Open the three passages of Ulysses
Reporter/Qiu Guangyu
Published in China News Weekly on August 16, 2021, No. 1008
On July 31, 2021, Dai Congrong, a professor at fudan university's department of Chinese, recalled the scene when she first finished reading Ulysses when she first read Ulysses when she was reading, when she closed her books and lay on her dorm bed, feeling that "a completely different world had opened".
In the 1998 list of "100 Novels of the 20th Century" selected by Random House in the United States, Ulysses ranked first. For various reasons, Ulysses has not been translated Chinese 72 years after its birth. It was not until 1994 and 1996 that two famous Chinese full translations were published: the "Xiao Wen Edition" translated by the writer Xiao Qian and the translator Wen Jieruo and his wife, published by Yilin Publishing House, and translated by Jin Sui, a professor at the Tianjin Foreign Chinese College, and published by the People's Literature Publishing House. Liu Xiangyu's Ulysses edition, which has just been published by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, is the third full translation of the Chinese.
Feng Tao, the editor of Liu Xiangyu's Ulysses edition, believes that every serious translator's translation is a pathway to the book. "The more angles, the closer to the truth."
James joyce. Photo/Visual China
Re-creation on the basis of predecessors
First published in 1922, Ulysses tells the story of what the protagonist, Brum, saw, heard and mentally "roamed" in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, for 18 hours on June 16, 1904, from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next day. It contrasts in full with Homer's epic poem Odyssey, but the protagonist is no longer a hero, but an ordinary person with a lot of problems. The book mixes stream-of-consciousness writing with multilingual, allusive, and multidisciplinary knowledge, and 18 chapters employ different styles and genres to create an unprecedented form of fiction. Because of its bold sexual depictions and offensive to religion, Ulysses was once banned in the United States, Ireland and other places, but after the ban was lifted, it gradually became popular around the world.
Dai Congrong, a professor at Fudan University, is the translator of another famous book by Joyce, Finnegan's Vigil. In her words, words such as "stream of consciousness" and "modernism" alone can no longer summarize the content of Ulysses, which contains many postmodern elements and can be called the originator of many modernist novels. Because of the difficulty of its original text, the translation of Ulysses is not just a simple translation of words, but an extremely complex undertaking that combines research, evidence, and literary re-creation.
Until Liu Xiangyu's translation was officially completed, the comparative study of Ulysses, translated by Xiao Wen and Jin Wei, had been underway. Researchers recognize that the "Xiao Wen" version is more literary, more popular and fluent, and the media exposure and sales are better, which has played a role in popularizing "Ulysses" to the public. Jin Sui's version is known for its elegance and rigor, centered on fully conveying the main theme of the original work, and has a good reputation. American "Joe scholar" Wei Erden Thornton praised Kim's version, saying that "it is difficult to imagine another translation that is as faithful to Joyce's fictional purposes as King's translation."
This time, Liu Xiangyu's translation has made a big breakthrough in challenging the difficulty of translation style. Anyone familiar with Ulysses knows that its fourteenth chapter is a concentrated expression of this "difficulty." This chapter parodies all the genres in the history of British prose development, from prehistoric and Anglo-Saxon old English, through Middle English, and from Elizabethan times to the 17th century onwards, to reflect the birth of life. Wen Jieruo once recalled that when she translated this chapter, she and Xiao Qian both felt that their chinese studies skills were insufficient and inadequate, and they had to seek help from the Japanese translator of "Ulysses" to solve the problem.
In the "Xiao Wen" translation, the text of this chapter gradually shifts from the ancient script to the vernacular, while the Jin Kui translation also changes from the ancient script to the vernacular. Liu Xiangyu wanted to use the development of Chinese style to correspond to the evolution of English style on the basis of the first two translations, such as the first three paragraphs of the fourteenth chapter, and the translation method he used was to transition from Jinwen, Xiaozhu, and Lishu to ancient style and then to modern colloquial style.
In addition, the annotations and translator's notes on Liu Xiangyu's translation of Ulysses are also extremely detailed. In order to facilitate the reader's understanding, Liu Xiangyu added 4771 notes to the main text of Ulysses, marked in the form of footnotes in each chapter, with an average of more than 200 notes per chapter. In addition, in the book "Translating the Book of heaven that cannot be translated"—The Translation of Ulysses", published with Ulysses and written by Liu Xiangyu, he made a detailed discussion and explanation of the two translations of "Xiao Wen" and Jin Sui and the differences in his own translation, and the thickness of this notebook alone is more than 500 pages.
In fact, as one of the first batch of foreign literature graduate students trained by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Liu Xiangyu began to study modernist works and translate Ulysses very early, and his actions even predate Xiao Wen. In March 1985, he published the third chapter of Ulysses, which he translated, in an overview of the Foreign Modernist Novel. Although Liu Xiangyu began translating Ulysses not too late, his Ulysses translation was officially published more than 20 years later than the previous two editions.
Although James Joyce's Ulysses has been described by experts as a "book of heaven" that most people give up without even reading 80 pages, it still ranks among the world's top literary works.
There are some objective reasons behind the long publishing process. As early as the end of the 20th century, Wang Yamin, the publisher of the Hebei Education Publishing House at the time, decided to publish the "World Literature and Literature Series" and formulated a huge publishing plan, inviting Wang Fengzhen and Liu Xiangyu to edit the Complete Works of Joyce, and Liu Xiangyu was responsible for the translation of "Ulysses". By 2004, Liu Xiangyu had completed the first translation of Ulysses, but because of other affairs, he did not have time to revise, and finally could not be published according to the contract, and later, the actual planner of this set of books, Wang Yamin, also left hebei education publishing house, and the publication was delayed. Until 2010, Feng Tao, the editor of Shanghai Translation Publishing House, learned that the Complete Works of Joyce could not be published, and took the initiative to contact and sign the contract for this set of books, and changed its name to "Joyce Collection".
Liu Xiangyu began to restart the revision of Ulysses, which was originally planned to be completed in more than a year, but it took another nearly 10 years.
Three Chinese translations spanning forty years
In fact, in the year of Ulysses' publication, literary scholars began to introduce such a strange book to Chinese. In 1922, Mao Dun published an article introducing Joyce's works in the "Novel Monthly", and since then, literary masters such as Zheng Zhenduo and Zhou Libo have also introduced Joyce to domestic readers in pieces, and Xu Zhimo, who studied in Britain, praised him as a "big hand".
However, the book's ideas were always contrary to the literary mainstream of the time, and the translation was too difficult, from the Republic of China period until the 1970s, few people paid attention to the Chinese translation of Ulysses. Even in the 1980s, when Li Jingduan, the founder of Yilin magazine, contacted the translator for Ulysses, the translator Ye Junjian also said that the book could only be translated by Qian Zhongshu because "there were not enough Chinese characters, and Mr. Qian could make words while translating." Qian Zhongshu believed that translating such a book at the age of 80 was a "unique suicide" and refused to participate.
After 1979, due to the literary field's thirst for "modernist" research materials and the development of publishing, Ulysses once again attracted the attention of major publishing houses. In 1979, when the scholar Yuan Kejia wrote the "Selected Works of Foreign Modernists" and introduced Joyce's works, he specially went to Tianjin to find his old classmate when he was studying in the Department of Foreign Languages at Southwest United University, Professor Jin Sui of Tianjin Foreign Chinese College, and invited him to translate the full text of the second chapter of "Ulysses". Selected Works of Foreign Modernists was published in 1981, the first time a complete chapter of Ulysses had been translated into Chinese.
On the other hand, in 1987, when Li Jingduan was an editor at the Jiangsu People's Publishing House, he began to study which foreign masterpieces had not yet been published and introduced, and Ulysses entered his field of vision. He recalled that he had contacted more than 20 famous translators he knew, including Wang Zuoliang, Zhao Luorui, Feng Yidai and others, but in that historical period, because Ulysses had been banned in Western countries and the difficulty of translating it, these old people politely refused to translate it.
In the process of searching for a translator, Li Jingduan listened to Qin Shunxin, then deputy editor-in-chief of the People's Literature Publishing House, say that they had asked Jin Sui how long it would take to translate and publish "Ulysses", and Jin Sui replied that it would take about 10 years. After listening to it, Li Jingduan felt that 10 years was too long for readers to wait.
But according to Jin Sui's account, it actually took him 16 years to actually translate the book, and the first 10 years were mainly conducting relevant research, and even if he "killed qingqing", he felt that "it did not reach a very satisfactory level". Jin Sui was instructed by the English literary scholar Yan Busun when he was young, and also translated Shen Congwen's novel collection into English, and his research style has always been serious and rigorous, advocating the restoration of the translator's true intentions in translation, and also proposed the famous "equivalent translation theory" - that is, the translation should accurately convey the information in the original text. His perfectionist requirements for translations are evident.
Two years later, Li Jingduan, who began to work at the Yilin Publishing House, finally contacted the right translator, The writer Xiao Qian's wife and translator Wen Jieruo. In fact, Xiao Qian was also one of the first writers to contact Ulysses and study modernist works, and in 1939, when he taught at the University of the East in London, he purchased Ulysses and Joyce's other works to read. Wen Jieruo is proficient in Japanese and english is also very good, and Ulysses has many translations and research results in Japan, which is also a convenient condition for the couple to conduct translation research.
Wen Jieruo naturally understood the importance of Ulysses in literature, and she first tried to translate a part of the content in Japanese and published it in "Translation Forest", which triggered a positive response from readers. At first, Xiao Qian had concerns that he was too old and the publishing house did not make money, but later he agreed to Wen Jieruo as a translator, responsible for translating the "letter" part of the "letter, da, ya" principle, and he was responsible for editing it himself. Since 1990, the two elderly people have worked fifteen or six hours a day without leaving home, using more than 20 kinds of reference books, making a large number of notes and cards, and spending more than 3 years to complete the translation.
In May 1994, Jin Sui's version of Ulysses (volume I) was published by the People's Literature Publishing House, and in the same month, Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo's joint translation of Ulysses (volume I) was also published by Yilin Publishing House. In 1995, the full version of Ulysses was first published, and in 1996, the entire Ulysses edition of the People's Literature Publishing House was published. At this point, through the translation of these two versions, Ulysses finally met with readers Chinese world.
Today, in the face of the three Chinese translations of Ulysses, as one of the earliest publishers to introduce Ulysses in China, Li Jingduan fully affirmed the importance of publishing multiple editions. He paid tribute to each of the first translators involved in the translation of Ulysses. "At that time, the conditions were very difficult, and the environment they were in, all their reference books and reference materials were not as many as they are now." Dai Rongrong believes that although no translation can convey the meaning of the original book 100%, several translators of the Chinese version of Ulysses are "serious writers" who have a love for the book and Joyce.
(Intern Luxi Yang also contributed to this article)