No 2 (2013)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/80625

Karl Vilhelm Zetterstéen. Taha Husayn

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    Taha Husayns Dagarna som religions­historisk källa
    (LIR. journal, 2013) Larsson, Göran; Olsson, Susanne
    The Egyptian author Taha Husayn’s autobiographical novel The Days has not been used as a source to the history of religions to any large extent. This article wishes to address if and how it can serve as a potential source to illuminate and analyze how religion is portrayed. Even though autobiographical texts are not pretending to present actual historical facts, but rather appear as reconstructions of a past, we address The Days as a text that says something about a specific historical situation, in particular concerning the religious landscape in Egypt at the turn of the century 1900. The Days illustrates the tensions and conflicts that prevailed in Egypt at the time, mainly considering religious interpretations and practices, between urban centers and countryside, but also among the traditional religious elites and the modernizers, attempting at reforming Islam. Taha Husayn was in favor of a humanistic and critical perspective in general, which made him align with a modernized and reformist version of Islam, which explains his critical comments on traditional pedagogy at al-Azhar and the Sufi traditions prevalent in the countryside.
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    Zetterstéens koranöversättning i idéhistoriskt perspektiv
    (LIR. journal, 2013) Hjärpe, Jan
    The Swedish Qur’an translation by K. V. Zetterstéen from 1917 is here viewed from a historical perspective. The development of the study of »Oriental languages« at the Swedish universities in the 19th century relates to the intellectual milieu of writers and publishers of that time. This period also meant a change of language, from Latin to Swedish for university publications. The translation by Zetterstéen had a special context as a part of the program for religious studies promoted by Nathan Söderblom. The premises in the society and in the intellectual circles at that time were different from the situation for the translation (or rather Qur’an paraphrase) by the diplomat Mohammed Knut Bernström from 1998. The one by Zetterstéen was made for an audience of students and intellectuals in a rather homogeneous Swedish milieu. The readers of the Bernström version include a young public of Swedish Muslims living in a society much more secular than the one in 1917.
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    Zetterstéens oversettelse av Taha Husayn: al-Ayyam i et komparativt perspektiv. Strategiske valg i overføringsprosessen mellom kildetekst og måltekst
    (LIR. journal, 2013) Mejdell, Gunvor
    This study compares the translation manuscript Dagarna with four different book translations of al-Ayya¯m into English (1932), French (1947), Swedish (1956) and Norwegian (1973) respectively. The investigation focuses on how »cultural markers « are rendered in the target texts, for example through transcription or the use of footnotes. The overarching question concerns their relative positions on a scale from a more »domesticating « strategy to a »foreignizing« approach. The comparison shows that of all the translators K.V. Zetterstéen is the most source language oriented; his translation is the least »domesticated« in the corpus; it has more academic traits than the other ones, which vary in their degree of adaption to the implied audience of their place and time.
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    Översättarröst och Översättarstrategi i Dagarna, ett översättningsmanuskript av K. V. Zetterstéen
    (LIR. journal, 2013) Rooke, Tetz
    K. V. Zettersteéns newly discovered translation from 1953 of Taha Husayn’s al-Ayya¯m (The Days) is the first translation from modern Arabic prose literature into Swedish as far as we know today. It was made to convince the Nobel Committee that the Egyptian author deserved the Nobel Prize for literature. The electronic publication of the manuscript offers new insights into the scholarly work of the great Orientalist. This article is a descriptive analysis of the translation as such. The aim is to uncover the voice of the translator in the text, establish his principles and evaluate the result from a literary point of view. As a literary translator Zetterstéen comes across as a literalist. He is faithful to the linguistic details of the source text and successfully transmits the content, but fails to communicate the humor and the finer elements of style. Dagarna is an adequate translation of the original, but has functional flaws. The manuscript highlights the need for a Swedish retranslation of the Arabic classic, but cannot fulfill this role itself.
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    The Zetterstéen – Myhrman controversy
    (LIR. journal, 2013) Eskhult, Mats
    In 1908, the desire of docent David Myhrman to qualify himself for the professorship of Semitic languages at Lund University by editing a large Arabic work on ethics, resulted in a tense relation to his superior at Uppsala University, professor K.V. Zetterstéen, and in 1911 the conflict degenerated into a fierce and implacable fight that lasted to 1913. Myhrman had undergone a swift training in Semitic languages and Assyriology in the Unites States and Germany, a circumstance that made Zetterstéen conclude that not only Myhrman’s edition was marred by insufficient knowledge of Arabic, but that he also had taken short cuts at the expense of others, when working on Sumerian texts in Philadelphia. Finally, Zetterstéen got rid of his undesired – and in his opinion undeserved – assistant professor, but his own good name among his colleagues suffered considerably from the unpleasant affair.
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    Inledning
    (LIR. journal, 2013) Larsson, Göran; Rooke, Tetz