Renascent Joyce

11. Joyce’s Dictionnaire des Idiotismes Reçus: Comparing the 1929 and 2004 Translations of “Eumaeus”

11 Joyce’s Dictionnaire des Idiotismes Reçus Comparing the 1929 and 2004 Translations of “Eumaeus” Robert Byrnes It’s a paradox well known in translation studies that translations date quickly, every generation or so, while originals only age, and very slowly, often becoming better with their years. André Topia asks why we have this “double standard.” If the colloquial language in a translation of Ulysses irritatesuswithitseighty -year-oldidioms,whydon’ttheeighty-year-oldidioms in the original bother us at all? Why is the original “unique” or “definitive,” while successive translations never achieve a perfect “coincidence” with it, “sans jamais évidemment parvenir à la coïncidence idéale” (Topia 45). Why do translations have to be reborn, when originals last virtually forever? Perhapsgreatworksintroducetheircolloquialidiomsintoeachnewgeneration , giving them life again, just as they keep “to be or not to be” alive, or “Ask not for whom the bell tolls.” Perhaps, as Topia suggests, originals are part of a vast web of other great works in the canon, and evolve, in Eliotic manner, along with the literary tradition (Topia 46–47). But translations must be renewed, every thirty years or so, before they become rebarbative with fossilized locutions that aggravate the gentle reader. The original was perfectly contemporary when it first appeared, and the reader wants the translation to feel contemporary too—the original needs a new birth in every generation to retain the semblance of its ancient self. This is all the more necessary for works with a great deal of monologue or dialogue,withtheirheavyburdensofephemeralcollocationandidiom.This is the register in which linguistic fashion revolves most rapidly, and where the out-of-date most quickly puts us out of countenance. It’s all the more Comparing the 1929 and 2004 Translations of “Eumaeus” 143 true of an episode that is written entirely in common parlance, like “Eumaeus ,” and surely no single episode, chapter, section, division, or fascicle in literary history (save the Wake) poses so many problems in translation as does this encyclopedia of Dublin cliché, nor is there any episode that must date a Ulysses translation more quickly. It’s a supreme test of a translator’s patience and scholarship, and it should be interesting to scrutinize the latest translation of “Eumaeus” against the first, of Auguste Morel, which, we remember, had Joyce’s supervision and imprimatur to recommend it. And of course there’s another reason a great piece of literature needs new translation every little while—literary criticism, in this case eighty-odd years of it since Ulysses was published. It elucidates artistic design that was invisible to the previous translator, and it cues a new one to look for patterns the earlier one didn’t notice. In sum, we should see deeper into the real “Eumaeus” in a new version, and we should read it in our own idiom. As Jacques Aubert explains it in a “Postface” to the new translation, the new version should be “plus proche à la fois du texte de James Joyce et de nous” (972), closer both to Joyce’s text and to us. Why is “Eumaeus” so much fun in English, and so difficult to translate? The reason is that the real antagonists are the two completely different registers that collide here (thecommonplace, the erudite)asBloom-the-autodidact tries to impress Stephen the Übermensch Bachelor of Arts by pouring what he undoubtedly thinks is “educated” or even “literary” style into Stephen ’s ear (Bloom has threatened to write a squib for the tabloids titled “My Experiences in a Cabman’s Shelter”). As Hugh Kenner long ago pointed out, “Eumaeus” reads as if Bloom were “in possession of the pen” (“Ulysses” 130), and as Karen Lawrence pointed out even longer ago, “the style has pretensions to elegance” (166). The first half of the fun is in Bloom’s unwaveringly commonplace mind, even as he strives for an elevated discourse; the second is in his failures, his maladroitness as he struggles to produce strings of locution that are ceremonious, or formal, when not just neutral. He regularly falls out of his high style into informality and slang, producing comical effects that Catherine O’Neill calls “incongruities of register” (48). He also produces a number of “Bloomisms,” my term for a congeries of malapropisms , botched idioms, blown quotations, grammatical solecisms, and awkward repetitions that make for repeated bathos, entirely confounding the impression he’s trying to manage. To scrutinize the language of this coruscating episode, and to provide a reference tool for translators, I’ve identified 2,923 clichés...