Revisions of the baroque St Wenceslas Bible, which František Faustin Procházka and Václav Fortunát Durych made at the request of Empress Maria Theresa (1778, 1780), and Procházka’s own translation of the Bible (1786, 1804) were based on the Humanist Czech language (Bible of Kralice, 1579-94) and the original biblical texts. Together with other editions, translations and commentaries relating to Humanist Czech literature, these Bibles influenced the modern Czech language norm, which was formed in late 18th and early 19th centuries. During the 19th century, these texts became subject to review several times (1849-51, 1888-89).

Initially, at the turn of the 18th century, literary translations into Czech were aimed at a non-elite audience with little or no reading knowledge of German, and also involved a certain “domestication“ of some of the contents. From around this time, efforts to demonstrate the value of the Czech language and its literary potential intensified, and were manifested in poetic translations of that period. Portions of Homer were translated into Czech by Jan Nejedlý, Juraj Palkovič and others; the first complete translation of the Iliad did not appear, however, until 1842, followed by the Odyssey in 1844. The translation of Klopstock’s Messias by Václav Stach remained unpublished, and other translations of popular authors struggled to reach a public. However, Josef Jungmann’s translations of Chateaubriand’s Atala (1805) and Milton’s Paradise lost (1811) influenced the development of modern Czech literature in the next decades, moving the practice of translation beyond the scholarly and educational fields. The model for these translations (and often their source) was contemporary German literature.

Translations from other Slavic languages were significant for the development of a Slavic consciousness in Czech literature and an appropriation of Slavic prosody and vocabulary. Thus, when Antonín Jaroslav Puchmajer translated Montesquieu’s Le Temple de Gnide from Polish (1804), he already adopted the Polish thirteen-syllable-verse as “classical”, rather than the alexandrine or hexameter. From the 1810s on, translations appeared of the Tale of Igor’s Campaign (Jungmann, and Václav Hanka with the help of Josef Dobrovský) and of Serbian oral literature as collected by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Hanka). Again, such translations had a cultural impact of their own. Jungmann, for instance, went beyond the earlier interest in Homer and hexameter and, by imitating ancient Indian verse forms, expressed what he felt to be the special closeness of Slavic/Czech (as opposed to German) to Sanskrit as well as to Greek.

These translations evince a tension between neoclassicism and pre-Romanticism, which had made its first appearance in Czech literature when authors like Shakespeare and Schiller were translated in the 1780s. Subsequent Czech translations of Shakespeare were rather tardy, partly because of the complex demands posed by the source texts, partly as a result of censorship.

In the 1830s the genre emphasis began to shift from poetry and drama to the novel, and translations appeared of representative novelists such as Walter Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Puškin, Dickens and Gogol’. Epic/dramatic poets like Mickiewicz and the earlier Tasso were also translated, as was Cervantes.

The concept of translation of world classics as a means to develop Czech literature was revived in the 1850s. New theoretical reflections (Jakub Malý) and publishing projects emerged; a collected-works edition of Shakespeare, on the occasion of his 300th birthday, was completed in 1873 as the first full translation of Shakespeare into a Slavic language. A widening Czech-speaking public was addressed in publication sets/series such Bibliotéka klasiků ("Classics’ library”) and Poesie světová ("World poetry“). As the 1850s turned to the ’60s, the Máj generation programmatically focused on translation of modern literary works, especially novels (Gončarov, Gogol’, Turgenev, George Sand, Victor Hugo, but also Byron’s Cain or Goethe’s Faust).

A new, extensive wave of translations into Czech in the 1870s was associated with young authors around the magazine Lumír. Translation became part of their efforts to enrich Czech literature in both classical and modern European cultural currents (some authors focusing especially on Slavic contexts). The poet Jaroslav Vrchlický translated both classic works (the Divinia Commedia, Faust), and modern poets like Baudelaire and Walt Whitman. Reproduction of the original poetic forms in Czech literature became a central part of this new translation programme, to the point of provoking some response from those who wanted to preserve the literature’s national character and homegrown artistic values. But criticism also came, later from a new, younger generation of modernists in the 1880s and 1890s.