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Finns Tusen och en natt på svenska?
Jonathan Morén
143, 2022, s. 245–260
Permanent länk: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-496969
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Abstract

This paper examines the history of translations into Swedish of The Thousand and One Nights, focusing mainly on the more extensive ones that attempt or purport to translate the “complete” work. Considering the textual history of the Arabic Alf layla wa-layla, however, the notion of “completeness” is largely illusory, since there is no definitive original text of the work, only a large number of differing versions. But the Swedish translators, beginning with Hinrik Sandström in the 1830’s and ending with Nils Holmberg in the 1960’s, also fail to provide faithful renderings of any single one of these versions; they fall short for a variety of reasons, mainly their lack of knowledge of the Arabic language and of Arabic culture, and an eagerness to adapt the text to the expectations and the taste (and at times the prudishness) of the Swedish audience and/or publishers. In many cases, these adaptations had already been made in the French, German, Danish, and English translations used as source texts for the Swedish ones. The only Swedish translation made directly from the Arabic, Professor Axel Moberg’s 400-page volume of selected stories (1928), comes closest to the original, but his translation covers only a small part of the entire work, and Moberg, too, deviates intentionally from the Arabic text in his treatment of poetry, saj‘ (rhymed prose) and sexually outspoken passages.