What is it about?
Aleksis Kivi's great 1870 novel Seitsemän veljestä (The Brothers Seven) has been translated 59 times, into 34 languages--and yet it has had zero cultural impact outside of its native Finland. Why? What does that mean for how we think of world literature?
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Why is it important?
There have been some brilliant and incisive theoretical/critical overviews of world literature in the last decade or so (Damrosch, Madsen, Casanova, Zhang, etc.), which, because they are overviews, have been unable to delve deeply into the problematic discrepancies and deviations in specific cases. This book does that: draws a complex historical and critical view of Kivi precisely in order to shed light on the complex problems plaguing the definition of world literature, and how those problems are connected with translation strategies. It also argues strenuously for what Deleuze and Guattari call a "minoritizing" approach to translating.
Perspectives
This was a labor of love. I have loved Kivi's work since I was first exposed to it, in 1975, and have been half-planning a monograph on Kivi for two-plus decades. I translated Kivi's greatest play as Heath Cobblers in 1975-76, published it in 1993; and my new minoritizing translation of his novel came out in the same month as this Kivi monograph, January, 2017. The book is driven by a passion for Kivi, for translation, and for a minoritizing approach to both reading and translating Kivi.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Aleksis Kivi and/as World Literature, March 2017, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004340268.
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