the Icelandic introduction makes a “signifi-
cant comparison” between fiction and macabre reality (147). While Stoker
may well have been influenced by the London murders, we cannot now
use the Swedish/Icelandic preface as archival evidence given the sleight of
hand in its creation. Yet this translation is still connected to Stoker’s work,
plumbing the depths of the nineteenth-century cultural unconscious in a
similar way as the original and featuring the kind of translingual “borrowing”
Stoker himself felt free to use.
The Nordic translations begin in recognizable form as Harker (now
called Thomas) journeys to Dracula’s castle in Transylvania. But both ver-
sions quickly descend—quite literally, via steps into the castle basement—
into more gruesome horrors. Dracula now bears the Germanic name
Count Draculitz (sometimes spelled Drakulitz in the Icelandic) and more
outrageously subscribes to “outright fascist” views of world domination
(Berghorn). Both versions feature more than their fair share of heaving
bosoms, complicated plot twists, and a dazzling cast of characters ranging
from Detectives Tellet and Barrington to Dracula’s alter-egos, Baron Székély
and Marquis Caraman-Rubiano. The Icelandic and Swedish texts resemble
each other up to the point at which Harker escapes from Draculitz’s castle
using his bedsheets as a rope (in Dracula, it is unclear how Harker frees
himself ); from then on, the Icelandic version is a hasty abridgement of the
longer Swedish text. Both versions feature a sensationalized scene of ritual
human sacrifice in the castle and Draculitz’s plot to take over the world.
The translator’s creative energy in imagining these additions includes copi-
ous borrowing from other Gothic texts, from Le Fanu’s Carmilla to stories
by Edgar Allen Poe, sources that have not previously been identified. These

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fraudulent translations point to a multiplicity of influences rather than a

single, authoritative source text.
An early deviation from Stoker’s original in both translations involves
Harker’s erotic obsession with an overtly sexualized Countess. Whereas in
Stoker’s Dracula, Harker turns from the three vampire women with an expres-
sion of  Victorian propriety, “Faugh! Mina is a woman, and there is nought in
common. They are devils of the Pit!” (55), in the faux-translations, Harker
obsessively longs for the vampire Countess for much of the opening scenes
in Draculitz’s castle. With her blonde hair, turquoise-blue eyes, dazzlingly
pale skin, bared bosom, and blood-red lips, the Countess poses a distinct
threat as Harker describes, in the Swedish version, how her kisses “feel
like an insidious poison running through my veins” (MM 93).5 Chillingly,
the vampire Countess is in fact a long-dead woman whose portrait haunts
Harker. As he wanders the portrait gallery, her life-sized image comes alive:
“I thought I saw part of the large portrait on the other side of the room rise
up and spread its arms out towards me as an electric tremor surged through
my entire being, warning me of impending doom” (MM 121). As thrilling
as this plotline is, however, it is not original to the Swedish translator.
The Countess and her portrait parallel a similar plotline in Le Fanu’s
Carmilla. In Le Fanu’s novel, the youthful vampire Carmilla is in fact Mircalla,
Countess Karnstein, whose 1698 portrait hangs in a Styrian castle. The por-
trait resembles Carmilla, even down to a mole on her throat, and seems
uncannily alive: “It was beautiful; it was startling; it seemed to live. It was the
effigy of Carmilla” (33). A similar trope appears in Varney the Vampire (1845–
47), whereby the vampire, Sir Francis Varney, is matched by both a scrap of
his coat and his uncanny resemblance to a “lifelike” ancestral painting in
which eyes seem to gaze at the viewer ([Rymer and Prest] 51). Each text in
this case disrupts notions of time and authenticity, and doubled characters
obscure their true “original.” It appears that the translator of Mörkrets makter
additionally asserts the tradition of vampire texts to borrow from multiple
sources, obscuring the “original” it purports to translate.
A detail in the Countess’s history also seems reminiscent of Poe’s story
“The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), a tale about a bloody pestilence. In
Poe’s story, a chamber of the prince’s Gothic abbey sports window panes
and velvet hangings of  “scarlet—a deep blood color” (38). In Mörkrets mak-
ter, the same unsettling effect is cast by “a hanging lamp with a blood red
screen” and walls “covered with ruby red velvet” (318).6 In Mörkrets makter
this room reappears repeatedly; as de Roos points out, a “blood red secret
room” also occurs among Stoker’s working notes for Dracula (Introduction
35–36). However, Poe’s tale seems a more obvious source for the Countess’s
sinister room given the latter’s rich furnishings and textures.
This conclusion becomes more likely when the Swedish translator
makes another adjustment to Dracula, borrowing from a different tale by
Poe. Dr. Seward is called upon to perform hypnosis on Countess Ida de

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Gonobitz-Vàrkony, an alter-ego of the seductive female vampire. Upon enter-
ing Carfax, Seward notes that the house would make “a fitting illustration for
a Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe story” (MM 311). It is perhaps no coincidence
that Seward calls Poe to mind before performing hypnosis as the sequence
closely resembles Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), in
which the narrator performs hypnosis on a subject at the moment of death.
In Mörkrets makter, Seward also hypnotizes the Countess while she is lying in
her blood-red room as if dead. The woman lacks a pulse but speaks “slowly
and uninterrupted with a voice that seemed to come from a far-off distance,”
instructing the doctor that she “is dead now. Y   ou must bring her back to life”
(319). The Countess’s post-mortem hypnotic state and disembodied voice
coming from a “far-off distance” parallel those of M. Valdemar, as the dead
character’s voice “seemed to reach our ears . . . from a vast distance,” saying
“I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead” (Poe 77).
Along with their debt to Poe and Le Fanu, the Swedish and Icelandic
translations, with their insistence on a racialized, Nietzschean politics, sig-
nificantly shift the tone of Stoker’s novel. The human sacrifice scene, for
example, features ape-like creatures menacing terrified and naked women
(MM 106). One of the simian beings (which have “disproportionately long,
almost ape-like arms . . . thick lips and wide jaws” [102]) bites a woman in
the throat as she lies on the altar. Such sensational scenes are reminiscent of
rites that might be imagined on the behalf of “primitive” peoples. Although
Dracula feeds anti-Semitic discourse, there is no parallel to this racialized
scene in Stoker’s novel. It appears that the translator was extemporizing on
nineteenth-century fears of racial others implicit in Stoker’s novel but voiced
more overtly elsewhere.
The second half of the Swedish translation is very noticeably different
from Dracula. Once in London, Draculitz sets in motion a political plot to take
over the world—starting with Britain. This includes paying off newspapers
to alter public opinion in countries such as France and Russia, seizing the
power of the mass media in ways Stoker’s Dracula had yet to devise. An
anonymous conspirator is overheard saying, “You can rest assured—should
the armaments run out, I promise that the climate here will need but a
spark to set London ablaze—and then—finis Britannia!” (MM 352). In this
version, Draculitz offers a more politically violent kind of reverse coloni-
zation than Stoker’s Dracula. A new character, the world-famous violinist
Guiseppe Leonardi, even declares that the “övermänniskan” (“Übermensch”
or “Overman”) will take over the world: “The strongest are destined to
rule the world and they shall!” (364). It is as though the translator decided
that Stoker’s emphasis on Dracula’s sexualized domination was lacking in
Nietzschean realpolitik—and sought to remedy the omission.
The Swedish translation concludes with Draculitz stabbed in the heart
with a dagger. But its ending offers a provocative exploration of the repressed
horrors of the unconscious mind as the vampires take over the asylum,

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incarcerating Dr. Seward and Quincy Morris as insane. Seward even under-
goes hypnosis at the hands of Draculitz (in the persona of the alter-ego
Caraman-Rubiano), whereupon the doctor finds himself at Lucy’s grave
and receives a “passionate kiss” from her: “I felt her pressing herself closer
into me and it felt as if I were reliving that moment when my blood, drop
by drop, flowed from my veins into hers” (MM 338). In this version, then,
Seward and Lucy symbolically “marry,” the asylum burns to the ground, and
Seward dies without regaining his sanity (410). It is as though the Swedish
translator is intent on unleashing, in sensational style, the repressed fears
we might attribute to Stoker’s own characters: an eruption of the novel’s
unconscious breaking the surface in another language.
Fraudulent and embellished as they are, the Nordic translations are tied
to Stoker’s original. There even remain some interesting links between
Stoker’s archived notes for Dracula and the Nordic translations—namely,
the “blood red secret room,” a deaf-and-mute housekeeper, “dinner party
at the mad doctor’s,” and the legend of a white lady (B. Stoker, Bram Stoker’s
Notes 69, 27, 23, 153). Despite de Roos’s sifting through Stoker’s archive for
matches (de Roos, Introduction 35–36), we find that these details are not
by themselves striking enough to earn the right to assume Stoker’s collabo-
ration on the translation. The similarities between Stoker’s notes and Makt
myrkranna evoke rather generic themes of Gothic texts and, more impor-
tantly, seem marginal in the context of both Stoker’s extensive notes and
the longer Swedish translation. Given the connections we have discovered
with published vampire literature, we believe it is evident that the Swedish
translator followed in the nineteenth-century tradition of unacknowledged
vampiric “borrowing” across linguistic borders rather than that Stoker’s
draft ended up in Swedish hands.
*    *    *
If the Swedish and Icelandic versions do not represent Stoker’s “lost” archi-
val draft of Dracula, how do we classify them? After all, translation itself
has something of a vampiric nature in that it constructs an “afterlife” of
the original, as Benjamin famously tells us (“Task of the Translator” 73).
Although both forgery and translation can be seen as forms of artistic crea-
tion, most would agree that there is a difference between a creative transla-
tion and an out-and-out forgery, a text that purports to be that which it is
not. In the case of the Swedish and Icelandic “translations” of Dracula, both
texts claim to be “by Bram Stoker” but depart so significantly from Stoker’s
novel that for hundreds of pages we are barely reading the original at all.
Perhaps worse, fraudulently assigning Stoker’s name to a plagiarized preface
sets the bar for vampire stories to a new low. Y  et it cannot escape us that the
fraudulent “afterlife” of  Dracula involves abundant invention. We might, then,
be tempted to consider whether the Nordic translations should be classed
as “unauthorized fan fiction,” as David J. Skal suggests in his recent Stoker

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biography, Something in the Blood (339). The translator’s inventions—fuelled
by late nineteenth-century racial and sexual fantasies—evoke the exuber-
ance of fan fiction, extending Stoker’s creation into uncharted territory. As
these translations blur the lines between forgery, translation, “borrowing,”
and creative fan fiction—exhibiting elements of all four—we find Dracula’s
archival strata obliquely connected to texts that themselves replicate the
doubleness and falsification of the vampire’s own nature.
With falsification and unauthorized transformation a common feature of
vampire texts, it appears that writers and editors embraced a more pragmatic
attitude to authorship based on the recombination of previous texts and
textual misattribution. Such techniques duped readers into believing that
Byron wrote Polidori’s The Vampyre and that Stoker penned the preface to the
Icelandic and Swedish editions of Dracula. Yet such deceptions were central
to disseminating the vampire’s myth. Just as Harker cannot produce an
“authentic document” in the world of Stoker’s Dracula, the novel’s extended
textual archive depends on the obscuring and multiplication of original
sources. From Dracula’s in-text representation of a false death certificate to
the textual compilation that is Mörkrets makter, the examples presented in this
article foreground texts that are inauthentic, misattributed, unauthorized,
“borrowed,” and forged. The expanded corpus of vampire literature, then,
complete with its handwritten notes, translations, and sources, problema-
tizes the notion of originality. If, for copyright scholar Paul Saint-Amour,
originality is an “artifice” (25), an ideological construct “more radically
unknowable than we would like to admit” (26), vampire literature seems
to bear out these words.
Undoing the notion of the original has implications for the notion of
an archive, a word whose source word, arkhe, means precisely “origin.” If
vampire literature puts into question the notion of the original through its
connection with fraudulent practices, our research suggests that we need to
reconceive the vampire’s textual archive as one embedded in the inauthentic,
abounding in unauthorized, translated, and fraudulent copies. In that case,
we might look beyond Dracula’s easily verifiable ethnographic and histori-
cal sources (which range from medieval accounts of V   lad Țepeș to Emily
Gerard’s The Land beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania [1888])
for further textual inclusion: its elided or silent sources, its later translations,
its entanglement in fraud and suppression. Such a move becomes more
necessary as we open our research to evolving notions of the archive in
the digital age. Today, the research that identified the fraudulent prefaces to
Makt myrkranna and Mörkrets makter was conducted using digital databases—and
interlingual translation—to match Stoker’s supposed words with those of
a Swedish priest. Such work refigures the often-overlooked role of transla-
tions within a modern notion of the archive. We might take a lesson from
Jacques Derrida’s re-examination of the archive in the digital age—along
with its Freudian underpinnings—in which Derrida directs his attention

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toward a translation of a Hebrew text, noting that such texts constitute a

“quasi-infinity of layers, of archival strata that are at once superimposed,
overprinted, and enveloped in each other” (22). He goes on to ask, “is not
the copy of an impression already a sort of archive?” (28), inviting us to
reconsider the secondary nature of such copies. Likewise, this article encour-
ages us to reconsider the position of the liminal, multi-layered, unauthorized,
translated, and fraudulently inventive copy.  The literary vampire, having been
dispersed through and inspired by unauthorized reproduction, epitomizes
a new kind of archive enabled by the practices of modernity: an archive of
inauthenticity marked by textual fraud and falsification.

Notes
1 Stoker is cited as the author of the Icelandic preface in numerous critical and
biographical texts, including those by Belford, Brundan, Dalby, Davison, Miller,
Skal, and Eighteen-Bisang and in Miller’s edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula.
Although somewhat skeptical, Skal is “confident” Ásmundsson had access to
Stoker’s manuscript (338).
2 See Butler 85–106 and Viets, especially 99–100.
3 Paul Féval’s La Ville-Vampire (1867) responds to “blatant piracy” by placing the
Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe in Paris as a vampire-hunter (21).
4 Macfarlane contrasts creatio (“creation as generation”) with inventio, or “creation as
rearrangement” (6).
5 Except as indicated, all translations from Mörkrets makter (MM) are by Benjamin
Mier-Cruz.
6 Berghorn’s translation.

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