This paper highlights how the Nyblom family contributed to the importation of contemporary Italian literature to Sweden during the late 19th century. Before 1880, it was rare for contemporary Italian works to be translated into Swedish, but between 1880 and 1900, the number of translations of contemporary Italian authors increased significantly. The Nyblom family’s engagement with Italian culture, combined with their various roles in the Swedish literary field, enabled them to facilitate the spread of Italian literature. The members of the Nyblom family represented the three types of literary mediators identified by Pascale Casanova: charismatic, institutional, and ordinary mediators. Their literary preferences significantly influenced the selection of Italian works that crossed into Swedish borders. The family’s literary tastes and affiliations played a pivotal role in shaping the reception of Italian literature in Sweden.

This chapter aims to analyze the translation, circulation and reception of Family Lexicon mainly in the Swedish context, which is representative of the inter-peripheral circulation of women writers. Drawing on the Swedish case, the two translations of the novel will undergo “a close reading at a distance” (Walkowitz, Born Translated. The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Columbia University Press, 2015), focusing on the texts and the paratexts as well as the cultural contexts in which they appeared. Particular attention will be given to Ginzburg’s reception trajectory and the impact of asymmetrical chronology. On the two occasions that the novel was translated into Swedish—in 1981 and 2021—it caused debates in the press, related to untranslatables in Ginzburg’s text. These untranslatables—related to dialect, idiolect and race—are analyzed in comparison with the three English translations of the Family Lexicon. One result is that the standardization norm seems to be losing support. Another important result is that the passage from the first to the second Swedish translation reveals an increasingly hegemonic role of the English language and culture.

This volume offers a detailed analysis of selected cases in the reception, translation and artistic reinterpretation of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (1972) around the world.

The book traces the many different ways in which Calvino's modern classic has been read, translated and adapted in Brazil, France, the Netherlands and Flanders, Mexico, Romania, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, Poland, Japan and Australia. It also offers analyses of the relation between Calvino's book and, respectively, the East and Africa, as well as reflections on the book's inspiration for, and resonance in, dance, architecture and art. The volume thus traces the diversity in the reception and circulation of Invisible Cities in different countries and continents, offering a much wider framework for the discussion of Calvino’s masterpiece than before, and a more detailed picture of its cultural and linguistic ramifications.

This book will be of interest to scholars in Comparative Literature, World Literature, Translation Studies, Italian Studies, Romance Languages, European Studies, Dance, Architecture and Media Studies, as well as to scholars specialised in paratext and reception.

This open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples to describe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case.

Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of 'cosmopolitan' and 'vernacular' – or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization – which provide an overall structure to the analysis of literature and literary phenomena. In this way, the authors show that the semi-periphery is an ideal point of departure to further the understanding of world literature, because it is a place where the cosmopolitan (the literary universal) and the vernacular (the rootedness in a particular culture or place) interact in ways that have not yet been thoroughly explored.

The aim of this essay is to explore the hypothesis that interperipheral literary circulation is achieved through support from institutional funders who are situated outside the target culture and mainly in the source culture – so called ‘supply-driven translation’. By focusing on Swedish translations of Italian and Portuguese (Angola, Cabo Verde, East Timor, Mozambique, and Portugal) language literatures this study investigates whether support from the source culture provides an alternative pathway for this literature to make its way into the hands of Swedish readers, including scholars. First, this study reviews the available funding for this literature and maps out which publishing houses, authors, and titles received financial support between 2000 and 2018. The analysis focuses on the support from institutions that are closely related to two of the source countries (Italy and Portugal) and addresses questions regarding the prestige and gender of the supported authors, the size of the publishing houses, previous translations into English, and how this support influences visibility in the public literary sphere and in the Swedish press. Translations and publications of Portuguese language literatures depended on and received financial support, whereas translations and publications of Italian literature were largely produced without any financial support. However, in many respects, the source languages show striking similarities.