This paper aims to present how the idea of untranslatability is played upon in
my translating A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Chinese. Following
Lawrence Venuti’s translation principles, I try to walk between the two poles of
“domestication” and “foreignization,
” and manage to bridge the lexical gaps
between Joyce’s original expressions and their possible Chinese counterparts. I also
refer to Walter Benjamin’s article of “The Task of the Translator,
” which assumes
some “sacred” meaning in the source language is in fact untranslatable, and Jacques
Derrida’s deconstructive concept of différance, which highlights the need and
impossibility of translation at the same time. With these theoretical supports, I will
address the issues of (un)translatability and aesthetic equivalence in my translating
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Chinese.
The issue of (un)translatability is conspicuous in this semi-autobiographical
novel. Joyce’s literary innovation and linguistic experiments have posed great
challenges to the translator. For the scope of this paper, I focus my discussions on
the following three points: (1) The necessary evil of annotation, (2) Language
games across cultures, and (3) Domestication or foreignization. Examples will be
offered to discuss how I manage to create some sort of “aesthetic equivalence” in
my Chinese translation. Going beyond the simple dichotomy between betrayal and
faithfulness, I emphasize the necessity of cross-cultural creativity in translating A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into Chinese.