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Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation. Patrick O'Neill. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. x + 301. $55.00 (cloth).
Translation is a matter at the heart of Joyce scholarship. Having spent almost two-thirds of his life in various Afferent European countries and outside of Ireland, polyglossy and intemationality have become trademarks in the critical approaches to the logophil Joyce. As Patrick O'Neill points out in his book, Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation, some of Joyces earliest literary efforts were translations: for example, translations of Gerhard Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang and Michael Kramer into English in 1901 and Italian translations of Yeats s The Countess Cathleen and Synges Riders to the Sea during the Triestine years. Likewise, Joyces books have been translated into at least forty different languages, some as exotic as Korean, Japanese, or Urdu, while Joyce himself took an active interest in having his works published in other European languages. And, of course, his last book, Finnegans Wake, crucially challenges the concept of translation. Although attempts were made to transpose the book into French and Italian during Joyce's lifetime, Finnegans Wake was long regarded as untranslatable.
Under the direction of Fritz Senn, the James Joyce Quarterly published a special translation issue as early as 1967, launching this novel interest in Joyce criticism. Since then a vast number of critical studies has been published on the subject, most of them offering in-depth, comparative analyses of a particular Joycean text and its equivalent in one foreign target language. O'Neill's Polyglot Joyce takes a different approach. Significantly marked by the influence of genetic criticism,...