Mircea Ivănescu – a Romanian poet rendering the style of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The concept of fidelity in translating the overture from “Sirens”

Abstract

The following paper deals with a view on the concept of fidelity in literary translation with an analysis of the Romanian poet Mircea Ivănescu’s work on the overture of episode eleven: “Sirens” from James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Mircea Ivănescu is a postmodernist poet who prefers to employ an ordinary language when writing. Moreover, he is a self-taught man of letters who didn’t even get a degree in the languages he translated from. When speaking of his work as a translator his attitude is often sceptical. However, “Ulise” is an acclaimed Romanian translation and critics have repeatedly praised Ivănescu’s translation skills and use of language. For that reason, the paper focuses on the concept of fidelity in translation and on the effort of the Romanian poet to efficiently render Joyce’s writing style in the target language and at the same time to preserve the original meaning of words. The paper is not intended to elicit the imperfections of the translation but rather to illustrate the intricacy of the task, the problems of non-equivalence that are difficult to avoid by any literary translator and some potential approaches.