Pokorného hledánÌ Oidipa vladaře

The translation work of Jaroslav Pokorný is rich and varied – he translated prose, poetry as well as drama. Among modern languages he focused mainly on Italian; however he did not hesitate to translate from French and German either. Translations from Greek and Latin form an important chapter in this corpus. He was the first to bring practical theatrical experience into translation of ancient drama, which was unavailable to philologists including those who had some kind of contact with theatre, such as Ferdinand Stiebitz. From the beginning his concept of translation moved from philological translation meant primarily for reading to creating translation meant for rendition on stage, i.e. dramatic translation, which is, according to Pavel Drábek, a “special kind of translation. As opposed to literary translation it shows an anticipated presence of stage action, of which the utterances captured in the translation are only one component. In dramatic translation other forces are reflected too. First and foremost, it is the translatoris theatrical taste and style, that is, a certain dramaturgy, which s/he considers adequate and optimal for translation of a particular dramatic text.” (Pavel Drábek: České pokusy o Shakespeara [Czech Attempts at Shakespeare], Brno, Větrné mlýny 2012, pp. 41–42). All Pokorný’s translations of ancient playwrights are characterized (while not neglecting their literary aspects) by his attempts at stage effectiveness. However, his translations of Sophoclesi Oedipus and Plautus’ comedy Mostellaria in the first place brought something crucially new. The study focuses on the translation, or rather, three versions of the translation of Oedipus the King, the first of which came to life around 1942, the second one most probably shortly after the Second World War. The third was published for the first time in 1953 and first staged at the theatre in Liberec in 1962. It was only Miroslav Macháček’s production at the National Theatre in Prague in 1963 that made this translation famous. Foreword to these texts was influenced by a Marxist concept of tragedy, as the Czech public knew it from G. Thomson’s publication Aeschylus and Athens (published in Czech translation in 1952). Jaroslav Pokorný, well versed in the Czech translation theory, as represented in his time by the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle Vilém Mathésius and Roman Jakobson, was the first to successfully apply functional aspect on translation of ancient literature as early as the 1940s. Thanks to this and to his dynamic concept of components of theatrical expression he created a translation in his early translation career (he was only little over twenty years old when working on Oedipus), which even 70 years later remains an example of a free but at the same time a serious approach to texts of ancient Greek drama.