Oameni din Dublin (Dubliners) by James Joyce, and: Portret al Artistului la Tinerete (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) by James Joyce (review)

The first Romanian translations of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both by Frida Papadache, appeared during a period of relative liberalization and cultural openness (1964-1971), ushered in just before the death of the country’s Stalinist ruler, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej.¹ Romania had to wait almost half a century, until after the loosening of copyright restrictions on Joyce’s works, for two new translations of Joyce’s early fiction to see the light of day: Dubliners, translated by Radu Paraschivescu, and A Portrait, translated by Antoaneta Ralian, both published in 2012.

If the first translation of Dubliners had given its Romanian readers some reliable historical indication of Joyce’s language in spite of the difficult conditions of critical isolation under which a Romanian translator labored then, Paraschivescu’s approach resolutely opts to recast Joyce in a different, more contemporary stylistic vein. With some seventy translations to his credit, Paraschivescu is certainly no novice: in 2010, he even declared to a journalist from Adevărul (a national daily) that he would consider taking on more texts, only if no other translator could be found, for his collection at the Humanitas Press.² His fiction testifies to his keen interest in garnering gems from everyday demotic language.

But this is precisely where my unease with the new rendering of Joyce’s collection of short stories starts. Arguably, graphic idioms come very spontaneously to Paraschivescu, and his range of colloquialisms undoubtedly stands him in good stead: in “Grace,” Joyce’s “country bumpkins” (D 160) plausibly become “mocofani de la ţară” (175, “boors from the countryside”³); “ignorant bostoons” (D 160) become “fârţângăi”⁴ (175, “boisterous lads,” a phrase that drops the “ignorant” qualifier); and “thundering big country fellows, omadhauns” (D 61) become “plăvanii ăia de la ţară” (176, “those great hulks from the countryside”; plăvan is a term usually meaning oxen with yellowish hair and, thus, is comparably odd). Similarly, in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” Joyce’s “spondulics” (D 122) are turned into “piţulele” (137), which adheres both to the historical register and quaintness of the idiom.⁵ Paraschivescu’s overall slant towards a colloquialized idiom presumably more in tune with his potential readership’s linguistic background and expectations, however, occasionally raises serious historical and stylistic issues. While tapping the rich conversational fabric of his native language allows him to do justice to the Hiberno-English vein, his (at times) indiscriminate use of colloquialisms and regionalisms, topped off by his own strained unnecessary lexical addenda (regardless of the original’s style and context), tends to bulldoze Joyce’s subtle palette into some latter-day compositional mix, of the kind heard in the linguistically less sophisticated depths of the capital’s strata. For instance, whereas Joyce’s expression “I have verified my accounts” in “Grace” (D 174) was rendered literally by Papadache as “mi-am verificat conturile” (258), Paraschivescu’s “mi-am verificat hârţoagele” (190, “I checked my old papers”) substitutes for the economic vein crucial to the story’s thematics an unnecessary colloquial extrapolation, all the more improper since it occurs in the sermon. In the same story, Paraschivescu also turns the Christian-specific “retreat” (D 162), rightly interpreted as “retretă” by Papadache with an explanatory footnote (242), into a more broadly ecumenical “mergem să ne spovedim” (178, “we are going to confess”).

In “A Little Cloud,” when Ignatius Gallaher rants about the corruption of the world capitals he has seen, Papadache endeavors to adhere homogeneously to early-twentieth-century parlance, while Paraschivescu’s attempt lapses into historically anachronous hybridity and approximation, including when Joyce’s “[h]e spared neither rank nor caste...