Compilation and Translation : Johannes Widekindi and the Origins of his Work on a Swedish-Russian War

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the dissertation is to trace the working process of Johannes Widekindi (ca 1620–1678), Swedish historiographer of the Realm, when writing his bilingual history of the Swedish military actions in Russia in 1609–1617, published in 1671 in Swedish as Thet Swenska i Ryssland tijo åhrs Krijgz-Historie and in 1672 in Latin as Historia Belli Sveco-Moscovitici Decennalis.Chapter 1 of the dissertation consists of an overview of the Latin historiography during the Swedish Great Power period, together with a sketch of Widekindi’s biography and an overview of his works. Chapter 2 deals with general information about Historia Belli / Krijgz-Historie and contains an overview of the previous research as well as a section on the aims and methods of the present dissertation. The subject of chapter 3 is the extrinsic evidence of the working process, provided primarily by the collection of letters from Widekindi to Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie.Chapter 4 deals with Widekindi’s sources. A detailed comparison makes it possible to evaluate the reliability of the author’s own statement that he first wrote his work in Latin and then translated it into Swedish. Whenever there is no obvious correspondence to the wording of the source in either of two versions, one needs to apply detailed philological analysis of the differences between them. It turns out that the Latin version is, with certain reservations, the original one, whereas the Swedish version contains both passages translated from Latin (in certain cases revised with the help of the source) and those quoted directly after the source.Chapter 5 deals with Widekindi’s translation technique. The quantitative TRIX-method is used to describe the formal correspondence between the source text and the target text, taking into account both the lexical equivalence between the corresponding substantives in two versions and the syntactical equivalence between the corresponding finite verb forms. Finally, there is a survey of some general differences between two versions, e.g. the lack of classical allusions in the Swedish version and the scarce and inconstant use of titles in the Latin one. Other bilingual editions and translations from Latin into Swedish from the same period serve as comparative background.