Fictions of Hybridity: Translating Style in James Joyce's Ulysses

Fictions of Hybridity is the first full-length study of the famous and infamous Danish translator Mogens Boisen’s translations of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Boisen published as many as three translations, in 1949, 1970 and 1980. In the 1970 edition he retranslated episodes 1-5 and 9 from scratch.

It is Ida Klitgård’s basic presumption that since Joyce’s international outlook was that of a multilingual exile, and since the style of his major works clearly demonstrates a fundamentally foreignising principle of linguistic, aesthetic and cultural hybridity, his works are shaped according to what Klitgård calls a poetics of translation as exile. This is for instance very much the case in Ulysses, and consequently translators of the novel are to take this stylistic trait into account when reproducing it in their own language.

In this study Klitgård explores such hybridity in Boisen’s translations. Based on a critical discussion of recent theories of translation, such as the concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’, she undertakes an extensive comparative analysis and evaluation of a number of episodes in Ulysses while paying close attention to the complex networks of the novel’s most important stylistic features of hybridity.

The book contains a foreword by Fritz Senn of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation.
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