Aleksis Kiven Seitsemän veljestä käännösromaanina

Aleksis Kivi’s (1834–1872) oeuvre gives inexhaustible sources for a scholar who is interested in translation history and linguacultural relations during the past 150 years. The first translation of his literary work was Gustaf Rancken’s Swedish translation of an extract from Kullervo (1864) right after its publication. Today, more than one and a half centuries later, new translations of Kivi still appear. This study focuses on his novel Seitsemän veljestä (Seven Brothers, 1870), which is one of the most translated Finnish books. The first translations appeared at the beginning of the 20th century (Swedish in 1919, German in 1921, Estonian in 1924, French and Latvian in 1926, and English in 1929), and it has now been translated into almost forty languages. Retranslations have also been made into several languages. This article focuses on the publishing history of Kivi translations and is based on the earlier enumerative bibliographical research. It also analyses studies how the translations and retranslations of Seitsemän veljestä are related to each other and to the translation history of his other works and gives an overview of the novel’s translation history from 1919 to 2017.