The translation and reception of French realism in Scandinavia 1830-1900

• Main Author: Mörte Alling, Annika
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: Languages and Literature; Bayard; Norway; Iceland
• Online Access: https://lup.lub.lu.se/record/4359429

I will present some results from an international project on the introduction of French literature in Scandinavia during the 19th century. A point of departure will be the database BREFS (Bibliographie du Réalisme Français en Scandinavie), containing the translations of novels, short stories, poetic works and theatre plays that were published in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden in book form from 1830 to 1900. This database is now publicly accessible via Lund University at http://projekt.ht.lu.se/brefs/. I will concentrate on the Swedish part of the bibliography, consisting of as many as 1500 translations, and present a list of the seemingly most popular French writers in Sweden — writers who (with some exceptions) are probably unknown to most Swedes, and not even mentioned in historical surveys of Swedish literature: Eugène Scribe, Eugène Sue, Charles Perrault, Anne H. J. Duveyrier, Henri Meilhac, Olivier Gloux, Michel Carré, Alice Durand and Jean F. A. Bayard. In fact, when it comes to the number of translations published, these authors by far exceed the today well-known French realists Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant.