Ulysses poster presented to DCU President:
Ireland in the world. The world in Ireland

Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski and Professor Michael Cronin

To mark the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Professor Michael Cronin, Director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies presented DCU President, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, with a poster which was designed to show the popular spread of James Joyce's Ulysses through translation.The Ulysses poster also hopes to create awareness of the work of translators around the world and to complement the Centre's work on a database of translations of Irish literature and biographies of the translators involved entitled TRASNA and TRASNABIO respectively (see below for further details).

Ulysses poster

The James Joyce Centre willingly lent translations of Ulysses from their comprehensive library, the covers of which were then scanned and used as the basic visual material for the design. The poster represents 24 different language editions of Ulysses published in countries ranging from Iceland to China. The difficulties of translating Ulysses, a book so rooted in Irish culture and written in such a complex style, can be demonstrated in the following passage from an article by Cait Murphy entitled '"Ulysses" in Chinese', where she writes:

"Translating Joyce is no party game in any language, of course. Even a simple sentence like "And going forth, he met Butterly" presents dangers. In fact in the book Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus meet no one named Butterly. Mulligan, Stephen's roommate, is just tossing off a clever remark as he and Stephen leave their residence south of Dublin. He is referring, crudely, as is his wont, to the biblical description of Peter after his betrayal of Jesus: "and going forth, he wept bitterly." In English the allusion is obvious enough. In German, though, after much cogitation, the thought has been put this way: they went forth "und weinte Buttermilch"--or "and wept buttermilk." In Chinese it is translated for sound: they "went out and met Ba Teli," meaning "to hope earnestly-special-inside," but in context signalling a group of foreign sounds. Well, okay: the reader is clued in that the phrase is more than it seems. But a lot is lost in translation.

"Another example: Stephen recalls that he has borrowed a pound from the poet and writer George Russell, who styles himself "A.E." Thinking of his debt, Stephen puns "A.E.I.O.U." In the German, Italian, Czech, and Latvian translations, the expression is simply left as it is, which must be rather baffling to readers. Most others include a native-language gloss. In the 1929 French translation the passage reads "A.E. Je vous dois. I.O.U." In Spanish it is "A.E. Te debo. I.O.U." In Hungarian the vowels are changed, killing the joke: "A.E.K.P." The same is true in Croatian, where an explanation is also added: "A.E.J.V.D (Ja vam dugujem)."

[http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95sep/ulyss.htm]

TRASNA is an online bibliography of Irish literature in translation from earliest times to the present. The bibliography will include translations published in book form but also translations published in journals and anthologies. The research project will be conducted in two phases over three years. The first phase will cover the translations of Irish literature published after 1900. The second phase will cover translations produced prior to 1900. The project will involve both the collection of data from existing library and institutional resources and primary data collection on translations that have hitherto gone unrecorded. Preliminary evidence shows that a considerable amount of translation of Irish literature has not been recorded, particularly translations published in newspapers, journals or anthologies. As the first ever comprehensive record of Irish literature in translation, TRASNA will be the basis for analysis and interpretation of the fortunes of Irish literature in the different languages of the world.

The TRASNA project also incorporates TRASNABIO which is a database containing biographical information on translators over the centuries who have been engaged in the translation of Irish literature into other languages.

The TRASNA project is a landmark initiative in the exploration of the influence and presence of Irish literature in the non-Anglophone world, a dimension that has often been neglected in Irish studies, due to the absence of comprehensive and reliable bibliographical and biographical information. TRASNA will also greatly assist the further development of translation studies, comparative literature and modern language studies in Ireland and abroad not only by providing researchers in these areas with an invaluable research tool but also by offering clear evidence of the centrality of translation to the dissemination of Irish literature in cultures around the world.