Joyce’s Voices In Translation: A Portrait In Spanish

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1980-4237.2010n8p267A major goal of my translation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Spanish is the recreation of the original heteroglossia and the attendant polyphonic interaction between the voices of the narrator, characters, other texts, and social and ideological discourses. The multiplicity of voices in this polyphonic novel must not be reduced to a monotone translation through the employment of fluent strategies. I resort instead to creative strategies that expose the reader to the alterity of the source text and culture. One such strategy is the use of Andalusian, a regional variety that is subordinated to the standard variety of Spanish, in order to reconstruct in my translation the original dialogical tension between the prestigious standard language and the stigmatized Hiberno-English. Dialectal usage is only one of various dislocating features that illustrate the sort of defamiliriarization typical of “open” translations—in wich the creative process of composition of the source text is continued into the target text—and of inoritizing translations—in which dialects, sociolects, registers and specific discourses are employed to reveal social stratification and to lay bare the unequal relations between the various social groups. The present study thus focuses on the relevance of Joyce’s careful and accurate use of Hiberno-English in A Portrait, and on my recreation of coherent and well-defined idiolects characterized by Andalusian features, despite the prevalent censorship of non-standard speech by translators, publishers and readers alike