Two Kajkavian Translations of Karl von Eckartshausenʼs First Play

Abstract

The Bavarian writer Karl von Eckartshausen (1752–1803) remained present in German and even in parts of European cultural memory primarily as an author of influential esoteric writings and as a political publicist. And although his dramatic oeuvre includes eight texts written in between 1778 to 1800, this segment of Eckartshausen’s output has been largely forgotten in German studies. Thus, the fact that translations of his three plays are known in Croatian Kajkavian literature poses something of a challenge to Croatian studies. This paper analyzes two Kajkavian translations of Eckartshausen’s first play, Das Vorurtheil über den Stand und die Geburt (1778), which were done relatively long after the original: the anonymous one of 1821 and the translation by Jakob Lovrenčič published in 1830. In addition to comparisons of composition and content, the analysis also focuses on the transmission of the conceptual substrate of Eckartshausen’s text. It has been shown that the two Kajkavian translations are based on two different German sources.