The overarching objective of the project is to determine whether the Swedish translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s unique novel Trans-Atlantyk, produced by the translator Anders Bodegård (first published in 2009), is based on a general principle that serves as the foundation for the translator’s stylistic choices and, consequently, as a mechanism enabling multi-level interpretations of the novel within the context of the foreign target culture—interpretations that may be seen as congruent with those in the source culture.

The hypothesis advanced in the project is that the translator’s stylistic creation of the Swedish text is guided by the principle of sustainability—a cognitively economical concept deeply embedded in the function of natural language in communication. This principle draws upon the archetypal idea of sustainability as formulated by Hans Carl von Carlowitz (1645–1714). Within this framework, sustainability entails a balance between what is lost (the old) and what is introduced (the new) at the level of linguistic structure.

In the Swedish translation, this principle manifests both in adherence to Gombrowicz’s own stylistic guidelines and in the translator’s creative communicative strategies, particularly the use of linguistic structures that may now be regarded as progressive or innovative within Swedish. The frequency and combination of such structures, formed across different linguistic levels, constitute expression patterns that underlie the construction of the translated text and its multifaceted stylistic character.

The aim of the research is to identify these patterns and to contextualize them in order to demonstrate the translatability of the work at the level of style.

Below you can read the activity report and two articles: one on the empirical part and one on the theoretical part, here presented as a draft.