Translation Visibility and Translation Criticism in the Swedish Reception of Post-Soviet Russian Literature: Literary Reviews as Epitexts

• Translation criticism—or rather the poor state of translation criticism—has been a reoccurring topic in the Swedish cultural debate since the 1980s. In this chapter, reviews of post-Soviet Russian novels published in Swedish translation has served as a case for analyzing translation visibility and translation criticism. This is an example of an inquiry related to the metadiscursive function of the pa-ratext, which means that the reviews have not been analyzed as commentaries on specific texts, but rather as a body of epitexts containing general information related to translation as a phenomenon. The corpus consists of 430 reviews of 82 post-Soviet novels published in Swedish translation between 1994 and 2020. The analysis indicates that the literary translation criticism available today in Swedish general media is not random. Firstly, works pertaining to highbrow literature and authors who write such literature not only receive more attention in Swedish media, but they also receive more reviews containing translation criticism. Secondly, positive translation criticism clusters around stylistically and linguistically challenging source texts pertaining to highbrow literature, and the translators responsible for translating such texts. Thus, demanding texts with elaborate stylistic and linguistic features seem to trigger the critic to address the translated nature of a novel in a review.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Övrig annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Other Humanities not elsewhere specified (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Paratexts

epitexts

translation criticism

reviews

translation visibility

translation reception

Russian literature

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)