Katedra translatologie

In the summer semester of 2024/2025, our department organized three events aimed at broadening the literary, cultural, and translation knowledge and skills of both students and colleagues at our university. The series was led by Associate Professor Monika Šavelová.

The first event, held on 20 March 2025, focused on the cultural concept of the vampire. Associate Professor Malíčková, from the Institute of Literary and Artistic Communication at the Department of Ethics and Aesthetics, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, delivered a lecture titled Narrative Invariants of Vampire Figures (with an Emphasis on Audiovisual Media). She examined the intertextuality of vampire characters across various audiovisual representations while engaging with fundamental and canonical works on this archetype. Drawing on her extensive research, she demonstrated methods of decoding the axiological and semantic migration of the vampire figure, tracing its transformations from Matthew de Clermont back to Varney. Building on the methodological framework of the Nitra School, she identified the narrative situations in which the vampire appears, with particular attention to the developmental dynamics of the character in relation to genre-specific features and intertextual connections. She analyzed the vampire as a dynamic metaphor and a symbolic threshold figure, charting its evolution from a demonic creature bound by a pact with the devil, to a romantic antihero in Beauty and the Beast-type narratives, and ultimately to a guardian of humanity in heroic storytelling.

The focus on heroic narratives continued on 27 March 2025 in a lecture by Dr. Ján Živčák from the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, titled From Ravaged Bodies to Sublimated Love? The Tristan Myth and Its Transformations in France and Slovakia. Using the legend of Tristan and Isolde, Dr. Živčák illustrated how this tale of love resisted social, moral, and religious orders and became embedded in the collective imagination as a universal archetype; as a result, modern cultures no longer feel compelled to engage with the earliest preserved twelfth-century versions in full translations. His reflections on the complex trajectories of the reception of the Tristan material in modern Europe provided an opportunity to revisit the ideas of Anton Popovič and Jozef Felix. The lecture also highlighted the need to consider translation in close relation to other forms of metatextuality particularly in research focusing on the reception of older literature, and to avoid erecting artificial barriers between translation studies and the study of other metatextual operations.

The series concluded on 2 April 2025 with a lecture by Dr. Eva Spišiaková from the Department of Translation Studies, Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, entitled William Shakespeare: Between Authorial Intention and Translational Shifts. Dr. Spišiaková discussed William Shakespeare’s collection of 154 Sonnets, which, in the four centuries since their publication in 1609, have become both a nearly universal symbol of love poetry and a formidable challenge for generations of translators, poets, and scholars. Students – future translators and interpreters – learned that attempts to render this collection from English into Slovak must contend not only with the constraints of a rigid poetic scheme, marked in particular by differences in semantic density between the two languages, but also with the temporal and cultural distance separating contemporary readers from the Renaissance court of Queen Elizabeth I. and King James I. These contextual differences emerge in intertextual references, cultural allusions, and in the Sonnets’ intimate tone, including the contested issue of the collection’s dedication. The lecture engaged with critical evaluations of Slovak and Czech translations of the Sonnets from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, situating them within broader theoretical frameworks. Particular emphasis was placed on approaches informed by poststructuralism and gender theory, while foregrounding the crucial role of contextualizing source texts.

All three lectures were supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract no. APVV-23-0586 Critical Reflection on Slovak Literary and Translatological Research in the Context of the Western European Tradition and the Current Form of Humanities. The organizer wishes to express sincere thanks to all speakers and participants for their inspiring lectures and discussions.