15.03.2019

Translated and transformed: Latin adaptation of Jan Hus's Czech sermons

Jan Odstrčilík

Jan Hus: National Museum Library in Prague, IV B 24, f. 27v

March 15, 2019 | Jan Odstrčilík | HI Research Blog |

Jan Hus (*c. 1370 – 6 July 1415) is rightfully numbered among the most influential people of Czech origin. He is mainly remembered for his efforts to reform the Catholic Church resulting in his execution as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415. His life and especially his cruel death led to the creation of the Hussite movement, which shook the region with long civil wars, caused social and religious upheaval but also brought the chalice to the laymen in the form of the communion under both kinds (i.e., both the bread and wine). While the movement was strong enough not to be defeated by numerous crusades, it was too weak to overcome its own infighting between various factions. Finally, the moderate Hussites (also known as Utraquists after their communion sub utraque) joint forces with the Catholics and after defeating and later completely destroying the radical Hussite wing of Taborites, they established a tenuous, and often contested and fragile tolerance between the two prevailing groups. This state of affairs lasted until the 17th century when a violent reaction on re-Catholization efforts in Bohemia started the Thirty Years’ War.

For all of this, Jan Hus is frequently labelled as a follower of John Wycliffe (who greatly influenced Hus) and a predecessor of Martin Luther (who edited later Hus’s letters). Although this is a considerable simplification, they all had many things in common: among others, they all wrote vernacular sermons and played important roles in the development of their respective mother tongues.

Since 1402, Jan Hus was a preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel in the Prague Old Town. The word “chapel” may sound somewhat misleading here. In fact, the Bethlehem Chapel was one of the largest public places of gathering in Prague. Since it was devoted solely to the preaching in the Czech language, it was effectively a mass medium. It is, therefore, no wonder, that Jan Hus as a prolific and famous preacher is accredited with the authorship of numerous sermon collections. However, almost all of them are composed in Latin.

This was nothing unusual in Hus’s day. For a long time, preachers wrote and read in Latin, while adjusting the language of delivery of sermons to their audiences: usually (although not exclusively) in the vernacular to the laymen and in Latin to clergy or educated audience.

It was the year 1412 which brought the radical change to Hus’s life and subsequently also to his literary production. A papal interdict finally forced Jan Hus out of Prague and deprived him of his original audience. This was probably one of the reasons why he decided to compose his first and only complete Czech sermon collection: It is called the Czech Sunday Postil and Jan Hus finished it in October 1413. It contains 59 sermons, of which 57 are on different Sunday readings of the liturgical year with the addition of Easter sermons and sermons on Pentecost. The last two are intended for the feast of church consecration.

While his previous Latin sermons were envisioned as model sermon collections that would help other preachers in their own preaching, this one had especially lay readers in mind. Jan Hus also used the Czech Sunday Postil as an opportunity to explain his cause, to defend himself against various accusations and to criticize the Church for its defects, wrongdoings and simony. On top of that, it was one of the first works written with the new Czech orthography system, which is still in use in its modified form. It is therefore not surprising that it has been characterized by its modern editor Jiří Daňhelka as his most important and most personal work.

In my upcoming monograph based on my Ph.D. thesis, I look at a particular (and peculiar) case of the reception of this work. It is a unique and an almost complete Latin translation of the Czech Sunday Postil which is preserved in a single manuscript in the Moravian Library in Brno, Mk 91 in the Czech Republic. As is usual in the Middle Ages, we know neither the author nor other circumstances of its origin. Only the motivation for the translation may appear self-evident at first glance: to disseminate Jan Hus’s important work abroad. However, even this assumption becomes more complicated when we take a closer look at the text itself.

The first striking feature of the Latin translation is actually its crudeness, even for standards of Medieval Latin. It is bascially a word-for-word “slavish” translation that contains many Czech constructions and phrases:

Postil   

A

tak

již

ten

vešken  

čas

nazývají  

advent

Mk 91

Et

sic

iam

istud

totum

tempus

vocant

adventum

English word-for-word translation

And

so

already

that

all

time

they call

advent

To make it worse, there are actually still many Czech words present in the text. Often untranslated from the original, sometimes even added by the translator. They are glosses and parentheses in a similar manner as described by Siegfried Wenzel in his monograph Macaronic sermons. These Czech passages are neither limited to complicated words, where the translator might not know the proper Latin equivalent, nor to places, where he wanted to preserve a Czech emotional expression. Sometimes even the simplest and shortest words may be left untranslated as “Y qumodo ego denuo renascar” (“And how will I be born again?”).

But why does it look like that? It is definitely not “marketable” as a Latin rendition of Hus abroad. Is it just a failed translation? The key hint seems to be the audience. While the original text was written mainly for lay readers, the adaptation bears clear signs that it was actually intended for priests. It gives, for instance instructions, where topics of sermons should be expanded. The priests at this time were used to reading model sermon collections in Latin and to translating them directly into Czech while preaching. In such case, the word-for-word translation of the Czech Sunday Postil could actually make this process of reverse translation much easier than a fancy and elegant translation. Similarly the occasional inclusion of vernacular words could be quite helpful. To paraphrase a common saying: it was not a bug, it was a feature! In other words, I argue that the Latin language is used here as a kind of a “metalanguage”, into which the original Czech language is encoded.

But still, why Latin at all? Wouldn’t it be easier for a priest to use the Czech original? There seem to be multiple reasons for that. To name a few: the conventions of the genre of model sermon collections, the effectivity of Latin abbreviations in making the work shorter, and also a dialectical independence of such “encoded” vernacular.

Let us also look at the content of the work, which is no less fascinating. First of all, Jan Hus practically disappears from the text. He is not only not mentioned as its author but virtually all personal passages are removed. And it does not stop there. Harsh criticism of the Church, so characteristic for Jan Hus, is either tuned down, removed or, rarely, even rephrased and redirected in other direction – at women, secular lords and even at radical Hussites – Taborites. It may almost appear that the translator was a Catholic. Could it be true?

Jan Hus is not only translated, he is also utterly transformed for new circumstances. But what were these new circumstances? The manuscript was written probably between 1448 and 1460 and the translation may be a little bit older. It speaks about wars, however, they do not seem to be a ubiquitous threat as expected during their peak in the 1420s and the first half of 1430s. This brings us likely to the second half of the 1430s to 1450s. Yes, that is the time I mentioned at the beginning of this post. In the year 1434, the Catholic and moderate Utraquist coalition defeated the radical Taborites, the moderate Utraquists were also allowed their Chalice by the Council of Basel and they understood themselves rather as an autonomous part of the Church than a radical sect. Although they were actually never really integrated, we can observe in their writings and praxis that the differences between them and the Catholic Church on the doctrinal level became minuscule.

In such circumstances, it is possible to imagine that even the writings of the main Utraquist martyr Jan Hus could become too aggressive and radical for Utraquists themselves in certain passages and that they had to be adapted for the new situation. Thus the Latin translation of the Czech Sunday Postil represents a unique example of the later reception of Jan Hus, reflecting the changes in the society twenty or thirty years after his death.

 

Literature:

Daňhelka, Jiří, ed., Jan Hus. Česká nedělní postila. Vyloženie svatých čtení nedělních (Pragae: Academia Scientiarum Bohemoslovaca, 1992).

Šmahel, František, and Ota Pavlíček, eds., A Companion to Jan Hus (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015).

Wenzel, Siegfried, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).