Alfons Åberg, or Alfie Atkins as he is called in English, is a famous Swedish children's book character created by author Gunilla Bergström in 1972, when the first book about Alfie was published. The Alfie Atkins series consists of 26 books, and books about Alfie have been translated into 40 languages and dialects. Despite Alfie’s great popularity all over the world, the first translations into the two major languages French and Russian came in 2020 and 2022 respectively. Interestingly, the same three Alfie-books have today been translated into the two languages, raising suspicions of collaborative practices as co-edition or co-production.

Much research in the history of translations focus on the genetic translation process,i.e. Genetic Translation Studies (GTS) (see e.g. Nunes et al. 2021) but as far as we know very little research has been devoted to the why of, or the reasons behind, a translation in a genetic perspective. Some studies are looking closer at cultural mediators as “key figures in literary and cultural history” (Meylaert et al. 2017: 67) or at the trajectory of an author within another literary system through “multiple mediatorships” (Schwartz 2017), but few studies are tracking the pre-translation genetic of a translation. By integrating ethnographic fieldwork (such as e.g. interviews), this study is a tentative reconstruction of post-translation documentation with the aim to establish why Alfie reached the French and Russian book markets so late, but also the events that led up to the translations. 

Furthermore, from a transnational literary perspective and considering translation as a cultural product, it is particularly relevant to consider the delayed translation into these important literary fields. Indeed, Alfie Atkins and his father may be seen as “representatives of Scandinavian social democracy” (Waage 2015: 234) or proposing a Swedish representation of childhood. Our research questions are therefore: 1) How and why this series was translated to Russian and French? 2) Who took the initiative to the translations? 3) Why were they translated so late? 4) Is this an example of a collaborative practice? The pre-translation genetic dossier we propose may contribute to understanding the social and cultural delay of the translations.  

References

Meylaerts, R., Gonne, M., Lobbes, T., & Roig, D. S. (2017). Cultural Mediators in Cultural History: What Do We Learn from Studying Mediators’ Complex Transfer Activities in Interwar Belgium? In E. Brems, O. Réthelyi, & T. van Kalmthout (Eds.), Doing Double Dutch: The International Circulation of Literature from the Low Countries (pp. 67–92). Leuven University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21c4rzf.6

Nunes, A. , Moura, J. , & Pacheco Pinto, M. (Ed.). (2021). Genetic Translation Studies: Conflict and Collaboration in Liminal Spaces. London,: Bloomsbury Academic. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350146846

Schwartz, C. (2018). From Nuoro to Nobel: the impact of multiple mediatorship on Grazia Deledda’s movement within the literary semi-periphery. Perspectives, 26(4), 526–542. https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676X.2018.1439979

Waage, L. R. (2015). The Apocalypse of Scandinavian Social Democracy? A Reading of Johan Harstad’s Novel Hässelby. Scandinavian Studies, 87(2), 234–254. https://doi.org/10.5406/scanstud.87.2.0234