The study focuses on three versions of the translation of Oedipus the King, the first of which came to life around 1942, the second one most probably shortly after the Second World War. The third was published for the first time in 1953 and first staged at the theatre in Liberec in 1962. It was only Miroslav Macháček production at the National Theatre in Prague in 1963 that made this translation famous. Jaroslav Pokorný, well versed in the Czech translation theory, as represented in his time by the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle Vilém Mathésius and Roman Jakobson, was the first to successfully apply functional aspect on translation of ancient literature as early as the 1940s.