Translation and Self-translation through the Shakespearean Looking-glasses in Joyce's Ulysses

Summary

There are several concepts of Shakespearean translation that might offer us a way into the reading of James Joyce's Ulysses and, not least, into the chaotically elliptical but brilliant discussions of Shakespeare that take place in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of that book. A reading of Ulysses confronts us with Joycean multilingualism but also with the need to examine issues of cultural translation and of the reading and rereading of Shakespeare in the European cultural contexts of the period during which Ulysses is set and of Joyce's own life. It is well known that Joyce can offer the reader a kind of diachronic modernist ‘translation’ of some aspects of Shakespeare into the circumstances of modern urban life, as well as a generic translation from drama into prose fiction. Ulysses conjures a ‘translation’ of Homer's Odyssey into Shakespeare's Hamlet and vice versa. To see Ulysses as a work of Shakespearean translation may also invite us to explore the senses in which, and the extent to which, Joyce dramatizes his central artist figure Stephen Dedalus in terms of a self-translation into Shakespeare.

Typically for Ulysses, the discussion of Shakespeare in the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode begins in medias res and the English reader, at least, might be struck by the continental European perspectives into which we are thrown from the start. Thomas Lyster, the ‘quaker librarian’, contributes to the discussion with a reference to Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister, in which a translation and a performance of Hamlet take place. In it, the focus is on the character of Hamlet and his character is read as being that of an ineffectual dreamer, incapable of meeting the demands placed upon him by a difficult political situation. Lyster extrapolates that Hamlet is ‘a hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles’ (U, 9.3–5). We might say that, in Goethe, Hamlet becomes translated into the terms of German Romanticism and that the German Romantic idea of Hamlet provides a specific historical and cultural starting point for the discussion. From the outset, the reader is confronted with a perspective on a perspective, which maintains and develops the sense of cultural particularity and of cultural diversity that is so important to Ulysses throughout.