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  • From Translation to Re-CreationThe Cases of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in Romanian
  • Arleen Ionescu (bio)

The more experimental a literary work, the more difficult, even “impossible,” its translation should become. This assumption raises questions about the exact nature of the work the translator undertakes in an effort to express a complex linguistic-cultural fictional universe within another aesthetic construct. Joyce’s last two novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, raise these questions with a vengeance because of their increasingly multilingual and multireferential dimensions. Ulysses could still conceivably be carried across (“trans-lated”) according to a “classical” understanding of the “task of the translator,” as evident in the “faithful,” “authorized” translations during Joyce’s lifetime, as well as in more recent ones. However, the many-layered, portmanteau idiom of Finnegans Wake pushes to radical extremes a redefinition of what takes place in such an exercise. Under such circumstances, translation goes beyond literalist conceptions and becomes more akin to a re-creation whose “laws” must be as adaptive as possible—as Joyce’s text itself claims, “[m]aking it up as we goes along” (FW 268, n. 2). In this essay, conceived as a case study, I shall compare a canonical translation of Ulysses in its national context by Romanian poet Mircea Ivănescu’s—an acclaimed version, originally published in 1984 and slightly revised with minor adjustments in 1996—with two existing Romanian translations of one fragment from the Wake, by Felicia Antip and Laurent Milesi, who also provides a short methodological introduction. In the case of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s own adaptations of the same chapter into both French and Italian will serve as an author-sanctioned precedent to assess a range of available practices. [End Page 196]

mircea ivănescu’s romanian ulysses

Following the serial translations of several random chapters from Joyce’s novel—“Oxen of the Sun” (1971), “Hades” (1973), “Aeolus” (1977), and “Cyclops” (1982)—Ivănescu’s complete translation of Ulysses first appeared in two volumes in 1984, at a time when the translation of Western literary works, especially those castigated for their bourgeois decadence—the case made against Joyce’s novel by Karl Radek in the Soviet Union of the 1930s readily comes to mind—could still border on dissidence. Romanians had not considered Ulysses as “bourgeois literature” and had actually ignored Radek’s widespread speech at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union. Radek asserted that Joyce’s method “would be like trying to catch a dreadnought with a shrimping net”1 and castigated those who would attempt translation:

Just because he is almost untranslated and unknown in our country Joyce arouses a morbid interest among a section of our writers. Is there not some hidden meaning lurking in the eight hundred pages of Ulysses—which cannot be read without special dictionaries, for Joyce attempts to create a language of his own in order to express the thoughts and feelings which he lacks?

(Radek 154–5)

Paradoxically, in Romania, a country whose national leader, comrade Nicolae Ceauşescu, had imposed a distinctly home-grown version of communist ideology, 1984 was an important year for Joycean scholarship. Censors must have been so preoccupied with the nation’s permanence and the international recognition of its leader that they missed the two major Joycean events that took place: Mircea Ivănescu published the full translation of Ulysses in two volumes at Univers Publishing House (a translation that he had worked on for some twenty years) and Dan Grigorescu published the only full-length monograph on Joyce in Romanian, Realitate, mit, simbol. Un portret al lui James Joyce [Reality, Myth, Symbol: A Portrait of James Joyce] with the same press. It is still a mystery how a translation and monograph on Ulysses could appear in such an age of oppression. However, the last note appended to the Romanian version offers a possible clue. Allegedly presenting other critics’ opinions of the novel in a then morally restrained communist country, Ivănescu seems to concur implicitly with the overall condemnation of Molly’s immorality: [End Page 197]

[T]he character’s crudeness of expression, its lack of morality and spontaneous...

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