European Joyce Studies 30: Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century ed. by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Erika Mihálycsa (review)

As announced by the editors, Jolanta Wawrzycka and Erika Mihálycsa, in their painstakingly researched and persuasively argued introduction, Retranslating Joyce for the 21st Century is a volume that compiles the work of scholars and translators with the aim of addressing a broad set of issues pertinent to Joyce studies from the perspectives of translation studies and translation theories. The focus of this collection of essays, published in Brill Rodopi's European Joyce Studies series, is the (rather slippery) notion of "retranslation" invoked and applied differently by different authors in/to their contrastive discussions of old and new translations of Joyce's works, mainly Ulysses. As the editors warn in the opening pages, "translation can never be over, and permanently calls for translation anew" (11), so, thus, it is only natural that the attempts made at systematizing the concept of "retranslation," particularly in the Joycean context, through the formulation of hypotheses and the application of essentialist prescriptive norms proves to be futile. What characterizes retranslations is precisely their "prevalent variability," their being "instantiations of the interpretive potential of the source text" (6), we are reminded. In this respect, rather than endorsing a single overriding argument about what retranslations do, the book defies assumptions and doctrines and serves, in most cases, as a wide-ranging exploration of the plural and diverse new translations of Joyce published since the turn of the millennium, which either depart from or are indebted to previous (often "canonical") ones.

The editors' decision to make translators visible in a book on retranslations of Joyce must be celebrated. Valuable insights into the modus operandi of translators as they face the challenge of having to forge a new translation "for the millionth time" are provided in the chapters authored precisely by several of them. Thus, Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes, who have translated the entire corpus of Joyce's published work into Dutch,¹ devote their essay to discussing their 2016 Dublinezen. Conscious of the fact that, in their role of scrupulous readers, "translators cannot overlook anything" (276), they give a detailed account of how their retranslation is well informed by old and new scholarship, manuscript findings, and translations into other languages. In general, the commitment to evoke Joyce's idiosyncratic and experimental use of language seems to guide most of the (re)translational endeavors. If the Brazilian translator Caetano Waldrigues Galindo, whose 2012 retranslation of Ulysses was written under the anxiety of influence—"As a third translator, I was unquestionably in a position where my role was profoundly determined by earlier work" (219)—adheres to a highly Joycean notion of creativity when he explains that his intention was "not only writing anew, but creating new writing" (204), the Turkish translator Armağan Ekici, who is well versed in Joyce scholarship, reveals that the strategies he adopted in his 2012 translation of Ulysses intended, above all, to imitate Joyce's language-games: "I like to imagine Joyce grinning mischievously and punishingly at his translators as he writes 'How will you pun? You punish me'" (188).² The concern with being true to Joyce's linguistic excesses emerges also in Wawrzycka's earnest discussion of her own ongoing Polish versions of "Calypso" and "Oxen of the Sun" and in Rareş Moldovan's analysis of the first celebrated 1984 Romanian translation, which he discusses against the background of his own retranslation project of the same episodes. Wawrzycka, a leading scholar in the field, who is well aware of how Ulysses works for the original reader—"as written through translation or as already translated" (127)—reveals that she undertakes the challenging task of replicating Joyce's creative undermining of language rules with reverence and passion for the source text: "not so much to bring Joyce into Polish again but to stretch Polish enough to accommodate Joyce's unprecedented [linguistic] plasticity" (147...