Translatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature ed. by Brian L. Price (review)

This book explores the unmistakable Joycean aesthetic in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese literature. The research conducted by the authors covers a significant gap in the literary criticism of current Spanish and Portuguese works by highlighting the evident influence and countless Joycean expressions and connotations contained in modern Spanish and Portuguese literary cornerstones. This text completes a historic circle that unites, above all, Spanish and English literature. While the impact of Miguel de Cervantes has been felt on both sides of the Atlantic, James Joyce has exerted, and continues to exert, a powerful transatlantic influence, through different channels, on the Spanish and Portuguese novel in both Europe and Latin America. Translatin Joyce opens debates about questions that have hitherto been rarely explored: Joycean aesthetics in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese literature.

The title of the book, Translatin Joyce, amusingly plays on words to capture the essence of a text that analyzes translations of Joyce’s work to assess its globalizing Spanish and Portuguese dimensions. The use of the word “latin” could be misleading in that the work deals exclusively with literature in Spanish and Portuguese, overlooking the other languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, including Galician, Valencian, and Catalan, all of which have left their own literary marks on both sides of the Atlantic.¹ Changing the scope of this book might be problematic, particularly given that the vast majority of Latin authors influenced by Joyce wrote first and foremost in Spanish or Portuguese.

In the first chapter, Gayle Rogers stresses the importance of Antonio Marichalar and contends that he has been unfairly forgotten in modern academic circles, despite being an essential figure in the introduction of Joyce into Spain. Rogers explores the literary, cultural, and human aspects of Marichalar, devoting a large section to the man considered to be the first writer to present Ulysses to the Spanish-speaking world through his well-received article “James Joyce en su laberinto”² in the Revista de Occidente,³ for, contrary to popular belief, the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges was not the first Spanish speaker to read Ulysses.⁴ Rogers reveals the importance of Marichalar’s ideas about Joyce within the Spanish-speaking literary panorama and also within British and American literary circles; his impressions and reflections position Marichalar as “what Domingo Ródenas [de Moya] calls the ‘European ambassador of the Generation of “27”’” (7).⁵ Additionally, Rogers compares translations of certain fragments of Joyce’s books into Spanish by Borges and Marichalar⁶ and emphasizes more recent contributions by Spanish authors, such as a 1999 translation of Ulysses and Francisco García Tortosa’s foundation of the James Joyce Spanish Society in 1994.⁷

John Pedro Schwartz discusses possible personal and literary ties between the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and Joyce in chapter 2 of Translatin Joyce. He argues that “Pessoa emphasizes the diseased nature of Joyce’s psychologism, labelling it ‘hallucinatory delirium’” (33) and draws interesting chronological parallels between Pessoa’s Portuguese literary postmodernism and Joyce’s Irish postmodernism. In chapter 3, Norman Cheadle studies two authors who approached Joyce differently, both ideologically and aesthetically: Borges and Leopoldo Marechal. Borges’s studies of Joyce and Marechal’s novel Adán Buenosayres offer two contrasting stylistic approaches that defined and guided the original Joycean schools in Argentina.⁸ Cheadle mentions the famous, highly regarded translation of Ulysses into Argentinean Spanish by José Salas Subirat in 1945, which was the first Spanish version of the novel.⁹ While Cheadle writes a magnificent introduction focusing on Joyce as seen through the eyes of Borges and Marechal, he gives only a partial appraisal of the work by Subirat, which is of equal importance and requires more detailed analysis.

In chapter 4, Francine Masiello makes an interesting comparative study of Joyce’s Ulysses and Los lanzallamas (The Flame-Throwers), a novel by Argentinean author Roberto Arlt...