Abstract
This paper aims to analyze the history behind the three Brazilian translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses, trying to consider how each translation helped to set up the conditions for the production of another, and may even define the need for this future retranslation, which by its turn will react to that first work, filling a cultural blank space previously created only by the existence and the specific characteristics of the work that came before. In this way, we attempt to provide some clarification for the apparent abundance of Portuguese language translations of Joyce’s seminal novel.
Highlights
During an interview concerning the publication of the latest Brazilian translation of James Joyce’s short stories, Dubliners (1914), the journalist took the opportunity to ask Caetano Galindo, himself the translator of Ulysses (1922), why was it that the Portuguese language already had ive translations of Joyce’s novel. She certainly had reasons to be perplexed by this information – even though she did not mention anything about Galindo’s translation of Dubliners being the eighth in Portuguese
Considering, for example, that up to today the French and the German languages have had the publication of only two translations each in the lapse of seventy-ive (1929 and 2004) and forty-eight (1927 and 1975) years respectively, the question of why the Portuguese language has had ive ones – all published within forty-eight years (1966, 1989, 2005, 2012, 2013) – really should give us food for thought.2 he irst thing we have to make clear is that there aren’t ive diferent translations of Ulysses available to any given reader of Portuguese, since two of them have been published in Portugal (1989 and 2013) and three in Brazil (1966, 2005 and 2012)
One cannot dream of comparing the gap faced by Portuguese speakers of the two sides of the Atlantic with the one faced by American and British English speakers
Summary
During an interview concerning the publication of the latest Brazilian translation of James Joyce’s short stories, Dubliners (1914), the journalist took the opportunity to ask Caetano Galindo, himself the translator of Ulysses (1922), why was it that the Portuguese language already had ive translations of Joyce’s novel.
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