Stanko Petrič and His First Slovenian Translation of Savitri with Notes

Abstract

The article deals with the Slovenian translation of the Sanskrit story about Savitri, a fragment from the Mahabharata, published in 1923 by Stanko Petrič, a second-year student of comparative philology at the University of Ljubljana. Unfortunately, the translator died only a month later and nothing is known about the circumstances of his translation. Judging from the facts about his life retrieved from various archives, he studied Sanskrit on his own, without a teacher. – The present analysis of his translation is based on the comparison with the original text he used, as mentioned by himself. This was the 1888 book Sâvitrî by Hermann Camillo Kellner, containing, among other things, a short Sanskrit grammar and the Sanskrit original of the Savitri episode with copious useful information in German together with a Sanskrit-German glossary of the words used in the text. The book was designed as an introductory course in Sanskrit for beginners or self-taught students. – The Slovenian version by Petrič—in spite of some difficulties he had, the tradition of translating from Sanskrit into Slovenian being meager and distant—shows that he was an able and gifted translator, especially for religious and ethical passages, and a little less careful in the passages about ordinary matters. His adaptations of Sanskrit names and terms are mostly in tune with contemporary practice, with some odd exceptions. He also showed great sensitivity for the sparse but important use of figurative language, reproducing it faithfully in his prose translation. He also knew remarkably well how to use the material he had at his disposal to inform Slovenian readers about a relatively unknown culture, and so Petrič’s notes were perhaps just as important for the reception of Savitri as was his translation.