DYNAMIC CHANGES: ULYSSES IN PRACTICE

Fritz Senn

Abstract

This essay uses concrete textual samples from Joyce's Ulysses to highlight what, in translation, must change, inevitably - apart of course from everything. Some things change even more, not things or words so much but vibrations, echoes, historical ghosts, reverberations. The focus is on passages that are also comments on, and therefore dependent on, the source language. The question is of what it is that has to be translated, and there are glances at the semantic confluences that may surface as play on words, ambivalences, double entendres or just misunderstandings.

Joyce generally magnifies all those age-old, well known issues and problems and often makes them central. Ulysses, moreover, can be seen as a sequence of its own internal translations, in its glides into diverse styles, registers or perspectives.