The study is a response to the lack of interest in liturgical translation on the part of contemporary Slovak and Czech scholars. Its main aim is to pave the way for a translation-studies-based reflection on liturgical meta-texts and to discuss the typological features of liturgical translation. The core of the study is divided into two chapters. Both provide a descriptive analysis of selected modern translations of two Byzantine liturgical compositions: the Paschal Canon by St. John Damascene and the Paschal Stichera. The translation procedures empirically used in the meta-texts are compared with procedures typical for either technical or literary translation. The analyses suggest that linguistic communities tend to translate liturgical compositions in a literary way when they perceive the proto-text as close to their domestic literary polysystem and translate more technically when aware of the strangeness of the original.
Socialist Slovakia did not pay much attention to medieval Occitan poetry, of which only one translation was accessible in the book format – the anthology Danteho trubadúri (The troubadours of Dante), published in 1972 by Jozef Felix and Viliam Turčány. This article seeks to reconstruct its ethical background, drawing mainly (but not exclusively) on contemporary approaches to the anthology as a concept. It responds to such questions as: Do the translators fall prey to cultural isolationism and plagiarize concrete foreign-language (especially French) sources? Does their selection of poems encourage ethnocentrism rather than a true exchange of literary values? Why is Dante’s name included in the title? To what extent are the accompanying para-texts marked by ideological manipulation? Perhaps not surprisingly, the editorial gesture is not discredited by the ordeal, proving that aesthetic elitism can be a powerful antidote to totalitarian practices.
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