Translating Gendered Paralysis in Dubliners: A Reflective Retranslation of James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case’ through a Feminist Translation Approach

ABSTRACT

While current Chinese translations of James Joyce's Dubliners are acclaimed, demonstrating a commendable effort to make this classic of English language world literature accessible to Chinese readers, the book's depiction of the way femininity, masculinity and broader society in early twentieth century Ireland are ‘paralysed’ could be further emphasised for young Chinese readers through specific translation strategies. This exegetical paper offers a reflective analysis based on a comparison between our feminist retranslation of one of the short stories in Dubliners, ‘A Painful Case’, and two of its existing translations. In doing so, this essay aims to demonstrate how specific translation strategies can encourage a more critical gender and cultural consciousness in a younger generation of Chinese readers, and sheds light on the benefits of applying feminist translation methods to the retranslation of a classic naturalistic short story by a male writer. This article also makes a fresh and distinctive contribution to the scholarship of Chinese studies of Joyce and the translation of his work, through the lens of gender and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Retranslation
• feminist translation
• literary translation
• James Joyce
• Dubliners
• ‘A Painful Case’
• gender
• paralysis

Acknowledgements

Our sincere appreciation goes to Esther Tyldesley for her invaluable support, which laid the foundation for the work presented in this paper. Additionally, we would like to express our gratitude to Şebnem Susam-Saraeva for her insightful discussions during the initial stages of this project. Furthermore, we acknowledge Rita Horanyi for her significant contributions to the editorial process; her valuable feedback and editorial expertise substantially enhanced the quality of this article. Lastly, we extend our heartfelt thanks to Lauren Harper for her dedicated proofreading.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Grant Richards, 1914).

2 James Joyce, 都柏林人 / Dubliners. Trans. Sun Liang, et al. (Hangzhou: Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, 1984).

3 James Joyce, 都柏林人 / Dubliners. Trans. Wang Fengzhen (Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2010).

4 ‘May Fourth’ refers to the New Culture Movement that commenced with the establishment of the magazine La Jeunesse 新青年 in 1915 and continued into the early 1920s. It was an anti-imperialist intellectual revolution characterised by a rejection of feudal values in favour of Western ideals and interaction between Chinese and foreign literature.

5 Scarlett Baron, “James Joyce – Big in China,” Guardian. 13 Jun. 2015. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/13/james-joyce-china-bloomsday-chinese-reputation>.

6 Jonathan Kaiman, “Finnegans Wake Becomes a Hit Book in China,” Guardian. 6 Feb. 2013. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/05/finnegans-wake-china-james-joyce-hit>.

7 Zhu Zhenwu and Liu Lvechang, “中国非英美国家英语文学研究的垦拓与勃兴 ” [The Development and Blossom of English Literature Studies from Non-UK/US Countries in China]. Comparative Literature in China 3 (2013): 36–48.

8 Seamus Deane, “Joyce and Nationalism,” James Joyce: New Perspectives. Ed. Colin MacCabe (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 176.

9 M. Keith Booker, “The Baby in the Bathwater: Joyce, Gilbert, and Feminist Criticism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32.3 (1990): 446.

10 Weiping Li and Huijuan Cheng, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Literary Giant: Thirty Years of Joyce Scholarship in China,” James Joyce Quarterly 51.1 (2013): 119–28.

11 Luo Peng, “Analysis of the Image of the Intellectuals in Dubliners,” Foreign Literature 21 (2018): 126–27.

12 He Baobao, “The Female Figure in James Joyce's ‘The Dead’,” Youth Literature 07 (2022): 83–85.

13 Liao Chunqi, “论《都柏林人》中女性的“角色作为” / [A Feminist Approach to James Joyce's Dubliners], Journal of Yancheng Teachers College (Humanities and Social Sciences) 26.3 (2006): 59–62.

14 James Joyce, Dubliners (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1999), 78.

15 Margot Norris, “Shocking the Reader in James Joyce's ‘A Painful Case’,” James Joyce Quarterly 37.1/2 (1999): 63–81.

16 Guijie Liu, “我国外国文学翻译出版的现状与发展思路探讨” [Current Situation and Development of Translation and Publishing of Foreign Literature in China], Master and Masterpiece 6 (2017): 108–09.

17 This project uses the translations of Huang et al. and Wang for discussion as these are the earliest and latest Chinese translations of Dubliners by a literature publisher. Wang's translation appeared during the New Era when there was a revival of interest in foreign literature after the dominance of Soviet Socialist literature. Later translations of Dubliners were largely produced by commercial publishers as interest in Joyce heightened. Wang's translation, published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2010, meets today's readers’ aesthetic and language habits. His version, a reaction to both the demands of the book market and the need to renew a literary classic, confirms a new openness to the West (and Ireland) in China, just before the Chinese translation of Joyce's untranslatable Finnegans Wake (1939) was published in 2011.

Other translations of Dubliners in Mandarin Chinese include the following:

James Joyce, 都柏林人 / Dubliners. Trans. An Zhi (Chengdu: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, 1995).

James Joyce, 都柏林人: 青年艺术家的画像 / Dubliners: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Trans. Huang Yushi (Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House, 1996).

James Joyce, 都柏林人 一个青年艺术家的肖像 / Dubliners – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Trans. Xu Xiaowen (Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2003).

James Joyce, 都柏林人 / Dubliners. Trans. Mi Zi and Shen Dongzi (Guilin: Lijiang Press, 2012).

James Joyce, 都柏林人 / Dubliners. Trans. Xin Caina (Beijing and Shenzhen: Citic Press, 2020).

James Joyce, 都柏林人 / Dubliners. Trans. Jiang Xiangming (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2022).

18 Pan Suiming, Sex Revolution in China: Its Origin, Expressions and Evolution (Gaoxiong: Universal Press, 2006), 51.

19 Samia Mehrez, “Translating Gender,” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 3.1 (2007): 106–27.

20 Sherry Simon, “Taking Gendered Positions in Translation Theory,” Gender in Translation. Ed. Sherry Simon (London: Routledge, 2003), 1.

21 Lei Mu, 翻译研究中的性别视角 / [Gender Perspective in Translation Studies] (Wuhan: Wuhan University Press, 2008), 1.

22 Bell Hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 1.

23 Luise Von Flotow-Evans, “Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories,” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4.2 (1991): 69–84.

24 Luise Von Flotow-Evans, “Gender and the Practice of Translation,” Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’. Ed. Luise Von Flotow-Evans (London: Routledge, 2016), 33.

25 Zhinan Ji and Xiangchun Meng, “A Feminist Translation Approach in Twentieth-century China: Bing Xin's 《园丁集》Translation of The Gardener by Tagore,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 9.1 (2022): 1–9.

26 Helen Dendrinou Kolias, “Empowering the Minor: Translating Women's Autobiography,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 8 (1990): 213–21.

27 On ‘scrupulous meanness’, see the letter from Joyce to his publisher in May 1906. James Joyce et al., Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 134.

28 B. K. Scott, “Character, Joyce, and Feminist Critical Approaches,” James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth. Ed. Bernard Benstock (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 162.

29 Joseph Valente, “Joyce's Sexual Differend: An Example from Dubliners,” James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (1991): 427–43.

30 Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, “Retranslation,” Routledge Encyclopaedia of Translation Studies. Ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2020), 485.

31 Lawrence Venuti, “Retranslations: The Creation of Value,” Bucknell Review 47.1 (2003): 25–38.

32 Siobhan Brownlie, “Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory,” Across Languages and Cultures 7.2 (2006): 145–70.

33 Luc Van Doorslaer, “The Relative Need for Comparative Translation Studies,” Translation and Interpreting Studies 12.2 (2017): 213–30.

34 Alan Tse Chung, “Deconstructing Comparative Translation: Facts, Myths and Limitations,” Translation Quarterly 66 (2012): 77–85.

35 Xiaocong Huang, “Transitivity in English-Chinese Literary Translation: The Case of James Joyce's ‘Two Gallants’,” Babel: Revue Internationale de la Traduction / International Journal of Translation 59.1 (2013): 93–109.

36 Anthony Pym, Method in Translation History (London: Routledge, [1998] 2014), 82–83.

37 Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (Routledge, 2000), 284.

38 Marlena G. Corcoran, “Language, Character, and Gender in the Direct Discourse of Dubliners,” Style 25.3 (1991): 439–52.

39 Florence L. Walzl, “Pattern of Paralysis in Joyce's Dubliners: A Study of the Original Framework,” College English 22.7 (1961): 519–20.

40 Royal E. Ingersoll, Engendered Trope in Joyce's Dubliners (Carlondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 16.

41 H is a one-letter acronym for Huang Jiade, the translator of ‘A Painful Case’ in 都柏林人 [Dubliners] by Sun et al. (1984).

42 W is a one-letter acronym for Wang Fengzhen, the translator of 都柏林人 [Dubliners] by Wang Fengzhen (2010).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences under grant number 19WZWB003.