Translating Courtly Literature and Ideology in Medieval Sweden: Flores och Blanzeflor

The aim of this paper is to propose some observations on the Old Swedish "Flores och Blanzeflor", which is considered as the youngest of the three chivalric romances known as "Eufemiavisor", as a translated text. The analysis is carried out against the theoretical background of the so-called target-oriented approach, developed by the Tel Aviv school within the interdisciplinary field of Translation Studies. In particular, after discussing the major philological problems regarding the identification of the source text, the article points out some of the main features of the target text (i.e. the Old Swedish Flores), with special reference to the deviations that might tell us something about the intended purpose(s) of the Old Swedish version and, more generally, about the cultural project that gave rise to these translations at the beginning of the fourteenth century.