Lineaments of Mimetic Desire: Ulysses in Turkish Retranslations

Of all the masterpieces of world literature, few works can rival James Joyce's Ulysses in terms of its author's transformation of letters into a timeless time capsule that regenerates the events of an (ordinary) summer's day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin. Though a cursory glance at Ulysses from this vantage point gives the impression that the writer offers a "slice of life" over the course of the novel, persistent efforts at coping with the text suggest a neat feature of Joyce's work that is perhaps best captured by Samuel Beckett's keen observation: "Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself."¹ By "here" Beckett was referring to Joyce's Work in Progress, later titled Finnegans Wake, but his remark might also describe Ulysses where Joyce writes life itself in a way that goes beyond conventional comprehension of mimesis qua realism owing to the novelistic manners through which myth, history, religion, and language(s) conjoin forces in the hands of a writer who was determined to build a colossal literary edifice.

Constructing this gargantuan structure on foreign soil is not an easy matter. Even the thought of trying one's hand at translation is intimidating. Yet frequent attempts have been made since the novel's publication in 1922, and the puzzling edifice called Ulysses has continued to be built and rebuilt in numerous lands through translations and retranslations into many languages including Turkish. Ulysses was introduced in its entirety² to the Turkish literary system by the late Nevzat Erkmen's translation in 1996,³ and the novel was retranslated by Armağan Ekici in 2012,⁴ immediately after Joyce's works entered the public domain. There is reason to maintain that the expiration of copyright has been a contributing factor to the Turkish retranslations of Ulysses, for 2019 saw another translation of Joyce's massive work undertaken by Fuat Sevimay.⁵ As with renderings of the novel into any language, Ulysses's (re)translations into Turkish seem to be translational tours de force, and on that ground alone attract attention. This ground in general, and its characteristics in particular, enable one to contextualize and conceptualize the retranslations of the novel within the realm of Translation Studies,⁶ where several scholarly writings dedicated to the socio-cultural, historical, and political facets of retranslations broaden the intellectual range even more.

Despite evolving approaches to the study and practice of literary retranslation,⁷ retranslations of demanding masterpieces such as Ulysses still leave many questions unanswered. As a case in point, one might ask, "From where does this curious urge to (re)translate Ulysses on the part of the translator derive from?" and note the absence of a reply from the discipline of Translation Studies. Surely, there might be ideological, economic, and sociological incentives behind any act of retranslation. But to a considerable degree, these ostensible underlying motives fail to explain the actual urge to (re)translate an opus magnum like Ulysses. For the most part, the theoretical and methodological discourse on retranslation excludes a minor, yet fundamental detail of the human behavior: desire. Most discussions of translation treat desire as a given.⁸ Yet the notion of a (re)translator's desire, considered in relation to René Girard's conception of "mimetic desire,"⁹ sheds light on the phenomenon, not primarily because of the inevitable textual "rivalry" intrinsic to retranslations themselves, but rather because of the certainty that "two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash" (Girard, VS 146).

Hypothetically speaking, rivalry, in the context of the existing Turkish translations of the novel, appears to operate not for the purpose of producing a "better" translation than the former, but as an attempt to attain the unattainable, the so-called "ideal" translation of a work that is desired in the...