Masarykova univerzita

Filozofická fakulta

Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky

Bakalářská diplomová práce

2011 Anežka Sobotková Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Anežka Sobotková

An Analysis of Czech Translations of English Texts on Wicca Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Renata Kamenická, Ph. D.

2011 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author’s signature Table of Contents 1 Introduction...... 1 2 What is Wicca...... 3 2.1 The Gardnerian Tradition...... 4 2.2 The Alexandrian tradition...... 4 3 The corpus...... 5 3.1 Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland...... 6 3.2 What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar...... 9 3.3 Witchcraft Today by Gerald Brosseau Gardner...... 11 3.4 The translations...... 14 3.4.1 Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft: The Czech translation by Jana Novotná...... 14 3.4.2 What Witches Do: The Czech translation by Lily Sekytová...... 18 3.4.3 Witchcraft Today: The Czech translation by Jan Auský...... 20 4 The analyses of selected vocabulary items...... 22 4.1 Coven...... 23 4.2 Wicca...... 27 4.3 Wiccan (a noun and an adjective)...... 30 4.4 Witch (a noun)...... 32 4.5 Witch (an attributive adjective)...... 37 4.6 Perform...... 40 4.7 Practice (a noun) and practise (a verb)...... 41 4.8 Cast...... 44 4.9 So mote it be...... 47 4.10 Chant (a noun and a verb)...... 48 4.11 Blessed be...... 50 4.12 Initiation and dedication...... 52 4.13 Heathen and pagan...... 54 4.14 Belief...... 57 4.15 Beliefs...... 59 5 Conclusion...... 61 References...... 63 Résumé (English)...... 68 Resumé (Czech)...... 69 1 Introduction

In the last decades, interest in alternative spirituality has increased both in Europe and the USA and new spiritual movements and paths started to emerge. Many of these paths can be labelled Neo-Pagan because they are, to different degrees, inspired by pre-

Christian (mainly) European Pagan religions, while hugely differing from all those in that they are designed to fit the spiritual needs of (post)modern European or American people. Wicca, which is part of this thesis's background, is one of these paths.

This bachelor thesis does not deal with Wicca or any other spiritual path in general, though. Rather than that, it is concerned with translated literature through which Wicca was introduced to the Czech readership. Czech translations of books on Wicca started to emerge in the 1990's and the interest has much increased since that time: Wicca is a label that sells today. Even though it is very difficult to tell, as there are no official data available, it can be presumed that it was through translated literature that Wicca found its way into the Czech environment and started to be practised by Czechs.

This means that translated literature has played an important role in the process. It is unfortunate, in this respect, that many popular books on Wicca (and other alternative spiritual paths) did not receive a professional treatment in terms of translation. As will be shown in the chapters on the translations included in the corpus this thesis is based on, some of the translations are rather substandard and bear hints of the translator's lack of language and translation skills and factual knowledge of the subject.

The main motivation for writing an analysis of translated texts on Wicca was the fact that a poor translation may discredit the book in the eyes of some readers and prevent them from actually seeing the content through the unfit “wrapping”. Wicca, for instance,

1 while becoming considerably popular, has not received much scholarly attention in the

Czech Republic.

Although whole chapters could be written on the subject of stylistic imperfections or imperfections caused by a lack of either translation skills or factual knowledge, this topic is left aside in this thesis (with the exception of some general comments on the translated books dealt with) because it is connected to translation in general, rather than being specific to texts on Wicca. In order to make the output beneficial or, a potential source of useful information for future translators on the subject of Wicca or other Neo-

Pagan paths, this thesis focuses on some most common lexis and terminology specific to the Neo-Pagan/Wiccan context, which occur in the majority of writings on the topic dealt with and which are hard to translate into Czech. For this purpose, an analysis of three books on Wicca and their Czech translations was done and each of the selected hard-to-render concepts was given a chapter, in which the meanings of the expressions are explained, if needed, and the various ways they got translated by the translators are compared, discussed, and questioned. In some chapters, additional possible solutions not suggested by any of the translators are included.

The most important part of the thesis is the analysis of the individual hard-to-render concepts from the three books chosen. Nevertheless, some background information had to be brought forth, too, to establish the context. In addition to the pieces of relevant cultural information included throughout the text, there is also a chapter explaining the term “Wicca” at the very beginning of the thesis. In the following part, the choice of primary literature is accounted for and the three books and their authors are briefly introduced. The translated Czech books are given similar introductions with the difference that the scope of these embraces the technical side of the issue (meaning the

2 quality of the translations) more than the cultural background and significance of the books. The final part, then, contains 15 chapters, wherein the individual lexical items are discussed.

2 What is Wicca

Wicca is a contemporary spiritual religion, based on and reviving the ancient

pre-Christian pagan religions of Europe. Wiccans believe in a divine force or

power as the source of all. It [this power] is both immanent and transcendent

while encompassing the whole universe. Therefore the world and all aspects

within the world, "nature" and "life itself" in particular, are considered sacred

(Knowles, n.d.).

The religion was founded by Gerald Brosseau Gardner in the early 1950's as a mystery tradition with a degree system and a notable influence from occultism. Since that time, however, it has become the main source of inspiration to many rather eclectic spiritual paths, which still use the label “Wicca”. The term is thus much broader than it was fifty years ago, as is quite evident from the above description by Knowles.

There are two deities in Wicca, the God and the Goddess. Often labelled “The

Horned God” and “The Mother Goddess”, they correspond to the male-female duality of the Universe (Farrar, 2010, p. 32). There is no moral code comparable to the

Christian commandments. However, moral behaviour is required with stress laid on personal responsibility and conscience. The overriding ethical principle is stated in the so-called “Wiccan Rede” and reads: “An it harm none, do what ye will”

(Valiente, 1993, p. 41).

3 In Wicca, and also in some other Neo-Pagan religions, eight seasonal festivals are observed. These are called “the Minor Sabbats” (the solstices and the equinoxes), which are held around the corresponding dates, and “the Greater Sabbats” (Candlemas/Imbolc,

May Eve/Beltaine, Lammas/Lughnasadh and Hallowe'en/Samhain), whose dates are set half way between two Minor Sabbats (Valiente, 1993, p. 47).

There are solitary practitioners as well as working groups called “covens”, which are led by a high priest and a high priestess (see chapter “Coven”, p. 23).

2.1 The Gardnerian Tradition

The tradition of Wicca founded by Gerald Brosseau Gardner with help of Doreen

Valiente, one of the members of Gardner's original coven (working group), in the early

1950's. Gardner is credited with having founded the whole Wiccan movement so the

Gardnerian branch can be considered the first of Wiccan traditions (Knowles, 2001b). It is a mystery tradition, which means that it contains a certain volume of information only available to those initiated into it. There are three degrees (levels of accomplishment), the third one of which entitles the initiate to break away from the mother coven and form their own (Moonfire, 2002).

2.2 The Alexandrian tradition

The tradition of Wicca founded by Alex Sanders (1926–1988)1. Because of its

1 “Alex Sanders – the ʻKing of the Witchesʼ as he became known - was responsible for founding the Alexandrian Tradition of Wicca, now one of the main traditions of the Wicca/Witchcraft movement,” George Knowles wrote at the beginning of his account on the person of Sanders (2001a). Sanders claimed to have been initiated into hereditary witchcraft by his grandmother at the age of seven, but this claim is difficult to verify or disprove. It is often reported that Sanders suffered from an obsessive tendency to show off and seek publicity. Thus it is possible that Sanders fabricated the story of his initiation in order to somehow compensate for the fact that he had sought entrance into some Gardnerian covens, but was refused because of his bad reputation (Knowles, 2001a). He indulged in various types of occultism, temporarily including some practices directed on Devil worship. During this period of his life, he struggled with alcoholism and lack of money, too (Knowles, 2001a). One of the reasons why Sanders is both celebrated and hated in Wiccan circles is the fact that it was he who was “responsible to a great degree for bringing the Craft (i.e. Wicca) into the public eye for the first time” (Elders of the Alexandrian Tradition, 2008).

4 founder's rather deep involvement with ceremonial magic, this Wiccan denomination contains many more ceremonial elements taken from that source than the Gardnerian denomination but, nevertheless, is similar to the Gardnerian on which it was based

(Elders of the Alexandrian Tradition, 2008). The source continues to claim that the label

“Alexandrian” was said by Alex's wife Maxine to have been coined by Stewart Farrar while writing What Witches Do, one of the books dealt with in this thesis.

3 The corpus

Even though many books have been written on the subject of Wicca, only three of them were chosen to serve as the corpus to this thesis. Different books may present different views of the subject, but the topic vocabulary, which is the main field of interest to this thesis, does not differ much throughout Wiccan writings. Providing that, in terms of vocabulary, it is not so important which of the many books we choose (as long as they have been translated into Czech), another criterion was used. The three books eventually chosen, Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond

Buckland, What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar, and Witchcraft Today by Gerald B.

Gardner, have all been very influential in the Wiccan movement and have received considerable attention and discussion since the times of their publication. They have become classic works on the subject of Wicca in the English-speaking world, and even in the Czech Republic their translations are among the most well-known ones in terms of translated Neo-Pagan literature.

On the following pages, each of the books and translations is further presented in a separate sub-chapter.

5 3.1 Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland

Let us begin the introductions part with presenting Buckland's Complete Book of

Witchcraft, a book that must be called popular in the broadest sense of the word. It has been read very widely and even affectionately called “Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book” or simply “Big Blue” (Buckland, 2009, p. xiv). It is also common for Czech people to refer to it as “Velká modrá” (obviously, the format is large and the cover is blue).

First published in the United States by Llewellyn in 1986, the first edition of the book had a total of 31 printings (Buckland, 2009). In 2002, Llewellyn released a slightly revised second edition. I am referring to this second edition, namely to its tenth printing released in 2009, in this thesis even though the translation was made from the first edition. The justification of this decision is that the texts are identical in both editions and the first edition is no longer available for purchase from the Czech Republic. On

The Cauldron, an interfaith pagan community forum, a reviewer called Randall (2010) writes that “the major change to the second edition is larger type”, by which she basically goes to the point. It is true that there are more things changed in the second edition than the size of the type; the appendices, for example, were restructured, the recommended literature list was expanded and updated and some photographs and illustrations were added. But as far as the text body is concerned, the changes are in the layout, not in the content.

The book is an introductory text to practicing Wicca or, more exactly, a Wiccan denomination called Seax-Wicca – a spiritual child of Buckland's. Initiated as a

Gardnerian in Perth, Scotland in 1963, Buckland returned to the United States and started the first working group there called the Long Island coven in 1964. This group was purely Gardnerian, Seax-Wicca only originated in the 1970s when Buckland, being

6 “fed-up with the egotism and power trips exhibited by others within the craft”

(Knowles, 2001d) decided to found a denomination on his own. Getting rid of the

Gardnerian degree system, Seax-Wicca was designed as more democratic and open and, as the name itself suggests, was largely based on a Saxon theme (Knowles, 2001d).

The book is essentially a do-it-yourself manual on how to become a witch (or

Wiccan, as the two terms can often be synonymous) in fifteen chapters. To add to the book's textbook-like layout, the chapters were called “lessons” by the author. This wannabe knowledgeable attitude of the author is one of the issues most commonly criticised in connection with the book, as is discussed below.

Buckland began the book with a chapter on the history of witchcraft, or rather its popular version based on the theories of the late Dr. Margaret Murray (1863–1963), who was an archaeologist, anthropologist and Egyptologist and who took “scientific” interest in the history of witchcraft in Europe, publishing several books on the subject

(Knowles, 2001c). According to these theories, witchcraft as a religion has continued since pre-history, surviving in secrecy during the times it could not be seen and being a highly structured cult (Murray, 1921, p. 8). Inclusion of this material is one of the reasons of frequent negative criticism, too, because Murray's views were long ago ruled out as groundless and non-scientific: “Her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is now seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments,” Jacqueline Simpson wrote

(1994).

Another issue often thought of as negative is the inclusion of too many topics, none of them dealt with properly as a result (Randall 2010). A very illustrative example of this is a sub-chapter where Buckland spent four very short paragraphs on explaining to

7 the reader what they should expect to experience in the time between two incarnations

(2009, p. 27). He does not use any sources to back his claims and deals with the topic in too straightforward a fashion as well as too briefly. This is connected with yet another drawback of the book: Buckland tends to be very condescending in his writings acting like a preacher imposing one truth where there may be many. He cites his own many books more than other authors and arrogantly disregards traditional Wiccan initiation and training telling the reader that they can achieve all this by themselves and by making use of his book.

As mentioned, the style of the book is quite condescending. At the same time, it is very easy (and maybe too easy) to read, as the book was evidently designed for as vast an audience as possible (and it actually got a very vast audience, we may claim, looking at the number of printings it has achieved).

A mention should be made of a non-dictionary spelling of the word “magic” which

Buckland employed, spelling it as “magick” adding the final “k” to it. He calls this “the old spelling” and claims to use it in order to “differentiate between [stage magic] and the other true magick, that of Witchcraft and the occult world” (Buckland,

2009, p. 222). While it is true that this “k” features in, for example, the Middle English version of the word, which is usually spelled as “magike” (Stratmann, 1967, p. 415) or

“magik” (Klein, 1971, p. 438), it is nonetheless true that it was the infamous British magician Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) who was the actual popularizer of this spelling and Buckland himself cites him as a source in Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft

(pp. 222–223). While this spelling is sometimes employed in occult writings, authors of

Neo-Pagan books publishing in the time when Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft was written did not generally use it.

8 In spite of the many misconceptions it contains, this book – arrogant and influential to a similar degree – has been one of the major sources of information on Wicca in the

United States.

3.2 What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar

In order to provide a basic background to the Alexandrian denomination of Wicca as well as learn something about the circumstances under which the book was written, let us now introduce Farrar's What Witches Do.

First published by Peter Davies in 1971, this book was called the “most innovative book of the period on witchcraft, and probably the first specifically on Wicca” (J. Farrar,

2009, p. xi). As the wife of the late Stewart Farrar further informs the readers, the book was written on a request by Alex Sanders, whose coven Farrar had joined (as did Janet, his wife, before they got married). The book describes Farrar's initiation and the training he received in the Sanders' coven and gives a large amount of information on Wiccan practices and beliefs.

Farrar's encounter with Sanders took place in 1969 when he, a journalist, was sent by his newspaper (the weekly Reveille) to a press review for a film called Legend of the

Witches, which Alex Sanders and his wife Maxine featured in. Farrar interviewed the

Sanders and then was invited to do more interviews and after several talks the request for a book followed (J. Farrar, 2009, p. xi).

Farrar had written some detective stories before, but What Witches Do was his first non-fiction project. The book turned out extremely successful and became a classic work on the subject, establishing its author as a leading voice promoting Wicca

(Knowles, 2001e).

9 It is said that Farrar decided to ask for initiation into Sanders' coven, which was carried out by Maxine Sanders in 1970, partly in order to be able to make his account of modern witchcraft a true one (Knowles, 2001e). Be it as it may, many of the issues presented as facts in the book have been disputed by Wiccans. What is maybe most untrustworthy about the book is the fact that it is very enthusiastic and unquestioning regarding the person of Alex Sanders, presenting things Sanders claimed to have done as if he actually did them. This included, among others, abortions Alex said he had done mentally to some women who had asked him for the service as they could not afford a standard abortion at a clinic. Farrar states that having worked about the issue at the energetic level, Sanders simply told the woman that the pregnancy was over, which it was. Allegedly, this procedure never failed (2010, pp. 126–127). While the practice of magic is a natural part of Wicca, the majority of Wiccans would question the trustworthiness of such a claim. Talking about magic, Alex's wife Maxine herself states that “ninety-five percent of all perceived results of magic are psychological, four and a half percent coincidental and just half a percent pure magic” (Sanders, 2008, p. 71). In other words, magic is understood as a powerful and useful tool eventually able to bring results even at the material level, but should not be thought of as too straightforward or omnipotent.

Another issue is certain training material included in the book and presented as

Alex's own, because Sanders had taught it to his students as such. Farrar corrects this imperfection in his comment on the third edition of What Witches Do where he admits that the exercises he included were originally authored by Franz Bardon and that

Sanders used them without acknowledging the source, as he often did (1990, pp. 206–

207).

10 Farrar also wrote that the record of the rituals used in Alexandrian Wicca, the so called Alexandrian Book of Shadows, was given to Sanders by his grandmother and was old, authentic and traditional. Later, having thought better of the person of his teacher and having gathered more facts, he corrected this fabricated piece of information acknowledging that the book was an imprecise copy of the Gardnerian version by

Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente. He attributes the fact that Sanders in effect lied in this point to his omnipresent tendency to seek publicity and make his own past much more colourful than it actually was or could have been (Farrar, 1990, p. 206).

To conclude, the main problem of this otherwise very informative and influential book is that it reads like an ode to Alex Sanders, whose student Farrar was and whom he actually consulted as to what and how he should include, as is understood from the text of the book. In later comments by Farrar the reader gets a more realistic picture of both

Sanders and Alexandrian Wicca viewed from a broader perspective, but this perspective

Farrar did not have as a newcomer, when writing What Witches Do.

3.3 Witchcraft Today by Gerald Brosseau Gardner

Finally let us look at the third of the books in the corpus this thesis is based on – a book chosen because it is not possible to talk about Wicca, and modern witchcraft in general, without considering the figure of its founder, Gerald Gardner, who is the author of this book. Gardner was an English hereditary witch (i.e. a witch born into a family of witches, or having witches among their ancestors), claiming to have been initiated into a

New Forest coven by its high priestess called Old Dorothy Clutterbuck in 1939. The members of the coven allegedly claimed to follow an unbroken tradition of witchcraft in which they were preceded by their ancestors and which reached back to the times of witch hunts of the Middle Ages (Hefner, 1997–2011).

11 Apart from joining the coven and later on running a coven on his own, Gardner was a member of certain occult brotherhoods, such as the Freemasons and the O.T.O.

(Orpheus, 2011). He became acquainted with Aleister Crowley, the infamous British magician and also a member of the O.T.O. (Davis, n.d., p. 25). All these are of course possible sources Gardner might have used when reworking the alleged witches' rituals to base Wicca upon them and also when writing Witchcraft Today. Another influence might have been the fact that Gardner spent the whole of his productive life in the Far

East where he did some research into aboriginal religions (Hutton, 2009, p. 176).

It was only in 1951 that the last obsolete laws against witchcraft were repealed in

England and this opened the opportunity to make a public statement about witchcraft

(Buckland, 2009, p. 9). Gardner's book Witchcraft Today, written and first published in

1954, can be called a statement of this kind. Unlike Gardner's earlier books, for example his fictional novel High Magic's Aid of 1949, Witchcraft Today is designed as an eye- witness account.

In the span of thirteen chapters, Gardner gives information on witch beliefs and covens speaking from the position of an eye-witness, or even a participant, of their rituals. Apart from this material, he also dedicated whole chapters to the history of witchcraft, out of which let us name “There have been witches in all ages” (Gardner,

1999, p. 26) and “How the Little People2 became witches, and concerning the Knights

2 According to Gardner, Little People in England “were mostly pre-Celtic aborigines, but among them would be many Roman-Britons who had stayed on after the Saxon conquest” (1999, p. 52). The author further claims that the people were continuously pushed back to inaccessible parts of the land, such as certain areas in Whales, where they lived on their own, not paying taxes or giving feudal dues and being able to work magic. Therefore, town people allegedly called them an “uncanny folk addicted to magic” (Gardner, 1999, p. 53). They would also hold large meetings which Gardner calls “sabbats” (1999, p. 53) and claims they would be attended also by ordinary people from villages and even by nobles. The Little People are said to have been thought of as “both fairies and witches” (p. 53), the witches of later periods thus having their predecessors among this folk. The weak point of this theory is that it contains a large number of rather controversial conclusions presented as facts but backed neither by any sources nor by research.

12 Templar” (p. 52). Even though Gardner did not cite any of his approximately forty sources properly and thus made it difficult for scholars to trace the origins of the ideas he presented, it can be stated that he drew on the views of Margaret Murray in terms of the history or, more precisely, the alleged history, of witchcraft in Europe, restating her theory of the continuity of witchcraft as a religion since the Stone Age fertility cult

(Gardner, 1999, p. 26), the controversy of which has been discussed (see p. 7). Margaret

Murray also wrote the introduction to the first edition of the book.

In addition to witchcraft in Western Europe, particularly in Britain and in Ireland,

Gardner also covered certain aspects of the Greek mysteries and the Egyptian religion, treating them as connected to the witch cult, and, as can be deduced from the title of the chapter mentioned above, he included half a chapter on the Knights Templar. He mostly examined the nature of initiation into mysteries, but, again, was not very explicit as far as print sources or research are concerned.

Speaking of the book as a whole and citing its translator into Czech (Auský, 2009, p.

215), we must again point out that, to begin with, the author did not include any precise bibliographical citations even though many claims of his can be considered controversial and would surely be more readily accepted by readers if backed by sources. Another issue, which is even more important for the readers and the translator alike, is the occasionally lacking coherence of the text. Gardner jumped from one topic to another, which can even be seen from his somehow illogical ordering of chapters.

Auský also noted that at certain points even two consecutive sentences do not show any logical link to each other (p. 215).

But regardless of these or any other deficiencies, this book became one of the most influential sources of inspiration in the Wiccan movement. As Ronald Hutton puts it

13 (2009, p. 179), regardless of the fact that it is not clear whether Gardner actually joined an ancient tradition, as he claims in his books, or whether he invented the tradition altogether, compiling it from various sources, all the modern branches of Wicca are formerly based on his work or inspired by it.

3.4 The translations

Having introduced the three books on Wicca that have been chosen to serve as the corpus to this thesis, let us, too, introduce their respective translations. Even though the analysis of the translations of concrete vocabulary items, provided in the practical part of the paper, is somewhat more important, it is not without interest to look on the Czech books from a broader perspective in order to acquire a notion of their quality.

3.4.1 Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft: The Czech translation by Jana

Novotná

In the Czech Republic, the title was by no means so successful as its American counterpart in the United States, but, nevertheless, it has remained on the shelves of bookshops since its first publication by Pragma in 1998 and is still offered by Internet booksellers. The book was titled Velká učebnice čarodějnictví a magie in Czech, a title probably not devised by the translator, who translated very literally throughout the whole text of the book, often keeping even the English grammatical structures. The title is more likely to have been an intervention of the publisher designed to make the book more attractive and to enhance sales.

The book is often called a classic book on Wicca and even claimed to have founded the Wiccan movement in the Czech Republic (Dostálová, 2010). While this seems an overstatement, it must be also mentioned that the book has really been read by the vast majority of people now involved in or interested in Wicca and that it, therefore, should

14 be acknowledged as influential. The influence can be seen, for example, in the adoption and, subsequently, the actual use of the not exactly fortunate translation of the English expression “so mote it be” which Buckland used in the suggested texts of rituals. This issue is discussed in more detail in the chapter “So mote it be” (see p. 47).

The translation was made by Jana Novotná and there are certainly more negative points to be made about it than positive. The probable common foundation of the below listed problems is the translator's lack of competence concerning both the English language itself and the theory of translation. It can be argued that the translation is not a professional one, the translator's level of English being far below advanced, judging from the type of comprehension mistakes she made in her translation. An illustrative example of the comprehension-based problems is “I have yet to meet anyone who does not have both a mother and a father” (Buckland, 2009, p. 22) translated into Czech as “i když se setkávám s těmi, kdo nemají matku ani otce” (Buckland 1998, p. 26), which is the exact opposite of the original meaning. In the source text, Buckland used the sentence as an argument to make it clear how the male-female duality is important. The

Czech text with a contradictory argument in the middle of a train of thought is then perceived as largely inconsistent. Another example is a phrase from an introductory paragraph on the use of circles in witchcraft where Buckland wrote that “Roman ambassadors in a foreign country would draw a Circle around themselves with a staff” to protect themselves from attack (Buckland, 2009, p. 64), which got translated as

“Římský velvyslanec v cizí zemi kreslil kolem sebe a svého štábu kruh” (Buckland,

2009, p. 55). Luckily, this mistake is not in a passage where the distortion of meaning would matter much, so it only looks amusing. Yet another rather amusing issue is the politically correct note of Buckland's that the terms “white” and “black” magic “have no

15 racial connotations” (Buckland, 2009, p. 222). Misunderstanding this cultural reference and possibly mistaking the word “racial” for “rational”, the translator wrote: “Tyto termíny nemají žádný jednoznačně vymezený význam” (Buckland, 1998, p. 165).

Looking at the text from an overall perspective, the reader can note that inconsistency and lack of both cohesion and coherence are present throughout. Literally every page contains imperfections caused either by insufficient understanding of the source text, as shown above, or by a kind of incompetence concerning translation itself.

Out of these let us mention undesirable lexical interference, which means words translated by their “usual meaning instead of by an appropriate other meaning

(Newmark, 1991, p. 83), for example “beliefs” (Buckland, 2009, p. 19) translated as

“víry” (Buckland 1998, p. 25), functional sentence perspective (FSP) and English grammatical structures retained in Czech.

Apart from the style, there are certain decisions of the translator which are hard to comprehend or justify. Among the most important is the persistent translating of

“coven” (a close Wiccan working group of a small number of people) as “sabat”. No clue is given as to why this rather controversial term was used, especially when it is already used to mean a Wiccan festival, where it is a transference (and naturalisation, the original spelling being “sabbat”) from English (for discussion of the word “coven” see p. 23). Another issue is the use of the word “kult” where it is not used in the source text. Although Wicca will undoubtedly qualify as a cult if we define the word “cult” as

“a system of worship” or “its body of adherents” (Webster's Universal Dictionary and

Thesaurus, 1999, p. 146), the word still has certain connotations in Czech suggesting extreme or weird practices, as evidenced by Akademický slovník cizích slov, where it reads “nekritické, přepjaté uctívání, velebení někoho n. něčeho vůbec; slepé uctívání

16 autority” (Petráčková & Kraus, 1998, p. 436). Referring to Wicca, Buckland himself occasionally used the word “cult” and earlier authors (Gerard B. Gardner, for instance) used it extensively. But the translator into Czech added it in the majority of cases where

Buckland only spoke of “Wicca”, for instance “Wicca's origins” (Buckland, 2009, p. 10) as “původ kultu Wicca” (Buckland, 1998, p. 19). This might only have been an attempt at avoiding the need to inflect the word Wicca in Czech, but still a deliberate intervention of this kind may change the reception of the text in the target culture.

Moreover, the author gives some practical information on where to purchase certain items he speaks of, for example an etching pen (Buckland, 2009, p. 44), and this information is retained in the translation (Buckland, 1998, p. 43) even though it is of little or no use to Czech readers. A similar case of mechanical translation without much thought given to the content is how the titles of the books Buckland referred to in the text were translated. Luckily, the vast majority of the books were not available in Czech translation at the time of the publication of Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, but the Czech translation of Farrar's title What Witches Do, for example, had been published two years before Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft and titled Čarodějnictví dnes

(1996), not Co dělají čarodějnice, as the translator suggested (Buckland, 1998, p. 19).

I have already pointed out that the style of the original book by Buckland is far from academic. Now, if we have called the source text too easy to read, we must call the translation substandard, because in addition to all the problems of the original, it is incoherent and sometimes even nonsensical. It can be argued, in this respect, that the poor quality of texts can discourage people from actually contemplating the content as well as disqualify the subject from scholarly discussion (not to speak of such cases where the meaning itself gets distorted). If a text does not make a serious impression,

17 then it is difficult to think of its topic as serious, to put it simply. In this case people, influenced by the condescending style combined with the poor translation, may start thinking of Wicca as something too straightforward and without depth.

3.4.2 What Witches Do: The Czech translation by Lily Sekytová

This translation, one of the earliest ones on the subject of Wicca, was published by

Ivo Železný as early as 1996 and titled Čarodějnictví dnes. Its stylistic level as well as its level of accurateness rank it between the other two translations dealt with in this paper.

While no instances of serious factual mistakes concerning the source culture were spotted, there are many imperfections caused either by too little attention paid to the source text or by a simple misunderstanding of it. As an example of the former may serve the translator's mistaking a “bed-sitter” (Farrar, 2010, p. 61) for a “baby-sitter” and thus translating it as “paní na hlídání” (1996, p. 74). The latter can be divided into two kinds, lexical and a syntactic. In the first chapter, Farrar writes that the coven he was about to join functioned in a very spontaneous way, stating that the coven members gave him “little warning” in terms of what he was to experience (2010, p. 10). The translator rendered this expression as “lidé ze sboru ho totiž trošku varovali” (1996, p. 15) and, subsequently, had to restructure the whole sentence so that its clauses were not contradictory. The resulting Czech sentence is stylistically unproblematic but carries a shift of meaning. While the translator formulated the target language sentence in such a fashion that the reader of the Czech text would not spot any controversy, it is clear from the comparison with the source text that the translator was not sure what the difference between “little” and “a little” was in English. As far as syntactic

18 misunderstandings are concerned, they usually consisted in a kind of confusion as to who or what the deep subject of a clause was (Farrar, 1996, pp. 9, 22).

Another point is that the translator decided to partially naturalise the name “Maxine”.

When it is used in the nominative, she transfers it. But in all other grammatical cases than the first, she inflects the name as if the nominative was “Maxina” (Farrar,

1996, p. 54). This decision does not seem to be an unproblematic one either because foreign female names ending in a silent -e should be normally transferred and not subject to flection, especially when the person referred to is not a historical figure

(Ústav pro jazyk český). It can be hardly counted as a mistake, on the other hand, as the rules concerning the declension of this type of names in Czech are not hard and fast.

There are also some instances of distorted functional sentence perspective, for example a chapter title, “What Witches Believe” (Farrar, 2010, p. 31) translated as

“Čemu věří čarodějové” (1996, p. 39), in which the word “čarodějové” should be regarded as the theme, because the whole book deals with the topic, and not given the final position for that reason. Generally speaking, though, Sekytová managed to restructure the word order in an appropriate manner throughout the book so that the resulting level of cohesion is satisfactory.

To sum up, if we take into account all the translation imperfections, examples of which are listed above, together with a few not exactly fortunate choices of vocabulary items used to render individual source language words, which will be discussed in the respective chapters, it still seems appropriate to call the translation an average one in its genre.

19 3.4.3 Witchcraft Today: The Czech translation by Jan Auský

Published in 2009 by Grada Publishing and titled Moderní čarodějnictví, this is the first, and so far also the only, translation of Gerald Gardner into Czech. If compared with the other two translations included in the corpus used as material for this thesis, it can be seen that it is a similarly faithful one, with very few exceptions. The majority of these exceptions consist of words, sentence fragments or sentences which were included in the original text but skipped in the translation. The purpose of this omission strategy was most probably to avoid translating some especially hard-to-render concepts which do not have one-to-one Czech equivalents (there are lexical gaps in Czech). One such case is a paragraph where Gardner talks about pagans and heathens and the difference between the two (1999, p. 53). As both of the two expressions are normally translated as

“pohané”, or in other words, an exact one-to-one translation of the word “heathen” is missing in Czech, Auský turned to a kind of functional equivalent and translated

“heathens” as “obyvatelé divočiny” (Gardner, 2009, p. 66) in order to differentiate the two groups of referents. But the price he had to pay to be able to use this solution was the skipping of the end of the sentence where Gardner stated that “we use those two names [pagans and heathens] to describe non-Christians to this day” (1999, p. 53) because, clearly enough, “obyvatelé divočiny” is no way to describe non-Christians. In the practical part of the paper, a chapter is devoted to the problematic expression

“heathen” (see p. 54).

Another fact to be noticed is the comparatively high quality of the translation. Unlike the translation of Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, the Czech text the readers are presented with is stylistically unproblematic with the principles of functional sentence perspective skilfully applied more often than not. Moreover, the translator,

20 translating with a comparatively very small number of mistakes caused by misunderstanding the source text, proved a much deeper knowledge of the English language than for example Jana Novotná. An example of a slip of his, however, can be the translation of the very end of the “Myth of the Goddess”, a legend of the Great

Goddess who descends into the Underworld, a version of which is included in

Witchcraft Today and where Gardner wrote: “But to be reborn you must die and be ready for a new body; to die you must be born; without love you may not be born, and this is all the magic” (1999, p. 35). The very last part of the sentence is clearly figurative, the meaning being “it is no more complicated than that”. But the translation in the Czech book is “taková je veškerá magie”, which does not cover the original function of the clause.

Contrasting with the otherwise satisfactory translation, there are unfortunately some cases of a lack of cultural knowledge, too, mirrored in the text. Arguably, the translator did not know what the meaning of “transubstantiation” was in the Christian context, translating the word without any further explanation as “proměna”(Gardner, 2009, p. 42), which, despite being the dictionary translation of the original word, is different from “proměňování” in Czech, and “proměňování” it should have been. Another, and maybe a more serious, example of both cultural knowledge and common sense missing is the unfortunate translation of “West Indies” as “Západní Indie” (p. 101). Although mistaking West India for the Caribbean seems to be a classic mistake by Czech translators (non-professional or semi-professional above all), the reader can only wonder how it could have happened that voodoo originated in West India and how

European magic, perverted Catholicism and various fragments of African religions could have met in the area to be used by French half-castes to create the cult (p.101).

21 The unpleasant question is why did not the translator wonder if it was possible, especially considering the fact that the source text reads “French West Indies” (Gardner,

1999, p. 80). Instead of doing a quick geographical research, the translator skipped the word “French” because, thinking of India, it must have seemed nonsensical.

But, the above mentioned imperfections notwithstanding, the translation is still one of the better ones in the context of translated spiritual literature published in the Czech

Republic, and Auský's stylistic level is higher than both Novotná's and Sekytová's.

The last point of the discussion is the Czech title of the book. As seen from the title of this chapter, the original book was called Witchcraft Today, and the obvious translation of this title into Czech is Čarodějnictví dnes. It is a common practice that book titles are adjusted by the publisher in order to boost sales, as it might have been the case with Velká učebnice čarodějnictví a magie (see p. 15). But here the reason seems to be rather connected to the fact that “Čarodějnictví dnes” had already been used as a translated title, namely of the Farrar's book What Witches Do, which is also included in the corpus explored in writing this thesis.

4 The analyses of selected vocabulary items

There are many vocabulary items in texts on Wicca and Paganism in general that have proved problematic in terms of translation into Czech. In some cases the problems can be caused by the translators' lack of knowledge of the subject. In other cases, though, the translators must deal with the fact that there are lexical gaps in Czech in the

Neo-Pagan vocabulary. Another obstacle is the Czech gender system, into which it is difficult to fit feminine nouns for general references (see for example the chapter

“Witch (a noun)”, p. 32); and there are other challenging issues related, for example, to the differences in cultural background (see the chapter “Blessed be”, p. 50).

22 To show the nature of the difficulties inherent in translating Wiccan texts into Czech, fifteen sample expressions were chosen and the ways they got translated by the translators this thesis deals with were discussed. A comparative analysis of the three books and their translations had been done for that purpose. The terms chosen are very common and important in the Wiccan context. In addition, they are the most challenging ones as far as translation into Czech is concerned.

4.1 Coven

“The coven is a small group; usually no more than a dozen. The ʻtraditionalʼ size is thirteen, though there is absolutely no reason why that particular number should be adhered to,” Buckland writes in the introduction to the chapter on covens and rituals

(2009, p. 79). According to the accessible information by Czech traditional Wiccans themselves, there are no covens in the area of the Czech Republic at present. One of these people claims that there is not yet any Wiccan coven in The Czech Republic where training and initiation could be undergone or which could be joined (Achrer, 2006). As far as my knowledge of the present situation goes, there has been no change since the time the cited text was written. The expression “coven” itself, however, is in daily use by Czech Neo-Pagans.

In each of the translations discussed here, a different term was employed to translate the word. At the same time, all the three translators were very consistent using the same word throughout the books.

Let us first look at Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft translated by Jana

Novotná. As mentioned earlier, the term used to translate the word “coven” is “sabat”, an expression suggestive either of the Jewish context or of Devil worship, according to

Tezaurus jazyka českého (Klégr, 2007, p. 974). The translator does not explain why she

23 opted for this expression. A possible reason is an attempt to avoid the transference of the expression “coven” similar to the reluctance to translate “Wicca” as “wicca” (see chapter “Wicca”, p. 27). Another possible cause is the fact that in some bilingual dictionaries, this translation was actually listed. Velký anglicko-český slovník published by Academia in 1984, for instance, translates the entry “coven” as “sabat čarodějnic” with a note that it is a Scottish English expression (Hais & Hodek, 1984, p. 432). John

Greer argues that the word “is a Scots English version of convent or conventicle and simply means ʻgatheringʼ” in Scottish English and was picked by Dr. Murray from some records of Scottish witchcraft trials where it appears several times (2003, p. 114). It might have been this meaning of the word “coven” the authors of the English-Czech dictionary were referring to, even though we cannot tell for sure, as the meaning “a group of people who gather” was also possible. Osička and Poldauf, to cite yet another source, also asserted the translation “sabath čarodějnic”, this time without any comment

(1957/1970, p. 100). Another dictionary source, which Novotná might not have used in

1998, but which, nevertheless, offers a viewpoint which would have supported her choice, is a recent English-Czech and Czech-English dictionary by Lingea, where the entry “coven” is rendered as “slet čarodějnic”, which clearly points to a gathering on an occasion or a feast (Velký slovník anglicko-český, česko-anglický, 2007, p. 148).

On the one hand, it is certainly true that the transferred word “coven” would have looked exotic, being a completely new loanword in the second half of the 1990's when the book was published in the Czech Republic, and it is thus understandable that the translator decided to substitute it. But, on the other hand, “sabat” is a very unfortunate choice, for three main reasons. Firstly, the word has some negative connotations in

Czech, suggesting wild, wicked, or orgiastic activities connected with Devil worship, as

24 quoted above. This is extremely inconvenient, providing that one of the aims of the book is to promote Wicca as a serious religion in its own right, the witches being described as “intelligent, community-conscious, thoughtful men and women of today”

(Buckland, 2009, p. xvii). Secondly, the expression “sabat” is by no means established to describe a group of people in Czech. Rather than that, it has always been used to describe an occasion or a festive day, especially Saturday, which is connected with the

Jewish context the word comes from (Petráčková & Kraus, 1998, p. 673) or, in the context of witchcraft, a gathering of witches, “schůzka čarodějnic a čarodějů” in Czech, as suggested in Příruční slovník jazyka českého (1948–1951, p. 4). The word “sabat” is nearer to this use when employed as a translation of the English “sabbat” (Buckland,

1998, p. 79). This brings us to the last point: the fact that the translator used the word

“sabat” to translate both the term for a group (a coven) and a festival (a sabbat) did not make the text clearer for the readers. This can be illustrated with two chapter titles:

“Covens and Rituals” (Buckland, 2009, p. 79) is translated as “Sabaty a rituály”

(Buckland, 1998, p. 65) and “Sabbats” (Buckland, 2009, p. 97) as “Sabaty” (Buckland,

1998, p. 79).

In Farrar's What Witches Do the expression “coven” is used many times and translated as “sbor” without exception. Not having any negative connotations, this expression can be claimed to be a better option than “sabat”. On the other hand, it is far from perfect. The Czech term “sbor” suggests either a fire brigade, a choir or, considering the expression “sbor čarodějů“ (Farrar, 1996, p. 44), a fairy tale. Another problem is that, as suggested by the analogy with a fire brigade, the word “sbor”, if not used to mean a choir, is used to talk about rather formal bodies. Slovník spisovné češtiny by Academia, for instance, suggests collocations “sbor učitelský, důstojnický,

25 diplomatický” or, in its religious context “společenství (evangelických) věřících

(správní jednotka)” (2003, p. 378). The Wiccan coven, on the contrary, is defined as a

“small unit of people acting together in perfect love and perfect trust3” and compared to a family (Buckland, 2009, p. 284). This clearly shows that the nature of a coven is anything but formal, even though a certain degree of discipline is usually required, and that a better option should be searched for to translate the word.

Increasingly, as the Wiccan movement became more popular and more books on the subject were translated, the transference of the word “coven” became widespread. Not surprisingly, this is also the expression that the translator of Gardner's Witchcraft Today,

Jan Auský, used (the translation was published in 2009). The transference may be considered the best option of the three. The main point to back this view lies in the fact that in contemporary English, the word “coven” is used nearly exclusively to mean a group of Wiccans or witches, thus being a specialized expression. The transferred Czech version is then also a specialized expression used only to mean a Wiccan (or sometimes pagan in general) group and thus makes a better equivalent to the original word. This makes it preferable to the more general expression “sbor”. In addition, it is strongly preferable to the above extensively discussed “sabat” because it does not bear any negative connotations.

After concluding that the transference seems the most convenient option, there is yet another remark to be made. In the quarterly bulletin of the Czech branch of Pagan

Federation International, namely in its issue from August 2010, an attempt to naturalise

3 The words “perfect love and perfect trust” might seem an overstatement providing they are used to describe a group of friends, in effect. It should be therefore explained that citing this particular expression the authors seldom think about its literal meaning. Rather than that they refer to the text of Wiccan Rede, a general Wiccan ethical code, namely to its first two lines: “Bide ye Wiccan laws you must/In perfect love and perfect trust” (Grimassi, 2003, p. 483).

26 the spelling of the word was noted. One of the authors, writing about the role of the elements in the pagan ritual, spelled the word with “k” consistently:“Koveny obvykle používají pro každou světovou stranu zvláštní vizualizace” (Král, 2010, p. 11). The text was written in Czech, it is not a case of translation. Considering the fact that Czech does not respect the original pronunciation of the word which Czech speakers pronounce as

['koven], there does not seem to be any reason why the Czech spelling should not be adopted. On the other hand, this spelling is generally frowned upon by Czech Neo-

Pagans, as the author of this thesis found out by enquiring in Czech Neo-Pagan discussion forums. The expression is not used very often by an average speaker of

Czech and some people might claim that it has not been present in the Czech vocabulary long enough to be likely to have its spelling actually naturalised in any short time, but practice will show if the naturalization proves useful or not.

4.2 Wicca

Wicca is the name of the religious movement founded by Gerald Gardner. Originally, it was only used to mean the cult with formal initiation rituals and a hierarchy of priesthood as Gardner established it in the early 1950's or, alternately, its modification by Alex Sanders, one of its famous promoters. The two traditional denominations became known as Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, respectively. But nowadays, especially in the United States, the term “Wicca” is widely used to refer to any belief system slightly inspired by the original ideas, however different it might be, for example a feminist denomination called Dianic Wicca (Starhawk, 1999).

The current trend in translation of texts on the subject is to transfer the word, as

Sekytová did in the translation of Farrar's What Witches Do (1996, p. 12). The transference has become the recognised translation, as defined by Newmark (2003,

27 p. 89). In the translation of Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, however, an attempt was apparently made to avoid the transference, or rather not to use it alone.

There are several cases of the transference, with the expression “Wicca” always in the first case (1998, p. 20), but the majority of the renderings add one or two general words, the purpose of which seems to be the fact that it is more natural to inflect these in Czech than the then new loanword “Wicca”. The most common rendering in the book is “kult Wicca” (1998, p. 27); yet another version used is “kult čarodějnictví Wicca”

(1998, p. 12). We can consider these translations to be couplets of transference and functional equivalents according to Newmark's definition (2003, pp. 81–83). As mentioned in the introductory chapter on the Czech translation of the book, it is not very fortunate to deliberately add expressions with negative connotations in the target language, as is the case with the Czech “kult” (Petráčková & Kraus, 1998, p. 436), where there is no mention of them in the source text.

It can be argued that the expression “Wicca” was likely to make a very exotic impression in the 1990s and that it was thus better to combine it with a kind of functional equivalent, but on the other hand, Sekytová had transferred and fully inflected the original word in her translation published two years before Novotná's translation. Yet the choice to explain the word somehow and thus make it easier for the reader to imagine its referent is understandable. However, there seem to be more neutral options at hand than “kult”. As an example let us cite Sekytová, who, although generally transferring the source language word, chose to extend it to “hnutí wicca” at some places (Farrar, 1996, p. 13).

Even though there does not seem to be a problem with the translation of the term

“Wicca”, as the transference turns out satisfactory in Czech, there is a detail which must

28 be addressed. It is a widespread mistake in Czech original texts and translations alike to write “Wicca” with a capital letter following the English way. This spelling does not conform to the rules of Czech orthography, where names of religious denominations or movements must be written with a lower-case initial letter, unless official (Pravidla

českého pravopisu, 2008, p. 70), and it must, therefore, be considered incorrect. While

Sekytová correctly changed the upper-case “W” to a lower-case one and thus translated

“Wicca” as “wicca”, Novotná kept the original capitalization throughout the text (cf. the examples above) and Auský used the incorrect spelling as well (Gardner, 2009, p. 114) despite the fact that Gardner himself did not use the word “Wicca” in Witchcraft Today at all. In the translation, the incorrectly capitalized expression “Wicca” is used to render the source text “Wica” spelled with a single “c” and presented by Gardner as a strange word worth an explanation. “They [the witches] are the people who call themselves the

Wica, the ʻwise peopleʼ (…),” Gardner wrote (1999, p. 88). In this case, it would have been more accurate not only to conform to the Czech orthography rules by using a lower-case initial letter, but also to transfer the specific expression from the source text, possibly putting it in italics and/or adding a translator's note on the spelling conventions in English. It is true that the term is the same, the only difference being the later standardizing of the spelling as “Wicca” (World Lingo), but Gardner, the first person to use the name in connection with the newly emerging religion, should be respected as an authority, spelling not excluded.

The last point concerns the use of the transferred word “wicca” in texts originally written in Czech. As suggested above, it is a very common mistake to spell the word with a capital initial letter and thus violate the Czech orthography system because, as has been commented on, while there is as a rule an upper-case initial letter in names of

29 religious paths in English, there must be a lower-case one in Czech (Pravidla českého pravopisu, 2008, p. 70). Rather than discussing some of the many misuses to be found on the Internet, let us look at an example from Wicca: První zasvěcení, a book on Wicca by a Czech author published by Volvox Globator in 2005. While commenting on the teaching he had received from his high priestess, for example, the author wrote: ”Jednou z prvních věcí, které jsem se to odpoledne dozvěděl, bylo, že to, co se doposud o Wicce napsalo a řeklo na veřejnosti, je vlastně jen jakási viditelná část ledovce...“ (Achrer,

2005, p. 47).4 As seen in this example, the word “wicca” was normally inflected by the author but spelled with a capital letter. It is, of course, impossible to tell why the author opted for this spelling, but it seems reasonable to consider the possible influence by translated literature on the subject a matter of some importance. To support this theory, let us state that the author himself acknowledges having read Buckland's Complete

Book of Witchcraft where the discussed spelling mistake also occurs (Achrer, 2005, p. 33).

4.3 Wiccan (a noun and an adjective)

“Wiccan” of course means “related to Wicca”, and as a noun it refers to a (male or female) follower of the religion. Similarly to the case of “Wicca”, the recognized translation into Czech for the noun is the transference. The word is inflected in the standard way in Czech and there is even a female form “wiccanka” in use. The noun has been partly naturalised to conform to the Czech gender system, and the same is true of the adjective “wiccanský” which accepts both singular and plural adjective endings of all the three genders of Czech and is normally declined (Farrar, 1996, p. 42).

4 “One of the first things I was to learn that afternoon was that the majority of what had been written or said about Wicca in public was but a kind of tip of the iceberg” (Achrer, 2005, p. 47; my translation).

30 The only problem of the use of this translation, again similarly to the case of

“Wicca”, is the tendency of some people to spell it with an upper-case initial letter, which has been ruled out as violating the Czech orthography system (see chapter

“Wicca”, p. 27).

If we look into the corpus this thesis is based on, we will find Sekytová largely exploiting the above mentioned option, translating “Wiccan” as “wiccanský”

(appropriately inflected, of course) in the majority of cases. There are a few cases where she used a different adjective, for example “Wiccan training” (Farrar, 2010, p. 71) got translated as “čarodějské dovednosti” (Farrar, 1996, p. 85), which does not collocate very well in Czech, and ”Wiccan coven” (2010, p. 73) was rendered as “čarodějný sbor”

(1996, p. 88) which, apart from the controversy of the word “sbor” as a translation of the original “coven”, which has been discussed (see chapter “Coven”, p. 23), suffers from the same problem (see the notes on the word “čarodějný” as a translation of the source language “witch” in chapter “Witch (an attributive adjective)”, p. 37). Novotná made very little use of the adjective “wiccanský” and, not surprisingly, tried to paraphrase it by the genitive “kultu Wicca” (Buckland, 1998, pp. 21, 75, 227) or

“čarodějného kultu Wicca” (p. 235), once even translating “Wiccan name” (Buckland,

2009, p. 212) as “název podle kultu Wicca” (1998, p. 159). All these options suffer from unnecessary lexical interference and violate the Czech orthography. As far as Gardner's book is concerned, we will not deal with it in this chapter as the author used the word

“Wiccan” neither as an adjective nor as a noun.

Out of the three authors dealt with, only Buckland used the word “Wiccan” as a noun. He used the expression alternately to the more general term “witch” (which he for a reason chose to spell with a capital letter). Both Gardner and Farrar speak only about

31 “witches” (spelled with a lower-case initial letter). In the translation, Novotná did not opt for transference very often, as with all the other expressions derived from the word

“Wicca”. She used the noun “wiccan” only a few times and spelled it alternately with both an upper-case (Buckland, 1998, p. 101) and a lower-case (p. 229) letter. Otherwise, following her strategy of couplets combining transference with functional equivalents, she translated the noun as either “vyznavač kultu Wicca” (p. 73), “příslušník kultu

Wicca” (p. 218), or “člen kultu Wicca” (p. 220). The questionable appropriateness of these expressions is discussed above (see also chapter “Wicca”, p. 27).

4.4 Witch (a noun)

There seems to be no problem with the Czech translation of the word “witch”.

Obviously, the meaning is “čarodějnice”. But two problems arise when we try to apply the word in its neo-Pagan context.

Firstly, there is a problem with the register: the Czech expression “čarodějnice” does not qualify very well to designate a follower of a religion. But, on the other hand, there is the same controversy in English, which means that the core of the problem does not lie in translation and that it does not have to be dealt with in this thesis. It should, however, be considered in connection with the word “witch” used as an attributive adjective because Czech has more options here, not all equivalent (cf. “čarodějnický” versus “čarodějný”). This issue will be dealt with in the following chapter.

Secondly, and more importantly, a “witch” is a label for both a male and a female follower of either Wicca or Witchcraft (also meaning a Neo-Pagan belief system, even though defined very loosely). This is despite the fact that in other contexts the word

“witch” refers nearly exclusively to females, the corresponding masculine term being for instance a “wizard”, and is thus not gender neutral. Gerald Gardner, one of the first

32 promoters of the expression in its Neo-Pagan usage, considered the issue worth a footnote in Witchcraft Today, where he wrote: “Witches are as often men as women, but in English a witch is always called a ʻsheʼ, so I will use that word, and the reader must understand it to mean either male or female” (1999, p. 15). In other words, the expression itself has feminine connotations, but the actual referents are male as well as female, so Gardner used it to refer to both sexes. As suggested at the beginning of this paragraph, this practice has become widespread in English speaking Wiccan circles since Gardner's time.

Now, whereas a male English person can say “I am a witch” without raising much controversy nowadays, it is unthinkable for a male Czech person to say “jsem

čarodějnice” because the Czech gender system is much stricter than the English one and, moreover, the gender is clearly marked by the ending. “Čarodějnice”, then, is a feminised (i.e. derived) form of the male “čaroděj” and it would be nonsensical to use that word, specially derived to designate female referents, for males. Unfortunately, this expression is very common in Neo-Pagan texts and must be rendered somehow.

In Witchcraft Today, Gerald Gardner suggested that he perceived the word “witch” as feminine. It it thus not surprising that the translator opted for the same strategy, choosing “čarodějnice” as the default translation. To stress that the person referred to is male, Gardner used the phrase “male witch” (1999, pp. 83, 121). The first instance of this expression was rendered as “čarodějnice mužského pohlaví” by Auský (Gardner,

2009, p. 104). The other instance got translated as “čarodějník”, which translation was kept throughout the sub-chapter on the subject and given a footnote by the translator. In this footnote the translator stated that he dared to switch from the feminine only in this one case and that the meaning, of course, was a “male witch“, or “čarodějnice

33 mužského pohlaví” (Gardner, 2009, p. 157). “Čarodějnice mužského pohlaví”, even though a faithful rendering of the source language “male witch”, is an option far from elegant in Czech where the feminine gender ending strongly clashes with the masculine attribute. In addition, the attribute “mužského pohlaví” is long and clumsy in comparison with the English “male”. Thus, although justified in the specific case, it is not of any help in the search for a neutral and generally usable expression.

In the translation of Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft, Novotná also translated “witch” as “čarodějnice” when the singular reference was female or general.

There are a few cases where Buckland used the word “witch” to refer to a male person, namely to himself and to Gerald Gardner, and these are translated as “čaroděj” (1998, pp. 18, 20), which is probably the most neutral male counterpart to “čarodějnice” in

Czech. In comparison with Auský's “čarodějník”, it is, on the one hand, more suggesting of a fairy-tale context, but on the other hand a word better established in Czech. Where the reference was plural, the translator kept the expression “čarodějnice” in some cases

(1998, p. 65). In other cases though, especially in those where the both-gender context was stressed, the translator chose to substitute the original “witches” with a gender- neutral phrase. Once, the gender neutralness was achieved by listing both the male and female words, “čarodějové a čarodějnice” (Buckland, 1998, p. 54). In other instances, the translator turned to a larger paraphrase, translating “witches” as “příslušníci

čarodějnického kultu”(1998, p. 26), “členové čarodějnického kultu” (p. 51),

“představitelé čarodějnictví” (p. 47), or “vyznavači čarodějnictví” (p. 31). Out of these options, the latter two can be considered more sensible because they do not contain the word “kult” discussed in chapter “Wicca” (see p. 27). It can further be stated that the last phrase is more convenient still than the other one because the word “představitel”

34 can suggest a person holding a higher position in a hierarchy and entitled to represent the others within the religion, which was not desirable in this case. The expression

“vyznavači čarodějnictví”, however, seems eligible for use in general, gender-neutral contexts.

Lily Sekytová employed a different strategy in the translation of What Witches Do. In cases of a singular reference where the gender was not suggested, she used the male word in Czech, i.e. “čaroděj”. This translation occurs in the plural, too. But, similarly to the case of Witchcraft Today, there are hints by the author in the text, this time suggesting that he thought of the word as a masculine one. Farrar did not make any statements about the word “witch” itself and its gender connotations in English but, nevertheless, he frequently uses it together with the masculine pronoun “he”. This can be shown on the examples such as “the witch in his coven” (2010, p. 138). It can be claimed, on the one hand, that this pronoun is used to make a general reference in the same way we would be inclined to use “his or her” today (the book was first published in 1971 and the text body was not changed in the subsequent editions). But on the other hand, there is no evidence to back this explanation as Farrar did not comment on the issue. It is thus understandable that the translator opted for the masculine form “čaroděj” as the default translation for both the singular and the plural. In the instances the author refers either to a specific woman, for example Maxine Sanders (the wife of the above mentioned Alex Sanders), or to a female person in general, Sekytová used the translation “čarodějka” (Farrar, 1996, pp. 7, 58). The word “čarodějnice”, the most often exploited expression by the other two translators, was used only once for a singular reference by Sekytová (1996, p. 33), otherwise it was only used for explicitly female plural references and only a few times.

35 Between the expressions “čarodějnice” and ”čarodějka”, there seems to be both a stylistic difference and a difference in connotations. The latter seems to be a more emotional lexical item in Czech than the former, often used in such sayings as

“láska/příroda je mocná čarodějka” (ČNK – SYN2000). In addition, it also suggests a more positive approach of the speaker towards the person such called, as is evident from the fact that “čarodějka” is the word most often used in both translated and original

Czech fantasy literature, where, as a rule, witches are presented in a positive light. The translated title of Terry Pratchett's book Witches Abroad, for example, is Čarodějky na cestách (Pratchett, 1996). Another piece of evidence is a quote from a Czech translation of Sapkowski, which reads: “ʻTy jsi čarodějnice?ʼ ʻUhodlas. Ovšem dávám přednost označení čarodějkaʼ” (1995, p. 51). “Čarodějnice”, on the contrary, imposes a negative image of an elderly, ugly, and possibly malicious woman, as seen from the Czech idiomatic expression “být ošklivá jako stará čarodějnice” (Slovník české frazeologie a idiomatiky, 1983, p. 67). It is an expression as often used in fairy tales as in daily speech where it is an offensive description of a female referent who is either ugly or wicked.

The option “čarodějka” can be, therefore, considered a more neutral one.

As far as the translations of the plural form in Farrar are concerned, it has already been stated that the default rendering was “čarodějové”. There are, however, several cases where the translator wanted to make it clear that both sexes were being referred to.

This applies especially to the text of “The Charge of the Goddess”, a text recited by the priestess when she represents the Goddess in Wiccan rituals. The line in question is

“...adore the spirit of me, who am the Queen of all witches” (Farrar, 2010, pp. 14, 25,

172). The rendering of the word “witches” in these cases was “čarodějové a čarodějky”

(1996, pp. 19, 32, 201).

36 Having discussed all the possibilities used as renderings of the noun “witch” by the translators in question, we must further state that none of the words is completely satisfactory in Czech. In the singular, the most neutral feminine word for the Neo-Pagan context is probably Sekytová's “čarodějka”, while “čarodějnice” is more eligible in a historical context, and the best masculine one is perhaps “čaroděj”, even though the masculine form is not used spontaneously by Czech Neo-Pagans (personal experience of the author). When a gender-neutral reference is to be made in the plural, there are two possibilities how to avoid the listing of both the feminine and the masculine forms.

Firstly, we can make use of the expression “vyznavači čarodějnictví” suggested by

Novotná. Secondly, the word “witch” is often used interchangeably with the word

“Wiccan” in English. If the context makes it clear that it is the case, the translator might substitute the problematic expression “čarodějnice” (or another of the above listed options) by the naturalised transference “wiccani”, which, despite having a masculine form, is unmarked in plural references in Czech as far as gender is concerned.

Substitutions of this kind, however, must be dealt with cautiously, because the expressions “witches” and “Wiccans” are as often synonymous as they are not.

4.5 Witch (an attributive adjective)

Having presented some conclusions concerning the word “witch” used as a noun, the same expression used as an attributive adjective should be shortly discussed. There are basically two ways to render the word into Czech. It can be translated as a plural genitive noun and used as an attribute not in agreement with the noun it is attributed to

(“čarodějnic”, “čarodějů”), or it can be rendered as an adjective, the attribute it forms thus being in agreement with its noun.

37 The former strategy can be demonstrated with the expression “witch beliefs”

(Gardner, 1999, p. 30) translated as “představy čarodějnic” (Gardner, 2009, p. 37). This same strategy, only with regard to the masculine gender chosen as default, was used by

Sekytová in her translation of What Witches Do. An example taken from this source reads “witch coven” (Farrar, 2010, p. 35) translated as “sbor čarodějů” (Farrar, 1996, p.

44). Sekytová used this strategy nearly exclusively.

As far as the latter strategy is concerned, we find the most examples in Auský's translation of Witchcraft Today. He used two adjectives “čarodějnický” and ”čarodějný” for that purpose, the latter being the preferred one. The title of chapter 4, “Witch

Practices” (Gardner, 1999, p. 38), was, for instance, translated as “Čarodějné praktiky”

(Gardner 2009, p. 47). This rendering is not exactly fortunate, though. Apart from the word “praktiky”, which is not always a good counterpart to the English “practices” and which will be discussed in the respective chapter (see p. 41), there is an issue concerning the word “čarodějný” itself. In Czech, this expression collocates much better with words designating things which have certain magical power (thus being somewhat near the expression “čarovný”), a sample collocation being for instance “čarodějná moc” (Slovník spisovné češtiny, 2003, p. 46), than with activities or qualities associated with people who we think of as witches. The fact that the adjective “čarodějný” is not natural in certain contexts in Czech can be shown on another two examples from

Auský's translation, these being “čarodějné rituály” (Gardner, 2009, p. 57) and

“čarodějný kult” (p. 76). Apart from the fact that these expressions are not very idiomatic in Czech, the adjective “čarodějný” is more readily understood as “magical” than as “connected to witches”. The other option, “čarodějnický”, is also used to translate the expression “witch cult”, which became “čarodějnický kult” in Czech

38 (Gardner, 2009, p. 110). Here the meaning is “connected to witches”, which is what it is expected to be, and the rendering can thus be considered more convenient than the other one.

In addition to the two above adjectives, Auský turned to paraphrase in one case and translated “witch power” (Gardner, 1999, p. 127) as “síla používaná čarodějnicemi”

(2009, p. 165). This translation is very sensitive as it respects the fact tackled in the book by Gardner that even though this power in question resides within the bodies of people, those wanting to make use of it must learn certain procedures in order to release it and use it, which means that the power is somehow separate from the people

(1999, p. 17).

To conclude, from the options suggested by the translators, the adjective “čarodějný” should not be used when the reference is being made to activities or qualities associated with witches, whereas the version “čarodějnický” seems to be a much more neutral and generally usable expression than its substantive counterpart “čarodějnice”. Good use can be also made of the plural genitive nouns discussed at the beginning of this chapter if the translator is prepared firstly to cope with the gender-related issues which arise together with the need to choose either a feminine or a masculine noun and secondly, to avoid these if the reference should explicitly embrace both genders. Lastly and similarly to the case of the noun “witch”, if the context makes it clear that it is issues related to

Wiccans that are being described by the adjective “witch”, the translator might substitute any of the more literal translations by the naturalised transference

“wiccanský”.

39 4.6 Perform

Although this verb can be used in many contexts, the only context which is of interest here is that of performing rituals. In the analysed English texts, it is the most common verb the authors use when they want to express that a ritual (or possibly some working of magic) was carried out.

It is somewhat unfortunate that the translators do not seem to have noticed that “to perform” is a very ordinary word in English and, because of that, should ideally be translated by a similarly ordinary word in Czech. The translations which do not respect this are as a rule clumsy even in written texts and probably could not be used in speech at all. To be able to assess individual examples, let us look at the options suggested by the translators.

The obvious dictionary translation “provádět”, suggested by both Novotná and

Auský (Buckland, 1998, p. 174; Gardner, 2009, p. 81), is a very common one. Despite this, it can be also claimed a far-from-the-ideal one because in Czech, it is very unnatural to say “prováděli jsme rituál”, unless jokingly. The verb often suggests somewhat dubious activities, as evidenced by the phrase “Co to tam sakra provádíte?”, or a rather formal style, as seen in “provádět reformu veřejné správy; provádíte-li cvik tímto způsobem, přesvědčte se...” (ČNK – SYN2000). In addition, the progress of the activity, i.e. its presentation as unfinished, is given focus. Not to imply these kinds of meanings, the verb usually requires a plural object – “provádět riskantní operace, provádět opravy” (ČNK – SYN2000). “Provádět rituály” seems more natural than

“provádět rituál”, too. What seems to be a crucial issue in this case is the imperfective grammatical aspect of the verb “provádět”. If we substitute it by its perfective counterpart “provést” in collocations containing a singular object, the resulting phrases

40 are much more satisfactory. The phrase “provést sčítání lidu” (ČNK – SYN2000), for example, refers to a completed action in the same way “provést rituál” does.

Another option by Novotná is “sloužit” (Buckland, 1998, p. 32). This expression collocates much better with the word “rituál” than “provádět” but, in practice, is not common at all. The reason for this might be the fact that it reminds far too strongly of the Christian mass (“sloužit mši” is a fixed expression in Czech). The alternative rendering “sloužit obřad”, though, seems to be a little more plausible in the Neo-Pagan context.

Yet another option suggested is “vykonávat” (Gardner, 2009, p. 57). This expression, with attention paid to a correct choice of aspect in each situation, collocates with

“rituál” without problems. The only drawback is that the Czech “vykonat rituál” sounds rather formal as opposed to “to perform a ritual”, which is nearly everyday English. In written texts, this expression seems plausible, even though in speech it is not common at all due to its formality. Instead, the counterpart of the English “perform” commonly used in speech is the mere “(u)dělat rituál”; or the word is avoided by saying “měli jsme rituál”, “byl rituál”, or the like. This can be illustrated by an example from Achrer

(a Czech author), who wrote: “Prostě jsem začal dělat rituály, i když jsem jim vlastně pořádně nerozuměl a nechápal principy, které mohou znázorňovat” (2005, pp. 46–47)5.

Although the perfective verb “provést” also occurred in the book, “provedl [jsem] samozasvěcení” (p. 38), the former formulation was very common.

4.7 Practice (a noun) and practise (a verb)

A person's Wiccan practice is their world view conforming to the Wiccan ways, their observance of the seasonal festivals, their attending to rituals and the like. It is

5 “I simply began to perform rituals without understanding these, or the principles possibly represented by these, properly (Achrer, 2005, pp. 46–47; my translation).

41 analogical to a person's Christian, or any other, practice. “To practise”, then, is the corresponding verb.

The most straightforward way to deal with these expressions is to render the noun

“practice” as “praxe” (Buckland, 1998, p. 21; Gardner, 2009, p. 77; Farrar, 1996, p. 36) and the verb “to practise” as “praktikovat” (Gardner, 2009, p. 51). On the other hand, the original expressions are much more commonly used in the source language than the suggested translations in the target language. “Praktikovat rituály”, for instance, is not an example of good Czech, whereas the English “practise rituals” is without problems.

In addition, the noun “praxe” is very common in Czech in its meaning “experience”, which might influence the perception of expressions such as “wiccanská praxe” in the target language, while the source language “Wiccan practice” only means an active participation in Wicca (“aktivní wiccanství”).

First looking at the verb “to practise”, it can be noted that the translation dilemma is somewhat similar to the case of “to perform” discussed in the respective chapter (see p. 40) because here, too, it is often most useful to choose the simplest word at hand as the rendering, for example “dělat” as in “dělat rituály” for “practise rituals”.

As demonstrated by the example from Gardner, the most commonly suggested translation is “praktikovat”. This rendering, while labelled as inconvenient for more concrete direct objects (“practise rituals”), works well with more abstract objects, such as “practise Wicca” translated as “praktikovat Wiccu”. Gardner's “many Popes and prominent churchmen were said to practise it [sorcery]” (1999, p. 41) translated as “říká se rovněž, že mnoho papežů a významných církevních funkcionářů kouzelnictví praktikovalo” (2009, p. 51) seems plausible, as far as the analysed lexical item is concerned. Another suggested solution is “provozovat” (Gardner, 2009, p. 108), but this

42 option does not fit the religious context well because it reminds of practising somewhat dubious activities, as in the Czech “provozovat nezbednosti” (Slovník spisovné češtiny,

2003, p. 317) or “přičinlivě provozoval každou prasárnu, která existuje” (ČNK –

SYN2000).

Secondly, let us look at the noun “practice”. The fact that translating this expression can be problematic can be seen on the example of Auský's translation of Gardner.

Apparently unable to produce a one-word equivalent that would cover the scope of the original “practice”, the translator sometimes substituted it with more than one words.

One of these renderings is “praktiky a obyčeje” (Gardner, 2009, p. 21), while “obřady a

činnosti” (p. 33) is another. These attempts, especially the former one, show the effort to include both the meaning “the things people do” and “the way things are traditionally done”.

Another possibility to deal with the expression suggested by Auský was to overtranslate the broad term “practice”, picking one of the possible interpretations only in each concrete case. There are many examples, such as “metody” (Gardner, 2009, p. 77), “zvyk” (p. 53), “obřady” (p. 81) (this, to be exact is the translation of the source text plural “practices” (1999, p. 65)), “cvičení” (p. 132), and “tradice” (p. 132). In a minor extent, the same is visible in Novotná's translation of Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft where the translation “zvyklosti” is made use of marginally (Buckland,

1998, p. 81). This clearly shows how broad the scope of the English “practice” is, because, in spite of inevitably narrowing the meaning, all the above suggested options work in their particular contexts.

Finally, Gardner often used the noun in its plural form, “practices”. The most frequent Czech rendering by Auský was “praktiky” (Gardner, 2009, p. 49). However,

43 this expression, too, suffers from register-related drawbacks because, similarly to the suggested verbal rendering “provozovat”, the Czech word is suggestive of dubious activities, which can be evidenced by the phrase “nekalé praktiky finančních podvodníků” (ČNK – SYN2000).

4.8 Cast

In the Wiccan context, we will discuss the word “cast” in two collocations, “cast a spell” and “cast a circle”.

As far as spell-casting is concerned, there are two main strategies used by the three translators. The first one is to understand the collocation “cast a spell” as one unit and translate it with one word in Czech. Buckland's “casting a spell” (2009, p. 15), for instance, is rendered as “čarování” in Novotná's translation (1998, p. 24). This translation would maybe fit the original phrases “casting spells” or “spell-casting” better because they are general, whereas “a spell” suggests a specific case. Another example is from the introduction to Gardner's Witchcraft Today, where “spell-casting and other evil practices” (Murray, 1999, p. 13) is translated as “kletby a jiné zlovolné praktiky” by

Auský (Murray, 2009, p. 13). In this case the translation is rather free in that the word

“casting” was skipped, in effect, and the word spell was overtranslated as “kletby”. The overtranslation, though, is justifiable in this case because the author asserted that she meant a malicious kind of spell-casting.

The other strategy consisted in translating the two words “cast” and “spell” each for itself. Auský asserted the translation “sesílat kouzla” (Gardner, 2009, p. 115), which is a decent one except for the fact that the Czech “sesílat” can suggest a negative object, as can be seen on the example “Bůh na něj seslal nemoc” (Slovník spisovné češtiny, 2003, p. 382), whereas spell-casting is neutral. Sekytová, on the other hand, used a neutral and

44 general rendering, “provádět nějaké zaříkávání” (Farrar, 1996, p. 165) to translate the original “When he casts a spell, he ritually involves the appropriate element or elements” (Farrar, 2010, p. 140). The strong point of this rendering is its neutralness, as mentioned above, but its weak point is the unnaturalness of the word “provádět” in religious contexts in Czech, which is dealt with in the chapter on the verb “perform”

(see p. 40).

In practice, in speech at least, the most likely usage would probably be simply

“(u)dělat kouzlo (kouzla)”, similarly to the case of the verb “perform” (see chapter

“Perform”, p. 40), even though none of the translators used it.

With casting a circle, the situation is more complicated. Before starting the discussion, let us look at what casting a circle means in the context of Neo-Pagan rituals. It is the introductory part in Wiccan (and many other) rituals wherein the sacred space, traditionally in the shape of a circle, is marked physically, but above all energetically. Apart from symbolical acts of purifying by smoke and water or any other acts depending on the tradition and personal preferences, the circle is cast by willing energy into the line of the circumference walking about it clockwise. The result of this should be the actual erecting of an energetic structure used for keeping one's own energy in and other influences out (Craft, 2003, p. 97). The translator should, therefore, accordingly acknowledge by the word chosen as the rendering that the act consists of more than a mere physical marking of a circle on the ground.

Although all the three authors explain the procedure and the significance of circle- casting in the books discussed here (Gardner, 1999, p. 22; Buckland, 2009, pp. 64–66;

Farrar, 2010, pp. 46–48), the translators did not always respect the distinction between

“drawing” and “casting”. Sekytová's most common translation of this verb, for example,

45 was “(na)kreslit” (Farrar, 1996, p. 72), another used by her was similarly misleading

“vyznačit” (p. 105). Novotná's “připravit” (Buckland, 1998, p. 167) is not an apt description of the act in question either.

On the other hand, some apter options were suggested as well. The most common of these was “vytvořit” (Buckland, 1998, p. 179; Gardner, 2009, p. 25), “utvořit” (Farrar,

1996, p. 14). This rendering seems much more plausible as it allows for a more abstract interpretation than just physical creation. They reflect the fact that by a successful circle-casting the person actually builds, or creates, an energetic structure over the area of the circle (Craft, 2003, p. 87).

Between these apter options and options marked as inconvenient is Sekytová's

“vytyčit” (Farrar, 1996, p. 57) because it is, on the one hand, not misleading by suggesting a physical interpretation only, but on the other hand, with its meaning

“vyznačit, stanovit” (Slovník spisovné češtiny, 2003, p. 525) does not reflect the act of actually creating something so well.

The last remark on this topic is that Buckland used a name for the ceremony of casting a circle, “Erecting the Temple” (2009, p. 86), which was translated as “Stavění chrámu” (1998, p. 69). Inspired by this rendering, we could think about the expression

“stavění kruhu” or analogically “postavit kruh”, too. This label clearly shows that more than the physical level is concerned because a circle, represented by a line on the floor or ground, cannot be built, physically speaking. It also points to the fact that by the word “circle”, we mean the sacred space rather than the actual circle marked on the floor, which is considered to be but a boundary.

46 4.9 So mote it be

This affirmation phrase is often used in Neo-Pagan rituals where it functions as an answer to proclamations. The person casting the circle, for example, may conclude the act by stating “The circle is cast”. “So mote it be”, then, is the answer of the other participants. The meaning is “so may it be”, the function similar to the Judeo-Christian

“amen” and it seems to be one of the inspirations by Freemasonry in Wicca (“So mote it be”, 1927). Out of the three authors it was only Buckland who dealt with concrete examples of rituals so the analysis will be of the translation of his book.

Attention should be paid to the fact that, grammatically speaking, the phrase is a subjunctive and is rather archaic. The subjunctive construction makes it old-fashioned even in its moderate variants, such as “so be it” (Buckland, 2009, p. 29), not to mention the fact that the word “mote” itself is far from daily use in contemporary English. Since it is used as a part of liturgy, in effect, the translator should provide a similarly old- fashioned counterpart in Czech.

One suggestion by Novotná which does not conform to this assumption was “ať je to tak” (Buckland, 1998, p. 75). Since this not exactly fortunate rendering has been actually used in practice by Czech Neo-Pagans, it must be considered a decision based on personal taste whether the expression is or is not eligible for a ritual. But as far as translation itself is concerned, it is not a good counterpart to the original expression because of a rather significant shift of register. Novotná provides other versions too, such as “ať je tomu tak” or “nechť je tomu tak” (pp. 108, 228), which seem to follow the old-fashioned styling of the English original in a better way.

The translator's favourite rendering used far more often than the other ones was “ať se tak stane” (p. 56). The strong point of this translation lies in the fact that it ends in the

47 verb and not in the adverbial like the other do. This word order is more natural in terms of functional sentence perspective. The weaker point is the word “ať” which still does not seem to be formal enough to contribute to an ideal translation of the original phrase.

Novotná uses the same set of possible translations for the original “so be it”, too; and in addition, suggests two more, namely “budiž to tak” and “staniž se tak” (pp. 32, 57).

These are plausible in terms of register but are still not ideal because of the issue of FSP described in the previous paragraph.

Finally, the phrase “tak staň se” could be also considered as a possible translation.

Novotná never used this one, but nevertheless, it both sounds comparatively old- fashioned in Czech and is well structured with regard to FSP. In addition, it seems to be able to be included into a text of a ritual very easily. Similarly, the even more archaic phrase “staniž se” could also be thought of. But this, of course, is a matter of personal taste.

4.10 Chant (a noun and a verb)

Velký anglicko-český slovník translates the noun “chant” as “zpěv, nápěv” or as

“recitující liturgický zpěv, žalm, chorál”. For the verb “to chant”, it suggests either

“zpívat, pět, zejm. círk.” or several secondary meanings such as “monotónně recitovat” or “skandovat” (Heis & Hodek, 1984, p. 298). Cambridge Advanced Learner's

Dictionary is even more explicit in differentiating a “chant” from a mere “song” by defining it as “a word or phrase that is repeated many times” and the verb as “to repeat or sing a word or phrase continuously, or to sing a religious prayer or song to a simple tune” (2008, p. 225), as in “to chant a mantra” (p. 837). This shows that the expression has religious connotations and, too, is suggestive of a repetitive pattern.

48 The above definition fits the Neo-Pagan context very neatly. Neo-Pagan chants are short, simple texts, as a rule with a spiritually directed content, sung to simple tunes which are easily transformed to basic polyphony. They can be sung during rituals or just for fun, but in either case, they are repeated many times in a mantra-like fashion. A typical example would be the text of a popular chant named “Lady Spin”: “Lady spin your circle bright, weave your web of dark and light, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, bind us to you” (Reclaiming quarterly, n.d.).

In the corpus used in this thesis, it is Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft that offers most occurrences of the word “chant”. Novotná's favourite translation was

“popěvek” (Buckland, 1998, p. 73). When in the form “chanting”, the word got translated as either “zpěv” (Buckland, 1998, p. 171) or “prozpěvování” (p. 172). While

“zpěv” is comparatively neutral and of course plausible, “popěvek” and “prozpěvování” do not seem to fit the register completely, as they lack any possibility of religious connotations.

In Gardner, we have one example which is translated as “hymnus” (2009, p. 82).

While fitting the particular context in which it is used in this concrete text, and in contrast to the examples from Buckland, this word is too formal for everyday use.

Arguably, chanting “Lady Spin” with guitars and hand drums by a fire (which is a likely situation) cannot be claimed to be an instance of performing a “hymnus”.

In Farrar, the reader is informed that “no chants are laid down” for a certain festival and that the coven should choose their own (2010, p. 83). This was unfortunately translated as “žádné zaklínací formule nejsou předepsány” (1996, p. 100), which is a misconception of the translator's and, subsequently, is of little use for our purpose.

49 Similarly to some other vocabulary items discussed in this paper, the expression most commonly used in practice nowadays was not made use of at all by the translators. This expression in question is the transference “chant”, pronounced as in English but declined in the usual Czech fashion. The advantage of this word is the fact that it establishes a specific context as opposed to, for example, the above discussed

“popěvek” or “zpěv”. The expression has been exploited to such an extent that it has been half-jokingly transformed into a verb “chantovat” in informal speech.

4.11 Blessed be

Sometimes alternated by the expression “bright blessings”, this is a typical Wiccan greeting used especially when parting. In English, it is used both in writing and speech, in Czech, it is often transferred by Neo-Pagans in (especially informal) writing as a transfer between a text body and a signature. This use is close to the English practice, as can be seen for example in Buckland (2009, p. xviii). In informal writing, such as e-mail conversations or discussion forums, the abbreviation “BB” is used in both English and

Czech (Australian Wiccans and Pagans, 2011). Its origin as a pagan greeting is in the text of a certain part of Wiccan initiation rituals.6

Translating this expression into Czech is a real challenge, because there are no religiously motivated greetings in daily use and it is subsequently hard to make any translation of “blessed be” sound as a natural greeting.

As a part of a ritual, on the other hand, it can be translated quite easily as “buď požehnán(a)” (Buckland, 1998, p. 28; Gardner, 2009, p. 24) or “požehnán(a) buď”

(Gardner, 2009, p. 24). Sekytová suggested also a more old-fashioned version “budiž

6 The full text of this part in question reads: “Blessed be thy feet that have brought thee in these ways, blessed be thy knees that shall knee at the sacred altar, blessed be thy phallus/womb without which we would not be, blessed be thy breast/breasts formed in strength/beauty, blessed be thy lips that shall utter the sacred names” (Farrar, 2010, p. 15)

50 požehnán(a)” (Farrar, 1996, p. 20). Even this old-style version functions well in a ritual with the exception that when used in the plural, like Sekytová's “požehnány buďtež”

(Farrar, 1996, p. 20), it is too old-fashioned not to sound unlikely in Czech. Auský suggested freer “požehnány jsou” (Gardner, 2009, p. 42), which is also convenient in the particular ritual context (cf. the footnote). Both of the cited plurals are translations used in the ritual text quoted in the footnote.

To return to the greeting, though, there does not seem to be any translation able to function in Czech. This becomes obvious when we look at the possibilities suggested by the translators. While “buď požehnána” might work as a ritual greeting, it cannot be used as a casual greeting in Czech, in the way Novotná used it (Buckland, 1998, p. 219), without raising smiles on the faces of the people present. Nor is “žehnám vám”

(Buckland, 1998, p. 12) appropriate as a translation of the original “bright blessings”, a phrase possibly interchangeable with expressions such as “best wishes”, used at the end of the author's introduction to Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft (2009, p. xviii).

A good solution that fits the context it is used in well can be found at the very end of

Witchcraft Today. Gardner concluded the text with “as the witches say to each other – blessed be” (Gardner, 1999, p. 132). Auský's skilful rendering reads: “Loučím se s vámi slovy čarodějnic: nechť vám Bohyně žehná” (2009, p. 172). But this sentence is of course context-bound and “nechť vám Bohyně žehná” is not eligible as a casual greeting either.

It is a task for translators to decide where this phrase can be translated and where a translation would sound too unnatural. Taking into account the latter situation, transference supplemented by an explanatory note might be considered a possibility.

51 4.12 Initiation and dedication

In the religious context, an initiation is a rite of passage wherein the initiate is accepted into a religious group and some aspects of the inner teachings are revealed to them. Všeobecná encyklopedie states that it is “obecně uvedení jednotlivce do jinak nepřístupného společenství”7 and, too, mentions physical and mental tests preceding the initiation itself, whose function is to prove that the person is prepared for the passage

(1999, p. 353). In Wicca, this initiation serves as an introduction of the person both into the tradition and into a coven and the respective initiation ritual is performed by the high priest or the high priestess of this coven in question. There is usually an oath to take by which the initiate promises to keep certain parts of the teachings secret

(Gardner, 1999, pp. 69–78; Farrar, 2010, pp. 10–18). Inherently, another person is needed to perform anybody's initiation.

The other term, a dedication, usually used in the expression “self-dedication”, designates a conscious act of a person by which he or she states the intention to follow a certain spiritual path. This usually takes the form of a ritual, too, but no other person is necessary here as there are no secrets revealed (Achrer, 2004). It can be explained as more of a personal resolution.

In Czech, unfortunately, both terms are often translated as “zasvěcení” (Buckland,

1998, p. 54; Farrar, 1996, p. 53). On the one hand, this is logical as in Czech, there are both the expression “být zasvěcen” (equivalent to “to be initiated”) and “zasvětit se něčemu” (equivalent to “to dedicate oneself to something”). On the other hand, there is a rather significant difference between a dedication and an initiation, as explained above. For this reason the translator should try to differentiate the two concepts in order

7 “Generally the introduction of a person into a community which could not otherwise be entered” (Všeobecná encyklopedie, 1999, p. 353; my translation)

52 not to cause confusion in the target culture. This can be achieved comparatively easily by substituting the familiar term “zasvěcení” by the naturalized transferences “iniciace” and “dedikace” for “initiation” and “dedication”, respectively. Another option would be to keep the word “zasvěcení” as a translation of an “initiation” only, because it has long been used in this context, translating “dedication” as “dedikace” in order to mark the difference between the two. While it must be admitted that the change from “zasvěcení” to “iniciace” may carry a shift of register, it is very useful in order to avoid confusion and mistaking different concepts for each other.

In this respect it should also be stated that the two terms are sometimes misused or confused by the source language writers themselves. Raymond Buckland, who uses the two terms “self-dedication” and “self-initiation” interchangeably (not to speak about the fact that the not unusual term “self-initiation” is, in effect, a self-contained contradiction) can be taken as an example of this (2009, p. 64). It is true that as eclectic spiritual paths based on the Wiccan philosophy are becoming more and more popular, the meaning of the word “initiation” may be perceived as closer to the meaning of the word “dedication”, as can be seen on the example of Raymond Buckland, who claims that a person can “initiate” (not only “dedicate”) themselves (2009, p. 64).

Be this as it may, the translator should present correct information to the target language readership. The distinction in translation between the source language

“initiation” and “dedication” thus seems as a very useful one. Such cases where the two terms are confused already by the author can be considered worth a translator's explanatory footnote.

53 4.13 Heathen and pagan8

The default translation of the word “heathen” into Czech is “pohan” or “pohanský”,

Velký anglicko-český slovník asserts also “barbar”, “neznaboh” (Hais & Hodek, 1984, p. 1005). Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary defines the word as “old use disapproving, a person who has no religion, or who belongs to a religion that is not

Christianity, Judaism or Islam” and “humorous, someone who behaves as if they are not educated” (p. 669). In practice, the word seems to be used to mean followers of native faiths in English, as contrasted with the word “pagan” which simply denotes a follower of other than world religions. The word “pagans” describes a more civilized group of people, in effect, as will be evident from the following paragraphs. In accordance with this and also because of the Germanic origin of the word, the term “heathen” is popular with many modern Pagans nowadays who practise revivals of pre-Christian religions, especially those Scandinavian or Germanic in general (Wolf, 2009). Because of this distinction, the two words are often used side by side in English when the writer wants to embrace both meanings, which is a problematic issue in Czech where there does not seem to be an appropriate expression equivalent to “heathen”, which would both set the religious context and distinguish the referent from “pagan”.

Out of the authors concerned, Farrar did not use the word “heathen” at all. Buckland used the term in the chapter on the history and philosophy of witchcraft, where he wrote:

Non-Christians at that time became known as Pagans and Heathens [sic].

“Pagan” comes from the Latin Pagani [sic] and simply means “people who live

8 The word “pagan” is alternately spelled with both a lower-case and an upper-case initial letter in the source language books. I spell it with an upper-case initial letter in this thesis when I refer to the contemporary religious movement. In this chapter, which mainly deals with the word in its historical context, I opted for the lower-case one, while respecting the upper-case letter when citing a source language text which included it.

54 in the country”. The word “Heathen” means “one who dwells on the heath”. So

the terms were appropriate for non-Christians at that time (2009, p. 7).

The translator rendered “pagans and heathens” as “pohané a barbaři”, omitting the second explanatory sentence (1998, p. 16). While it is certainly true that better work could be done on “haethens” than “barbaři”, it is understandable that any Czech term here will be an undertranslation because of a lack the (religious) connotations the word

“heathen” has acquired. But then, of course, the translator should also have transformed the note on the fact that the two names (in Czech “pohané a barbaři”) were appropriate labels for non-Christians at that time keeping only “pagans” for that purpose, because the Czech expression “pohan” is related to the English “pagan” in terms of their origin.

She did not do that, though, so the reader may only wonder if “barbar” is, etymologically speaking, an appropriate name for a non-Christian.

In Gardner, who dealt excessively with the origins of witchcraft, we have many examples of the use of the expression, both paired with “pagans” and on its own. The author himself explained the difference between the two terms and reminded the readers about the meaning of the term “heathen” throughout the book referring to the people as

“heathens, the People of the heath” (Gardner, 1999, p. 28).

When the expression stands alone in the source text, it is possible to render it as

“pohan”, which is what Auský often did (Gardner, 2009, p. 71). In other cases, especially when Gardner pointed out the importance of the fact that these people lived out of cities, the translator paraphrased it as for instance “lidé z divočiny” (2009, p. 64).

The weak point of this otherwise fitting paraphrase is the fact that it lacks the religious connotations of its source text expression.

55 When, on the other hand, the expression is paired with “pagan”, the rendering

“pohan” is no longer possible because the translator cannot write “pohané a pohané” into the translation. Here Auský makes use of several kinds of paraphrase, for instance

“původní obyvatelé” (Gardner, 2009, p. 48) or “obyvatelé divočiny” (p. 66). In

Witchcraft Today, Gardner wrote that

The kings and townspeople accepted [Christianity], but the country people, the

pagans (pagani – people dwelling in the country), the villagers, the heathens

(the “people of the heath”), were mainly of the old faith, which is why we use

the two names to describe non-Christians to this day (1999, p. 53).

Here similarly to the above quote from Buckland, the translator must deal with the fact that there is no corresponding term in Czech with both the religious connotations and the etymological connection with the country and, consequently some reductions must be made. Auský translated this passage as “Králové a měšťané [křesťanství] přijali, ale venkovští lidé, vesničané, pohané a obyvatelé divočiny se drželi víry původní”. The last part of the sentence was skipped and instead, the word “pohané” was given a translator's footnote, which reads: “Anglické slovo pagan, tedy pohan, původně označuje lid obývající venkov” (Gardner, 2009, p. 66). Here it could be discussed whether it would not be more elegant to render Gardner's “the two names” as a singular in Czech (as “toto označení”, for instance) and thus make it possible to keep the statement that the word “pohané” is still used in the main text. At least, this would be a lesser reduction than Auský's version is. But, nevertheless, Auský's solution is a valid one.

Finally, unlike any of the solutions suggested by the translators, it is maybe not inappropriate to skip the word “heathen” in such cases where it is paired with the word

56 “pagan”, because the natural translation of both in Czech is “pohan”, and acknowledge in a translator's note that there are actually two different expressions in English, explain what they mean and state that for “heathen” there is no satisfactory equivalent in Czech.

4.14 Belief

The translation of this word first at hand is probably “víra”. This is also the first problem at hand, though. If the translator does not stop to think about the actual meaning and function of the word in a particular context, they can easily fail to notice the fact that the Czech “víra” has a much narrower scope than the English “belief” and misuse it. Let us therefore look at the alternatives suggested by the translators.

Novotná unfortunately seems to be the kind of translator who does not spend too much time thinking about a range of solutions before picking one, so she translated

“belief” as “víra” whether it was appropriate or not. Because this approach is of no great help here, we will leave Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft aside.

One solution suggested by both Auský and Sekytová is “přesvědčení”. Illustrated by

“a belief that Wicca develops that instinct” (Farrar, 2010, p. 39) translated as

“přesvědčení, že Wicca tento instinkt rozvíjí” (1996, p. 48), this seems to be one of the convenient alternatives. It reflects the fact that the Czech term “víra” is too pompous in situations where “belief” can mean little more than an “opinion”. It is a task of the translator's not to get confused with the spiritual or religious context of the book and distinguish between different uses of this expression.

Another suggestion by Auský is “představa”, as in “usual belief” (Gardner, 1999, p. 30) rendered as “obvyklá představa” (2009, p. 37). This again is a useful option, but the translator must respect the fact that this word is different in meaning from

57 “přesvědčení” and that it can suggest that the writer distances himself from it. Also,

“přesvědčení” implies an intellectual process which preceded the belief, and so does

“názor” (Gardner, 2009, p. 95); whereas “představa” does not. Strongly suggesting the author's distance, or even doubt, is the term “domnění”. This, of course, is not generally applicable, but can do a good service in specific cases, such as “in the belief that”

(Gardner, 1999, p. 89) sensibly rendered as “v domnění, že” (2009, p. 115).

To turn to more specific renderings, let us first discuss the word “poznání”. This was once used by Auský and, in contrast to his many good solutions, does not seem to cover the original meaning very well. In translation of the original “modern medicine men now seem to incline to the same belief” (Gardner, 1999, p. 129), Auský wrote “moderní medicína zřejmě spěje ke stejnému poznání” (Gardner, 2009, p. 168). This seems to be somewhat contradictory to the source text phrase because a belief is inherently something a person either believes, or thinks is good; which is to say that he or she does not know it for sure. In this respect, it could be contrasted with a “realization”, a word which much better covers the meaning of the Czech “poznání”. Another, and more convenient, specific rendering by Auský was realized by using the term “pojetí” and a slight paraphrase. The original “the Christian belief that the East is the holy place”

(Gardner, 1999, p. 20) thus became “křesťanské pojetí Východu [sic] jakožto posvátného místa” (2009, p. 23). Also Sekytová made use of a rather specific term translating the expression as “pověra” (Farrrar, 1996, p. 30). While this word fits the particular context quite well because the reference is made to the popular belief that witches worshiped the Devil, which is uprooted as nonsensical in the text (Farrar, 2010, p. 23), it must be also marked as a clear case of overtranslation, for it, unlike the original “belief”, is not neutral.

58 Finally, the obvious translation “víra” can of course be also made use of, if it is appropriate in the particular context. An example of such a context is Gardner's “the belief in many different heavens” (1999, p. 34) translated as “víra v několik různých míst posledního odpočinku” (2009, p. 42).

4.15 Beliefs

While it has been concluded that it is possible to translate “belief” directly as “víra” in many situations, it is at least questionable whether this can be done with the plural form of the word. Unless the reference made is to different people's beliefs in, for instance, different gods, apparitions or qualities, the Czech expression “víry” seems very inappropriate.

An example of such inaccurate usage is Novotná's “Víry” (Buckland, 1998, p. 25) as a title of a chapter called “Beliefs” in the source text (2009, p. 19). Providing the fact that the chapter mainly deals with such topics as the God and the Goddess of Wicca, the belief in reincarnation and retribution or the “Myth of the Goddess”, the context can be considered as religious. But even in this case, “víry” is very unidiomatic in Czech, especially when the reference is to a single belief system. Taking into account the authoritative approach of the author when he explains what, according to him, Wiccans believe, we could make use of the word “věrouka” to render the word in this particular case. Another option would be to use a sensible paraphrase, for example “Čemu věříme”. As a chapter title, both seem more satisfactory than the one actually used by the translator.

In other cases, Novotná made use of the singular form in Czech to translate the plural form in the source text. “Local beliefs” (Buckland, 2009, p. 99) thus became “místní víra” (1998, p. 81). This solution does not seem fortunate either because the sentence

59 which contains it is about the enactment of seasonal motifs in rituals and reads: “This

[enactment] can vary greatly and may be based on any of a number of themes, including local beliefs and practices.” (1998, p. 99). Here the referent of the word “beliefs” has much more in common with folklore than religion. In another chapter, however,

Buckland writes that it is unacceptable to “disallow the other the right to their own beliefs” (2009, p. 292) and here, as the topic was the reception of Wicca by society, the translation “víra” (1998, p. 221) is both acceptable and convenient. The term “víra” was also used by Sekytová, in both instances quite appropriately (Farrar, 1996, pp. 29, 141).

Of course, and in non-religious contexts especially, other expressions such as “názor(y)” and “přesvědčení” would do.

Auský, in accordance with his renderings of the singular “belief”, most often translated the plural form as “představy”. For example Gardner's “While these beliefs can occur independently, where they are very alike, I am inclined to suspect a connection” (1999, p. 76) is Auský's “I když se takové představy mohou vyskytovat nezávisle na sobě, na základě jejich značné podobnosti odvozuji, že mezi nimi pravděpodobně existuje spojitost” (Gardner, 2009, p. 95).

When the reference was made explicitly to the religious side of the issue, Auský supplied the attribute “náboženské”, as in “The Witch Beliefs”, a chapter title, (Gardner,

1999, p. 34) translated as “Náboženské představy čarodějnic” (2009, p. 41). This rendering shows the author's distance, or rather his not expressing any opinion on the beliefs in question, but this is also present in the original title. So, it seems to be a sensible choice in this case, even though it would be less convenient in the case of

“Beliefs” by Buckland, who acts and writes as an active practitioner of what he describes.

60 Yet another option worth discussion is Auský's “obraz světa”. This is used in the translation of the English “force exterior to accepted conditions and beliefs” (Gardner,

1999, p. 88), which is rendered as “síla nacházející se vně všeobecně přijímaného obrazu světa” (2009, p. 114). In connection with this expression, we can think of several similar ones in Czech, for example “světonázor” and “pohled na svět”. These are useful in that they cover a lot of the scope of the expression “beliefs”. We can demonstrate this by translating “his (personal) beliefs” as “jeho pohled na svět”. The drawback, however, is that these expressions are not very common in Czech and can be highly noticeable in a text, especially when used often. The word “beliefs”, on the other hand, is very unobtrusive.

Sekytová either made use of the word “přesvědčení”, similarly to the singular

(Farrar, 1996, p. 196) or, more singularly, of the word “principy”. This rendering cannot work in all contexts but in “one of the fundamental beliefs of witchcraft” (Farrar, 2010, p. 138) as “jeden z podstatných principů čarodějnictví” (1996, p. 163) it seems fitting.

As shown above, there are many good suggestions of how to translate the expression

“beliefs”. The translator must, however, make sure to think about the context and to define the actual referent or referents before picking one expression, with special attention paid to the translation “víra” or even “víry” which, while not impossible, are rather unlikely to fit a context.

5 Conclusion

As stated in the introduction, the aim of this thesis was to examine some representative vocabulary items specific to the Wiccan/Neo-Pagan context which are difficult to render into Czech. The introductory chapters on the Czech translations of the three books chosen to serve as the corpus to this thesis throw some light on the

61 motivation for writing such an analysis by showing the fact that none of the three translations is completely professional (while the translation of Buckland's Complete

Book of Witchcraft is clearly substandard). As also stated in the introduction, the quality of texts, translations not excluded, can and does influence the reception of the subject by the readers. It is, therefore, important for the potential acceptance of the topic in the target culture that the text presented to the readers not be substandard.

This thesis cannot help to do anything about the fact that many Czech publishers are not willing to pay professional translators and, subsequently, commission the translations to people whose level of English or/and translation skills are not sufficient.

On the other hand, it is possible to avoid renderings ruled out as inconvenient and promote some better ones in translations of essays and articles published on the Internet, or even in translations of books, with regard to the experience gained by the fifteen analyses. Such translations can serve as a source of inspiration to other potential translators. As there are many people among Neo-Pagans who are likely to occasionally translate something to be published on the Internet and who, too, are likely to read the

Internet translations made by their “colleagues”, this vision is not at all impracticable.

In addition to the possibility to exploit the conclusions of the individual analyses while translating Wicca-related texts, the practical part of this thesis serves as an overview of the most important lexical concepts in Neo-Paganism.

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67 Résumé (English)

This bachelor thesis deals with Czech translations of English books on Wicca, focusing on vocabulary specific to that topic. The corpus the paper is based on consists of three famous English books on Wicca, Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland, What Witches Do by Stewart Farrar and Witchcraft Today by Gerald B. Gardner, and their translations into Czech.

In the first part of the thesis the key term “Wicca” is briefly explained and a basic cultural and historical background is given; the two oldest traditions of Wicca (the

Gardnerian and the Alexandrian traditions) are, too, given short chapters.

In the part called “The Corpus”, basic cultural and historical facts are given both on the three books dealt with and on their authors, in order to establish the context. The

Czech translations, too, are given introductory chapters. In contrast to the chapters on the source language books, these deal with the comparative quality of the translations, drawing the readers' attention to the strong points and weak points of the target language texts rather than to cultural or historical issues. These short presentations of the translations are illustrative of the quality of the Czech texts as well as the translation skills of the translators in question.

The main part of the thesis consists in a discussion of fifteen selected vocabulary items typical of the Wiccan (or generally Neo-Pagan) context and hard to render into

Czech. The discussion is based on a comparative analysis of the English source texts and their Czech counterparts. After explaining the meaning of the concepts, where necessary, the various suggested renderings into Czech are compared, contrasted and commented on.

68 Resumé (Czech)

Tématem bakalářské práce jsou české překlady anglicky psaných textů o wicce, přičemž ve středu zájmu stojí slovní zásoba pro wiccanské (nebo obecně neo-pohanské) texty typická a specifická. Korpus pro analýzu se skládá ze tří klasických anglicky psaných knih o wicce (Buckland's Complete Book of Witchcraft Raymonda Bucklanda,

What Witches Do Stewarta Farrara a Witchcraft Today Geralda B. Gardnera) a jejich

českých překladů.

V první části práce je krátce vysvětlen klíčový pojem „wicca“. Tato kapitola obsahuje dvě podkapitoly týkající se dvou nejstarších tradic wiccy – gardnerovské a alexandrovské.

Část nazvaná „The Corpus“ byla zahrnuta kvůli nastínění kontextu, z něhož analyzovaná slovní zásoba vychází. Její podkapitoly postupně představují zvolené knihy ve zdrojovém jazyce s cílem poskytnout základní kulturněhistorické informace týkající se jak knih samotných, tak jejich autorů. Zařazeny jsou i obecné úvody týkající se jednotlivých překladů, které se však příliš nezabývají kulturněhistorickým pozadím. V těchto podkapitolách se nastiňuje všeobecná úroveň překladů zařazených do analyzovaného korpusu a upozorňuje se na jejich přednosti a (především) nedostatky.

Hlavní, praktickou částí práce je rozbor překladů patnácti vybraných výrazů typických pro wiccanský/neo-pohanský kontext, které je z různých důvodů náročné převést do jazyka cílového (češtiny). Rozbor je založený na komparativní analýze zdrojových textů a jejich českých překladů. Každý z výrazů je diskutován ve vlastní podkapitole, kde je v případě potřeby nejprve vysvětlen jeho význam a použití a poté jsou porovnány a kriticky zhodnoceny jeho překlady použité překladateli knih, kterých práce využívá jako korpusu.

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