Po stopách Dor[untin]y aneb nepřeložitelný princip albánského mýtu
On the Trail of Dor[untin]a, or the Untranslatable Principle of the Albanian Myth

Summary/Abstract: The paper is conceived as a translator‘s note on I. Kadare‘s novel Doruntine. The book became inspired by an old Balkan ballad in which the title bears differents variants of the female name (very often dependent on the territory). From a close-up semantic analysis of the possible substitutes of the name, it turns out that all the women are related to the Albanian principle called besa. For translators the word seems very peculiar and it is not a coincidence that translations of Kadare´s novels leave besa in its primary language, Albanian. The essential difficulty is in the fact that the word stands for one of the basic principles of Albanian common law, which target languages totally lack.

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