Ulysses 'in his French dress': 1929/2004

International audienceJoyce’s Ulysses has only been translated into French twice, and both translations were advertised as major events on the French literary scene—be it in 1929 when the publication of the first one was celebrated during the “Déjeuner Ulysse” organized by Sylvia Beach at the hotel Leopold in Versailles, or in 2004 when Gallimard published a much-awaited new translation for the centenary of Bloomsday. In the postface to the 2004 Ulysse, Jacques Aubert and his team argued that the aim of their work was to bring forth a version of the text that was “closer to Joyce and closer to us,” thereby defining their translation project as opposed to the first translation of Ulysses into French, published in 1929, carried out by Auguste Morel, Stuart Gilbert and Valery Larbaud, with the help of James Joyce himself, and often considered as canonical. Illustrating Antoine Berman’s thoughts on the specific temporality of translation, which is according to him that of caducity and incompleteness, Aubert’s statement highlights the need that was felt in the early 2000s in France for a new translation of Joyce’s novel, seventy-five years after the first one, which was by then considered to some extent ill-suited for a twenty-first-century readership, having acquired what Pascal Bataillard called a “bad unreadability.”Through an analysis of the stance of the 2004 team of translators towards Morel’s work, but also of their own translation project and choices, based on examples taken from both the published versions and earlier drafts of the translation, this paper aims at highlighting how paradoxically indebted the new translation is to the 1929 enterprise and text, and at studying the influence of various contextual parameters on a retranslation designed seventy-five years later to supposedly depart from what Jacques Aubert nonetheless called “a moment and a monument” within French literature.Giving a detailed account of the origin of the retranslation project and of the manner in which it was carried out by a team of writers and scholars, and then moving on to detailed analyses of the text itself, dealing with a range of problems from the translation of proper names and compounds to that of specifically Joycean stylistic and syntactic issues, this essay will present a few of the strategies used by Aubert’s team of translators to translate Ulysses for the twenty-first century, questioning to what extent they “undid” French as Bernard Hœpffner, one of the retranslators, phrased it