Literary translation, being a subjective activity, is limited by the translator's subjectivity. Zha Mingjian and Tian Yu define translator’s subjectivity as a subjective initiative in the translation process, with "its basic characteristics being the translator's conscious cultural awareness, humanistic qualities, and cultural and aesthetic creativity." Tu Guoyuan and Zhu Xianlong also emphasize that the translator should play a major role in the complete translation process (including the original author, translator, reader, and the receptional environment), as "it runs through the entire translation process, the subjectivity of other factors is only reflected in specific stages of the translation." In the conventional view of translation, translators frequently find themselves "serving two masters." They must serve the author by keeping to the criterion of "faithfulness" to the original work, while also taking into account the readers and striving for the effects of "expressiveness" and "elegance" in translation. These two features appear to be in paradoxical opposition.
In contrast to Chinese scholars who equate the translator's subjectivity, inventiveness, and centrality, Western writers and translators see translation as a subjective practice. Goethe once described translators as "busy professional matchmakers" (Übersetzer sind als geschäftige Kuppler anzusehen). "They praise a half-concealed beauty to the utmost, making us unable to resist our interest in the original work." Because of the translator's subjectivity, the original appearance of the work is partially veiled, preventing target language readers from having the most direct and true experience with the original. Lawrence Venuti, an American translation scholar, proposed the concept of "translator's invisibility," which describes the translator's identity as that of an invisible person hiding behind the author. He stated, "The smoother the translation, the more invisible the translator's identity becomes, and the more prominent the author's or the foreign text's meaning will be." According to Peter Bush, literary translation is "an original subjective activity situated at the center of a complex network of social and cultural practices." All of those underline the translator and author's complicated and subtle relationship, as well as the translator's subjective initiative.
Literary translation exemplifies the translator's subjectivity, notably in 20th-century Western modernist novels with variegated vocabulary and complicated styles. Ulysses (1922), considered a representative work of 20th-century stream-of-consciousness novels, uses the narrative framework of a single day in the lives of three ordinary Dubliners to reflect the intertwined relationships between the individual, family, marriage, religion, identity, and national survival. It follows the protagonist Bloom's journey from "wandering" to "return." To date, the novel has been entirely translated into over 20 languages. Since 1994, our country has progressively released three relatively competent and accepted complete Chinese translations: the 1994 and 1996 Jin Di editions of Ulysses (hereafter referred to as the "Jin edition") and the 1994 Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo edition of Ulysses (hereinafter referred to as the "Xiao edition") and the 2021 Liu Xiangyu edition of Ulysses (hereinafter referred to as the "Liu edition"). This has shattered people's imagination of this untranslatable tome, providing new inspiration for exploring the deeper meanings of the text and related modernist thoughts.
Faced with experimental novels like Ulysses, which present translation challenges, translators must not only fully understand the original text, including its typography, style, and syntactic transformations, but also consider the methods of language conversion when translating into the target language. Due to phenomena such as language overlay, the mixing of words and symbols, and the blending of styles, translations may sometimes eliminate the coexistence of different languages present in the original text. Translators also need the courage to make attempts and breakthroughs in their translations, finding the best way to balance the source language and the target language. Therefore, to better understand and interpret the Chinese translations of Joyce's novels, it is first necessary to explore the different identities, research experiences, and translation motivations of the four translators. These not only reflect the translators' personal translation styles but also represent the translation choices of different eras.
As a translator of modern Chinese literature, Jin Di (1921-2008) translated and published Shen Congwen's short story collection The Chinese Earth (1947) under his own name during his university years. He served as an English teacher at the Department of Foreign Languages at Nankai University in 1957 and at Tianjin Foreign Languages Institute in 1976, while also holding positions as a council member of the Translators Association of China and an advisor to the Tianjin Translators Association. Jin Di first began translating Ulysses with selected passages. Driven by a love for literature, Jin Di embarked on a career in literary translation. He firmly believes that literary translation should prioritize effect, which means that "the reader's experience of the translation should be as close as possible to the reader's experience of the original text."
Xiao Qian (1910-1999) held multiple roles. He was a writer, journalist, translator, and also served as the editor-in-chief of literary magazines. In the fall of 1929, Xiao Qian entered the Chinese Language Program at Yenching University, where he attended guest lectures on modern literature by Professor Yang Zhensheng and a course on modern British novels by American professor Paul Guise, learning about James Joyce and Ulysses. His wife, Wen Jieruo (1927- ), is a distinguished linguist proficient in Chinese, Japanese, and English, working as an editor and literary translator. She graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Tsinghua University. During the translation of Ulysses, Wen Jieruo read a large amount of related Japanese literature, including Japanese translations and research papers, providing broader and more reliable reference value for the Chinese translation of the novel.
Liu Xiangyu (1942- ) is a renowned scholar and translator specializing in Western modernism and postmodernism theory. He graduated from the Foreign Languages Department of Shanxi University in 1967 and from the Department of Foreign Literature at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1981, possessing a solid foundation in foreign languages and literary knowledge. He once went to the University of London to study 20th-century British and American literature and Western Marxist literary theory, and then to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to research modernist and postmodernist literature in Europe and America (his co-advisor was Ihab Hassan, who is regarded as the "father of postmodernism"), including studies on Joyce. Since the 1980s, he has begun to focus on and translate Joyce, translating excerpts of the poem Chamber Music, the short story The Dead, and ten chapters of Ulysses, among others.
Gérard Genette, a French narratologist, established the notion of "paratext" (or "derivative text" in the 1980s, which refers to "all verbal and non-verbal materials used to present a work that play a coordinating role between the primary text and the reader." Internal paratext (titles, translator's prefaces and postfaces, appendices, illustrations, etc.) and external paratext (book reviews, translator interviews, etc.) are subsets of paratexts. The translator's notes or footnotes in a translated work are common internal paratexts that serve as "primary sources" for understanding the translator's methodology or perspectives. Chinese annotations are clearly necessary for Ulysses, the large and comprehensive modernist novel. It not only conveys the translator's personal understanding and interpretation but also, to some extent, condenses the pertinent perspectives and theories.
Take Episode Four and Episode Fourteen as two examples. In Episode Four, Molly asked Bloom the meaning of “metempsychosis”, which is one of the core themes of Ulysses. To simply put it, the Jin version uses metaphorical language directly in the translation. Despite being plain and unambiguous, it lacks the original text's literary appeal. The Xiao version keeps the original terms while providing a brief explanation of their implications. The Liu version, on the other hand, conducts textual research on the material and incorporates it into the original context, providing readers with a logical interpretation and explanation. The translation of Ulysses necessitates not just consideration of important word connotations and metaphors, but also of the text's stylistic correspondence and appropriateness. For example, when it comes to changing registers in Ulysses, the key to translation is retaining the distinctions inside the same language.
In Episode 14, Joyce utilizes a range of languages, including Old Irish, Latin, old English, and modern colloquial speech, to mock numerous concerns, parodying many issues in the history of the evolution of British prose from antiquity to the present, and representing the complete process of a baby from embryo to birth. According to Liu's research, the original text uses a mixture of Old Gaelic (Deshil) and Old Latin (Eamus) in the first paragraph, Old English in the second paragraph, and modern colloquial language in the last paragraph. Therefore, in the translation, Liu's version uses oracle bone script, classical Chinese, and colloquial Chinese to correspond to these styles. Aside from stylistic considerations, because the first paragraph depicts the mixed form that existed prior to the birth of English during the Anglo-Saxon period, the translation employs three types of scripts—bronze script, small seal script, and clerical script—to simulate the mixed evolution of style. This translation not only exhibits the translator's smart vision, but it also demonstrates the compatibility and resemblance of the histories of Chinese and English script development. Compared to the Jin version, which likewise corresponded to the history of Chinese characters, lacking any literariness.
Generally speaking, the annotations and footnotes as paratexts can help readers better understand the connotations and implications of the original text, especially the unique linguistic techniques, formal experiments, and cultural allusions found in Joyce's novels. By comparing the annotations of three Chinese translations of Ulysses, it can be observed that due to differences in translation time and strategies, the four translators place varying degrees of emphasis on the annotations. The Jin version has fewer annotations and less in-depth content compared to the latter two translations, while the Liu version, as a retranslation, has conducted new research and interpretation of the original text based on the first two translations. From a single word to the entire text structure, it contains the author's understanding and reflection on human history, which is also what the translator hopes to present and convey to the target language readers during the translation process.
In traditional views of translation, the importance of the translator's role is often overlooked and undervalued. Nowadays, more and more experts and scholars are beginning to pay attention to the status of translators, exploring and studying their influence and value on the translated work and even the entire translation activity. Among these, the focus on the subjectivity of the translator reflects the degree of emphasis on the relative independence of the translator's identity and behavior. Due to the influence of educational background, social environment, cultural context, and ideology, there are certain differences in the translator's translation style and strategies. Understanding the translator's identity also helps to reveal their main translation thoughts, concepts, and the translator's mental world. At the same time, as an important internal subtext, the annotations in the translation text analysis reflect the translator's thoughts and interpretations of the original text. These annotations not only greatly aid the target language, but also provide important reference value for the translators studies.
For Chinese translators, translating Ulysses not only involves the complex language system but also the challenge of arbitrary switching between different stylistic and syntactic forms. In the case of Joyce's later two novels, the greatest challenge for translators lies not only in achieving the basic translation standards of "faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance" but also in guiding readers to understand Joyce and the unique modernist texts he represents, including various textual transformations, stylistic changes, and profound themes of human history. At the same time, it is worth noting that the translator's subjectivity is not entirely free and arbitrary, "but rather has verifiable subjective and objective factors." For example, the richness and accessibility of reference materials are important objective factors that limit the translator's subjectivity, as they are situated in different historical periods.
Therefore, we need to be tolerant of the inevitable cultural misinterpretations and omissions that occur during the translation process, and encourage more knowledgeable scholars and readers to actively point out translation errors, promoting the revision and improvement of new translations. Only by truly recognizing and understanding the translator's experiences and the social context in which they operate, and accepting the unavoidable shortcomings of translation, can we more deeply and thoroughly understand the relationship between the original text and the translation, and appreciate the literary value and cultural connotations.
