Domestikace v překladech z anglické literatury v českém národním obrození
Domestication in Translations from English Literature in the Czech National Revival

Summary/Abstract: The paper surveys domestication, one of the characteristic features of a number of translations in the early period of the Czech National Revival in the first decades of the nineteenth century. At that time, translations played a role of enormous cultural significance in the development of Czech literature, making up for as yet unrepresented genres and providing models to enrich the corpus. A particular set of circumstances developed due to the social and political conditions of the Czech nation: after a period of gradual decline of the Czech language following the Thirty Years’ War, the Czech language was gradually regaining the status of a language of literature and science. From the twenties onwards the rising middle-class reading public demanded entertaining belles-lettres in Czech. Many of these translations were freely adapted mainly from contemporary popular German prose without crediting the original author and at times even plagiarized, as the writer Karolina Světlá, well-read in both literatures, later recorded in her memoirs. This paper presents two typical examples of localization of English pieces of literature. In his translation of Thomas Gray’s An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Josef Jungmann replaced the English historical figures (Hampden, Milton and Cromwell) with Czech ones (Thurn, Rokycana and Žižka), while Jan Kaška replaced the London characters and setting with Prague in his translation of a piece from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz. These examples show how domesticated poems and tales typically preserved the original plot with localized characters and setting. At present we can see an increase in scholarly research of the original and translated literature of the period.

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