Taking my starting-point in Maria Tymoczko’s claim (1999) that syntagmatic elements in texts present the greatest challenges to translators and readers of translations, I want to argue that literary translators and translation scholars need to pay greater attention to clusters of wordplay rather than distinguishing puns as individual, separate brain-teasers. Hence, more is at stake in the translation of wordplay than just trying to transfer the source text complexities into the target language. Historical, social and other contextual and intertextual factors must also be taken into consideration. My case in point is an examination of the transfer of highly challenging networks of puns in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into Danish and German. The theoretical frame of reference is a discussion of puns in the critical works of Dirk Delabastita, Jonathan Culler, Derek Attridge and Patricia Parker followed by a critique of translator and critic Frank Heibert’s methods of evaluating the German translations.
Joyce, James1922/1934. Ulysses. New York: Random House.
Joyce, James. 1922/1986. Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler. London: The Bodley Head.
Joyce, James. 1949. Ulysses, tr. tr. Mogens Boisen. Copenhagen: Martins Forlag.
Joyce, James. 1970. Ulysses, tr. Mogens Boisen. Copenhagen: Martins Forlag.
Joyce, James. 1986/1990. Ulysses, tr. tr. Mogens Boisen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
b. secondary literature
Attridge, Derek. 1988. “Unpacking the portmanteau, or Who’s afraid of Finnegans wake?”.
Culler 1988
: 140–155.
Culler, Jonathaned. 1988. On puns: The foundation of letters. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Culler, Jonathan. 1988a. “The call of the phoneme”.
Culler 1988
: 1–16.
Delabastita, Dirk. 1993. There’s a double tongue: An investigation into the translation of Shakespeare’s wordplay, with special references to Hamlet. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Heibert, Frank. 1993. Das Wortspiel als Stilmittel und seine Überstetzung: Am Beispiel von sieben Übersetzungen des Ulysses des James Joyce. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Henry, Jacqueline. 2003. La traduction des jeux de mots. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Levine, Suzanne Jill. 1991. The subversive scribe: Translating Latin American fiction. St.Paul: Graywolf Press.
McKerras, Ross. 1994. “How to translate wordplays”. Notes on translation. 8: 1. 7–18.
Parker, Patricia. 1996. Shakespeare from the margins: Language, culture, context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tęcza, Zygmunt. 1997. Das Wortspiel in der Übersetzung: Stanisław Lems Spiele mit dem Wort als Gegenstand interlingualen Transfers. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Tymoczko, Maria. 1999. Translation in a Postcolonial context: Early Irish literature in English translation. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Wall, Richard. 1986. An Anglo-Irish dialect glossary for Joyce’s works. Gerrads Cross: Colin Smythe.
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Nissan, Ephraim & Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner
2014. GALLURA and the Challenge of Combining Phono-Semantic Matching with Story-Generation: Zoonomastic Illustration. In Language, Culture, Computation. Computational Linguistics and Linguistics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8003], ► pp. 780 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.