ABSTRACT
In his book Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes Patrick O’Neill surveys a range of different translations of some, or occasionally all, of James Joyce’s recondite masterpiece and identifies three currents that seem to prevail among the strategies adopted and their approaches to fidelity. There are explanatory versions, which attempt to “identify what appears to the particular translator to be at least the surface meaning of the text” (O’Neill 2013, 288). One such rendering might be C.K. Ogden’s early intralingual translation of the closing pages of the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section into Basic English. Such translations, as Ogden notes, aim “to preserve merely a surface narrative coherence rather than striving for multiple textual resonances” (O’Neill 2013, 289). There are then what O’Neill calls imitative versions “attempting to reproduce as faithfully as possible the play of the text, including as far as possible some rendering of its pervasively flaunted polysemy” (O’Neill 2013, 288). In other words, wordplay in the original is replaced by wordplay in the target text, rather than explained. Finally, there are what he calls competitive versions, which attempt “to outdo Joyce at his own game, utilizing the original text as a springboard for displays of verbal pyrotechnics” (O’Neill 2013, 288). Yet what is most interesting in O’Neill’s assessment is that the translator who seems most intent on out-Joyceing Joyce is Joyce himself! The first example of a translation in this category that O’Neill quotes is the 1931 French translation of part of Anna Livia Plurabelle, a revision and extension by various hands, working under Joyce’s supervision,1 of a translation from the previous year by Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron; the second example is the 1940 Italian translation of the same text, translated by Joyce with Nino Frank.
