Jag lånar den här tråden för att ställa till med ett anspråkslöst litet partaj för Gullivers resor. Nu i höst är det 300 år sedan boken kom ut, och det har skrivits en mängd artiklar med anledning därav. Knappast någon annan litterär klassiker har getts ut i så många förkortningar och bearbetningar, där den ilskna och blåsyrebittra satiren förvandlas till barnlektyr. Naturligtvis har de naturalistiska beskrivningarna av jättarnas kroppar samt varje antydning till könsliv, urin och avföring regelmässigt sanerats bort.
'Depicts humanity at its most grotesque': Why the 300-year-old novel Gulliver's Travels is so misunderstood
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20261106-why-the-300-year-old-novel-gullivers-travels-is-so-misunderstood"It's perhaps one of the most adapted texts in the world," says Daniel Cook, author of Gulliver's Afterlives: 300 Years of Transmedia Adaptation. It has sparked spin-offs, illustrations, plays and films, all contributing to a broad "Gulliveriana".
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This edition [från slutet av 1700-talet] was more swashbuckling fairy-tale fare than satire, focusing on Gulliver's capers among the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians. Younger audiences, perhaps appropriately, would not read of the small Gulliver noticing pockmarks and sores on the gigantic Brobdingnagians (or his allusions to being used to pleasure the queen's chambermaids), nor his efforts in putting out a Lilliputian palace fire by urinating on it. Though scenes like these "carried on the great scatological tradition seen in Shakespeare and Chaucer", says Cook, they were, perhaps appropriately, deemed unfit for children.
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"The Victorians thought it was un-Christian, they hated the scatology and sexual elements, and they hated that bleak and persistent misanthropy," says historian Hester Grant. "So I think they were largely responsible for expurgating and stripping the ugly, as they perceived it, satire, and leaving this lovely, clean work of the imagination."
Och boken förutspår också framtiden på ett kusligt träffsäkert vis.
300 Years Before ChatGPT, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels Imagined Machines Writing Books and Producing Knowledge (1726)
openculture.com/2026/10/gullivers-travels-imagined-automated-machines-writing-books-and-producing-knowledge.html
No less a satirist than Jonathan Swift made it one of his many targets in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), imagining an elaborate machine of wood and wire called “the Engine” /---/ that automatically generates text, though few remember it — or rather, few remembered it until the rise of large language models in the real world.
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“This is one of the earliest known mentions of a machine that could be considered as a computer in literature, more than a hundred years prior to the first calculating engine designs by Charles Babbage,” writes Chris Garcia at the web site of the Computer History Museum. “The Engine might be seen as a computer, but perhaps it’s better thought of as a sort of random-number generator,” spouting out whichever words of the local language that correspond with the digits. That post dates from ten years, nearly to the day, before the launch of ChatGPT, which changed the general public’s ideas about what computers can and can’t do. We may disagree about whether a machine can truly generate “a complete body of all arts and sciences,” as the Engine’s inventor intends, but it no longer sounds like sheerest fantasy.
