UNIVERSITATEA SAPIENTIA DIN CLUJ-NAPOCA

FACULTATEA DE ȘTIINȚE ECONOMICE ȘI UMANISTE, MIERCUREA

CIUC

SPECIALIZAREA: LIMBA ȘI LITERATURA ROMÂNĂ – LIMBA ȘI

LITERATURA ENGLEZĂ

James Joyce’s Ulysses inTranslation

Candidată:

Péterfy Tünde

Îndrumător științific:

Lect. univ. dr. Pieldner Judit

2014

Miercurea Ciuc

Content

Introduction...................................................4

I. The English Ulysses...........................................6I.1. James Joyce’s Ulysses – the novel...........................6

I.2. Causes of translational difficulties......................8I.2.1. General observations..................................8

I.2.2. Internal translations in the text.....................9I.2.3. Variety of style.....................................11

I.2.4. Recyclings from other Joycean texts..................15I.2.5. Literal coincidences.................................15

I.2.6. Intentional errors and mistakes......................18I.2.7. Covert intertextual allusions........................20

I.2.8. Narrative techniques in Ulysses........................21I.2.8.1. Incorrect grammar in interior monologues..........23

I.2.8.2. ‘Shortmind’.......................................24I.3. Conclusions..............................................27

II. Ulysses in Hungarian.........................................30II.1. The odyssey of the Hungarian Ulysses....................30

II.2. The necessity of a new translation....................31II.3. Errors and their correction...........................33

II.3.1. Far-fetched solutions..............................34II.3.2. Structural errors..................................35

II.3.3. Referential errors.................................37II.3.4. The treatment of covert intertextual allusions.....39

II.3.5. Correcting the incorrect grammar...................41Final conclusions.............................................42

Introduction

The problem of translatability emerges whenever an

attempt is made to transpose a text from one language and

culture into another, since every language describes

reality in a different way; moreover, every community and

culture experiences a reality that is slightly different

from all the rest (see the existence of cultural realias,

for example), thus, each language community has a different

worldview, a different mental representation of the world

they live in. Kinga Klaudy mentions, among other examples,

that languages denominate the elements of reality in

varying details: Eskimos have much more expressions for the

different snow types than a community that barely has any

contact with snow; the English have more expressions

connected to navigation and shipping than the Hungarians

who live far from any sea; the Arabians have a more

detailed vocabulary built around keeping camels than

nations not living in the proximity of deserts, etc.

(Klaudy 2002, 35).

In addition, the more difficult a text is, the more

complicated the problem of translatability becomes.

Katherina Reiss categorizes texts as belonging to the

informative, expressive, operative or audiomedial type

(Munday 2001, 73). Literary texts belong to the expressive

one. This type of text, beside its potential referential,

expressive, conative and phatic function – as Roman

Jacobson distinguishes them ‒ resorts mainly to the

language’s poetic function, especially poetry, but prose

and fiction as well; building heavily on the aesthetic

dimension of language. In the case of literary texts the

focus is not only on content, but on form as well: it is

important not only what is said, but also the way it is

said. Therefore, we can stipulate that literary texts are

the most difficult to translate, inasmuch as the translator

must reproduce in the target language not only the source

text’s content, but also its form; and form is deeply

embedded into language.

As Klaudy points out, the translator cannot transpose

form slavishly into the target language, he has to create

’an analogy of form’1 [formai analógia] that can be applied to

the given language (Klaudy 2002, 59). Based on this

statement, one can easily come to the conclusion that poems

raise the most difficulties for translators, since poetry

is the most strongly connected to form; and, as it is

generally established, one has to be a poet himself to be

able to translate poetry.

James Joyce’s Ulysses is written in prose; however, his

work, certain chapters specifically (the Sirens, for

example) contain poetic elements such as musicality,

rhythm, repetition, alliterations, lack of punctuation,

etc.; or other kinds of fine linguistic juggleries, such

verbal units that are carefully woven into the texture of

the novel, all essential in the process of decoding its

1 Term translated from Hungarian by me

meaning and in finding the well-hidden connections among

them.

The above mentioned feature of Joyce’s text, that of

being highly poetic is not the only one that makes a

translator’s work an odyssey in itself. This paper aims at

listing and presenting those specific narratological

techniques and other characteristics of the text that make

Joyce scholars deem it untranslatable, or translatable only

at the price of an immense and inevitable loss that

deprives those reading Ulysses in translation of many

occasions of experiencing such epiphanies as the original

text offers.

This presentation will be followed by our assertion

that, in spite of these seemingly unsurmountable

difficulties, Ulysses can and should be translated because,

on the one hand, every translation – being in itself an

interpretation as well ‒ reveals something new about the

original; on the other hand, the novel itself suggests ‒

through Bloom’s character, who, in spite of the marital

conflict they experience, does not give up on her wife -

that difficulties and challenges are to be met with and not

to be avoided.

Furthermore, reading the translation which is

inevitably defective is, after all, a better solution for

non-native readers than not being able to read it at all.

Translations of Ulysses have been received with enthusiasm

in all the language communities, which proves that the

features of the novel that could be saved and transposed

into other languages still have a great deal of pleasure

and satisfaction to offer.

The second part of our paper presents the

circumstances which led to the need for a new Hungarian

translation or, as it will be shown in the following, not

an entirely new one, but rather a re-edition and correction

of the existing ones. We will list some of the difficulties

the new translator team met with during their project and

illustrate the way they managed to solve some of those

problems.

I. The English Ulysses

I.1. James Joyce’s Ulysses – the novel

Not long after its first edition in 1922 in Paris, and

in spite of the controversies following it, James Joyce’s

novel Ulysses became a representative work of art in modern

literature. This 933-page-long novel2 presents one day in

the lives of Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, and

their encounter with several other characters; the

particular day being the 16th of June 1904, the scene that

of the Irish capital, Dublin. In the introduction of Ulysses

Declan Kiberd quotes Joyce himself who says: “The thought

of Ulysses is very simple, it is only the method which is

difficult” (U, xv): a method of focusing on the smallest

and seemingly least significant happenings of the

characters’ lives, which results in a meticulously detailed

account of an ordinary day. As a prototype of the

subjective novel, it contains little action; the emphasis

is on the inner life of the characters, presented by

recurring to such narrative techniques and by improving

them to such mastery which, as we shall see later, gives

the hardest time for translators who insist on preserving

as much of the original work’s features and clues for

understanding as possible.

2 When referring to the English Ulysses throughout this paper it alwaysapplies to the following edition: James Joyce: Ulysses. Annotated StudentEdition. Penguin Books, 2000. (abbreviation: U, page number)

Its chapters are loosely built on the frame of, and

contain analogous elements, motifs with the happenings in

Homer’s Odyssey; the novel is partially autobiographical,3

it abounds in references of Irish history and culture (or

subculture, respectively), and whatever its plot, meaning

or message, it is deeply interwoven into the novel’s

structure and form. It has a very complicated texture,

being a ‘Daedalian’,4 presenting the richness and wholeness

of human life.

In his summary, Kappanyos (2011, 131-132) underlines

the complexity of Ulysses by saying that the novel can be

considered a psychological novel, by bringing the ‘stream

of consciousness’ technique to perfection; a social novel,

by drawing a detailed, vast social fresco of contemporary

Dublin; a comedy, by creating a fine, complex type of

humour that needs the activation of the reader’s set of

pre-existing knowledge about the world, his keen

observation and memory in order to be enjoyable;5 a

humanistic novel, by presenting humanity not only as petty,

envious, frustrated, deceitful or self-deluding, but

emphasizing the existence of human values as well, such as

solidarity, empathy or fatherly love and grief.

Finally, Ulysses is an experimental novel, since no

author before has put so much emphasis on structure, sound,

3 Several facts of Stephen Dedalus’s life correspond to the writer’s,such as his age, studies, family circumstances (the mother’s death,many siblings, poverty, etc ).4 That is, a complex, labyrinthian structure built on language,reminiscent of Daedalus’s work. The rambling reader has to work hisway through and out of it like in a labyrinth. 5 See e.g. Bloom’s mistakes regarding scientific or cultural knowledge.

visuals, etc., and managed to use language so consciously

to build such a poetic, stylistic and rhetoric masterpiece,

at least not in prose fiction.

Michael Seidel (2002, 2) also quotes the author who,

in Portraits of the Artist in Exile says about Ulysses: “I don’t think

that the difficulties in reading it are so insurmountable.

Certainly any intelligent reader can read and understand

it, if he returns to the text again and again. He is

setting out on an adventure with words.” [italicized by me,

T.P.]. Joyce seems to expect from his readers to develop a

’long term relationship’ with his works: to slow down and

read it patiently, to be very attentive to every detail,

even if he does not understand it at the moment, to invest

his time in trying to find the links that connect the

separate elements together, etc; for, the reader is drawn

into a game whose rules are not stated in an explicit way;

therefore, a fast and superficial reading would certainly

not open the novel’s treasure chest. By this it teaches us

what ’close-reading’ is, how to read attentively so we can

understand things in retrospection.

A Hungarian literary historian, Antal Szerb, wrote

about Ulysses that the book was a bluff, and, what is more,

an unmasked bluff (quoted in Kappanyos 2011, 22). It is

easy to understand that this opinion is the result of a

rather hasty judgement. Since then, many studies have been

carried out on Joyce and his works worldwide, numerous

international conferences have been organized around

Joycean topics, countless periodicals have dealt only with

Joyce’s oeuvre, etc; therefore, based on the results of

this extensive academic research we can say for sure that

Ulysses, in spite of its complexity and quasi

impenetrability, is a compact unity, a construction built

by the precision of an engineer, where every element is in

the right place and fulfils its function. As the building

material is language itself, the translator of the novel

has to rebuild this perfect construction in his own

language, hence the difficulty of it.

I.2. Causes of translational difficulties

I.2.1. General observations

James Joyce was in his thirties when he wrote Ulysses.

This erudite writer who knew several languages spent seven

years writing the novel, sometimes working for days on the

‘burnishing’ of just one phrase. He selected the words,

together with all their nuances and shades with much care

for them to serve a multitude of purposes. As a result, the

novel contains many well-hidden linking elements, or

allusions to Irish literature and history, parodies of

different literary styles and authors so deeply integrated

into the English language that, even if the translator

understands their meaning and purpose, he is often

incapable to “recreate the intellectual, aesthetical and

emotional impressions the author wanted to convey to his

reader.” (Boisen 1967, 166)

The following presentation of the manifold

difficulties the text of Ulysses raises for translators is

based on several publications on the subject by Fritz Senn.

Fritz Senn is a widely known James Joyce scholar, a central

and representative figure of the field. Since 1985 he has

been in charge of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation and has

published several studies on Joyce and translation. He is,

by his own admission, a “far-fetcher by constitution”

(Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 205) who searches for hidden

connections between elements of the text by paying hyper-

close attention to the texture of Joyce’s language.

As he states in one of his articles on the subject

(Senn, 2010, 6) all results of translation “reflect their

cultural background, the potentialities and confines of the

language the translations are written in.” In addition,

they also represent the translators’ own interpretations of

the text. These factors all include the danger of

distancing the translation from the original text which is

in contrast with the purpose of being true to the original.

He also points out what we have mentioned in the

introduction: that, in the case of literary texts language

is used in a subtle and sophisticated manner; adding to

this the fact that with Joyce form and content become one.

Thus, Ulysses is labelled a borderline case regarding

translatability because of this ‘expressive form’, that is,

meaning is so strongly embedded into the form of English

language (e.g. the words’ formal or acoustic features) that

it hardly enables reproduction in other languages. For

example, in the case of Molly Bloom’s comment on the name

of a real author when she tells his husband what kind of

book to bring her next: “Get another of Paul de Kock’s.

Nice name he has.” (U, 78) – if the translator decides to

leave the name unchanged, which would be a reasonable

decision on his part, as it is the real name of an actual

author who might be known by this name, then the ‘nicety’

of it will probably be incomprehensible for the non-English

speaking reader, as long as the name does not activate ‒ by

its acoustic similarity to the pejorative word ‘cock’ ‒ the

same notion and reverberation in the readers of other

languages. This small detail may seem to have no particular

importance; however, Ulysses is built not on a complex and

rich plot, but on the abundance of such verbal coincidences

which create its special style and atmosphere.

Furthermore, the novel is not only built on language,

but is highly concerned with it; the characters use certain

words in a conscious and deliberate way. For example, an

even more sophisticated game with language is presented by

Senn (2010, 14), a playful comment on an oddity of English

spelling made by Bloom, when thinking about food: “Do ptake

some ptarmigan.” (U, 223) The spelling peculiarity of the

word ‘ptarmigan’ is mocked at by repeating the ‘pt’

combination adding an extra ‘p’ to the word starting with

‘t’ (take). This implicit and playful comment on the

strangeness of English spelling can hardly be transposed

into another language.

Henceforward we will try to categorize the manifold

characteristics of the novel that may raise difficulties

for translators in their work. Before dealing with the

hardships that only the most recent translations have had

the opportunity to deal with – that of the ungrammaticality

of the interior monologue ‒ first we shall make an

inventory of the other possible translatorial pitfalls one

must avoid.

I.2.2. Internal translations in the text

The text of Ulysses often causes difficulties in

understanding even for the English speaking reader because

of recurring to the remote layers of English (e.g. Dublin

slang), implanting foreignized elements into the text

(Latinate words, for example) or inserting words or shorter

passages in other languages (Greek, Latin, Italian, French,

German, Jewish, Hungarian, etc.), thus transforming the

process of reading into a translational process with a

delayed understanding even for the sophisticated native

reader.

Here are some examples of passages in foreign

languages: “Introibo ad altare Dei.” (U: 1) - which is the

opening line of old Latin mass parodied by Mulligan; “Qui

vous a mis dans cette fichue position? C’est le pigeon,

Joseph” (U: 51) – here Stephen quotes from a French book

and refers to Joseph, the father of Jesus; “Shema Israel

Adonai Elahenu.” (U: 155, emphasis in the original) – Bloom,

who is of Jewish origin, remembers his father reading

Hebrew books backwards and recalls this short line about

the Lord, etc. There are countless other insertions of

passages in foreign languages; the text abounds in them all

through the novel. Joyce’s characters, especially the

highly educated Stephen, are familiar with several foreign

languages just like the author himself, and they do not

hold themselves back in using them.

The Ithaca chapter in particular abounds in Latinate

words that often have to be back-translated into the common

and more familiar form of English (Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka

2012, 207). For example, the following word of Latin

origin: “duumvirate” (U: 776) requires a certain richness

of vocabulary in order to understand its meaning, and then

the capacity to identify it as a humorous metaphor used for

Stephen and Bloom (as it obviously does not refer to any

ancient Roman city official here).

Another example for the use of Latinate words in the

text is: “the latration of illegitimate unlicensed vagabond

dogs” (U: 855), or “vespertinal perambulation” (U: 841). By

exploiting the possibilities offered by this double

vocabulary of English, even the native English speaker has

to carry out an act of translation to decode the meaning,

an act of recognition with a short delay in understanding.

Since this double vocabulary of English (Latinate synonyms

of common English words) is a characteristic that most of

other European languages lack, the possibility of the

original text to cause a delayed understanding (an ulterior

‘aha’ moment) unfortunately gets lost in translation.6

6 Readers speaking one of the languages of Latin origin (Romanian, forexample) have little difficulty understanding that ‘latration’ meansbarking, but, for this very reason they miss on the experience ofdelayed understanding that the original text offers for the Englishspeaking readers.

I.2.3. Variety of style

Ulysses follows on the steps of A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man not just by having a common protagonist in the

person of Stephen Dedalus, but by manifesting the same

variety and gradation in language style, only in a much

more complex manner. The reader experiences a rich variety

of moods, perspectives, styles and linguistic features

characteristic for each chapter, and a variety of register

from Hiberno-English to colloquial language, to slang, to

literary diction, and then parodies (see Mihálycsa and

Wawrzycka 2012, 207).

The first edition of the novel did not offer any help

for the reader in understanding it. It contained no preface

or epilogue, the chapters had neither titles nor numbers.

However, Joyce drew two charts ‒ the Gilbert and Linati

schemes ‒ which do offer some kind of map to the novel’s

structure. These tables identify the title of each chapter

and contain information on the scene, the date (in hours),

the dominant techniques, etc.

In the following we shall present the narratological

techniques and linguistic styles of each chapter based on

the literary analysis of András Kappanyos (Kappanyos 2011)

in order to illustrate the novel’s linguistic variety and

richness. This linguistic characteristic of the novel

requires that the translator should be as much of a

linguistic virtuoso as Joyce was in order to successfully

recreate this richness and variety in his own language.

The first chapter entitled Telemachus is a ’young

narrative’, as Joyce calls it. It is built mainly on

traditional third person narration with the occasional

insertion of interior monologues. The name is meant only to

make a structural connection between the first chapter of

Stephen and that of Bloom (fourth chapter: ’mature

narrative’), and later on with the sixteenth chapter (’old

narrative’).

The second chapter called Nestor is built on ’personal

catechism’. The word originally refers to the organization

of a certain knowledge (mostly religious) in a question-

answer form. In this chapter Stephen asks questions from

his students, then later on he is the one questioned by Mr.

Deasy, the schoolmaster, Stephen’s boss. Again, this

chapter is put in parallel with the seventeenth (the

penultimate one) which is also entitled ’catechism’;

however, while the latter is actually written in question-

answer form, this second chapter is the traditional

narration of the question-answer type of situations.

The third chapter bears the title Proteus and,

according to Joyce’s scheme, it is a ’male monologue’ put

in parallel with the last chapter which is a ’female

monologue’. Again, this third chapter is not a proper

monologue like the last one, but a narration alternating

between exterior and interior viewpoints interwoven by the

interior monologues of Stephen.

Chapter four is entitled Calypso, and this is where

the other main character, Leopold Bloom appears for the

first time. The time turns back to that of the first

chapter, it is a ’mature narration’ of Bloom’s morning

episode.

Joyce identifies the technique of the fifth chapter,

called Lotus-eaters, as ’narcissism’ which refers to the

chapter’s thematic aspect rather than to its style. The

narrative technique here is again third person narration

interwoven with interior monologues, in this case, with

that of Leopold Bloom.

The Hades chapter recurs to the technique of

’incubism’. Once again, this term does not refer to a

stylistic or rhetorical characteristic of the text, but

rather to its thematic aspect.7 From a narratological

perspective, this chapter is based on exterior narration,

including dialogues recorded without commentaries and

Bloom’s interior reflexions that gradually fuse with the

exterior narration, making the reader ‒ and the translator

‒ wonder which impression is the narrator’s own and which

is filtered through Bloom’s mind. We can observe that, just

like the linguistic style in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,

the narratological techniques here become more and more

complex as the text progresses.

The seventh chapter, Aeolus, is ’enthymemic’. The term

’enthymeme’ belongs to the field of rhetoric, and it means

an informally stated syllogism in which one of the premises

is missing because it is assumed. This chapter is full of

7 The term of Latin origin means ’nightmare’ or male demon that appearsin dreams.

such rhetorical procedures, recalled or produced on the

spot, many of them related to information known only to

journalists. It contains 63 short articles with titles,

thus the style corresponds with the scene which is an

editorial office. Nevertheless, this chapter is a

continuous narration; those short articles do not

constitute real structural units inside the chapter.

Furthermore, this is the chapter where both Stephen and

Bloom are present, even though they do not meet yet; and

the narrative perspective switches between the two

characters.

The eighth chapter entitled Lestrygonians is called

’peristaltic’ by the author, referring to the digestive

system. The term suggests, once again, the topic of the

chapter rather than its technique: the reader follows

Leopold Bloom’s stream of consciousness at lunchtime, even

during his conversations with other characters.

The Scylla and Charybdis chapter is dialectic, the

scene being that of the library. We perceive everything

through Stephen’s artistic mind, thus the text takes

different artistic forms: dramatic dialogue, blank verse,

etc. It also includes numerous unmarked quotations from

Shakespeare and references to contemporary Irish

literature. Beside being artistic, at this point Stephen’s

mind is also under the influence of alcohol: it produces

several puns and jokes out of the names and behaviour of

his debating partners.

Joyce calls the technique of the next chapter,

Wondering Rocks, a ’labyrinth’ and this chapter is indeed a

textual labyrinth built on a well-constructed matrix of 19

episodes and a multitude of characters: each episode

follows the movement and actions of a certain person or

group. Elements from the different episodes are occasionaly

linked to, or cross each other. This chapter often resorts

to cinematic techniques, such as presenting in parallel

happenings that take place at the same time but in

different locations.

One of the most difficult chapters to translate is the

Sirens: its technique is called by Joyce ’fuga per

canonem’, that is, fuga according to the rules. This

chapter imitates the musical genre of fuga, by using the

instrument of language: at the beginning it presents the

basic themes that will be developed further in the chapter.

The text itself is characterized by strong musicality

created by the abundance of onomatopoeic words, frequent

use of alliteration, rhytmic schemes, repetitions, etc.. It

starts with the sentence: “Bronze by gold heard the

hoofirons, steelyrining Imperthnthn thnthnthn.” (U: 328) ‒

where ‘bronze by gold’ is one of the waitresses in the

Ormond Hotel’s bar. The chapter continues with short,

sharp, elliptic sentences containing many onomatopoeic

words, such as ‘jingle’, ‘notes chirruping’, ‘clock

clacked’, ‘tup’, etc. (U: 329).

The twelfth chapter, Cyclops, is called ’gigantic’:

happenings or objects are exaggerated to such an extent

that they become parodies, embedded into the narration of

an unknown and unnamed narrator.

The first part of the Nausicaa chapter presents the

events from the perspective of the young Gerty MacDowell

according to her manner of self-expression, that is, in the

style of corney sentimental novels. On the other hand, the

second half of the chapter shows us Bloom’s perspective on

the same situation, a much more rational one; and the

narrative style is also adjusted to his rational, more

prosaic way of expression.

Oxen of the Sun is another chapter that, with its high

stylistic complexity raises serious difficulties for

translators. Its technique is ’embrionic development’, and

is based on the fact that the ontogenetic stages of the

embrio are in fact the faster and miniature reproductions

of the stages of philogenesis. Joyce creates this chapter

on the analogy of the above mentioned scientific fact in

the following way: he reproduces in it the historical

stages of the development of English prose, imitating

different styles in their order of appearance on the

historical palette, evoking the particular style of certain

authors (John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift,

Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, etc.), groups of writers

or literary periods.

The longest chapter, Circe, is built on the technique

of ’hallucination’. It is written in dramatic form,

consisting of names, dialogues, monologues and stage

directions. Elements of reality mingle with those of the

imagination or hallucination and there is nothing to

indicate the boundary between them. Realistic time expands

here into cosmic dimensions.

The sixteenth chapter, Eumaeus, is an ’old narrative’,

a relatively simple, traditional one compared to the

extravaganza of the previous ones; it returns to Bloom’s

personal style. However, as this time he tries to impress

Stephen with his level of sophistication, he often uses

foreign – especially Latinate – expressions and, at the

same time unfinished, elliptical sentences occur.

The penultimate chapter is called Ithaca, it is built

on ’impersonal catechism’, and this time the text is,

indeed, constructed in the form of questions and answers.

Otherwise, from a linguistic point of view, it does not

raise any particular obstacles for translators.

The last chapter, Penelope, is a ’female monologue’ that

requires the reader’s – and the translator’s – special

attention and patience as it contains no punctuation marks

whatsoever. It is hard to decide what elements of the text

belong to a certain unit of thought, thus almost all of

Molly’s assertions remain open, unfinished; the reader can,

and has to resort to his creative and combinatory power to

interpret this last section of the novel. In addition,

Molly does not name − most of the time − the subject of her

narrative; for example, she uses the same masculine

personal pronoun for both Bloom and Boylan.

I.2.4. Recyclings from other Joycean texts

Different Joycean texts ’recycle’ each other’s

previous ideas and characters. In the Telemachus chapter,

for example, right at the beginning of the novel, a name of

a character appears that can be identified not even by the

most attentive reader, nor even in retrospection because he

will not appear in Ulysses again. The words: “Cranly’s arm.

His arm.” (U: 6) appear in Stephen’s thoughts during a

conversation with Buck Mulligan, his flat-mate in the

Martello Tower and, as one may find out after an

investigation into Joyce’s earlier works, Cranly is a

character imported from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and

belongs to Stephen’s past, being an intimate friend of his

who just made a hint of a homosexual pass at the end of the

book. That is the reason why the utterance of Mulligan:

“God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might

do something for the island. Hellenise it.” (U: 6) – the

last sentence in particular, reminds Stephen of Greek love

rather than Greek art, and then activates the memory of

Cranly in his mind (Seidel 2002, 86-87). Joyce practically

expects the reader not just to be hyper-attentive to every

word in his novel, but also to be acquainted with his

earlier works as well; for, he recycles both characters

(Stephen and Cranly) through all of his books, from

Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. As Fritz Senn puts it, in this

sense Joyce is rather arrogant and unduly demanding

(Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 208).

Translators must be even more attentive to these re-

appearing characters and themes in order not to commit an

accidental shift of the themes, for example, and to remain

consistent with the translations of Joyce’s earlier works

to the given language.

I.2.5. Literal coincidences

Coincidences appear in many novels on many occasions.

One major basis of Joyce’s techniques, however, is literal

coincidence: words, expressions, advertisements, slogans,

parts of a song, etc. are repeated throughout the text, or

reappear in a slightly modified way, becoming important

linking elements between motifs or thematic lines. If not

recognized by the translator, these links can easily get

broken, thus depriving the reader of important

mnemotechnics that could help him put the separate pieces

together.

A literal coincidence, one that fortunately has only a

local effect, is Bloom’s Freudian slip when having a

conversation about the deceased Dignam’s insurance and his

widower, saying “the wife’s admirers” (U: 405) instead of

‘the wife’s advisers’. This slip of the tongue is due to

the phonetic proximity of the words ‘advisers’ and

‘admirers’ and, also to the fact that Bloom’s wife is about

to have an affair with her agent, Boylan that very day, and

he is probably thinking about that personal issue at the

moment. The translator has, again, the difficulty of

reproducing such a slip of the tongue in the target

language while the denotative meaning of the words should

remain similar. Obviously, one cannot have both ways, so a

choice has to be made about the importance of each

parameter. A straightforward, correct translation of the

words’ meaning necessarily deprives the passage of its

function (in this case, the logical cause of the Freudian

slip, that of phonetic similarity); but, if the translator

resorts to an artifice and introduces a different pair of

words that are acoustically similar, the formal parameter

may be preserved but distortions of other nature may occur

(Senn 2010, 33), shifts in thematic reverberations, for

example.

Let us now examine a literal coincidence that is, in

addition, a very important linking element in the novel:

Leopold Bloom has a brief encounter with Bantam Lyons on

the street. The latter asks for the newspaper to look up a

French horse in it that is to run that day, but it seems to

take him a while to find the section. Bloom wants to get

rid of him as fast as he can, so he says to Lyons that he

can keep the newspaper, and then continues: “I was just

going to throw it away, Mr. Bloom said.” (U: 106) [italicized

by me, T. P.]. Accidentally, Bloom’s way of formulating the

sentence chimes with the name of a starter horse,

Throwaway. Bantam Lyons takes his words as a tip for the

winning horse. This misinterpretation will have, in a later

chapter, an important role in understanding why Bloom is

accused of avarice: of having won a large sum of money on

the horse and still not inviting his companions for a

drink.

Motifs such as ‘home’ and ‘key’, or ‘womb’ are ones

that run through the whole novel; they are words loaded

with “heavy thematic burdens” (Senn 2010, 25). The latter,

for example, occurs about twenty times in the text: as a

metaphor in Stephen’s chain of association from midwives

via navel cords to Eve and to the “Womb of sin.” (U: 46);

then he continues: “Wombed in sin darkness I was too” (U:

46), where the noun becomes a verb, a morphological

transformation most probably impossible to repeat in other

languages. The word ‘womb’ occurs in Bloom’s thoughts as

well: “womb of warmth” (U: 107), then he returns to it in

the Sirens chapter: “Because their wombs. A liquid womb of

woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly,

hearing.” (U: 369). Furthermore, the Oxen of the Sun

chapter ‒ which takes place in a hospital where Mrs.

Purefoy is about to deliver her child ‒ is thematically

dominated by this organ. In each of the passages the word

‘womb’ appears, it has different roles and connotations.

The translator’s dilemma might be whether to stick to one

correspondent throughout the whole text for the sake of

unity (and whether the target language’s structure allows

this to him) or to adjust it to the optimal effect of each

passage in which it occurs, making much harder for the

reader to identify the thematic interconnections among the

distanced passages.

If taken literally, a figure of speech, besides its

usual meaning, can have an ironical overtone. Senn gives

the example of Bloom’s advice to Stephen after they finally

meet and Bloom can finally take Stephen under his fatherly

wings (Senn 2010, 26): “I wouldn’t personally repose much

trust in that boon companion of yours who contributes the

humorous element, Dr Mulligan, as a guide, philosopher, and

friend, if I were in your shoes.” (U: 714). The irony of

his remark is the fact that Stephen happens to be wearing

the very shoes that have been given to him by the same

Mulligan he is warned against; a fact unknown to Bloom and,

only known by the reader if he had paid close attention to

the happenings and conversations between Stephen and Buck

Mulligan at the beginning of the novel. This kind of

coincidence, first of all has to be observed, but even if

observed, there is little chance that another language can

reproduce an expression that has the same meaning and, at

the same time, contains the word ‘shoes’.8

Joyce’s characters share with the author the

inclination towards using such literal coincidences in

their conversations so that they seem to be in cahoots with

the author in creating riddles, ambiguities, puzzles and

other verbal challenges for the reader’s memory and for

the translator’s creativity, regardless of them being witty

or not. Lenehan is a punster of the latter category who,

upon hearing a few lines from an opera entitled ‘The Rose

of Castille’, produces the following joke: “What opera is

like a railway line? […] The Rose of Castille. See the wheeze?

Rows of cast steel. Gee!” (U: 170). Again, this word-play

8 The new Hungarian translation also fails to keep this allusion to Stephen’s shoes. It goes like this: “ha a maga helyében lennék” (H: 522), that is: ’if I were in your place’.

built on phonetic similarity is one of many whose neglect

in translation would not be in itself an enormous loss, if

it had not been integrated so deeply into the texture of

the novel (see Senn 2010, 35). The opera in question is a

recurrent motif in the Sirens chapter where its title

appears several times, and there are allusions to the

riddle itself in later chapters of the novel, not to

mention that the rose of Castille motif is strongly

associated with Molly, Bloom’s wife, who has Spanish

origins. Its importance is proven by the fact that most

translations leave the riddle intact, keeping the title of

the opera unchanged even at the cost of destroying the

phonetic relation between the words and thus, the riddle’s

logic. Should the title of the opera be changed, it could

not be connected to the sounds of that particular aria

heard before by the participants, in which case the reader

would not understand how the idea of the riddle came to

Lenehan’s mind. On the other hand, the ‘railway line’

element of the riddle is also important as, once all these

elements were associated with one another through the

riddle, later on one of them is meant to evoke the whole

riddle on its own, then the title of the opera, the rose,

and through the rose, even Bloom himself is drawn into this

chain of associations at one point, thanks to his family

name.9

As emphasized by the former examples, no translation can

keep all the elements of the original, as no other language

9 Bloom’s father is of Hungarian origins. He changed his name from ‘Virág’ to ‘Bloom’ when he came to Ireland.

can give the same combinatory possibilities as English has;

therefore, an order of priorities must be set up by the

translator regarding the elements that necessarily need to

be preserved and the ones that may be ignored. The

accumulated interpretative studies on the important

connective motifs and themes are a huge help for

translators in this selective process.

As we have seen earlier, each chapter in Ulysses has an

idiosyncratic style; nevertheless, these chapters are

connected by a network of recurring motifs, echoes, links

and cross-references, the novel thus becoming a huge

hypertext through the means of literal coincidences, a web

of small, interconnected verbal units. After translation

the result will necessarily be much less tightly woven

(Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 219).

I.2.6. Intentional errors and mistakes

A linguistic phenomenon similar to that of literal

coincidence is the set of errors and cases of typo ‒ all

deliberately made by the author ‒ that constitute a

creative challenge for translators in inventing analogous

forms in the target language; errors like lapses,

aural/semantic slippage, defects, misquotes, etc. (see

Senn, F., Mihálycsa E & Wawrzycka J. (Eds.) 2012, 165). As

we have pointed out before, this ’co-opting of chance and

error’ becomes a principle of composition, consequently not

neglectable by translators. They must strive to recreate

for the non-English speaking readers similar occasions for

such ’portals of discovery’ that the original text allows.

These errors also fulfil a structural function inside the

texture of the novel contributing to its indeterminate

aspect and to the lateral proliferation of its meaning.

In the early editions of the novel these errors – the

authorial intention behind them not yet recognized ‒ were

often corrected by the editors and only restored by the

Gabler edition of Ulysses in 1984. Furthermore, early

translators assumed that any error in the translated text

would be considered as transmissional error and attributed

to their work and not to the author of the original.

However, the newer generation of translators is aided by

the continuously increasing critical studies, hence being

much more aware of the importance of these Joycean

anomalies and, as a result, they demonstrate a much

stronger attempt to recreate them in their translation.

Most of these errors are echoed throughout the novel

requiring a ’nodal translational practice’. (idem, 166)

The following example is deemed one of the most

important lapses, exploited through multiple echoes in the

text. In the Lotus Eaters chapter Leopold Bloom is reading

the secret letter he has received from the typist Martha

Clifford, which contains a suggestive typo: “I called you

naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please

tell me what is the real meaning of that word.” [italicized

by me] (U: 95). The spelling mistake of ’world’ instead of

’word’ in the first sentence will later recur in Bloom’s

interior monologues in relation to his thoughts on life,

love and death. Its first echo appears in the Hades chapter

where, after Dignam’s funeral Bloom is contemplating about

death and the ’other world’: “There is another world after

death named hell. I do not like that other world she wrote.

No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet.” (U:

146). This is a direct allusion on the part of Bloom to the

error Martha made in her letter (“she wrote”). Translations

into languages that do not have a paronymous pair of words

for ’world’ and ’word’ – which is true for almost all the

other languages – will necesarily correct Martha’s typo or

take an opportunistic turn and reproduce it with some other

slip offered by the target language which will,

unfortunately, add a different semantic reverberation to

the text (idem. 167). If this specific antecedent ’world-

word’ slip gets lost from the letter in the course of

translation (either its denotative meaning or its paronymic

aspect), there is no way the reader can understand why,

further in the novel Martha’s sentence is referred to by

Bloom when thinking about death and hell. And, in a novel

where there are so many aspects raising difficulties in

understanding even for the English reader, translators must

strive to preserve those connecting elements that are meant

to help readers to put the pieces together.

I.2.7. Covert intertextual allusions

Another form of literal coincidence is when a phrase

or a sentence is either taken literally from a piece of

work (most frequently from the Bible or a Shakespearean

work) or from some kind of religious ceremony without the

identification of the source. They can also appear with a

little modification, containing only elements that perhaps,

in the author’s estimate should be enough for the

sophisticated reader to detect the source and understand

the surplus that it adds to the meaning. This kind of

handling of foreign elements causes translators not only

the difficulty of recognizing these intertextual allusions

as such, but they also have to take into consideration the

possibility that the works cited or alluded to are already

translated; and if so, they have to decide whether the

translated form does or does not fit into the new context

(Senn 2010, 44).

An example for the case where the phrase or sentence

literally coincides with an expression from a particular

Christian ceremony is the moment when Leopold Bloom thinks,

before his bath: “This is my body.” (U: 107). This

narcissistic remark is identical with what the Catholic

priest utters at Mass (Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 212)

and obviously brings together the figure of Bloom with that

of Jesus; for what reason, that is a matter of literary

interpretation. The translator, nevertheless, must observe

these coincidences, and, in this particular case, needs to

use the exact expression the given language uses for this

particular part of the Catholic ceremony.10 Another example10 In Hungarian, for example: “Ez az én testem”.

for a faint allusion to a real character, an English

politician, which is ignored by many translators, appears

in Stephen’s thoughts: “lousy Lucy” (U: 277), who is turned

into a woman in a German and a French translation (Senn

2010, 16), though is said to be referring to Sir Thomas

Lucy, a magistrate who is known to have enterred into some

kind of conflict with Shakespeare. This error of ignorance,

or error of facts remains a professional risk for

translators of this still obscure novel, Ulysses, in spite of

the numerous literary analyses that have been done since

the novel’s first publication and which make the job much

easier than it was for early translators.

For the latter case – when only bits of the borrowed

foreign text are preserved and which therefore is much more

difficult to notice by the translator, Fritz Senn gives the

following example: at one point Buck Mulligan refers to

Stephen as “the loveliest mummer of them all.” (U: 4).

Translated to other languages, it is quasi impossible to

evoke, through this line, the image of Brutus, who “was the

noblest Roman of them all” (Julius Caesar, V, v.68, quoted in

Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 212). In the original, this

partial literal coincidence makes different situations and

times come together: the present time of Stephen and

Mulligan with Roman history, and finally, with the

Shakespearean stage (through The Tragedy of Julius Caesar); these

reverberations enrich the Joycean text, a text that builds

not on a complex, detailed plot, as we mentioned before,

but on this finesse of language which inevitably becomes

weaker as these reverberations get lost in translation.

I.2.8. Narrative techniques in Ulysses

In the course of presenting the narrative techniques

used by Joyce in Ulysses I follow the categorization of

Seidel (2002, 81-98):

1. Joyce introduces the new and unconventional

narrative proceedings gradually, progressively, by giving

time to the reader, through a training phase, to find out

the way they function before recurring to them exclusively.

Accordingly, the novel starts with the traditional

narrative technique of ‘third-person narration’, where an

omniscient, neutral narrator tells the important parameters

of the plot: scene, time, characters, physical appearance,

objects, etc. This type of narration appears mostly in the

first few chapters, but it never disappears totally. The

very first sentence, the opening lines of the book are the

example of ‘good-old’ third person narration:

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,

bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay

crossed.” (U, 1). This type of narration is easy to

understand, it contains no occasion for misinterpretation,

at least not on a grammatical, literal level. This way the

novel sets up the scene, providing readers with the most

basic information in a stable, easily comprehensible

manner.

2. Whatever sound or noise is made by a character or

an object in the novel (dialogues, for example) it is not

put between quotation marks but signalled by a long dash

(−) and is termed by Seidel as ‘sounded narration’:

“− Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.” (U, 1).

Later on Joyce will start experimenting with other ways to

signal the coming of a speech, hoping maybe that the

readers have already learned to find their way around the

text.

3. The most complicated narrative technique used in

the novel is the ‘interior narration’; difficult to even

recognize at times, and then much more difficult to

translate. It mimics the natural, unconscious flaw of

thoughts, the chain of associative memory. It looks like

the record of unspoken, and - in many cases of Bloom’s

interior monologues ‒ ungrammatical or pre-grammatical

shreds of thought, made up of elements from past history,

imagination, of accumulated – and often incorrect ‒

knowledge, emotions, motivations, etc. This type of

narration is more difficult to comprehend because Joyce

succeeds in copying the working of the human mind so

perfectly that the result is as illogical, often chaotic,

fragmentary, incoherent and inchoative as it is in reality;

finally, this technique does not transpose or explain this

internal world for the external receiver because that would

ruin the impression of authenticity.

Interior narration is often embedded into third-person

narration without any specific warning in punctuation.

There are, however, other ways to mark this change in the

text: in the case of interior monologue the narrative voice

usually changes from third person to first person, and verb

tense to present; or it contains some idiosyncratic

expressions that help the reader to recognize the

proprietor of the interior voice. Seidel identifies an

early instance of interior monologue hidden in a

description in third person narration:

“Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to

him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and

others see me. Who chose this face for me?” [words

italicized by me] (U, 5).

The shift from third person to first person is easily

detectable here; this way the reader knows for sure that

the narration has turned into interior monologue and, what

he is reading, are the character’s inner thoughts.

This technique, developed to a uniquely high level by

Joyce, and numerous other aggravating factors cause

translators such difficulties that need a vast knowledge

and a great deal of creativity to overcome.

I.2.8.1. Incorrect grammar in interior monologues

Let us take a more detailed look at what these pre-

articulations – especially in the case of Leopold Bloom’s

interior monologues ‒ are like. In his article entitled

“The Lure of Grammatical Rectification” Fritz Senn says

about Ulysses that it is “polytropically deviant and

transgressive” (Senn 2012, 7), characteristics generated

mostly by the use of this specific narrative technique that

readily abandons grammaticality for the sake of

authenticity, in order to imitate “the immediacy and

seeming randomness of intruding impressions and

associations before the emerging thought is mentally

articulated with syntactic precision” (Senn 2012, 7) that

is, already verbalized but not yet structured. All this is

accomplished through such idiosyncratic verbal proceedings

as indeterminacy, anomalous word order, lack of

punctuation, ellipsis, polysemy, etc. (see: Senn, Mihálycsa

& Wawrzycka (eds.) 2012, 133). Translators have a strong

normative urge to correct these deviances according to the

rules of the target language; punctuation is often inserted

for the sake of clarification when none is called for by

the original text; thus this sense of immediacy of the

original text disappears, the inchoative thoughts are

transcribed into neat and correct sentences expressing

reasoned reflections. One possible explanation to the

tendency of translators to forcefully correct the

ungrammaticalities of the original text can be that they

suppose that readers of the translations do not give them

the benefit of the doubt as readily as to an original work,

on the contrary, they attribute all errors to the

translators’ lack of command in the target language (see

Senn 2012, 9). But even when a translator consciously tries

to preserve this pre-grammatical feature of the original,

he has to confront with the restricted possibilities of the

target language (e.g. certain syntactic rules or the need

for inflections that cannot be totally dismissed, certain

word order, compounds, idioms, etc.).

I.2.8.2. ‘Shortmind’

Fritz Senn coined the term ‘shortmind’ upon the

analogy with ‘shorthand’ in writing to refer to the mind’s

inchoative, pre-formulated grammar, jottings that are not

coherent yet (Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 221). Most of

the Bloomian interior monologues are a succession of

emergent associations, often fragmentary, without a

grammatical structure, following the order of intrusion

rather than grammatical order, beginning with the first bit

of thought that comes to the mind – something perceived,

thought or remembered.11 Senn explains that English is well

suited for imitating the pre-articulations of the mind

because of its rarity of inflections and also because of

the frequency of homonyms (especially homophones): many

words can be verbs or nouns or adjectives at the same time

by having the same form in all cases (eg. hurt, cut, light,

11 Stephen, in contrast, generally does think in complete sentences.

etc.). Many of them are only one-syllable-long and easily

fit to any pattern. Agglutinative languages, such as

Hungarian, does not have this degree of flexibility.

Bloom’s thought about another character in the novel,

Richard Goulding, whose financial situation had changed for

the worse, goes like this: “Now begging letters he sends

his son with.” (U: 352). This is not exactly the prototype

of a grammatically correct sentence. The typical S+V+O word

order is subverted here. The line rather follows the order

in which the ideas appear rapidly one after the other. The

starting point is the present situation, ‘now’, which

induces the word ‘begging’, then ‘begging letters’ which

are sent by his son. In an articulated, matured form it

would sound something like this: ‘He now sends his son with

begging letters’. However, these words are not uttered,

just thought; and thoughts start out before they could have

a definite goal or direction toward which to flow.

Another example for shortmind is again in a Bloomian

interior monologue; towards the end of the day Bloom is

resting on the beach and thinks, after his physical relief

at the sight of a young woman, Gerty MacDowel: “O!

Exhausted that female has me.” (U: 497). Again, the feeling

of exhaustion is the starting point of the thought; the

cause of this state is looked into only later. If put in a

grammatically correct order: ‘That female has exhausted

me’, the sentence becomes a reflection on the situation,

while the original succeeds in presenting the inchoative

nature of a thought, captured in the moment of being born.

The following examples of ‘impact structure’ or

‘process’ sentence, all occurring in Bloomian monologues,

selected by Senn to illustrate the phenomenon, reinforce

furthermore this rule of priority in structuring sentences

(Senn 2012, 9-10): on one occasion the image of a luminous

crucifix enters Bloom’s mind and then, a bit later we read

his thought about it: “Phosphorus it must be done with.”

(U: 190), where the sentence’s core element is the first

word ‘phosphorus’, which is the solution to Bloom’s

wondering about the way that crucifix could be made so

luminous, while the rest of the sentence is the result of a

secondary process of completion.

In Lestrygonians, a chapter dominated by food and

eating, Bloom thinks about Dilly Dedalus, Stephen’s sister:

“Good Lord, that poor child’s dress is in flitters.

Underfed she looks too.” (U: 191). Again, the core element,

his bewilderment expressed by the word ‘underfed’ is at the

beginning of the sentence, the rest is just a grammatical

supplement. Unfortunately, translations tend to ‘correct’

these ‘impact structures’ into neat, coherent sentences,

transforming them into reflections.

Other cases of shortmind where thoughts ‘jostle’ upon

each other in a seemingly random order constitute a much

bigger challenge for translators. Fritz Senn exemplifies

this phenomenon once again with a Bloomian interior

monologue in which Leopold Bloom recalls a memory of Molly

singing: “I turned her music. Full voice of perfume of what

perfume does your lilactrees.” (U: 355). Now, beside the

fact that this sentence has a subverted word order, it

seems totally incomprehensible. However, all of its

constituents have their subjective reason to be part of the

sentence: Bloom remembers the time he first heard Molly

sing ‘full of voice’ which he synaestetically associates

with her smell ‘of perfume’ which in turn activates in his

memory a line from the letter he received that morning from

Martha Clifford: “Do tell me what kind of perfume does your

wife use.” (U: 95). He compares the smell of her perfume

with the smell of lilac trees which brings the chain of

association back to its starting point. This is a very

suggestive example of how, in Ulysses, and especially in

the Bloomian interior monologues, grammatical rules are

totally abandoned and the reader has to find its meaningful

chunks and the connections between them by himself. These

verbal units are like thought-recordings, as if thought had

been transcribed in their incipient forms. Through the

process of translation, however, the grammatical rules

imposed by the different target languages unfortunately

transform these verbal units into much more ordered and

more logical sentences, lacking the idiosyncratic deviancy,

and thus the authentic sense of immediacy of the original

Joycean text. The same happens in the case when Bloom tries

to reckon whether it was possible to have been a full moon

on the day that another character, Mrs Breen, mentioned:

“Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight

exactly there is a new moon.” (U: 212).

Another kind of ‘Bloomian pitfall’ for the translator

is when he tries to recall a piece of declarative

information stored in his memory incorrectly, like when

trying to invoke a law of physics learnt long ago and what

turns out to have been acquired inadequately: “Because the

acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of

the water is equal to the law of falling water.” (U: 364).

This rambling sentence is the result of certain cognitive

steps motivated by Senn in the following way: “Acoustics:

the resonance changes [how exactly?]/ the resonance changes

according as … /[new start] the weight of the water … [in

formulae something is always] “equal to”/ [there is a] law

of falling [“bodies”] / [in this case] water.” (Senn,

Mihálycsa & Wawrzycka (eds.) 2012, 157). Thus, ’the law of

falling water’ is the result of an amalgam of Bloom’s

defective knowledge on physical laws.

Then, in the case of the following elliptical

sentence: “Could never like it again after Rudy.” (U: 213)

we cannot tell who is that could never like it: I, he or

she; but in the process of translation (at least, in the

case of inflectional languages) one cannot avoid to

identify the person and number through an inflection. As

Fritz Senn puts it: “The more eccentric, specific, local

or, in Joyce’s case, refracted an item is, the less are its

chances of travelling across to different cultural

conditions.” (Senn 2012, 19).

I.3. Conclusions

All results of translations are inevitably incomplete,

especially in the case of the Joycean texts, as we have

seen in numerous examples above. The difficulties in

translating this novel go far beyond the ones caused by the

differences in linguistic structure of the source- and the

target language (such as word order, tenses, questions of

gender etc.) dealt with by the theoreticians of

translation.

Often one does not have to translate sentences but

“verbal events” (Mihálycsa and Wawrzycka 2012, 216). On

many occasions, the choices the English speaking reader

faces are already made for the non-English speaking ones

after the translational process. The original text of

Ulysses often lets the reader be misled or at least

momentarily puzzled by being deliberately ambiguous or

misleading; while in translation this experience is often

smoothed out. For, translators must choose from the

multiplicity of a word’s or sentence’s facets, they cannot

preserve them all (meaning, form, typographic or musical

characteristics) in either of the other languages.

Translators of Ulysses face similar problems as the

translators of poetry: they have to change everything

(every word) yet somehow preserve everything (all meanings

woven into those words). Just as in the case of poetry,

Ulysses is heavily built on form: there are key elements in

the novel that represent important motifs and keep

recurring throughout the text. If these are not used just

as consistently as in the original, if they are replaced by

a synonym, they bring into the text different connotations

and thus, the attentive reader may easily build a totally

different chain of association and get off the original

track. However, in spite of all the obstacles the

translator meets with, the underlying problems are always

interesting and challenging: if he manages to recreate some

of the verbal and structural finesse of the original, he

gives the possibility for the reader to go through a

similar process of decoding and deciphering, even if they

lead to different results than the original text (which

they necessarily do).

One of the interviewers, J. Wawrzycka, suggests that a

criterion by which translations could be judged, is how far

they can assimilate the results of the numerous critical

studies on Ulysses (idem. 242). However, no translator of our

time can be familiarized with everything literary criticism

has produced on the novel. Since its first publication, it

has become something much more different from what its

early readers could see in it. The elements connecting it

to Homer’s Odyssey are only one among many aspects that have

to be taken into account when trying to interpret and

translate the novel (see the many twists and distortions in

the Eummaeus chapter, misleading metaphors, incongruities

and malapropisms, etc.). When reading and translating a

multi-layered kind of literature like the Joycean texts

are, nobody can find all the possible meanings, overtones,

quotes, allusions and cross-references hidden in the text.

Joyce’s prose is very ’slippery’, one can never know for

sure what overtones or connotations are important and

significant in the light of the whole.

Fritz Senn stipulates that, first of all, translators

have to be able to identify the basic elements, the factual

level, the surface (idem. 223) – for example the cultural,

Irish references, the vocabulary of Hiberno-English, etc. ‒

which is already troublesome. Secondary matters, such as

reverberations, parodies, refractions and overtones, even

if noticed, will often be sacrificed in absence of any

other possibility to tranpose them into a different

language. And when translators try to somehow recreate

these phenomena in their own languages, they cannot help

diffusing misleading seeds, especially in the case of

Ulysses, where readers learn that they have to be alert and

look out for hidden meanings. An alert reader will find

latent meanings in the translated text as well – as the

saying goes: Search and you shall find ‒ only probably not

the ones that the original text offers.

The question is: does it matter if the reader of the

translation comes to different results (regarding fine

nuances in their impression, in the sense of atmosphere,

overtones, etc.) as long as he gets involved in the process

of reading, searching and ’investigating’ just as much.

Fritz Senn does not take a stand on the question of what a

good translations should be like. He only suggests that

translators should indicate in the preface of their work

which direction the translation is going: trying to

familiarize and bring the text closer to the target

language and culture, or preserving the characteristics and

the elements of the foreign culture; this way the reader

knows what to expect (idem. 219). An annotated edition can

also be helpful because once the translator can resort to

explicative notes, he always has a way to help the reader

and he can do that outside the text itself.

We think, however, that every translation should be as

faithful to the original work and to its stylistic features

as the target language’s constraints make it possible. This

goal is very difficult to reach in the case of Joycean

texts, but we think it should be the guiding principle of

translators even if they often come across problems that

seem insurmountable. This attitude characterizes the group

of Hungarian translators who took the former Hungarian

versions of Ulysses and reshaped them into a new one,

restoring many structural and compositional linguistic

elements that were ignored in the former translations for a

number of reasons.

II. Ulysses in Hungarian

II.1. The odyssey of the Hungarian Ulysses

As Péter Egri states at the beginning of his paper

entitled James Joyce’s Works in Hungarian Translation (Egri 1967,

234), the “general literary standard of the receptive

language” is a very important factor which determines the

success or failure of translating the works of a foreign

author. The translator’s individual sensibility is not

enough for the success of the translation, the receptive

language must also have a sensibility of its own. This

sensibility of the language develops as a result of its use

by generations of its speakers, and more importantly, its

writers and, we may continue the thought, its translators.

The first Joycean work to be translated in full-length

was Ulysses by Endre Gáspár, published in 1947. Prior to this

moment of literary historical importance, two main changes

had taken place regarding Hungarian literary language and

style.

Firstly, at the beginning of the twentieth century,

the literary movement called Nyugat attracted such

outstanding poets as Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső

Kosztolányi, Gyula Juhász, and novelists like Zsigmond

Móricz or Gyula Krúdy, who transformed and enriched their

mother tongue so that it became a “proper medium” (ibid.)

for introducing Symbolism, Impressionism and Naturalism to

the Hungarian readers.

Secondly, during World War I and in the inter-war

period, poets like Lajos Kassák, Attila József, Miklós

Radnóti, and novelists such as Tibor Déry or Miklós

Szentkuthy carried out experimentations with the stylistic

possibilities of Expressionism and Surrealism, while some

of the listed authors had already been familiar with the

works of Joyce. However, Péter Egri points out that the

literary activities of those first four decades of the

twentieth century were just stylistic experimentations

paving the way for the later translations. In spite of the

fact that the first translation of Ulysses by Endre Gáspár

contains errors and inexactitudes – for example, the loss

of some of the Irish linguistic and literary qualities ‒ it

manages to preserve the novel’s surrealist, expressionist,

impressionist, naturalistic and symbolic effects, just like

its musicality.

It is also worth mentioning that the first translation

appeared a few years after the end of World War II, during

the “hopeless oppression of the communist era” (Kappanyos

2010, 554). For a long period after its publication, Joyce

was banned and deemed “a suspicious writer of the rotting

bourgeois culture”. After the revolution in 1956, political

control over cultural products became more loose; however,

a completely new translation of Ulysses appeared only in

1974 by Miklós Szentkuthy, which proved to be a high

success and thus, it increased immensely Joyce’s public

recognition in Hungary. This was followed by a second

edition in 1986 containing important editorial changes by

Tibor Bartos and since then it has been considered to be

the standard text.

A re-edition and partial retranslation of Ulysses

appeared in 2012 as a result of a collective effort of a

translator team. The coordinator of the project was

literary translator András Kappanyos, the members: Gábor

Zoltán Kis, Dávid Szolláth and Marianna Gula, scholars of

English translation, Joyce philology, Hungarian stylistics,

Irish studies, etc.

II.2. The necessity of a new translation

There being already two ‒ or, if we take into account

the re-edition of Tibor Bartos, then three ‒ existing

Hungarian translations of Joyce’s Ulysses, why the necessity

of another one? András Kappanyos, the coordinator of the

translator team answers this question by highlighting the

strong and weak points of the existent translations, by

comparing the works of the two previous translators, and

making an inventory of errors that needed correction

(Kappanyos 2010, 554-556).

The first translator, Endre Gáspár, had a long history

of literary translation and still, with that behind him, in

his preface he called Ulysses the greatest effort of his

career. His text is “scholarly” (554), his attitude is that

of a humble servant: he tries to be as faithful to the

original ‒ the source text ‒ and to keep as much

information from the original as possible. Szentkuthy, on

the other hand, being a first-rate writer, an early

follower of Joyce, and a virtuoso of style himself,

produces an artistic text. His aim was to recreate the deep

cultural effect the original text had had on its readers,

together with its scandalous nature, and to familiarize the

novel, to bring it closer to the Hungarian readers. But, as

a result, he oversimplified it: whenever he did not

understand something in the text, he turned it into

something funny, often obscenely funny, or he conjured up

some euphony by recurring to his own linguistic creativity

which, however, was not in concordance with the meaning or

effect of the original. In consequence, Szentkuthy’s

version of Ulysses may be much funnier to read, but more

difficult to understand. While Endre Gáspár did his best to

remain faithful to the original text and its writer,

Szentkuthy handled the original with much more freedom and

even tried to “improve” on Joyce. While the former

concentrated more on content and turned out to be a great

master of English, the latter tried to immitate the novel’s

form and style with the help of his virtuosity in his

mother tongue.

Kappanyos chooses an example from the second chapter

entitled Nestor to illustrate the two different attitudes

of the above mentioned translators toward the original

text: in the second chapter Stephen Dedalus is holding a

history class and asks one of his pupils what he knows

about Pyrrhus. Since he does not know anything about that

historical figure, he tries to improvize, making a free

association based on the sounding of the name: “‒Pyrrhus,

sir? Pyrrhus, a pier” (U: 29). The phonetic similarity of

the two words ‒ Pyrrhus and pier ‒ and thus, the logic of

the association is obvious to the reader of the original,

but again, when translating the text into any other

language, the problem occurs how to transpose both form and

content through the translating process. Endre Gáspár, who

always aimed at being faithful to the original, leaves the

word ’pier’ unchanged, assuming that his restricted number

of readers – there was only a small number of one thousand

copies published − will be able to guess its meaning or, if

not, consult a dictionary in order to understand it:

“Pyrrhusról, sir? Pyrrhus az egy pier” (quoted in Kappanyos

2010, 554). Meanwhile, Szentkuthy translates the word

‘pier’ into Hungarian: “Pyrrhus, tanár úr? Pyrrhus az egy

móló” (Joyce 1998, 31). It is easy to notice that Gáspár’s

translation sounds more foreign (see the words ’sir’ and

’pier’ in the Hungarian text) and thus, seems more

difficult to understand; however, in spite of the fact that

Szentkuthy’s readers can understand better what the pupil

says ‒ his exact words ‒, since the similarity in sounding

dissapears, they cannot comprehend its reason, that is, the

logical connection between the words, the idea’s source,

its motivation.

As far as translation theories and translatorial

attitudes are concerned, in the mid-19th century Ferenc

Toldi, the father of Hungarian literary history,

distinguished between ’fidelity to content’ and ’fidelity

to form’ and denied the possibility of their coexistence.

Károly Szász, on the other hand, proved this view to be

wrong by successfully translating epic poems from several

languages (see Baker 2001, 451). The aim of the new

translator team was the same, to prove that they, as a

group, can achieve both: Gáspár’s scholarly competence

(fidelity to content) and Szentkuthy’s artistry (fidelity

to form). With the help of the numerous critical editions

of the novel12 and with the possibilities offered by the

digitalized text, the problems of textual, informational

nature seemed to have decreased significantly,13 but

Szentkuthy’s contribution would have been far more

difficult to exceed. Since it was obvious for the

translator team that they could not surpass many of his

brilliant poetical solutions, they decided to base their

work on Szentkuthy’s translation and correct its far-

fetched, improper or unreasonable solutions. The meticulous

work lasted almost nine years: it started in 2003 and ended

in 2012; furthermore, it was carried out under the

conception that it would be a critical translation with

ulterior additional notes to help the reader in the process

of reading and interpreting.

12 HansWalter Gabler’s edition of Ulysses in 1984 or Gifford’s annotations to the novel. 13 Other useful informational sources available for the new translator team: contemporary maps, postcards, newspapers, advertisments, or photographs of scenes in Dublin, etc.

II.3. Errors and their correction

In the following we shall look into the translatorial

difficulties that Joyce’s novel sets against those

translators who are brave enough to settle down to the task

of translating it; and we shall see how the new translator

team managed to correct the errors of their predecessors.

For example, the first ‘translatorial pitfall’ listed

in the first part of our paper was represented by the

internal translations in the text: some of the latinate

words have been transposed as they were in the original

(e.g. duumvirate-duumvirátus), but many others have been

translated into Hungarian in a way that their foreign

feature got lost in the process, so there could not be much

improvement in that area (e.g.: latration-ugatás). These

kinds of losses, however, are miniscule compared to the

gains in other respects. The passages written in foreign

languages were obviously taken over unchanged, a decision

based on the conception that the translated text should not

be more transparent, more easy to understand than the

original. The case of dealing with the Hiberno English

vocabulary will be presented later on in more details.

Like the new Hungarian translator team, we will also

take as starting point Miklós Szentkuthy’s work and look

into the kinds of errors that had been surfaced in it and

needed to be rectified during the retranslating project. In

this presentation we shall emphasize in more detail those

translatorial difficulties which are relevant from the

specific point of view of the Hungarian translations and

those that we found the most interesting.

II.3.1. Far-fetched solutions

Not long after the publication of the new Hungarian

Ulysses, Marianna Gula gave an interview about the project,

in which she presented the manifold problems they had

encountered in the previous editions and the kinds of

alternatives they had come up with to correct them (see

Bényei 2012).

She mentions in this interview that Szentkuthy’s

biggest fault was that, during its translation, he reshaped

Joyce’s work according to his own style inasmuch as the

result may seem brilliant at first sight, but it reflects

the translator’s writing habits rather than the real

author’s. In other words, Szentkuthy became a co-author of

Ulysses ‒ by often going too far from the original text ‒

rather than remaining a humble servant a translator should

be. Examples of such poetic exaggerations can be found

already at the beginning of the novel. When Buck Mulligan,

who is shaving in the morning and, in the meantime, poses

as a Christian priest, calls for Stephen Dedalus from the

top of the tower: “Come up, you fearful jesuit” (U: 1). In

Szentkuthy’s version this order sounds like this: “Hozzám,

te Loyola Diabolica!”; while in the new translation: “Gyere

fel, te félelmetes jezsuita!” It is easy to observe, even

from this short passage, that Szentkuthy lets his

creativity run free and does not bother to remain faithful

to the original text, while the new translation strives not

to tell or express more than the original does. Another

example is related to a linguistic game favored by Joyce,

that of creating original, stunning compound words. Still

at the beginning of the novel, Mulligan says, praising the

sea: “The scrotumtightening sea.” (U: 3) In Szentkuthy’s

version it goes like this: “Ondulált ondó, ez vagy te,

tenger.”; while in the new edition: “Herezacskószorongató

tenger.” Again, the same difference in the translators’

attitude can be noticed: while Szentkuthy stylistically

overdoes it, the new version mirrors the original meaning

and, at the same time, imitates the form as well, using the

same linguistic game of creating an original, long compound

word. The new translator team put a lot of effort to cut

back these linguistic juggleries of Szentkuthy, which had

transformed the novel into a work of the translator’s and,

through this, not only stole a lot of credit from the

writer, but also made the text much more difficult to

understand, with serious derails in themes, motifs or in

tone.

II.3.2. Structural errors

According to Marianna Gula, another type of problem

with Szentkuthy’s translation is that his solutions often

function only on a local level and not on a global one,

thus he breaks the linguistic web woven so carefully by

Joyce, and decomposes the novel’s structure.

We have already mentioned that the novel is full of

literal coincidences, the repetition of words, expressions,

advertisements, slogans, parts of a song, etc. which

function as linking elements between motifs and thematic

lines throughout the novel’s texture, referring back to

ideas that had previously appeared in former chapters. The

example given then was the ‘Throwaway-problem’, when

Leopold Bloom’s reply to his interlocutor (“I was just

going to throw it away, Mr. Bloom said.” U: 106)

accidentally chimes with the name of a starter horse,

Throwaway and, as a result, he will later be accused of

having won a big amount of money on that horse. To restore

the connection between those “pivotal textual points” (Gula

2010, 124) the new translator team re-established the link

between Bloom’s words and the horse’s name by finding a

satisfactory solution that enables the reader to perceive

and recognize the connection: the horse’s name became

‘Semmirekellő’ (meaning: good-for-nothing) instead of

‘Többsincs’ (Nomore) while Bloom’s words in Hungarian are:

“Nekem már úgysem kell semmire” (meaning: I don’t need it

for anything) (see idem. 124). To the attentive Hungarian

reader, the similarity between the noun/adjective

‘semmirekellő’ and the phrase ‘kell semmire’ is

unmistakable, or at least, it is not less obvious than its

original equivalent.

These literal coincidences are difficult even to

recognize, not to mention their successful transplantation

into the translated text. Szentkuthy’s fault to succeed in

it is not just his, then. In any case, its mistreatment is

an error that makes the reader of the translation

frustrated, as it stands in the way of understanding the

connection between separate parts of the novel; it deprives

him of playing those kinds of mnemotechnic games that the

original offers to help the reader reconstruct meanings and

the connections between them.

The words or longer passages resurfacing in a

leitmotiv-like way are most often parts of high culture ‒

quotations from the Bible or from a Shakespearean work ‒

but not exclusively. There can also be found elements

belonging to the contemporary pop-culture or subculture,

such as advertisements, slogans, popular songs, etc. One of

the main characters, Leopold Bloom has a profession that

was very new at the time, that of an advertising canvasser.

He reads an advertisement in the morning newspaper which

will recur in his thoughts many times throughout the day.

The slogan goes like this: “What is home without Plumtree’s

potted meat? Incomplete. With it? An abode of bliss” (U:

91). Szentkuthy translated it as follows: “Mit ér az

ebédem, ha nincs hozzá Plumtree húskonzerv? Keserv. Ha van:

második Éden”. Seemingly, there is nothing wrong with this

solution. The meaning and form ‒ sentence structuring ‒ is

indeed similar and, at the same time, there is a certain

creative quality to it (natural rhythm and alliteration:

húskonzerv- Keserv). However, as Marianna Gula points it

out, a keyword is left out entirely from the slogan, that

of ‘home’ which, according to literary analysis, is an

important motif in the novel: the text of the slogan

suggests not simply the incompleteness of a meal, a lunch

(Mit ér az ebédem) but the incompleteness of ‘home’; and

the feeling of physical and spiritual homelessness is

characteristic of both Stephen and Bloom, thus it is

essential to preserve this motif in translation. In the new

version the slogan goes like this: “Plumtree húskonzerv:

Nélküle mit ér az otthona? Szinte keserv. De véle: a tökély

hona”. This version preserves the musical quality of the

original, a necessary quality for a slogan to be easily

remembered (it is not accidental that it keeps recurring in

Leopold Bloom mind) and, at the same time, this new version

encompasses the ‘home’ motif which is meant to be evoked

and associated with the immediate textual context whenever

the slogan ‒ or a part of it ‒ resurfaces in Bloom’s

thoughts.

As we have also mentioned in the first part of our

paper, another structuring element in Joyce’s novel is the

committing of intentional errors by the author which later

recur in the characters’ thoughts, so that they become key

linking elements that connect separate parts of the text

through cross-references. The example given to this kind of

‘translatorial pitfall’ was Martha Clifford’s letter which

contains a suggestive typo, a spelling mistake: “I called

you naughty boy because I do not like that other world.

Please tell me what is the real meaning of that word.” (U:

95). Leopold Bloom will later remember this mistake, this

particular passage from Martha’s letter, during a funeral

when contemplating about life and death: “There is another

world after death named hell. I do not like that other

world she wrote. No more do I.” (U: 146). Thus, Bloom

associates Martha’s misspelling, the ‘other world’, with

death and hell. It is quasi impossible to find a word-pair

(word-world) with this formal similarity in Hungarian

which, at the same time, carries the same meanings (szó and

világ), as the original. As Kappanyos explains in one of his

presentations on the subject (see the presentation of

Kappanyos, p. 5), the first step to solve this problem was

to determine the order of priorities among these factors.

The translator team started out from the original

communicational intention of Martha Clifford to avoid

breaking the basic narrative line, so they tried to invent

a similar spelling mistake in the Hungarian version of the

sentence which, finally, reads as follows: “Rossz kisfiúnak

neveztem Magát, mert énnekem nem tetszik az a másik só”

(quoted on p. 5). Thus, the typo in Hungarian translation

materializes in the spelling mistake: szó-só (word-salt),

where the word-pair ‘szó-só’ shows the necessary formal

similarity present in the original. After deciding upon

this solution, the next step was to transform the context

in which an allusion to this mistake appears, so that it

should be able to incorporate the necessary linking

element, in this case, the word ‘só’. Therefore, the

English passage: “There is another world after death named

hell. I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do

I.” (U: 146) translated into Hungarian reads as follows: “A

halál után a másvilág jön, a halál az élet sója. Énnekem nem

tetszik az a másik só, azt írta. Nekem se”. [italicized by

me, T. P.]. There is an insertion compared to the English

original, a short sentence is added: ‘a halál az élet sója’

(meaning ‘Death is the salt of life’) and its only function

is to incorporate the linking word ‘só’ (salt) which serves

as the logical connector between Martha’s letter and

Bloom’s thoughts about death.

II.3.3. Referential errors

In the above mentioned interview, Marianna Gula

identifies another type of error in Szentkuthy’s version

that the translator team needed to rectify: the inaccurate

translation of culture-specific, Irish referential

information. Although Ulysses deals with numerous universal

themes ‒ the role of the sexes, prejudice, adultery, faith

vs. religion, questions of life and death, etc. ‒ it also

abounds in specifically Irish historical, political,

cultural and linguistic references. The English language

used in the novel is not part of, or an extension of the

well-known Victorian or post-Victorian imperial British

culture; on the contrary, it has its own specific

characteristics (see the presentation of Kappanyos, p. 2).

Their identification and accurate translation is much

easier for the translators of our time, as numerous

annotated volumes have been published since Szentkuthy’s

time, and the enormous amount of information on the

Internet also facilitate a much more effective work. Since

Ulysses is an Irish novel, its vocabulary is full of

Hiberno-English words which may exist in the vocabulary of

British English as well, but with different meaning. In his

presentation Kappanyos gives the example the Ormond Hotel’s

waiter named Pat, who is described by the following

epithet: ‘bothered’. This word, however, does not mean

‘troubled’ or ‘worried’ in this particular case; its

meaning is rather under the influence of the Irish original

‘bodhar’ which means ‘deaf’ (idem. 3). This characteristic

of his is quite important inasmuch as he is a character

constantly present in the chapter called the Sirens and

built on and around music.

A more complex referential error presented in the

interview with Marianna Gula is taken from the second

chapter entitled Nestor and, without any doubt it can be

labeled as shocking, even scandalous. During the class, in

his stream of consciousness Stephen Dedalus compares

himself with St. Columbanus, one of the most prominent

Irish saints of the Middle Ages, who was so determined to

go to Europe that not even her mother’s body, laid down on

the doorstep in front of him, could withhold him. In

English, the passage reads like this: “His mother’s

prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode”

(U: 33). Szentkuthy translates this as follows: “Az anyja

kinyújtott testét tüzes Szt. Kolumbán bigott hitőrületben

meglovagolta”. This sentence justly awakes the Hungarian

reader’s bewilderment, for there is no call for such

obscene overtone anywhere in its immediate context. If one

looks up the word ‘bestride’ in the dictionary, he can find

the following meanings (Hanks 1984, 140): “(1) to have or

put a leg on either side of, (2) to extend across, span,

(3) to strive over, or across”. Szentkuthy, however,

chooses another meaning which has, in Hungarian, an obvious

pejorative connotation.14 Now, this is another example for

his excessive, unreasonable attitude toward translation. In

the new version the sentence goes like this: “A lánglelkű

Kolumbánusz szent hitbuzgalmában az anyja földre omlott

testén is keresztüllépett”. While the latter version states

something that corresponds with the historical fact that

St. Columbanus left to preach the Gospel on the Continent,

Szentkuthy subverts this allusion into an obscene nonsense.

As Marianna Gula observes in the interview, he often

resorts to this strategy, that is, whenever the meaning of

the original text is unclear to him, he replaces it with

some alliterating obscene, scatological or blasphemous

expression. For example, when Stephen contemplates about

the milk-woman, she appears in his thoughts as the woman

symbolizing Ireland who serves her betrayer, Mulligan, and

her conqueror, the English Haines: “serving her conqueror

and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean,…” (U: 15). In

Szentkuthy’s translation this reads: “szolgálja hódítóját

és csapodár megcsalóját, közös kakakurva”, where the14 The word ’meglovagol’ has a strong sexual overtone in Hungarian.

Hungarian equivalent of the last word is again a result of

Szentkuthy’s frivolous solution; for, the term ‘cuckquean’

means the female obverse of the cuckold, that is, a woman

who has been cheated on. The new translation corrects this

error by cutting out the inappropriate connotation from the

expression: “szolgálja hódítóját és könnyelmű árulóját,

mindkettőtől megcsalatva”. This version may sound more

‘boring’, but it is much closer to the original meaning.

II.3.4. The treatment of covert intertextual allusions

As we have mentioned in the first part of our paper,

the existence of unmarked quotations or slightly modified

ones that are just alluded to in the novel, make Ulysses a

highly challenging text to translate. Right in the first

chapter there is a mysterious sentence that, according to

the critical analyses of the novel, is an allusion to a

similar sentence from the Bible. Buck Mulligan, still in

the mood for posing as a Biblical figure (see: “Mulligan is

stripped of his garments” – U: 19), passing out of the

room, he says: “And going forth he met Butterly” (U: 20).

Because this sentence is preceded by several Biblical

allusions leaving the mouth of Mulligan, one might assume

that this is another one. However, there is no such

sentence in the Bible, with the name of Butterly. And who

this Butterly could be, anyway, for there is no mentioning

of another person as a participant in the scene. Marianna

Gula points out that the sentence is actually a

‘Mulliganesque variation’ of the Gospel sentence: “And

going forth he wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:75, quoted in Gula

2010, 129) which refers to Peter who remembers the prophecy

of Jesus about his betrayal. The sentence is another

example of Joyce’s sophisticated pun, built on the acoustic

similarity of certain words and, through them he brings

into the text a multitude of potential reverberations of

meaning open to the reader’s interpretation. Both of the

two previous translators ‒ Gáspár and Szentkuthy – failed

to find such a solution that could show this biblical echo

for the Hungarian reader. The former translated the

sentence word by word: “És menet közben találkozott

Butterlyvel”, while the latter introduces a slight change

in meaning in his attempt to immitate at least Mulligan’s

parodistically lofty diction: “És előremenvén látá

Butterlyt”. The members of the new translating project

found that the existing Hungarian translations of that

particular sentence from the Bible are suitable for a

similar playful transformation so that the result should be

charged with a similarly multi-faceted meaning. From the

Gospel sentence “És kimenvén onnan, keserves sírásra

fakadt” it changes into: “És kimenvén onnan, kesergő

sírásóra akadt” (And going forth, he came across a grieving

gravedigger) (quoted in Gula 2010, 131). The transformation

is as witty as in the original, the rhythm of the Gospel

sentence is closely followed and, though the reverberations

related to the name Butterly (see Gula 2010, 130-131) get

lost in translation, the result can still be more

satisfactory than the previous ones. Beside the fact that

it preserves the motif of meeting (“akadt”-found) in this

“Book of Meetings” (Gula 2010, 131), the element of the

gravedigger is quite convenient, as Stephen is accused by

his aunt of being his mother’s gravedigger – since he

refused to pray at the side of his mother’s deathbed.

In the above we have listed some problematic features

of Miklós Szentkuthy’s version of Ulysses, the ones that we

found more interesting from a translator’s point of view,

but they are not the only ones. Beside these, and not

counting the ever occurring printing errors, in his

presentation Dávid Szolláth speaks about other kinds of

errors as well, such as trivial linguistic

misunderstandings and mistranslations which, however, were

easy to correct and thus, not so interesting from our point

of view; the inconsequent translation of some of the

characters’s names, nicknames or their invariable

attributes which makes it even more difficult for the

reader to recognize them; and finally, in spite of

Szentkuthy’s linguistic and stylistic virtuosity, the

reduction of stylistic variety in the characters’ diction:

most of them speaks the language of the translator (see the

presentation of Szolláth).

II.3.5. Correcting the incorrect grammar

Intentionally breaking the grammatical rules is one of

Joyce’s favorite means to build an effect of originality,

to immitate the natural, spontaneous flaw of thoughts of

the characters, or to conjure, with the help of linguistic

elements, a strong musicality within the text. These

linguistic deviances are often corrected in the

translations because the features of the target language do

not allow the creation of analogous infringements of the

grammatical rules. For example, most of sentences of the

original with an anomalous word order will sound perfectly

normal in the translated text. Nevertheless, we will

present a case here which, with the help of the

translators’ creativity and freedom of grammatical

constrains, manages to preserve the musical characteristics

of the original passage. The chapter called Sirens is

defined by music, and in this chapter Leopold Bloom thinks

about how annoying it was when two girls in his

neighbourhood used to practise scales on the piano, all at

once. Then there are three sentences in the next paragraph

which musically immitate the described memory of the girls

practicing the scales: “Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat

pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite flat pad. Pat took

plate dish knife fork. Pat went” (U: 359): they can be read

scaling up and down as they contain 8-8 syllables just like

the musical notes in a scale (do re mi fa sol la ti do).

Szentkuthy also pays attention to the rhythm of the passage

but this rapport between the words’ choice and their

particular musical function had not yet been discovered.

The passage in his translation reads as follows: “Kopasz

süket Pat lapos tömböt hoz. Tintával a tollat leteszi

laposan. Elvitte a tányért, tálat, kést, villát. Elment”

(quoted in Bényei 2012, 8). The passage has already a

telegram-like briefness, but it still sounds too ‘normal’.

The latest version, with its word trunks, gives back the

function of the original text. Hungarian is not that rich

in one-syllable-long words as English so the translators

had to break not just the natural fluency of a sentence −

as they figure in English, in a telegraphic style – but

also truncate the longer words so that they should fit into

the sentence’s rhythm: “Kop sük Pat hoz toll tint lap tömb.

Pat tesz tint toll Bloom lap tömb le. Pat visz tány tál kés

vill. Pat megy” (ibid.). The result makes the reader able to

read it out loud in solmization, just like the original;

and this strategy works perfectly here as long as this

chapter is full of truncated words in the original as well.

Final conclusions

James Joyce’s ouvre, including his novel entitled

Ulysses, has an encyclopedic, strong intertextual feature,

in that it encompasses numerous elements – quotations,

allusions, paraphrases – from previous literary works

carefully woven into the structure and thematic concept of

his textures. Ulysses is a relatively vast novel, but it is

not a complicated plotline that makes it so, but the

several associations of ideas, or the rich variety in style

when presenting themes.

Joyce’s Ulysses is probably the largest literary work

with such a carefully built structure that has ever been

translated into Hungarian. The text is full of

‘translatorial pitfalls’, as we could see in the first part

of this paper; therefore, the translators of this novel, as

Endre Gáspár said in the preface of his edition, face, with

all certainty, the most difficult translatorial decisions

of their proffesional career. They must find a solution for

all the situations when the adherence to the referential

meaning and to the structural elements enter into conflict,

and even if they find a satisfactory way out of the

pitfall, they still need to adjust the solution to the

situation so that it fits into the context and does not

sound artificial, unnatural in the target language.

The new, 2010 edition of the Hungarian Ulysses is the

result of an evolutional and cummulative process. It

started with the work of Endre Gáspár in 1947, which was

intended to be written for the contemporary intellectual

elite; Gáspár assumed that his readers possess the

necessary cultural and linguistic erudition to understand

the text, so he did not bother to familiarize its complex

system of cultural references. The Hungarian translation

was further developed by the contributions of Miklós

Szentkuthy, by his linguistic virtuosity and creativity.

The newest version was published in 2012 and it is strongly

built on Szentkuthy’s text: it preserves all its useful,

original linguistic inventions which could be reconciled

with the structure, system of cultural references, and

narrative texture of the original. With the help of new,

up-to-date sources, online and offline data bases, the new

translator team rebuilt the broken structural links and

reintroduced the cultural references within the novel

wherever it was possible, and eliminated the

mistranslations and stylistic exaggerations of the former

translator. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the ‘end

product’ is a final one, it certainly can be improved, as

long as even the original text itself contains many yet

unresolved issues waiting to be discovered or still under

debate.

The aim of this paper was to show some of the

difficulties a translator necessarily meets if s/he decides

to dive into such a complex and demanding text as James

Joyce’s novel, Ulysses and, after an exhaustive work of de-

construction and re-construction, to produce a satisfactory

result in rebuilding the ‘edifice’ by using the

possibilities the material of the target language allows

and offers. During our research we have found some very

interesting information on the novel’s complex structure,

its web of internal and external references, its linguistic

virtuosity, its richness in style and other factors

presented in this paper, all of which makes one realize

that, when it comes to literary translation as a particular

assignment, the assumption of translation theories are of

little help. They are useful in offering a necessary set of

terminology for didactic and critical purposes, for example

giving such general conceptions as ‘foreignizing’ or

‘familiarizing’ translation, which are the two basic

translatorial attitudes toward a source text and thus, they

are of primary importance right from the beginning of the

process of translation. However, other key terms, such as

‘equivalence’, show such a proliferation in meaning that

trying to comply with it would only paralyze the work of

the practicing translator. As far as the problem of

translation is concerned, we were interested mainly in how

practicing translators meet the manifold difficulties of

transposing a text from a source language to the target

language and, without any doubt translating literary texts

offers the greatest strain on the problem-solving and

creative abilities of the translator. From among the vast

scale of literary works we have chosen James Joyce’s Ulysses

for two reasons: on the one hand, the recent publication of

the new Hungarian edition brought the novel back into the

centre of attention among the Hungarian readers and

critics; and, on the other hand, the international interest

in the novel has never really faded since its first

publication.

We realize that what we have managed to present in our

paper is just the tip of the iceberg; the translatorial

‘pitfalls’ and the demonstrating examples described in it

give only a taste of the real complexity of James Joyce’s

masterpiece and of the struggle and delight of the

translators in trying to find optimal solutions to the

manifold translatorial problems. The real research of these

issues can start after a much deeper study into the fields

of English translation, Joyce philology, Irish studies and

Hungarian stylistics. Then, this paper could be extended

with further observations and exemplifications, it might as

well include critical observations regarding certain

choices and solutions of the different Hungarian

translators in translating Joyce’s Ulysses.

Ulysses in Hungarian

The odyssey of the Hungarian Ulysses

As Péter Egri states at the beginning of his paper

entitled James Joyce’s Works in Hungarian Translation (Egri 1967,

234), the ’general literary standard of the receptive

language’ is a very important factor which determines the

success or failure of translating the works of a foreign

author. The translator’s individual sensibility is not

enough for the success of the tranlation, the receptive

language must also have a sensibility of its own. This

sensibility of the language developes as a result of its

use by generations of its speakers, and more importantly,

its writers and, we may continue the thought, its

translators.

The first Joycean work to be translated in full-lenght

was Ulysses by Endre Gáspár, published in 1947. Prior to this

historical moment, two important changes had taken place

regarding Hungarian litarary language and style.

Firstly, at the beginning of the twentieth century,

the literary movement called Nyugat (West) attracted such

outstanding poets as Endre Ady, Mihály Babits, Dezső

Kosztolányi, Gyula Juhász, and novelists like Zsigmond

Móricz or Gyula Krudy, who transformed and enriched their

mother tongue so that it became a “proper medium” (p.234)

for introducing symbolism, impressionism and naturalism to

the Hungarian readers.

Secondly, during World War I and in the inter-war

period, poets like Lajos Kassák, Attila József, Miklós

Radnóti, and novelists such as Tibor Déry or Miklós

Szentkuthy carried out experimentations with the stylistic

possibilities of expressionism and surrealism, while some

of the listed authors had already been familiar with the

works of Joyce. However, Péter Egri points out that the

literary activities of those first four decades of the

twentieth century were just stylistic experimentations

paving the way for the later translations. In spite of the

fact that the first translation of Ulysses by Endre Gáspár

contains errors and inexactitudes – for example, the loss

of some of the Irish linguistic and literary qualities ‒ it

manages to preserve the novel’s surrealist, expressionist,

impressionist, naturalistic and symbolic effects, just like

its musicality.

The first translation appeared a few years after the

end of World War II, during the “hopeless oppression of the

communist era” (Kappanyos 2010, 554). For a long period

after its publication, Joyce was banned and deemed “a

suspicious writer of the rotting bourgeois culture”. After

the revolution in 1956, political control over cultural

products became more loose, however, a completely new

translation of Ulysses appeared only in 1974 by Miklós

Szentkuthy, which proved to be a high success and thus, it

increased immensly Joyce’s public recognition in Hungary.

This was followed by a second edition in 1986 containing

important editorial changes by Tibor Bartos and since then

it has been considered to be the standard text.

A re-edition and partial retranslation of Ulysses

appeared in 2012 as a result of a collective effort of a

translator team. The coordinator of the project was

literary translator András Kappanyos, the members: Gábor

Zoltán Kis, Dávid Szolláth and Marianna Gula, scholars of

English translation, Joyce philology, Hungarian stylistics,

Irish studies, etc.

The necessity of a new translation

There being already two ‒ or, if we take into account

the re-edition of Tibor Bartos, then three ‒ existing

Hungarian translations of Joyce’s Ulysses, why the necessity

of another one? András Kappanyos, the coordinator of the

translator team answers this question by highlighting the

strong and weak points of the existent translations, by

comparing the works of the two translators and making an

inventory of errors that needed correction (Kappanyos 2010,

554-556).

The first translator, Endre Gáspár had a long history

of literary tranlsation and still, with that behind him, in

his preface he called Ulysses the greatest effort of his

career. His text is “scholarly” (554), his attitude is that

of a humble servant: he tries to be as faithful to the

original ‒the source text ‒ and to keep as much information

as possible. Szentkuthy, on the other hand, being a first-

rate writer, an early follower of Joyce and a virtuoso of

style himself, produces an artistic text. His aim was to

recreate the deep cultural effect the original text had on

its readers, together with its scandalous nature, and to

familiarize the novel, to bring it closer to the Hungarian

readers. As a result, he oversimplified it: whenever he did

not understand something in the text, he turned it into

something funny, often obscenely funny, or he conjured up

some euphony by recurring to his own linguistic creativity,

which, however was not in concordance with the meaning or

effect of the original. In consequence, Szentkuthy’s

version of Ulysses may be much funnier to read, but more

difficult to understand. While Endre Gáspár did his best to

remain faithful to the original text and its writer,

Szentkuthy handled the original with much more freedom and

even tried to “improve” on Joyce. While the former

concentrated more on content and turned out to be a great

master of English, the latter tried to immitate the novel’s

form and style with the help of his virtuosity in his

mother tongue.

Kappanyos chooses an example from the second chapter

entitled Nestor to illustrate the two different attitudes

of the above mentioned translators toward the original

text: Stephen is holding a history class and asks one of

his pupils about Pyrrhus. Since he does not know anything

about that historical figure, he tries to extemporize,

making a free association based on the sounding of the

name: “‒Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier” (U: 29). The

phonetic similarity of the two words ‒ Pyrrhus and pier ‒

and thus, the logic of the association is obvious to the

reader of the original, but again, when translating the

text into any other language, the problem occurs how to

transpose both form and content through the translating

process. Endre Gáspár, who always aimed at being faithful

to the original, leaves the word ’pier’ unchanged, assuming

that his readers will be able to guess its meaning or, if

not, consult a dictionary in order to understand it:

“Pyrrhusról, sir? Pyrrhus az egy pier” (quoted in Kappanyos

2010, 554). Meanwhile, Szentkuthy translates the word

‘pier’ into Hungarian: “Pyrrhus, tanár úr? Pyrrhus az egy

móló” (Joyce 1998, 31). It is easy to notice that Gáspár’s

translation sounds more foreign (see the words ’sir’ and

’pier’ in the Hungarian text) and thus, seems more

difficult to understand; however, in spite of the fact that

Szentkuthy’s readers can understand better what the pupil

says ‒ his exact words ‒, since the similarity in sounding

dissapears, they cannot comprehend its reason, that is, the

logical connection among the words, the idea’s source, its

motivation.

As far as translation theories and translatorial

attitudes are concerned, in the mid-19th century Ferenc

Toldi, the father of Hungarian literary history

distinguished between ’fidelity to content’ and ’fidelity

to form’ and denied the possibility of their coexistence.

Károly Szász, on the other hand, proved this view to be

wrong by successfully translating epic poems from several

languages (see Baker 2001, 451). The aim of the translator

team was the same, to prove that they, as a group, can

achieve both: Gáspár’s scholarly competence (fidelity to

content) and Szentkuthy’s artistry (fidelity to form). With

the help of the numerous critical editions of the novel and

with the possibilities offered by the digitalized text, the

problems of textual, informational nature seem to have

decreased significantly, but Szentkuthy’s contribution is

far more difficult to exceed. Since it was obvious for the

translator team that they could not surpass many of his

brilliant poetical solutions, they decided to base their

work on Szentkuthy’s translation and correct its far-

fetched, improper or unreasonable solutions. The meticulous

work lasted almost nine years: it started in 2003 and ended

in 2012; furthermore, it was carried out under the

conception that it would be a critical translation with

ulterior additional notes to help the reader in the process

of reading and interpreting.

Errors and corrections

Far-fetched solutions

Not long after the publication of the new Hungarian

Ulysses, Marianna Gula gave an interview about the project,

in which she presented the manifold problems they had

encountered in the previous editions and what kind of

alternatives they had come up with to correct them (see

Bényei 2012).

She mentions in this interview that Szentkuthy’s

biggest fault was that, during its translation he reshaped

Joyce’s work according to his own style so that the result

may seem brilliant at first sight, but it reflects the

translator’s writing habits rather than the real author’s.

In other words, Szentkuthy became a co-author of Ulysses ‒

by often going too far from the original text ‒ rather than

remaining a humble servant a translator should be. Examples

of such poetic exaggerations can be found already at the

beginning of the novel. When Buck Mulligan, who is shaving

in the morning and, in the meantime, poses as a Christian

priest, calls for Stephen Dedalus from the top of the

tower: “Come up, you fearful jesuit” (U: 1). In

Szentkuthy’s version the order sounds like this: “Hozzám,

te Loyola Diabolica!”; while in the new translation: “Gyere

fel, te félelmetes jezsuita!” It is easy to observe, even

from this short passage, that Szentkuthy lets his

creativity run free and does not bother to remain faithful

to the original text, while the new translation strives not

to tell or express more than the original does. Another

example is related to a linguistic game favored by Joyce,

that of creating original, stunning compound words. Still

at the beginning of the novel, Mulligan says, praising the

sea: “The scrotumtightening sea.” (U: 3) In Szentkuthy’s

version it goes like this: “Ondulált ondó, ez vagy te,

tenger.”; while in the new edition: “Herezacskószorongató

tenger.” Again, the same difference in the translators’

attitude can be noticed: while Szentkuthy stylistically

overdoes it, the new version mirrors the original meaning

and, at the same time, imitates the form as well using the

same linguistic game of creating an original, long compound

word. The new translator team put a lot of effort to cut

back these linguistic juggleries of Szentkuthy, which

transformed the novel into a work of the translator’s and,

through this, not only stole a lot of credit from the

writer, but also made the text much more difficult to

understand, with serious derails in themes, motifs or in

tone.

Structural errors

According to Marianna Gula, another type of problem

with Szentkuthy’s translation is that his solutions often

function only on a local level and not on a global one,

thus he breaks the linguistic web woven so carefully by

Joyce, and decomposes the novel’s structure.

We have already mentioned that the novel is full of

literal coincidences, the repetition of words, expressions,

advertisements, slogans, parts of a song, etc. which

function as linking elements between motifs and thematic

lines throughout the novel’s texture, referring back to

ideas that had previously appeared in former chapters. The

example given then was the ‘Throwaway-problem’, when

Leopold Bloom’s reply to his interlocutor (“I was just

going to throw it away, Mr. Bloom said.” U: 106)

accidentally chimes with the name of a starter horse,

Throwaway and, as a result, he will later be accused of

having won a big amount of money on that horse. To restore

the connection between those “pivotal textual points” (Gula

2010, 124) the new translator team re-established the link

between Bloom’s words and the horse’s name by finding a

satisfactory solution that enables the reader to perceive

and recognize the connection: the horse’s name became

‘Semmirekellő’ (meaning: good-for-nothing), while Bloom’s

words in Hungarian are: “Nekem már úgysem kell semmire”

(meaning: I don’t need it for anything) (see p. 124). To

the Hungarian reader, the similarity is unmistakable.

These literal coincidences are difficult even to

recognize, not to mention their successful transplantation

into the translated text. Szentkuthy’s fault to succeed in

it is not just his, then. In any case, its mistreatment is

an error that makes the reader frustrated, as it stands in

the way of understanding the connection between separate

parts of the novel; it deprives him of playing those kinds

of mnemotechnic games that the original offers to help the

reader reconstruct meanings and the connections between

them.

The words or longer passages resurfacing in a

leitmotiv-like way are most often parts of high culture ‒

quotations from the Bible or from a Shakespearean work ‒

but not exclusively. There can also be found elements

belonging to the contemporary pop-culture or subculture,

such as advertisements, slogans, popular songs, etc. One of

the main characters, Leopold Bloom has a profession that

was very new at the time, that of an advertising canvasser.

He reads an advertisement in the morning newspaper which

will recur in his thoughts many times throughout the day.

The slogan goes like this: “What is home without Plumtree’s

potted meat? Incomplete. With it? An abode of bliss” (U:

91). Szentkuthy translated it as follows: “Mit ér az

ebédem, ha nincs hozzá Plumtree húskonzerv? Keserv. Ha van:

második Éden”. Seemingly, there is nothing wrong with this

solution. The meaning and form ‒ sentence structuring ‒ is

indeed similar and, at the same time, there is a certain

creative quality to it (natural rhythm and alliteration:

húskonzerv- Keserv). However, as Marianna Gula points it

out, a keyword is left out entirely from the slogan, that

of ‘home’ which, according to literary analysis, is an

important motif in the novel: the text of the slogan

suggests not simply the incompleteness of a meal, a lunch

(Mit ér az ebédem) but the incompleteness of ‘home’; and

the feeling of physical and spiritual homelessness is

characteristic of both Stephen and Bloom, thus it is

essential to preserve this motif in translation. In the new

version the slogan goes like this: “Plumtree húskonzerv:

Nélküle mit ér az otthona? Szinte keserv. De véle: a tökély

hona”. This version preserves the musical quality of the

original, a necessary quality for a slogan to be easily

remembered (it is not accidental, that it keeps recurring

in Leopold Bloom mind) and, at the same time, this new

version encompasses the ‘home’ motif which is meant to be

evoked and associated with the immediate textual context

whenever the slogan ‒ or a part of it ‒ resurfaces in

Bloom’s thoughts.

Referential errors

In the above mentioned interview, Marianna Gula

identifies another type of error in Szentkuthy’s version

that the translator team needed to rectify: the inaccurate

translation of culture-specific, Irish referential

information. Although Ulysses deals with numerous universal

themes ‒ the role of the sexes, prejudice, adultery, faith

vs. religion, questions of life and death, etc. ‒ it also

abounds in specifically Irish historical, political and

cultural references. Their identification and accurate

translation is much easier for the translators of our time,

as numerous annotated volumes have been published since

Szentkuthy’s time, and the enormous amount of information

on the internet also facilitates a much more effective

work.

One referential error presented in the interview is

taken from the second chapter entitled Nestor and, without

any doubt it can be labeled as shocking, even scandalous.

During the class, in his stream of consciousness Stephen

Dedalus compares himself with St. Columbanus, one of the

most prominent Irish saints of the Middle Ages, who was so

determined to go to Europe that not even her mother’s body,

laid down on the doorstep in front of him, could withhold

him. In English, the passage reads like this: “His mother’s

prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode”

(U: 33). Szentkuthy translates this as follows: “Az anyja

kinyújtott testét tüzes Szt. Kolumbán bigott hitőrületben

meglovagolta”. This sentence justly awakes the Hungarian

reader’s bewilderment, for there is no call for such

obscene overtone anywhere in its immediate context. If one

looks up the word ‘bestride’ in the dictionary, he can find

the following meanings (Hanks 1984, 140): “(1) to have or

put a leg on either side of, (2) to extend across, span,

(3) to strive over, or across”. Szentkuthy, however,

chooses another meaning which has, in Hungarian, an obvious

pejorative connotation15. Now, this is another example for

his excessive, unreasonable attitude toward translation. In

the new version the sentence goes like this: “A lánglelkű

Kolumbánusz szent hitbuzgalmában az anyja földre omlott

testén is keresztüllépett”. While the latter version states

something that corresponds with the historical fact that

St. Columbanus left to preach the Gospel on the Continent,

Szentkuthy subverts this allusion into an obscene nonsense.

As Marianna Gula observes in the interview, he often

resorts to this strategy, that is, whenever the meaning of

the original text is unclear to him, he replaces it with

some alliterating obscene, scatological or blasphemous

expression. For example, when Stephen contemplates about

the milk-woman, she appears in his thoughts as the woman

symbolizing Ireland who serves her betrayer, Mulligan, and

her conquerer, the English Haines: “serving her conqueror

and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean,…” (U: 15). In

Szentkuthy’s translation this reads: “szolgálja hódítóját

és csapodár megcsalóját, közös kakakurva”, where the

Hungarian equivalent of the last word is again a result of

Szentkuthy’s frivolous solution; for, the term ‘cuckquean’

means the female obverse of the cuckold, that is, a woman

who has been cheated on. The new translation corrects this

error by cutting out the inappropriate connotation from the

expression: “szolgálja hódítóját és könnyelmű árulóját,

mindkettőtől megcsalatva”. This version may sound more

‘boring’, but it is much closer to the original meaning.

15 The word ’meglovagol’ has a strong sexual overtone in Hungarian.

Covert intertextual allusions

As we mentioned in the first part of our paper, the

existence of unmarked quotations or slightly modified ones

that are just alluded to in the novel, make Ulysses a highly

challenging text to translate. Right in the first chapter

there is a mysterious sentence that, according to the

critical analyses of the novel, is an allusion to a similar

sentence from the Bible. Buck Mulligan, still in the mood

for posing as a Biblical figure (see: “Mulligan is stripped

of his garments” – U:19), passing out from the room, he

says: “And going forth he met Butterly” (U: 20). Because

this sentence is preceded by several Biblical allusions

leaving the mouth of Mulligan, one might assume that this

is another one. However, there is no such sentence in the

Bible, with the name of Butterly. And who this Butterly

could be, anyway, for there is no mentioning of another

person as a participant in the scene. Marianna Gula points

out that the sentence is actually a ‘Mulliganesque

variation’ of the Gospel sentence: “And going forth he wept

bitterly” (Matt. 26:75, quoted in Gula 2010, 129) which

refers to Peter who remembers the prophecy of Jesus about

his betrayal. The sentence is another example of Joyce’s

sophisticated pun, built on the acoustic similarity of

certain words and, through them he brings into the text a

multitude of potential reverberations of meaning open to

the reader’s interpretation. Both of the two previous

translators ‒ Gáspár and Szentkuthy – failed to find such a

solution that could show this biblical echo for the

Hungarian reader. The former translated the sentence word

by word: “És menet közben találkozott Butterlyvel”, while

the latter introduces a slight change in meaning in his

attempt to immitate at least Mulligan’s parodistically

lofty diction: “És előremenvén látá Butterlyt”. The members

of the new translating project found that the existing

Hungarian translations of that particular sentence from the

Bible are suitable for a similar playful transformation so

that the result be charged with a similarly multi-faceted

meaning. From the Gospel sentence “És kimenvén onnan,

keserves sírásra fakadt” it changes into: “És kimenvén

onnan, kesergő sírásóra akadt” (And going forth, he came

across a grieving gravedigger) (quoated in Gula 2010, 131).

The transformation is as witty as in the original, the

rhythm of the Gospel sentence is closely followed and,

though the reverberations related to the name Butterly (see

Gula 2010, 130-131) get lost in translation, the result can

still be more satisfactory than the previous ones. Beside

the fact that it preserves the motif of meeting (“akadt”-

found) in this “Book of Meetings” (Gula 2010, 131), the

element of the gravedigger is quite convenient, as Stephen

is accused by his aunt of being his mother’s gravedigger –

since he refused to pray at the side of his mother’s

deathbed.

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with Marianna Gula, one of the re-translators of Ulysses]

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Spring 1967, Vol. 4, n. 3.: 165-169.

Egri Péter: James Joyce’s Works in Hungarian

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Gula Marianna. 2010. Lost a Bob but Found a Tanner:

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