| Summary: | 博士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所比較文學博士班 === 101 === Reading Ulysses, Translating Stream of Consciousness:
A Hermeneutic View
Abstract
This dissertation aims to study James Joyce’s Ulysses and its two Chinese translations by Jin Di, and by the husband-and-wife team of Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo, from the perspective of how the stream of consciousness and interior monologue techniques in Joyce’s original posed difficulties and challenges to reading and translation. This analysis entails a thorough review of how James Joyce employs these thought representation techniques in three representative episodes, namely “Lestrygonians,” “Sirens,” and “Penelope.” Issues and concepts related to this study are discussed, beginning from a quasi-chronological review of the changing relationships between Comparative Literature and Translation in Chapter One.
Chapter Two deals with the concept of the role of the translator as intermediary, and focuses on a comparison between the Van Tieghem mesologic model and the Jakobsonian model for the translator’s role in the transfer of linguistic message.
Chapter Three discusses translation in general from the perspective of hermeneutics, with focus on the different hermeneutic concepts relevant to contemporary Translation Studies, such as equivalence, language asymmetry, translatability, third text and author’s intention. These hermeneutical concepts are analyzed side by side with a comparative review of relevant writings by Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Chapter Four gives a bird’s eye view of Ulysses, with emphasis on a detailed discussion of stream of consciousness and interior monologue techniques adopted by James Joyce to portray acts of the mind in his oeuvre. Definitions of key terms, based on Dorrit Cohn’s classification of the modes of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, such as psycho-narration, quoted monologue and narrated monologue, are illustrated using samples passages from Ulysses, as well as a comparative study of how they were translated by Xiao Qian and Jin Di, and how the translators differ in their readings and approaches to translation.
Chapter Five focuses on the “Lestrygonians” episode and looks into how the theme of food interferes with reading when presented together with Joyce’s already complex speech representation techniques. In this chapter, we see that the aroma and images of food, the pungent associations they conjure up in the “thoughtful” mind of Bloom, once juxtaposed with his disturbing anxiety over Molly’s infidelity, easily contribute to the difficulty of understanding the text of the episode. Allusions to food and long passages describing scenes of eating, interwoven with Bloom’s inner thoughts, easily make “Lestrygonians” the book’s most densely written section. The generous garnishing of gastronomical concepts and terminology in the episode contributes to a heightened difficulty of reading and translating passages in “Lestrygonians” where Joyce frequently employs his “cataloguing” technique. This episode represents a shift in style, made necessary because the main character of the episode moves around Dublin in search of a place to have lunch. This creates the need for opening psycho-narration passages for whole paragraphs or sections, thus giving context and stability to the quoted monologues that immediately follow.
Chapter Six discusses the theme of music, and probes into how sound and rhythm interfere with reading when incorporated into stream of consciousness passages. In “Sirens,” Joyce puts emphasis on playful phrasings and the disruption of conventional syntactical patterns done so as to enhance prose rhythm needed for musical effect. In this episode, Bloom’s interior monologues are no longer presented in extended passages. Instead, they are integrated into the narrative and often juxtaposed with dialogue and psycho-narration. Over and above these narratological changes, the density with which rhythm, sound, music and song lyrics are included makes reading of this episode quite formidable for a reader with an ear untrained in the innuendos of sound and musical patterns embedded in literary texts, more so when a translator has to render the story into another language.
Chapter Seven focuses on the last episode of Ulysses, “Penelope.” After getting acquainted with psycho-narration, narrated monologue and quoted monologue, as well as their various combinations in some of the preceding chapters of Ulysses, the reader faces a totally different perspective and format in the very last episode. “Penelope” is the only instance in the novel where the authorial voice is totally obliterated by the figural voice all throughout the episode. There is absolutely neither signs of an omniscient storyteller’s presence nor are there echoes of an overt narrative voice. Autonomous monologue is the most extreme form of stream of consciousness and the purest. In this episode, Molly tells her story by drawing from her memories of the past and her present circumstances, and her flights of fancy often touch on unexplained allusions to circumstances and details from the other episodes. This makes reading “Penelope” extra challenging, and when thought representational aspects related to autonomous monologue, as well as the absence of punctuation, exacerbate the difficulty of interpreting Molly’s mental excursions, the obstacles to a clear, unequivocal reading are multiplied several folds.
Chapter Eight is the concluding chapter and analyzes Joyce’s textual experimentation in Ulysses from the point of view of Saussure’s langue and parole, and from Jakobson’s metaphor and metonymy. For instance, James Joyce’s adopted technique of deviating from the common linguistic fund (langue) through his textual engineering and word coinage leads to reading difficulty. Among other techniques, Joyce uses agglutination to roll several words into one. Borrowing Umberto Eco’s term, agglutinations are “forced contiguities” between two or more words. Moreover, Joyce’s adopted technique of fragmenting quoted monologues, such as omitting a subject or cutting off a predicate, leads to what we could call an “absentee” metaphor. By extension, forced contiguity could be applied to study the shading of psycho-narration into quoted monologue, in which a third person sequence is made to combine with a first-person figural thought fragment, thereby disrupting the axis of combination. Similarly, the occlusion of words derived from themes of episodes in the discourse also constitutes “forced metaphor.” A case in point is song lyrics in “Sirens,” in which words of a song impair contiguity when inserted into a passage without any logical reason.
Finally, the translators’ adopted translation strategy vis-à-vis Joyce’s thought representation techniques are discussed from the perspective of context. Xiao, anxious of the political climate in China at that time, thus translates without retaining the Modernist forms of stream of consciousness while Jin, a Joyce scholar, applies his theory of dynamic equivalence in processing Ulysses’ verbal extravagance and textual experimentation. In many of the chapters, the two Chinese versions are juxtaposed with the original not so much to hunt translation errors as to illustrate the difficulty of understanding Ulysses passages written using Joyce’s well-engineered thought representation techniques.
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