The Remake of Judita

Abstract

To mark the five hundredth anniversary of the first edition of Marko Marulić’s Judita in 2021 the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics issued a prose adaptation of this famous epic in modern Croatian. Drawing on straightforward examples, this paper aims to illustrate and describe the adaptation techniques that were essential to bring this early sixteenth century work closer to a wider readership and to prompt readers from different walks of life and educational background to read Marulić’s original. The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section outlines basic facts about Marulić’s life and work. The second section analyses the historical, linguistic and cultural background of Marulić’s Judita and considers its role in a contemporary society. The third section addresses specific aspects of its prose adaptation and the expected reception among twenty-first century readers, but also explores the concepts of intralingual translation and adaptation. The conclusion posits that this particular translation exemplifies that albeit intralingual translation is still an important theoretical construct, its practical purposefulness continues to be ambiguous.