The paper examines Thorsten Jonsson’s Fly till vatten och morgon (Flee to water and morning, 1941), a short story collection based on material from real criminal cases, reported in newspaper articles and investigation records. Special attention is given to the connections between Jonsson’s short stories and the criminal psychology of Andreas Bjerre, an intertextual relation highly neglected by earlier scholars. Jonsson studied Bjerre’s psychological theories while working on a monograph on the prose writer Martin Koch. The discussion of the paper focuses on fi ve intertextual areas. Firstly, it is argued that the characters in Jonsson’s short stories in their construction are founded on Bjerre’s psychological classifi cation of criminals. Secondly, it is demonstrated that Bjerre’s conception of the paradigmatic criminal had an analogous infl uence on Jonsson’s characterization. Thirdly, drawing on Bjerre’s ethics, the paper analyzes the collection’s moral approach to criminality. Fourthly, some intertextual correspondences are shown between Jonsson’s social discourse and Bjerre’s criticism of the European judicial and penal apparatus. Fifthly and fi nally, the paper points out that some of the collection’s most effective narrative devices are inspired by Bjerre’s interview method, invented by him for the purpose of revealing self-deception of criminals.

The present paper examines the distribution of a particular case of embedded V2, i.e. the embedded S – Vfi n – Adv word order in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Both the standard written forms of the languages, as well as their spoken variants and dialects are considered. The study provides a statistic, corpus-based overview over the V2-phenomenon and its results prove a discrepancy between the written language on one hand and the spoken language and the dialects on the other. Embedded V2 is only rarely attested in the written varieties (and it is limited to that-clauses and some types of adverbial clauses), at the same time as it is very frequent in the spoken language and in the dialects (where it is suprisingly also attested in conditional clauses and relative clauses). This latter fact challenges the link between embedded V2 and rich verbal agreement, as presented in Hrafnbjargarson & Wiklund (2010), whereas the high percentage of embedded V2 in expected contexts raises the question of syntactic standardization in Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish.

The primary objective of the present study is to fi nd translational equivalents of Swedish demonstrative pronouns used in attributive function in the nominal phrase and compare these equivalents with the original forms in terms of their structure and meaning. A comparative analysis of selected examples excerpted from the source language and their translation equivalents presented here will make it possible to identify differences as well as similarities between them, which will enable the principle of equivalence to be implemented at particular planes.

The central scene in August Strindberg’s play To Damascus, Part 1 (Asylum scene) is predominantly built on a scene from Goethe’s Faust, Part 1 (Cathedral scene) and – at the same time – on the well known illustration of this scene, “Gretchen in der Kirche” (1816), by Peter von Cornelius. I also show how this famous scene from Faust (Gretchen in the Cathedral) reoccurs as an echo in several of Strindberg’s texts – from the early to the late.

Translating Samuel Pufendorfs historical works gives us unique perspective of Sweden as a great power in the Baltic Region. We know Pufendorf as a philosopher, specialist of natural law, or as outstanding jurist. But he was also a historian and his legacy in this fi eld is still valuable, however it is used only fragmentary. Article deals with different aspects of translation of Pufendorfs work on King Charles X Gustav deeds in the period of the Second Northern War (1655–60).

The paper addresses one of the aspects of poetic imagery in the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer, namely his usage of colours, which has not been discussed as a whole so far. Since Tranströmer’s imagery is mainly based on sensory impressions, especially visual ones, a question arises as to how he transforms sensations into poetic images and how nature is depicted as far as colours are concerned. The analyses show that Tranströmer’s visions capture the very fi rst visual impressions without rationalizing them. Colours are not treated as constant features of things concerned, but as abstract and fresh impressions, as if perceived for the fi rst time. Consequently, colours appear as intense and bright against a nonspecifi c background or they are diffi cult to defi ne due to the light which makes them fl ickering and unstable. Apart from their purely visual qualities, colours often form synesthesiæ with other senses, especially sound impressions.

In 1736, a volume entitled Polska Kongars Saga och Skald (Saga and Song of Polish Kings) was published at the royal printing house in Stockholm. The rulers of Poland, from the nation’s foundation up to the present day, are here portrayed in 51 individual chapters, each of which contains an engraving of the monarch, an historical sketch in prose, and a concluding comment in verse. Apart from discussing the attribution of this unusual work, the article specifi cally investigates the verse comments, arguing that the delineation of Poland’s history is used primarily as a stock of exempla, being explained in terms of virtues and vices in the terminating poems. In particular, the chapters on the medieval rulers Bolesław V and Ludwik I are scrutinized. Both of them employ verse fables by Jean de La Fontaine, translated into Swedish, as moralizing end comments on the historical events, a fact – it is shown – of remarkable signifi cance within the fable tradition as well as the La Fontaine reception in eighteenth century Sweden.

In this paper I investigate the presence of the traditional narratives in short stories of Stig Dagerman, one of the leading Swedish writers of the 1940s’ modernism. The phenomenon is analysed with the use of theories proposed by Michael Riffaterre in connection to his notion of the referential fallacy. In the fi rst part of the article I briefl y expound on modernism in Swedish prose and clarify the understanding of the text, as viewed by Riffaterre. In the second part of the article I explain the term traditional narrative and analyse how Dagerman employs the potential of particular genres within traditional narratives in his short stories – I look into transtextual references to myths, fables, legends, folk tales as well as fairy tales. The third part of the paper includes conclusions from my analysis – Dagerman effectively weakens the mimesis in his short stories not only by establishing transtextual references to the genres within traditional narratives, but also by distorting these genres. This device signifi cantly impacts the construction of meaning in the short stories.