“This may sound odd, but I have found Ulysses to be my easiest translation thus far! The most demanding and yet the easiest.”

A FASCINATING interview with Finnish translator Leevi Lehto on translating James Joyce’s Ulysses into Finnish. A couple of translations had already been done in Finland, the main one done by Pennti Saarikoski in 1964, but Lehto found them unsatisfactory for various reasons (which he goes into in the interview). My favorite comment from him about the Saarikoski translation revealed him to me as a kindred spirit, and made me want to send this to my father so badly.

Saarikoski’s translation is also clearly influenced by certain basic aesthetics of Finnish modernist prose, and its particular concept of realism. The leading theoretician of Finnish modernism, Tuomas Anhava (1927–2001), was one of the cursory readers of Saarikoski’s translation, and, as I like to say, the result is what Joyce’s Ulysses might have become if Joyce had let Ezra Pound have his way with it.

Hahahaha. Dad would love that. So, Mr. Lehto decided to give it a go himself. He explains a moment he had translating the Sirens episode, just as an experiment:

Having worked as a professional translator for 15 years, I was naturally intrigued by the translation aspects. It was also around that time that, as a poet, I was becoming increasingly fascinated in the sound and phonetics of language (today one of the areas of poetry identified with me is sound poetry): therefore the ‘Sirens’ episode, balancing – as it does – on the boundary between language and music, became the focal point of my study of the translation. After reaching Molly’s final “yes” I put down my Saarikoski, located my Joyce, and sat down to translate the ‘Sirens’. After about ten pages I showed it to my wife. “It’s a new text altogether,” said she, having read her Saarikoski years ago, and added: “Why don’t you translate the whole book?” I remember how strange the notion seemed to me at the time. I was rather thinking that my translating days were behind me, and that it was (finally) time for me to concentrate on doing “something of my own”. The idea stuck, however, and by the next New Year I found myself making finishing touches on the ‘Sirens’. In January and February of 2003 I made first drafts of episodes 1-3 and sent all the four episodes to Gaudeamus publishing house to be looked over by Tuomas Seppä. Tuomas sent them to Professor Hannu K. Riikonen, who gave his support to the enterprise. The process of a new translation of Ulysses had begun.

The Sirens episode is all sound (naturally. Why? Because it’s the SIRENS EPISODE, got it? What do Sirens do? They call to sailors, with their voices, causing them to crash. Therefore, the Sirens episode is all sound, sound upon sound – Joyce trying to capture what it sounds like in a crowded bar with chattering waitresses and conversing patrons.) Here’s the excerpt I posted a while back – and it seems, basically, untranslateable, right? Because it’s barely in English, right? Leevi Lehto went at it another way, and his conversation about this and other episodes (I was particularly interested in his story of translating the ‘Circe’ episode – and also the Oxen of the Sun episode) is deep and fascinating stuff. It reminds me of Seamus Heaney deciding to start off his translation of Beowulf with the conversational word, “So.” I remember my dad talking about that, how exciting he found it. In the NY Times on March 29, 2000, there was an interview with Heaney. Here is what he had to say about that “So” (and, by the way, his recording of the translation is not to be missed!):

A breakthrough came with his discovery of the verb “thole” in the text. Anglo-Saxon for suffering, it was a word that he had heard in his childhood in Northern Ireland. That offered him a bridge between cultures and centuries. Searching for an equivalent oral tradition, he remembered his father’s cousin Peter Scullion, a man who had “a large voice and a very stately method of speech.” As Mr. Heaney said, “That’s how I got started on ‘Beowulf’, with those voices from my country past.”

The first problem was the first word, hwaet in Old English, which had been translated as lo, hark, behold, attend and listen. By choosing the more conversational “so”, Mr. Heaney called for attention and plunged the reader into the middle of the story.

I wonder if I had read a version in high school that started with “so”, as opposed to “hark”, I might have responded better to Beowulf. Translation can be KEY. There is always something lost in the transfer. I am fluent enough in French to at least be able to read it, and Moliere reads so different in the original than in translation. Moliere translations can be clunky, due to the rhyming couplet nature of so many of his plays, which rollick along in French, but sometimes feel amateurish in English. Same with Little Prince. Perhaps the most famous line in Le Petit Prince is: “Here is my secret: Only with the heart can one see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Now that is quite nice. The meaning is nice, but it sounds nice too. I couldn’t improve upon it. But here it is in French: Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple : on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. I know enough of French to know that the translation is not exact – it can’t be. Two different languages.

I remember my French teacher in high school saying once, when a student asked him, “So ‘c’est’ is ‘It is’ … right?” and he replied, “No. It is ‘c’est’.” He wanted us to get away from English entirely and stop trying to find the correlation in our own language. Only then will you become actually fluent. You won’t be translating it all in your head before you open your mouth.

Now that I’m older, and feel pretty comfortable with my ability to handle difficult language, I actually prefer the Constance Garnett translations of Russian literature, even though she is a bit out of favor now, and new translations are out, with more of a modern feel to the language. For Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I prefer the more stately formal translations of Garnett, having tried the other ones, and not liking them. Contrarily, the new Paul Schmidt translation of Chekhov’s plays (I wrote a little bit about it here) are fantastic, and I prefer them so much more to the translations I grew up with. Maybe it’s different with plays. Chekhov’s works are emotional and personal, and the standard translations I read (and performed) in college and beyond were really difficult to get your mouth around. They FELT foreign. Paul Schmidt’s translations breathe and pulse with life. Constance Garnett’s translation of Sonya’s big confession to Yelena in Act 3 (and this is a scene done in acting classes across the land – and this was the translation most often used):

No, when a woman is ugly they always say she has beautiful hair or eyes. I have loved him now for six years, I have loved him more than one loves one’s mother. I seem to hear him beside me every moment of the day. I feel the pressure of his hand on mine. If I look up, I seem to see him coming, and as you see, I run to you to talk of him. He is here every day now, but he never looks at me, he does not notice my presence. It is agony. I have absolutely no hope, no, no hope. Oh, my God! Give me strength to endure. I prayed all last night. I often go up to him and speak to him and look into his eyes. My pride is gone. I am not mistress of myself. Yesterday I told Uncle Vanya I couldn’t control myself, and all the servants know it. Every one knows that I love him.

Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking even in its rather overblown formality of language. This is how Chekhov writes. It would be a mistake to lessen the impact of that language – you need that “Oh my God” in there, for example. But take a look at Paul Schmidt’s translation of the same monologue. It feels more speak-able, to this English-speaking woman:

That’s what people always say to an ugly woman; they say: “Oh, you have beautiful eyes. Oh, you have beautiful hair.” I’ve been in love with him for six years now; I love him more than my own mother. All I can hear is the sound of his voice, feel the touch of his hands. I keep watching the door, I always think it’s him coming. And now look, I keep coming to you so I can talk about him. He’s here every day now, but he never looks at me, he doesn’t even see me … It hurts so much! And it’s all so hopeless, it’s completely hopeless! Oh, my God, I don’t know where I’ll get the strength … I lie in bed all night long, just praying … And I have no shame anymore – I hang around talking to him, I keep looking him right in the eyes… I just can’t help myself anymore! Yesterday I told Uncle Vanya I was in love with him … And the servants know, they all know.

Bravo, Mr. Schmidt.

I couldn’t even begin to translate a work of literature from one to another language, and writing about this right now makes me a bit lonely, because this is the kind of stuff I want to talk about with my father, who loved this stuff as well. He was particularly interested in an essay I found by Jim Di, who translated Ulysses into Chinese (I posted it here.) Marvelous stuff. “The woman word.” Translation cannot be a one-to-one correspondence because languages don’t work that way. If you want to get across the feel of Molly Bloom’s monologue, and how it feels to us in English, to a Chinese audience, then you have to think deeply about the language, and find appropriate correspondences. Interviews with translators help me to think more deeply about works such as Ulysses – they grapple with the text in a way I never could, because their purposes are different.

Joyce’s language is its own thing. He was a linguist. He loved puns. He loved making connections, with sound and the look of words. This works in English, but it wouldn’t in, say, Finnish, because the base is different. So Leevi Lehto, especially in the Oxen of the Sun episode, really wrestled with this.

The Oxen of the Sun episode (basically, the “maternity ward” episode) is difficult for English readers – especially those of modern-day audiences who, as a whole, are not as well read as the regular readers back in Joyce’s day. In the Oxen of the Sun episode, a baby is being born (the literal “story” of the episode). Joyce writes the chapter in a way that it takes you through the entire history of the English language – the English language being “born”. I write about that here. If you don’t know the references (and Joyce doesn’t give them to you, you just have to recognize them on your own), then you will be baffled. As I said, that chapter is one of the ones where I can actually sense how unqualified I am to “get” it. No matter. I struggle on through it.

However, Mr. Lehto comes up against a big problem with translating this episode. Listen to what he has to say. The question is: In episode 14, ‘Oxen of the Sun’, you have decided to translate the ‘embryonic development’ of English prose by going through the history of Finnish prose style instead of, for example, alluding to those English writers Joyce parodies. Why is this? Lehto answers:

Interesting question! This decision is an example of how there is no one single correct way to convey the how-aspect of translation (cf. 2.3. above). In the ’Oxen of the Sun’ my technique is, so to say, categorical domestication, whereas in other parts of the novel I categorically refuse to domesticate – for the most part I don’t translate Irish/Dubliner idioms into their Finnish/Helsinkiner correspondents, because I consider Joyce has meant his idioms to be foreign to an average English reader. (My rule of thumb has been to abstain from domesticating if Gifford & Seidman consider it necessary to add an explanation to their English readers.) In the ’Oxen of the Sun’, in my view, Joyce’s aim is slightly different: Instead of alienation he is striving for, shall we say, maximum recognition: the exact way they wrote in such and such time at a given part of the British Empire (presuming a reader with maximum of education and imagination, as Joyce always happily and shamelessly presumes). In this exact way aspect Joyce is not, in fact, content with imitation – ’Oxen of the Sun’ has more direct quotation and plagiarism than pastiche and parody. One proof of this is that Joyce’s “parodies” stop at the point of history, in which copyright laws become a factor (on this, cf. Paul Saint-Amour’s excellent book The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination, Cornell University Press 2003). Again, I aimed to “do what Joyce did”: where he had his manuals of English prose style, I had Paavo Pulkkinen’s book on the development of modern Finnish language (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1972), with its excellent text appendices.

Amazing, and I am sure will be controversial to some, but to me Lehto’s tactic here is a way of bringing the text alive in another context, a Finnish context. I love love his thoughts on it. I am not sure that Joyce would agree that all good literature is local (I am thinking of Thomas Hardy’s praise and dedication to “provincialism” in literature) – and although he didn’t live in Ireland at all after a certain point, it certainly was the wellspring of his creativity, and his rage. It is a local concern. He is a writer in exile from his home. Like Ulysses, his journey is always about going home. So Lehto sees the universal concern in that (it is something anyone from any culture anywhere can relate to), and works on the idioms and symbols and clues from a Finnish context. I was just so fascinated to hear his thought process on it.

There is more good stuff in the interview (read the whole thing here) – and I have to admit, I feel a strange connection with Joyce and Finland – because, for some reason, my post on Finnegans Wake is linked on the Finnish Wikipedia page for that book. I am strangely proud of that. So go Finland with your Joycean adventures!! And thanks for including me, in some sideways kind of way.