Kuin korallien luoma

Tekstikriittinen näkökulma Topeliuksen Luonnonkirjan runokäännöksiin

Authors

• Sakari Katajamäki Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61200/mikael.129365

Keywords:

Johan Bäckvall, Zacharias Topelius, history of Finnish translations, poetry, Textual Scholarship, collation

Abstract

Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, journalist, historian, and rector of the University of Helsinki. His schoolbook Naturens Bok (1856, ‘The Book of Nature’) became one of the most influential textbooks in elementary instruction for many decades. Interestingly, it also contains ca. 30 poems, both Topelius’s original poems and Swedish translations and adaptations of Scandinavian poetry. In 1860 Johan Bäckvall (1817–1883) translated Topelius’s textbook into Finnish. Since then, the translation Luonnonkirja was used as a schoolbook until 1920s and the translation was revised several times. In the present article I will discuss how the Swedish poems of Naturens Bok were translated into Finnish and how the translations were revised in the later editions. By focusing on one particular case, the fable “Eläinten tavoista” (‘On the manners of animal species’), I will examine how the methodology of textual scholarship, such as digital collation, can be applied in translation studies and how textual invariance illuminates the translation history of Naturens Bok.