La traduzione postcoloniale in Irlanda: Finnegans Wake, una traduzione in corso

Over the last decades translation studies have increasingly focused on the central role of translation in the colonial and postcolonial periods, highlighting the complicity of translation in the colonial expansion of Western Europe, but also its capacity to act as a tool of resistance to the cultural legacy of colonialism and contribute to the process of liberation of colonised cultures. This book investigates the resistance potential of translation in postcolonial countries by making special reference to James Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake, and demonstrating how in this text translation is used in the service of the Irish writer’s struggle against British imperialism. The first part gives an overview of postcolonial translation studies (chapter one), and outlines the anomalous state of Ireland in the postcolonial paradigm, by demonstrating the crucial role played by translation in the colonisation and decolonisation of the Irish culture (chapter two). The second part explores the anti-imperialist and postcolonial dimension of Joyce’s writing, especially in Finnegans Wake (chapter three). Finally chapter four describes the variety of translational mechanisms and processes through which the English language, that is the language of the colonial master, is progressively “traduced into jinglish janglage”, that is dismembered and reinvented to reflect the cultural difference of Ireland vis-à-vis the British Empire, and contaminated with a multitude of foreign languages to represent the hybrid status of the Irish cultural reality, which is, for Joyce, irremediably damaged by the colonial encounter.