Abstrakt
Czech Sunday Postil is one of the most famous vernacular works of John Hus. He finished it in 1413, only one year before his departure to the Council of Constance, where he tried unsuccessfully to defend himself against the accusations of heresy.
Some years after his death a translation of the homiletic collection was made, which is preserved today in the ms. Mk 91 in the Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic.
The translation has attracted only a modest scientific attention and only a few of its sermons were studied and published. However, it is noteworthy for many reasons: From the linguistic point of view it features a macaronic Latin-Czech, almost word by word translation heavily dependent on the Czech syntactical constructions.
It resembles quite well some reportationes or sermons based on preacher's drafts, albeit its different origin. On the semantic level the translator did some very substantial changes in the content, which mainly escaped the previous research.
He not only omitted long passages of the original collection of homilies, but also made a number of smaller modifications and additions, and he even sometimes changed completely the meaning of the text. In the paper based on the results of my dissertation project, I will argue that behind these characteristics we can observe a translator's firm strategy or ideological programme.