Manipulating the matricial norms

The paper examines the “crime fiction boom” and the cultural spaces from which translated crime fiction originates within the Swedish cultural system. This introduction contextualizes the Swedish translation through comparison with the English and French translations of the Spanish crime novel La caverna de las ideas. The study draws on the polysystem theory approach (Even-Zohar 1990; Toury 1995, 1998) and the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1986, 1992a; Gouanvic 1997, 1999) in putting forward the hypothesis that the meta-textual elements in the novel will be translated differently, depending on the cultural system within which the translators perform their task. It is shown that the English translator manipulates the matricial norms of the source text to a higher extent than do the Swedish and French translators. Moreover, the paper examines some of the international consecration processes within the global literary space (Casanova 1999), which made it possible for the Somoza crime novel to reach the Swedish literary system by means of translation.