Slovene Translations in the Baroque Period

Research into Slovene Baroque literature of the 17th and 18th centuries has remained deficient to this day, which is why new studies are needed. Most Slovene Baroque texts circulated among readers and listeners only in the form of manuscripts, and many of them have been lost altogether. Slovene translations of the Baroque period had various historical forms, including adaptation, variation, abridgement, report and translation in the modern sense. With the pastoral initiatives of Bishop Tomaž Hren for the renewal of religious life and church singing, the Catholic revival of the early 17th century gave rise to a new movement, and thus several kinds of new texts in Slovene were needed. For this reason, many new Slovene translations or adaptations of older texts were created in the 17th century. The genre in which translation has the longest tradition in Slovene literature is the hymn. In the intense literary life of the 17th century, there were even translations of long poems, such as the medieval Cistercian poem about the tortured limbs of Christ, the Rhythmica oratio, in two Slovene versions. In the 18th century there were also many translations and adaptations of songs for the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, the saints, for pilgrimages and brotherhoods. In the genre of meditative prose, Slovene Baroque writers translated several hagiographic and ascetic works. Four translations of the famous work Imitation of Christ by Thomas of Kempis were made, but only two of them were published. In the field of Baroque drama, two Passion plays in Slovene have been preserved in manuscripts: one from Eisenkappel and the other from Škofja Loka. As a whole, they were originally written in Slovene, but the individual elements probably originated from an older Passion tradition in Latin. Slovene Baroque literature, through original and numerous translated texts, was able to achieve an important advance over earlier periods, and gave rise to the entire literary system of poetry, prose and drama.