always meeting ourselves
Ulysses, episode 9, Scylla and Charybdis
We’re approaching Bloomsday (June 16) and it is safe to say, I will not finish Ulysses by then. I’m still chipping away and enjoying letting whichever once I read last rattle around in my head for as long as I like.
But, this is the half way point in the episodes and maybe a third of the way through the text (the Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita1…of it all), so that’s thrilling. All previous Ulysses updates are here.
“Scylla and Charybdis” is mentioned in a few things that I’ve read as another frequent “oh I give up point” for Ulysses readers, like “Proteus” before that, which also took me a minute to get through. And it is incredibly dense! I knew that it would be a Stephen chapter again and he would be going to the National Library to discuss his theories of Hamlet with some fellow pseudo and otherwise intellectuals. In preparation for this chapter, I rewatched Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. I had watched a Hamlet production earlier in my reading, but it was a Russian adaptation with a translated screenplay by Boris Pasternak, which then was translated back into English for my subtitles. A wonderful movie. Perhaps not ideal for brushing up on my Shakespeare references.
The Branagh adaptation is famously faithful to the text language-wise, keeping in scenes that are frequently cut in even the most robust stage productions. But the film also adds about a million flashbacks and imaginings over the dialogue. We see Ophelia and Hamlet in bed together, for example, or Hecuba wailing about and mourning in Troy. The whole thing is four hours long. More than anything, I couldn’t get over how ugly I found the framing of the close-ups, which Branagh uses obsessively and seemingly with little rhyme or reason.
But it did help me recognize some of the allusions in Scylla and Charybdis on my own a little more, though I am still relying heavily on my Gifford annotations. I meant to try and read this chapter with no annotations at first and then go back with the annotations, but this was not the episode to attempt that, at least my first go around. Beyond Hamlet, this is just a very literature heavy chapter, where I know enough often to catch that an allusion is happening, but not always where it is from. Whereas in Bloom’s chapters, that are more likely populated with specific references to Dublin, the specific references hold less weight to me naturally and can wash over me as set decoration of the specific street scenes.
But more even than the Shakespeare references in this episode, the thread I was interested in following the precursor discussion that the men have, before Stephen really launches into his theory of Shakespeare. The audience (a poet, a librarian and an essayist) align themselves with Plato’s school of thought on argument. They are interested in the “mystical, whirling Platonic dialectic (of Russell and the other scholars) on ideal forms – that ‘Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences’ (9.48-9).”2 But Stephen aligns himself with Aristotelian rhetoric.
The dialectics of Plato, the back and forths, the conversation, aims for truth, according to Joyce’s metaphor, devolve into a whirlpool like Charybdis, concluding nothing, consumed by the pull. Aristotle’s rhetoric is the solid rock, immovable, dogmatic, the rock that Scylla waits on. Like how Circe recommends that Odysseus hew close to the Scylla, and sacrifice six men to its heads, Joyce seems to advocate for Stephen’s position, but it is not without its downsides. The Odyssey references Scylla “yapping” like a newborn dog and Stephen, at this point in the book, is the undeveloped man, yapping to try and persuade a group of men he doesn’t respect (but desperately wants the approval of) of a theory that he admits he doesn’t even really believe. The rhetoric is fortified, but it might be hollow.3 Between the devil and the deep blue sea!4
Much of Stephen’s theory rests on the unity of selves. His theory is that both King Hamlet is the figure who represents Shakespeare, who wrote Hamlet after his son Hamnet’s death and his own father’s death. Stephen argues also that Anne Hathaway is more suspect for Hamlet’s railing against adultery than Shakespeare’s mother. But since Hamnet has died, Shakespeare has to transmute himself into Hamlet, leaving the father behind and using the son as his platform for grief. When the Father embodies the Son, that is the Holy Spirit’s representation, completing the trinity.
On the meta level, this triangulates neatly (as ever) to Father/Odysseus/Bloom, Son/Telemachus/Stephen and Joyce’s place as author embodying all the pairs as the animating Holy Spirit.
Given Stephen’s theory about Hamlet, which relies so heavily on a both/and approach to binaries, I imagine there must be an attempt to move towards a more happy medium approach, one where Stephen will neither devolve into a whirlpool, but also not alienate and isolate himself. Stephen does have an off-handed thought about the “transmutation” of the self, in a very Stephen context, where he thinks about having spent a borrowed pound on a sex worker and thinks:
Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
The Stephen who owes the pound and who paid for sex with it is an entirely different form than the Stephen who is now distracting himself with the memory of it, though both are Stephen Dedalus. He’s transforming in the text as Joyce is transmuting him by writing the text.
None this above is revelatory. You can find it nearly every gloss of this chapter; I’ve read it restated about four or five times (and now am transmitting it for all of you).
Where I’m excited is how the above connects with a new avenue of Joyce exploration that I am doing. I’ve been poking around a lot of supplemental material, since my workplace has a huge Irish studies department, we have quite a few materials available on Joyce and I’m taking advantage of it. The one I am reading now is Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation by Patrick O’Neill, which I incorrectly assumed was about Joyce’s use of multiple languages in his work, but is instead about the history and practice of translating Joyce, a gargantuan and seemingly impossible task.
I am, predictably, most interested in the history of Italian translations of Joyce. Joyce’s relationship to Italy is the first thing that remotely endeared him to me, after years of kind of being a curmudgeon about ever reading him.
In the introduction, O’Neill first describes the traditional theory of original text and translation, conceiving of a master/servant relationship, with utter supremacy given over to author and original language. Under this paradigm the translator’s goal is to be “as absent as possible” and the translator is a “necessary evil” for attempts at universality of literacy for any given piece of work. O’Neill traces transformations of this conceit with the rise of poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s, with a “metatextual model of translation [that] is based on a particular model of reading that privileges the shaping role of the reader.” Under the scheme, the translator is the ultimate reader of the prototext, since “while every reader produces his or her own implicit text in processing the authorial text, some readers, namely translators, go on to write down their own quite explicit texts. Every translator is both reader and author.” Every translator is both Son and Father and consequently the transitory Holy Ghost as well!!
But O’Neill still proffers a third model of interpretation, where all Joyces, in every language, come together a macrotextual system, available for interpretation, with the “locus of authority” neither with author or reader, but completely dispersed, “diffused throughout the entire polyphonic textual system.”
O’Neill distinctions between the three systems makes me little semiotician brain buzz:
In the third model authority is intertextual, for this model, subscribing to poststructuralist conceptions of textuality, duly holds that a Joyce read in Spanish cannot be the 'same' Joyce read in French or German or English, that your Joyce is not my Joyce, and that my Joyce today is not my Joyce of yesterday or tomorrow - and yet all of these synecdochic Joyces together comprise the macrotext we also call 'Joyce/ the Joyce phenomenon, the Joyce system. Where the traditional or prototextual model is unitary (one Joyce for all readings), and the metatextual model is pluralist (one Joyce for each reading), the macrotextual model is in principle holistic (since all possible readings constitute one Joyce). The ultimate sum of this intertextual, macrotextual system of readings, of course, must always remain incalculable, and its 'one' Joyce ungraspable, whether we view it primarily as a model of translation or as a model of reading. In the former case, the practical linguistic limitations of individual readers ensure the unreadability of the macrotext; in the latter case, any attempted summation of the system merely extends the system by producing one more reading.
This of course me me think of my beloved Pierre Menard. The infinite, impossible task of language!
The process of transforming a story from one linguistic and cultural context to another is obviously central to Ulysses, since it is, on its surface and announced from the title, a retelling of The Odyssey. O’Neill points out that looking at The Odyssey and Ulysses would be an intertextual reading, where as looking at multiple translations of Ulysses would be what he calls transtextual, necessarily both inter- and intratextual, since the prototext of Ulysses and the translations of it are simultaneously the same work and different works.5
I’ve ordered a copy of Enrico Terrinoni’s translation of Ulysses into Italian, but in the meantime, I read his article “Who’s Afraid of Translating Ulysses?” from Translation and Literature, published in 2013.6 The opening anecdote is about a meeting post-publication where Terrinoni expected questions about why there were so many intervening years7 between the published Ulysses translations in Italian or why he felt he could take on the impossible task. But the question he got and was unsure about the answer was “'Why did you have to translate the book again, if there was already an Italian translation? Was the previous one so bad?” With his answer of course not, the follow-up was even more disorienting, “Are you saying there was no need at all for your translation?”
Afterwards, when thinking about the question that in the moment he failed to address, Terrinoni lands on “A translator is like a lover…and many lovers are better than one.”8 Terrinoni centers the discussion of his theory of his translation on the tension of aiming to discover new angles beyond the previous translation and the central theme of “returning” in the story. But he also argues that translation is also in a sense a return, a revisitation.
The distinctions Terrinoni makes between his tone, particularly of characters’ dialogue, moving away from the epic and formal, to the casual and vulgar, reminded me of the discussion of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, where one of the reasons people were ostensibly upset was because of her move away from the formal sounds of traditional epic poem translations, though she quotes this review from the Atlantic on her own website:
“In her powerful new translation, Emily Wilson, a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania, has chosen immediacy and naturalism over majestic formality. She preserves the musicality of Homer’s poetry, opting for an iambic pentameter whose approachable storytelling tone invites us in, only to startle us with eruptions of beauty.”
I’m finding myself writing more and more about translation.9 Maybe it is the Italian classes and maybe it is Ulysses, but this chapter about communication and the failures of adopting exactly one mode it aligned really neatly with the miasma floating around my head. None of this feel very conclusory, so I’ll leave you with a quotation from Terrioni’s article that I loved.
There is no win or lose in translation, though to translate is always to fight. We always leave something behind on the way, just as after a fight sometimes somebody is left on the ground. What is important is the new space created as an alternative to the old one. What's lost in translation is precisely the idea of sameness, which leaves scope for the concept of change. In communicating we do not just change our position in relation to the people we are talking to: we also change ourselves, in that our knowledge changes as a result of the sharing of information between people. In translation this process is exalted because we are sometimes forced to deal with far distant entities to be transferred, and because the transfer itself entails carrying along a number of meanings and values implied in the very 'thing' to be 'transported'.
Like Martello Tower!!
Terence Davies mentioned.
Hypostatic union!!
Terrinoni, Enrico. “Who’s Afraid of Translating ‘Ulysses’?” Translation and Literature 22, no. 2 (2013): 240–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24585316.
The first complete edition appeared in 1960, and Terrinoni elides one translated by Bona Flecchia in 1995 that was removed from circulation after two weeks because of a copyright dispute, which was incidentally the first full length translation of the novel by a woman. After Terrinoni’s 2013 joint effort with Carlo Bigazzi, six more editions have been published, included a second translation by Terrinoni!
Never beating the Italian accusations.