Adaptations of PD material: Jukan

There are eighteen surviving books in Niels Meyn’s surreal Yukan series, which have a huge potential to be translated into the English language, helped by the titular antihero who’s essentially the Amazon jungle-based Nordic equivalent of DC’s Batman. There is a high chance that, when all eighteen become PD in much of the world, their future English versions will instead partly come from the superior Swedish translations rather than from the unremarkable originals, which are in Danish. The rest will be relatively Woolseyfied to various degrees, mostly due to the fact that Niels Meyn himself was a dude as uncomfortably values dissonant as his (somewhat more polite but still brazen and opinionated) German counterpart Gerhardt Hauptmann, yet also meaner than Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

Although a definitive translation into English is still increasingly possible, there are only a few significant changes coming into the series’ writing as usual, whereas the rest are rather minor. Because of how values dissonant the series’ own creator was, it’s daring to think that it’s perhaps waiting to become public domain in almost all nations, bar Guatemala, Spain and Mexico! When it’s going to be reasonably translated (for adults) into Australian English as ‘the Old School Potboiler Edition’, (since it’s initially aimed at Nordic Silent Generation schoolboys after all) the original writing will be carefully labelled as ‘a series of Nordic pulps containing disgusting mistreatment of various peoples as usual’ (read: in terms of indigenous people’s sad mistreatment, the Nordic nations are just as bad as, if not worse than Canada.). 

In hindsight, a moderately rewritten yet much more fantasy-oriented edition of what’ll become the first eighteen volumes will instead be something much better than the original writing (of them all) at any cost. By 2028, the final two books of the original series will be published in six languages all at the same time. 

In 2029-2032, an even more plausible sequel series (read: it is ten fucking books long) will technically be written first in Estonian, Finnish and Australian English, rather than in all three official Nordic Germanic languages. 

Hey, wait a minute, there’s more to do! New Standard Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Estonian translations are slowly coming out at the end of this decade. Latvian and Lithuanian translations are also going to exist in the near future. Once a series becomes public domain in almost all the world’s nations (but only in its boring native language, funnily enough), it’s going to be translated into many Indo-European languages.