Taking the pun by the horns: The translation of wordplay in James Joyce’s Ulysses
IdaKlitgård
Roskilde University, Denmark
Abstract
Taking my starting-point in Maria Tymoczko’s claim (1999) that syntagmatic elements in texts present the greatest challenges to translators and readers of translations, I want to argue that literary translators and translation scholars need to pay greater attention to clusters of wordplay rather than distinguishing puns as individual, separate brain-teasers. Hence, more is at stake in the translation of wordplay than just trying to transfer the source text complexities into the target language. Historical, social and other contextual and intertextual factors must also be taken into consideration. My case in point is an examination of the transfer of highly challenging networks of puns in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into Danish and German. The theoretical frame of reference is a discussion of puns in the critical works of Dirk Delabastita, Jonathan Culler, Derek Attridge and Patricia Parker followed by a critique of translator and critic Frank Heibert’s methods of evaluating the German translations.
With this essay I want to argue that literary translators and translation scholars need to pay greater attention to clusters of wordplay rather than distinguishing puns as individual, separate brain-teasers. Hence, more is at stake in the translation of wordplay than just trying to transfer the source text complexities into the target language. Historical, social and other contextual and intertextual factors must also be taken into consideration. As Maria Tymoczko argues in her work Translation in a postcolonial context: Early Irish literature in English translation (1999):
References
a. Texts
Joyce, James
1922/1934Ulysses. New York: Random House.
Joyce, James
1922/1986Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head.
Joyce, James
1949Ulysses, tr. tr. Mogens Boisen. Copenhagen: Martins Forlag.
Joyce, James
1970Ulysses, tr. Mogens Boisen. Copenhagen: Martins Forlag.
Joyce, James
1986/1990Ulysses, tr. tr. Mogens Boisen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
b. secondary literature
Attridge, Derek
1988 “Unpacking the portmanteau, or Who’s afraid of Finnegans wake?”.
Culler 1988
: 140–155.
Culler, Jonathan
ed.1988On puns: The foundation of letters. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[ p. 91 ]
Culler, Jonathan
1988a “The call of the phoneme”.
Culler 1988
: 1–16.
Delabastita, Dirk
1993There’s a double tongue: An investigation into the translation of Shakespeare’s wordplay, with special references to Hamlet. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Delabastita, Dirk
1994 “Focus on the pun: Wordplay as a special problem in Translation Studies”. Target 6: 2. 223–243.
Delabastita, Dirk
ed.1996Wordplay and translation. Special issue of The translator. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Delabastita, Dirk
ed.1997Traductio: Essays on punning and translation. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman
1988Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press.