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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Science & Style: Literal Translation in the French versions of 'Ithaca'

Résumé

Describing “Ithaca” to Frank Budgen, James Joyce famously declared it to be “the ugly duckling of the book,” but also claimed it as his favourite. In keeping with the art, technique and organ assigned to it in the 1921 schema for Ulysses, “Ithaca” is often described as a dry and colourless, abstract and unemotional, mathematical and technical, mostly denotative episode, which in Karen Lawrence’s words “dons the antiliterary mask of science” and represents “a radical attack on the idea of literary style.” The move from the literary to the scientific, the technical and the affectless seems to imply that, because the episode comes across as characterized by denotation, it should be easier to translate. Defined as “a form of translation in which each source-text linguistic element is replaced by its closest target-language correspondent” (Jeremy Munday) and “because it is assumed to lose or destroy the literary” (Nikolai Popov), literal translation appears as the designated strategy to approach “Ithaca.” Yet, this mock-scientific style also largely depends on linguistic, formal features (e.g. the defamiliarizing use of Latinate words and structures, as well as morphological derivation) and therefore challenges the classical opposition between the literary and the literal, as the translation of the spirit requires that of the letter. Through a genetic analysis of the different French versions of “Ithaca," this paper will explore the approaches used by the translators to convey the features of this highly-constraining pseudo-scientific style, which requires both linguistic rigour and creativity, into a Romance language, and contend that Joyce’s playful experimentations, with the translation processes they entail, question and shed a new light on the commonly disparaged strategy of translating literally.
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Dates et versions

hal-03339224 , version 1 (09-09-2021)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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  • HAL Id : hal-03339224 , version 1

Citer

Flavie Epié. Science & Style: Literal Translation in the French versions of 'Ithaca'. Omniscientific Joyce: 27th International James Joyce Symposium, Ronan Crowley, John McCourt, Katherine O'Callagan & Laura Pelaschiar, Jun 2021, Trieste, Italy. ⟨hal-03339224⟩
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