It was a seminal text of its time, deepening the influence of an important figure, and of the organization he headed: Markings, a memoir by United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold. The book was found in manuscript in Hammarskjold’s bedside table after he was killed in a plane crash in 1961, and when it was published in 1963, in a translation overseen and introduced by W.H. Auden, it was hailed by critics — a front-page New York Times Book Review, for example, praised it as “the noblest self-disclosure of spiritual struggle and triumph, perhaps the greatest testament of personal devotion, published in this century.” But now, as Warren Hoge reveals in a New York Times article, the centennial of Hammarskjold’s birth coming up in July, attention has returned to the book—and to long-standing complaints about Auden’s handling of the translation. Reports Hoge, “Swedes familiar with the original say that Auden took large liberties with the Swedish text, misunderstanding some of Hammarskjold’s allusions, misconstruing others to inject his own religious and cultural biases and even altering citations in a way calculated to turn Hammarskjold’s musings on friendship into Auden’s expressions of anxiety at being neglected by a longtime lover.” Auden biographer Richard Davenport-Hines says the charges are true, but adds, “I don’t think one can expect poets to make their translations as neutral as diplomats make their translations of official documents.” But former Swedish diplomat Kai Falkman says “It is a pity that foreigners will never be able to understand the purity and beauty of Hammarskjold’s language.” He says what Auden did is not a forgiveable literary liberty. “This behavior,” he says, “seems to me to be a kind of crime.”