Collocation and connotation in chapter “Scylla and Charybdis” of James Joyce’s Ulysses. An analytical study of the Romanian translation

Abstract

The present article was written as part of the PhD dissertation entitled “An analysis regarding the evolution of James Joyce’s writing style in ‘Dubliners’, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ and ‘Ulysses’ and the strategies of translating it into Romanian”. The research starts from the hypothesis that a perfect rendition in a different language of a literary text of this type is nothing more than a utopia. However, a translator should always intend to achieve an equilibrium between the author’s intentions, the form, the content and the target culture. In “Ulysses”, James Joyce experiments with language, abandoning the definition of sense and revolutionises the art of expressing thoughts through words. The current work will concentrate on the thorough analysis of adjectival and adverbial collocations conceptualized in the ninth chapter of “Ulysses”. Our purpose is to investigate how Mircea Ivănescu’s Romanian translation deals with collocations and especially with those that typically represent Joyce’s authorial style. Mircea Ivănescu (1931-2011) is a Romanian poet and the sole translator who accomplished the difficult task of translating the entire novel, although there had been various attempts at translating only chapters of it. It is an approved work of translation, having received both praise and critical appreciation. After more than three decades from this chapter’s translation, our research aims for a further exposition of the similarities and distinctions between the source language text and the target language translation.