Zelfportret van de kunstenaar als jonge man by James Joyce, and: They Were Like Poetry by Elisabeth Tonnard (review)

The first work of James Joyce to be translated into Dutch was A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by Max Schuchart in 1962.¹ In 1972, Gerardine Franken and Leo Knuth published a second translation, more precise but less fluent than the first one.² Forty-two years passed before a third translation was produced, this time by Eric Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes. In recent years, Bindervoet and Henkes have become a familiar sight at Joyce conferences all over Europe. Their connection with Joyce began in 1995, when they started working on the first Dutch translation of Finnegans Wake.³ The book was published in 2002, not as a vertaling (translation), but as a hertaling (reproduction in another language), thanks to Stephen Joyce.⁴ Undeterred, they next tried their hand at Ulysses,⁵ a book that had already been translated into Dutch twice before.⁶ To top things off, they have now produced Zelfportret van de kunstenaar als jonge man.

In the epilogue to the book, Bindervoet and Henkes discuss the first sentence of A Portrait and the way they arrived at their translation of it, revealing some of the principles they applied. Joyce’s “moocow” (P 7), for instance, became “kakoetjeboe” in Dutch, “because we had that left from our translation of ‘I Am the Walrus’ by the Beatles.”⁷ As one Dutch reviewer noticed, Joyce himself would probably have liked such an anachronism, because it yields a strange yet understandable little children’s word.⁸ This is vintage Bindervoet and Henkes: at first glance, they might seem rowdy and not to be taken seriously, but at the end of the day they deliver the goods in a way that deserves much respect.

One small example indicative of the difference between the three translations is illustrated as follows. Towards the end of chapter 4, Stephen muses on his refusal to become a priest and remembers “a proud cadence of Newman,” while “[t]he pride of that dim image brought back to his mind the dignity of the office he had refused” (P 165). The first Dutch translation by Schuchart renders this as “[d]e verhevenheid van die onduidelijke beeldspraak bracht de waardigheid van het ambt dat hij had afgewezen in zijn herinnering terug” (181). He needs thirty-seven syllables for a Dutch sentence that is still a bit obscure, and he misses part of the original meaning. The second translation, by Franken and Knuth, is more accurate but rather cumbersome: “De trotse luister van dit wazige beeld deed hem terugdenken aan de waardigheid van de levensstaat die hij geweigerd had te aanvaarden” (211). They require thirty-seven syllables as well, and words like luister, levensstaat, and aanvaarden have an archaic ring. Bindervoet and Henkes create a translation of the sentence that is both correct, short, and fluent: “De trots van dat vage beeld bracht hem weer de waardigheid voor de geest van het ambt dat hij had geweigerd” (194). Using only twenty-six syllables, none of the original meaning is lost, and the result is a normal sentence in contemporary Dutch.

Bindervoet and Henkes’s translation of the last sentence of A Portrait, “[o]ld father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead” (P 253), also reveals an interesting detail. The final three words are lost in the first two translations despite the fact that “to stand in good stead” has a perfect (albeit archaic) Dutch equivalent: “goed te sta(de) komen.” As the Dutch Joyce scholar Onno Kosters pointed out to me, because of their work in translating Ulysses, Bindervoet and Henkes are aware that the first word of that book, “[s]tately” (U 1.01), echoes the last word of A Portrait. Their choice, therefore, for the...