TransCultural Criticism: "jinglish janglage" Joyce in Polish.

8
Transcultural Criticism 'jinglish janglage' joyce in polish OLANTA W. WAWRZYCKA At one of the International James Joyce Symposia a prominent Joyce scholar told me that one of his books of criticism was being translated into Polish. Happy to hear about the project, I remained curious about its progress only to learn some time later that it had been halted. It is futile to speculate why. However, my aware- ness of that particular translation project has had a lasting effect on my reading of Joycean criticism: I approach it differently now, maybe because of my ongoing engagement in translation studies and maybe because I too, at various times, have considered a possibility of translating into Polish some of the classics of Joycean criticism but never fulfilled that ambition. The scope of the task seems enormous, and my recent re-reading of the Polish version of Dubliners has raised a number of questions about translation, not just of literature, but also of literary/theoretical criticism. The cardinal question pertains to the kind of Joyce' that the readers of the Polish language (and other languages) get to read. The Polish version of Dubliners made me realize not only that the Joyce of Dubliners could not but be lost in translation, but also that, in this context, little of the massive Western scholarship on Dubliners would make sense to Polish readers. In this essay I will illustrate my point by providing a handful of examples of the kinds of textual concerns present in critical readings of Dubliners that are untranslatable into Polish because the existing Polish translation of that text does not support the merit of translated criticism. In other words, the translator of criticism, having to rely for illustrations on the published Polish text of Dubliners , would encounter con- siderable difficulties in supplying illustrations/ examples of what the Western Joyceans mean when they analyse a given aspect of Joyce's work.' Some of the most fundamental departures from 'Joyce' in Polish have to do with what myriad critics have been for years commenting on: Joyce's unprece- dented economies of usage and syntax. As early as 1965, in his essay • "He Was Too Scrupulous Always"; Joyce's "The Sisters"', Fritz Senn had observed that 'All through his career Joyce seemed incapable of using words in one single bare sense only ... [H]e made them do a lot of work, discharging all their potential historical 436 and literary accretions. Words, too, are symbols behind which are massed centuries

Transcript of TransCultural Criticism: "jinglish janglage" Joyce in Polish.

Transcultural Criticism 'jinglish janglage' joyce in polish

OLANTA W. WAWRZYCKA

At one of the International James Joyce Symposia a prominent Joyce scholar told me that one of his books of criticism was being translated into Polish. Happy to hear about the project, I remained curious about its progress only to learn some time later that it had been halted. It is futile to speculate why. However, my aware­ness of that particular translation project has had a lasting effect on my reading of Joycean criticism: I approach it differently now, maybe because of my ongoing engagement in translation studies and maybe because I too, at various times, have considered a possibility of translating into Polish some of the classics of Joycean criticism but never fulfilled that ambition.

The scope of the task seems enormous, and my recent re-reading of the Polish version of Dubliners has raised a number of questions about translation, not just of literature, but also of literary/theoretical criticism. The cardinal question pertains to the kind of Joyce' that the readers of the Polish language (and other languages) get to read. The Polish version of Dubliners made me realize not only that the Joyce of Dubliners could not but be lost in translation, but also that, in this context, little of the massive Western scholarship on Dubliners would make sense to Polish readers. In this essay I will illustrate my point by providing a handful of examples of the kinds of textual concerns present in critical readings of Dubliners that are untranslatable into Polish because the existing Polish translation of that text does not support the merit of translated criticism. In other words, the translator of criticism, having to rely for illustrations on the published Polish text of Dubliners, would encounter con­siderable difficulties in supplying illustrations/ examples of what the Western Joyceans mean when they analyse a given aspect of Joyce's work.'

Some of the most fundamental departures from 'Joyce' in Polish have to do with what myriad critics have been for years commenting on: Joyce's unprece­dented economies of usage and syntax. As early as 1965, in his essay • "He Was Too Scrupulous Always"; Joyce's "The Sisters"', Fritz Senn had observed that 'All through his career Joyce seemed incapable of using words in one single bare sense only ... [H]e made them do a lot of work, discharging all their potential historical

436 and literary accretions. Words, too, are symbols behind which are massed centuries

Transcultural Criticism

of traditional, scriptural, literary and marketplace use. '• It is in this context that Senn looks at a few instances of how the Italian, Spanish and German translators handled Joyce's use of words. Senn's attempt is to determine the degree of sensit­ivity, if any, to Joyce's economies of language; he concludes that 'none of these translators gives the original text the attention it deserves' (72). Almost thirty years ago Senn had registered the same kinds of concerns about the translators' treatment of Joyce's text that l wish to raise now . in regard to the Polish translation of Dubliners.

There are certain losses in the Polish Dubliners that, most likely, have to do with the unavailability to the Polish translator of some basic 'satellite' texts by (and about) Joyce, such as his letters, or Ellmann's biography.' The stylistic features of the translation, for example, convey none of Joyce's declared 'scrupulous mean­ness'; Joyce's famous letters to Grant Richards that proclaim Dubliners to be 'a chapter of the moral history of his country' (and all of the voluminous correspon­dence between Joyce and Grant Richards that preceded the publication of Dubliners in 1914) might not have been available to the translator. Such speculations, tenuous (and unfair) as they may be, are based on numerous instances of inattention to (r) those aspects of Joyce's style that precipitated his problems with the publisher in the first place (i.e. his lexical and syntactic choices) and to (2) the very essence of what makes Joyce's style so uniquely his (including his use of repetition).

Such inattention happened to one of my favourite sentences in Dubliners, found in 'The Boarding House'. We learn that Mrs Mooney was, as a butcher's daughter should be, an appropriately decisive woman: 'she dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat' (D 63). In Polish this sentence reads: 'Problemy moraine zwyk.la traktowac podobnie jak mi<(SO kt6re sift dzieli toporem' (Polish D 55) ('[She] treated moral problems similarly to meat that is divided by an axe'). The syntactic parallel is lost in the Polish version, as is the rhythm of the sentence. 'Cleaver' is rendered as 'top6r', ('axe') instead of as 'tasak', all of which pretty much, well, butchers for the Polish reader Joyce's poignant, cutting, and 'scrupu­lously mean' simile.' The French translation is more faithful in tone and rhythm to Joyce-'Elle traitait les problemes meraux comme un couperet traite Ia viande' (French D 121)-and so is the Spanish version: 'Ella lidiaba con los problemas morales como Iidia el cuchillo con Ia came' (Spanish D 61); the Italian version skips the beat, but preserves the bite: 'Trattava i problemi morali come il macellaio Ia camel' (Italian D 96). When Fritz Senn analyses this line in his essay '"The Board­ing House" Seen as a Tale of Misdirection',' he highlights the play on the word 'cleaver' by pointing out that 'It was a cleaver also that [Mrs Mooney's] husband used when he "went for her" (D 61). It was after that that she "got a separation" (0 61).' Senn quotes Genesis to remind us that 'the injunction was that man "shall cleave unto his wife" (Gen. 2.23-4)' (407). Now, to translate Senn's article into Polish and to preserve his line of thinking in this passage would be difficult if not impossible, because the Polish word for 'cleaver' and the subsequent play on the economies of this word are missing from the Polish text of 'The Boarding House'.•

Philip Herring, in his analyses of malapropisms in 'Structure and Meaning in Joyce's "The Sisters'" ,7 points out that in the story the boy 'hears ritual dialogue and misnomers like "the Freeman's General" for "the Freeman's journal", "rheumatic"

437

A Collideorscape of Joyce

438

for "pneumatic" wheels. These signs of defective language are appropriate to the conversation's subject-a defective priest' (Herring 135). The language phenomena mentioned by Herring in this quotation are particularly difficult to deal with. I have analysed them in some detail elsewhere,' so here I will only point out that the Polish, French. Spanish and Italian translations leave Joyce's Freeman's General as just that: Freeman's General (only the French translation footnotes it as malaprop­ism), and that the 'rheumatic wheels' of the carriage are corrected into 'pneumatic wheels' in the French, Spanish and Italian translations of Dubliners. The Polish translator attempts to make sense out of the seemingly nonsensical 'rheumatic wheels' and, via the process of semantification, creates the carriage with wheels that 'nie trzttsi. dobre dla reumatyk6w' (Polish D 12) ('do not jolt, good for rheumat­ics'). Herring's comments on malapropisms in Joyce's text would make no sense if they were to appear in Polish; as is the case with Senn's critical remarks, the phrases under Herring's critical analysis simply do not exist in the Polish text of Duhliners."

As is commonly known among Joyce critics, Joyce paid special attention to titles. In 'Metaphors of the Narration/Metaphors in the Narration: "Eveline'", John Paul Riquelme states that it is the title rather than the language of narration that often contains structural metaphor, as in the 'implications of the title of FW when treated as figures, both pun and metaphor'." Suggesting that title 'focuses the reader's attention on the act of writing as telling', Riquelme sees several of Joyce's titles in Dubliners as being 'suggestive, particularly in their interaction' (74) . What follows is Riquelme's poignant analysis of that interaction. However. since few titles in the Polish Dubliners correspond to Joyce's titles, l will depart from Riquelme's comments here and conceurate on the manner in which Joyce makes usc of titles in Dubliners and how they are rendered in Polish.

In analysing the titles of Dubliners, Ulrich Schneider notes their extreme short­ness, appropriate for the genre they represent." 'They indicate', says Schneider, 'that Joyce will not waste a single word but instead develop a strategy of omission, which is further suggested by the word 'gnomon' on the first page' (408). Schnei­der continues by enumerating nine one-word titles ('The Sisters' , 'An Encounter', 'Araby', 'Eveline', 'Counterparts', 'Clay' , 'A Mother', 'Grace', 'The Dead'), one compound ('The Boarding House') , four titles that 'just add an adjective, a preposi­tion, or a numeral' ('After the Race', 'Two Gallants', 'A Little Cloud', 'A Painful Case!'), and one title which 'runs into six words, four of them monosyllabic ('Ivy Day in the C orrunittee Room')' (408).

As can be expected, critical analysis pertaining to titles would have to be quali­fied if it were to be translated into Polish, or any language for that matter, because the number of words in translated titles does not always correspond to the number of words used by Joyce. More significantly, however, some titles in Polish have been changed altogether: 'Counterparts' to 'Umowa BodJey & [sic] Kirkwan' ('Agreement between Bodley and Kirkwan', change from one word to four), 'Two Gallants' to 'Dwaj rycerze', ('Two Knights'; two words are kept), 'Clay' to 'Wr6i:by' ('Divinations', one word translation is kept), and 'Ivy Day in the Com­mittee Room' to 'Lise bluszczu' ('Ivy Leaf, six words are reduced to two)." I will address briefly the effect those changes have on the meaning of the Polish transla-tions of Joyce's stories, especially in the context of criticism.

Transcukural Criticism

The Polish title 'Agreement between Bodley & (sic] Kirkwan' for 'Counter­parts', by adding words to Joyce's one-word title, shifts the focus of the story and simplifies, if not flattens, its impact. The ambiguity of the English-language title could be preserved by the Polish equivalent of the word 'counterparts' but the demands of Polish inflection make it necessary for the translator to decide whether the word refers to people ('odpowiednicy') or to inanimate objects ('odpowied­niki'). If the problem were to be solved by using singular case in Polish ('odpowiednik'), then Joyce's plural would have been adulterated. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the context of Joyce's story does not necessarily eluci­date the title. The Polish translator opted for a descriptive solution which elimi­nates the story's (and the title's) built-in ambiguity.''

The word 'counterpart' is analysed by David Weir in his essay, 'Gnomon is an Island: Euclid and Bruno in Joyce's Narrative Practice', in the context of politics of the power structures that Farrington unconsciously imitates:

We have already noted that the activities of mimicry and copying in the story, of producing counter­parts of various kinds (documents, accents, stories), are gnorrtic in a general sense because of the dual principles of replication and dirrtinution: a gnomon may be smaller 'counterpan' of a larger parallelo­gram-identical' in shape but smaller in size. This meaning of gnomon seems to have considerable rele­vance to the politics of'Counterparts'."

The dynamics described by Weir, not that novel after all, appears to have been unperceived by the translator, so much so that a brand new title had to be forged for Joyce's story to sort out the correlation between its title in the original and its content. A question emerges: should a translator of Joyce be also a critic? My answer is an emphatic 'yes'. Critical insights, or their absence, can make, or break, a story.

In the case of 'Two Gallants', the change of title to 'Two Knights' significantly reduces the sardonically caustic milieu of the story. The Polish language has the word 'galant' in its vocabulary, with adjectival and nominal equivalents correspond­ing to those in English (including Polish 'galanteria' for the English 'gallantry') . Both in English and in Polish, the word 'gallant/galant' reverberates with the kind of ironic overtones that the word 'knight' does not, and the synonym, 'ladies' man', (Polish 'bawidamek') takes it much deeper into its negative semantic spec­trum than does the word 'knight'. In addition, the Polish translator had a rare opportunity here (as is the case with 'The Sisters', 'Eveline' , 'Araby', and 'A Mother') to stay lexically as close to the original word as possible.

The title 'Clay' is translated into Polish as 'Wr6Zby', or 'Divinations'. Notably, the word 'divinations' is never used by Joyce in this story. There is a mention of 'some Hallow Eve games' (D 104), which is rendered as 'various games' (Polish D 'r6ine gry', 92). Poles do not celebrate Halloween and Joyce's two references to 'HalJow Eve' (D 101, 103) are translated first as 'wigili(a] Sw. Andrzeja' (Polish D 88), meaning 'Eve of St Andrew' (29 Nov.) and the second time as 'Andrzejki' (Polish D 90), a more popular name for the Polish celebration ofSt Andrew's Day, which falls on 30 November, a month away from the 31 October celebration of All Hallow's Eve. The Polish translator opted for substituting one celebration for the other probably because they share the game of divination played by those who attend the parties. During St Andrew's divinations, each person pours melted wax 439

A Collideorscape of joyce

440

into cold water and the shape into which the wax coagulates is then cast on the wall as a shadow whose shape is 'read' for its possible significance, much to the amusement of all 'Andrzejki Party' participants. But since in Poland these festivities are not associated with witches, the web of witch/Maria/Halloween connotations woven by Joyce in 'Clay' is absent from the translation, which renders this remark­able story particularly flat and incomprehensible to the Polish reader.''

More importantly, such critical readings as Margot Norris' 'Narration under a Blindfold: Reading Joyce's "Clay"', are untranslatable into Polish given the current version of the Polish 'Clay'." Norris' analysis of the 'soft wet substance' and Maria's 'fear to utter its significance' (213) as the excrement that Maria's life really is (imperfectly hidden under flattering narration), relies on the reading of the word 'clay', which Norris designates to be a 'polite circumlocution that eradicates the dirt and squalor of Maria's life and therefore replicates her own efforts as a slavey. "Clay" names and exhibits the work of a rhetorical scullion' (2 I 3). How does one translate a piece of criticism whose key term coincides with the key (and title) word of the story in the original, but which term/word is entirely absent from the translation?"

The case of the Polish 'Lise bluszczu', or 'l vy Leaf, for Joyce's 'lvy Day in the Committee Room' presents another difficulty. The contents of the title (the histor­ical Ivy Day, the ivy leaf itself, the Corrunittee Room) are the examples of what, for the Jack of a better word, I would call 'irishisms', that is, those condensed asso­ciative (or symbolic) units of knowledge that encapsulate the Irish history, legend, and lore and that contribute to richness (and Irish ness) of Joyce's texts by providing the knowing reader with context, subtext and overtext, looming large over, under, and around the surface text. 'lrishisrns' are pretty much commonplace for the read­ers of Joyce (or of Irish literature in general), but they are, for the most part, not accessible to the foreign-language readers of Joyce. The Polish text of 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room' provides a footnote to Joyce's 'If this man was alive ... ' (D 1 22), stating that the reference is to Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the Irish national liberation movement whose faithful followers wore an ivy leaf in their buttonholes. Considering the importance of the figure of Parnell to Joyce and to Irish history (not to mention the fact that this was Joyce's favourite story), the translation of this title into Polish merits particularly close attention: the title, l argue, needs to be not only preserved in translation but also annotated (as the French translator did it), since the Polish reader will not be familiar with the imme­diate historical reference to Parnell nor with the intricacies of Parnell's role in the history of nineteenth-century Ireland (and his impact on twentieth-century Ireland) to appreciate the story fully. Incidentally, the Spanish and the Italian translations of this story provide nothing (as in 'nada' and 'niente', respectively) for their readers in terms of explanation of this particular title, and whereas there are sporadic foot­notes in the Italian text of Dublinm, none exist in the Spanish one.

'Ivy Day in the Corrunittee Room', as discussed by Michael Brian in his essay, "'A very Fine Piece of Writing": An Etymological, Dantean and Gnostic Reading of Joyce's "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"', allows for yet another the set of comments pertinent to translation.'' They have to do with a particular brand of repetition. Brian points out a high frequency of occurrence (deliberate on Joyce's

Transcultural Criticism

part) of the word 'man' in combination with 'major', 'Master', 'Mr', in 'Ivy Day'. He quotes Skeat's derivation of the word 'man' and its cognates 'mind', 'mention', 'money', 'mean', also highly concentrated in the story, and appearing in the con­text of O'Connor and Henchy, who are 'having a particular battle of manhood between themselves' (471). The Polish translation of the Joyce sentences quoted by Brian for the most part replaces Joyce's repetitive use of the word 'man' either with 'he', or with a proper name, or entirely omits it as a word. And since, as can be expected, there is no paraUel etymological link between the words 'man', 'mind', 'mention', 'money', 'mean' in Polish, the Polish reader would not/could not profit from the insights ofBrian's article, if it were to be translated.

In this context, the immediate question arising for translation theory and prac­tice is: should the translator be expected to perceive nuances like the ones illus­trated by Brian's article, or Norris', or Senn's, and footnote them? Is there a required level of familiarity with J oycean criticism that decides whether a translator is qualified or not to translate Joyce? The 'agenda' behind these questions, transpar­ent as it is, betrays my belief that translators of Joyce need also to be Joyce scholars and critics, for only then will they know Joyce's work well enough to appreciate the cardinal importance of, say, repetition, (or of Skeat's Etymological Dictionary which Stephen reads 'by the hour'). In the Polish Dub/inns, almost without excep­tion, Joyce's deliberate repetitions of words or phrases are either substituted by syn­onyms or entirely omitted from the translated text. Thus such constructs as the famous description of Maria-' Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin' (D 99)-end up dismantled in transla­tion and read back into English as 'jinglish janglage' : 'Byla niziutkiego wzrostu al e miala ogromnie dlugi nos i nie mniej dlugt brod<t' (Polish D 87) ('She was of tiny height but she had an enormously long nose and equally long beard'), the last word being an unfortunate choice, since 'beard' in Polish means both 'chin' and 'beard' (there being also a perfectly corrunon word in Polish denoting only 'chin' , 'pod­brodek', which should have been employed here) . Which brings me to another issue, but .. . I need to close.

The pwblems of translation raised by me here are part of a more in-depth study I am presently working on. As a practising translator, I feel the traduttore I tradittore split in me for engaging in the critique of another translator's work. Roman Ingar­den once asked: 'What is the lowest allowable threshold that still makes translation 'faithful'?''' The answer would require a clear defmition of 'faithful' , which lngar­den attempts to provide though a senes of phtlosophical and philological divaga­tions (163-86). But in practice , the agonies of translation , in terms of fidelity to form and sense, are known to bur a handful of scholars. Paul Valery captured ir well when he described the process of translation as 'making, unmaking, remaking, sac­rificing here and there, resto ring . . . ' and as a 'labor of approximation with its little successes, its regrets, its conquests, and its resignations . .. ' ."' In this context, Fritz Senn's wise and witty warning that '[t]he search for errors in translations, though deeply gratifying to our malevolence and a gleeful pastime of fellow translators, is perhaps the least profitable pursuit' is well taken." But it is my contention that a task as grand as transmitting a text by none other than Joyce from one language (and culture) to another, carries with it a responsibility to the audience, who will

441

A Collideorscape of Joyce

442

read the source text in a target language, and it borders on crime to mis/transmit and mis/render what Joyce wrote. The implications of such mis/rendition are not limited to just 'joyce'; they extend to Joycean textual and critical scholarship and, ultimately, to the reception of Joyce's work in other countries.

notes As I will d~monstcate throughout this essay, the trarulator of Joycean criticism would have to sup­ply his/her own translation of passages from Joyce that are the subject of critical commentary, rather than rely on the existing, published translation. The Dubliners translations used in this essay are the following: D11bliriczycy, Kalina Wojcicchowsk:a (mos.) (Warszawa: Osk.ar, 1991). D11bliuois,jacques Aubert (trans.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). D11blitwes, Guillermo Cabrera-lnfante (trans.) (Madrid: El Libro de Bolsillo, 1974). Ge11te di Dublirw, franca CanCOI,'tli (trans.) (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 1978).

2 james Joyce Quartttly 2.2 (Winter 191i5), M-71 ((i(i) . The text of the Polish Dublinm I'm working with was published in II)<) I. However, as I found out during one of my visits to the ZilrichJamesJoyce Foundation, this translation 6rst appeared in 195H,

though the 1991 publication does not identify itself as a reprint. Whereas the translator in the late 6fues in Communist Poland could be excused for not having access to Joycean materials (Gilbert's Letters appearing in 1957 and Ellmann's James Joycr and uccers not having been published yet), the appearance of the same text over thirty years later without any revisions borders on inexcusable.

4 The rhythm and syntax of this sentence can be preserved by rendering it as follows: 'Traktowala problemy moralne jak tasak traktuje mi<;,so.' jam-s Joyce Quarterly 23-4 (Summer 19M6). 40 5-1 3.

1\ Alas, the word 'to cleave', so wonderfully antonymous in English, does not have its parallel in Pol­ish. Senn 's brilliantly insightful reading would have to be footnoted for the Polish reader.

7 In Bernard Benstock (ed.), The Stvmtll ofjoycr (Bloomington: lnrliana UP, 1982), 131-44· R My e"ay 'Te>et at the Crossroads: Multilingual Transformations of Dub(;.,.,.,· is scheduled to appear

in New Readi11gs of Joyu's Dubliners, Rosa Maria BosineUi and Harold F. Mosher, Jr (eds) (U of Kentucky P, forthcoming 1 ')98).

9 Retaining Frumau's General and translating 'rheumatic wheels' as 'kola reumatycme' (and footnot­ing them as misnomer and malapropism respectively) would certainly add to the Polish reader's appreciation of Joyce's style. J n adrlition to Herring's, numerous other critical essays that deal with these phrases would be much more translatable.

10 In Harold Bloom (ed.),Jame>]oyce's Dubliners (New York: Chelsea House, 1988), 73-87 (73) . 11 Ulrich Schneider, 'Titles in Dubliners', Style 25 (Fallt991), 405-15. 12 The following three columns list Joyce's titles, their Polish translations as they appear in the pub­

lished Polish translation and, in the right-hand column, my own translations (asterisks flag the dif­ference in translation). My effort was to preserve both Joyce's sense and the number or words he used (minus the articles. which Polish does not use): 'The Sisters' 'Siostry' 'Siostry' 'An Encounter' 'Spotkaniell 'Spotkanie' 'Araby' 'Arabia' 'Anbia' 'After the Race' 'Po wyscigach' 'Po wy~cigach' 'Two Gallant' 'Dwaj rycerze'* 'Dwaj galanci'* 'The Boarrling House' 'Pensjonat' 'Pensjonat' 'A Lttle Cloud' 'Chmurka' 'Chmurka' 'Counterparts' 'Clay' 'A Painful Case' 'Ivy Day in the Committee

Room' 'A Mother'

'Umowa Bodley & K.irkwan'* 'Wr62:by'* 'Przypadek godny ubolewania'* 'Lilc bluszczu '*

'Matka'

'Korespondenci'* 'Glina'* 'Bolesny przypadek'* 'Dzien bluszczu w

gabinecie komitetu'* 'Matka'

Transcultural Criticism

'Grace' 'The Dead'

'Laska Boza'* 'Zmarli'

'Laska'* 'Zmarli'

1 J The Polish word 'odpowiednik' ('counterpart') shares a root with 'odpowiadac' ('to answer'); we remember the answer that Farrington deals to Mr Alleyne. Semantic range of this word in Polish, as in English, includes 'to correspond (to/with sth/sb)', 'to be responsible (for sth)', 'to suit (a pur­pose)', 'to satisfy (a need)', etc. and all of these meanings are played upon in 'Counterparts'. Another translation of the word 'counterparts' into Polish would also produce 'kopie; duplikary' ('copies; duplicates'), a word that I would be tempted to adopt for this story and the one that the Spanish translator chose: 'Duplicados'. The French title, 'Contreparties', has a slightly different semantic coloration: 'compensations'. The Italian 'Contropartita' is a coinage roughly denoting 'the opposites' or 'opponents'. As the preceding footnote indicates, my translation of this title into Polish would be 'Korespondenci' ('Correspondents').

14 David Weir, 'Gnomon is an Island: Euclid and Bruno in Joyce's Narrative Practice', james joyce

Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1991), 343-&J (349-50). 1 5 In French, Spanish and Italian 'the Hallow Eve' is rendered by their eguivalents in those languages:

'veillee de Toussaint', 'Vispera' and 'vigilia d'Ognissanti' respectively. The reference to 'some Hal­low Eve brames' is translated as 'les jeux de veillee de Toussaint' (French D 178), 'juegos de vlspera de Todos los Santos' (Spanish D 99) and 'giochi di circonstanza' (Italian D 138), the latter, 'occa­sional games', resembling the Polish non-specific translation, 'various games'.

11i PMLA 102(March 19H7),2o6-15. 1 7 Only the French translation of 'Clay' is rendered faithfully as 'Argile', allowing the reader to make

the connection between the title and the 'soft wet substance' Maria touches (D 105) (and certainly making it possible to translate Norris' reading into French). The Italian 'Cenere' {'Ashes') and the Spanish 'Polvo y ceniza' ('Dust and Ashes') depart from Joyce and, although the words 'dust' and 'ash' reverberate with connotations of death (like 'clay' does in Joyce), they become relegated to the realm of metaphor (unlike the literal, palpable clay felt by Maria). The Polish title, 'Divina­tiOns', reductive however it may be, seems almost more adeguate when compared to the Italian and Spanish translations because it retains the connection to the context of the story.

1M Style 25 (Fall19<)1), 41ili-H7. 19 Roman Ingarden, 'On Translations', Jolanta W. Wawrzycka (trans.), Analecta HIISserliana 33,

I] 1--<)2 (164). 20 Paul Valery. 'Variations on the Eclogues', in Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (eds), Theories of

Tramlatio11 (Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1992), IIJ-21i (1 19). 21 Fritz Senn,joyce's Dislowtiom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1 9H4), 5.

443