Språk och ordkonst i österled

(Western Asian languages and texts.) The authors of this book are all philologists from Scandinavian universities and active members of the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. Together they show how linguistic studies can deepen our knowledge of different cultures and enrich our own views.

Éva Á. Csató is professor in Turkic languages. In her article she deals with endangered languages focusing on a small Turkic language, Karaim, spoken in Lithuania by a diminishing number of native speakers. The author illustrates how the loss of the Karaim language leads to the discontinuation of a long cultural tradition. She argues that there are good reasons to document endangered languages and the cultural heritage encoded in them. The next author, Joakim Enwall, is professor of Chinese. He describes how he has found some 18th century manuscripts in Georgia that are written in a kind of Turkic language, but with Georgian letters. An analysis of these manuscripts shows that they are texts in Middle Azerbaijani. This leads the author to a discussion of the use of Georgian letters for texts in other languages than Georgian. He points out many different possible social reasons for such a use and discusses the development of the Georgian alphabet. Bernt Brendemoen, professor of Turcology, has translated Orhan Pamuk into Norwegian. In this article he discusses and exemplifies principal problems in crossing linguistic and cultural borders when translating literary texts. He also compares different and divergent translations of Pamuk. The last article also deals with the problems of translation, but now translations of poetry from old and modern Iranian languages. The author, Bo Utas, is professor emeritus of Iranian languages. He gives many examples from his own translations and illustrates general problems in the translation of poetry.