Zwei frühe tschechische Übersetzungen aus N. M. Karamzins „Istorija gosudarstva rossijskogo“

For the early activists of the Czech ‘National Revival’ at the beginning of the 19th century Russian was a primary source of (not only) lexical material in order to enrich the emerging Modern Czech Standard Language. An enthusiast in this field was Václav Hanka, who published the first Czech translation from Karamzin’s “Istorija Gosudarstva Rossijskago”, which turned out to become one of the most influential Russian texts for the Czech (and Slovak) ‘National Revival’. Hanka follows the Russian source text extremely closely, lexically as well as syntactically. This can be shown by his use of participial constructions which corresponds in more than 80% of cases to Karamzin’s. There are, however, important differences: While the active past participle in -(v)ší – coined in Czech only some 10 years before the publication of the translation – is used with a certain caution, especially in the second part of the translation, and replaced by the present active participle when expressing contemporaneity in the imperfective aspect, the present converb is used even more often than in the Russian text and replaces in a couple of cases a Russian finite verb. An interesting contrast is built by another translation of a part of the text translated by Hanka: Its author, Jan Slavomír Tomíček, is much more reluctant to straight lexical russisms than Hanka, nevertheless in his use of participial constructions he follows Karamzin’s text virtually as closely as Hanka. In some cases there might be an influence on Tomíček by the contemporaneous German translation of the „Istorija“, but these cases are isolated and therefore difficult to prove.