In Search of a Shared Expression: Karel Čapek’s Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography of Europe

Kiöping against what was commonplace in the tradition and found the work wanting. The translation, meanwhile, is clunking: over-reliant on verbal locutions with “get”, guilty of solecisms (e.g. intransitive “tell”, 90), it may reflect a clunking source text, but the absence of any note explaining translation procedures or strategies (except a lengthy disquisition on measurements and currency) leaves this reader once again in doubt. In short, Kiöping has arrived in English in magnificent form. His writings are of potential interest for the light they may throw onto European activity in the Orient from the distinctive vantage of Sweden, a nation whose influence on European affairs in the central decades of the seventeenth century is easily overlooked. The pity is that this edition raises more questions than it answers.