engleski

Redrawing the Boundaries of Translation: James Joyce's «Oxen of the Sun» episode in Ulysses and the Issue of Translatability

James Joyce's 'Ulysses' is one of the key modernist texts that overtly challenge the conventional notion of translation and calls for its reconsideration. Written in encyclopaedic mode and being, as Umberto Eco has viewed it, a composite, transitional or hybrid text, grounded in intertextuality and parody it not only stages the modernist celebration of translation embodied in an ongoing, albeit subversive, dialogue with tradition but also evokes the concept of translation as border-crossing and exile. My paper, therefore, proposes to rely on the examples from Ulysses and its translations into several languages as an energizing platform for problematizing and illustrating the porous borderline between translation and adaptation. Both concepts are closely intertwined with the architectonics of Ulysses as the reinscription of other texts in the novel in various forms of intertextuality and pastiche, forging a textual archive and a complex repository of cultural memory. My paper will argue that the translation of this novel into other languages is always a multiple coded process that defies the traditional criterion of fidelity and redraws the boundaries of translation, since the task of the translator is to decode the ambivalences of infinite semiosis in the novel and encode them in another language and culture, enacting translation as an open intercultural dialogue. To illustrate this my paper will focus on the 'Oxen of the Sun' episode which is concerned with gradual embryonic development of life as well as language. This episode is a pastiche of classic English prose styles, often considered an anthology of styles. Discussing examples from two different German, two French, two Italian and two Croatian translations of Ulysses and bringing into discussion the issue of translatability (as discussed by Benjamin and Derrida) my paper will show how the translators came to terms with the linguistic, stylistic, rhetoric and cultural barriers between source text/culture and target culture and which strategies they adopted to legitimise the border-crossing between translation and adaptation.

James Joyce

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