The Geno-song and Pheno-song of the "Sirens": The Finnish, Swedish, and Italian (Re)Translations of the Musical Prose of "Sirens"

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Niskanen, Lauri A. and Autieri, Arianna. 2024. The Geno-song and Pheno-song of the "Sirens": The Finnish, Swedish, and Italian (Re)Translations of the Musical Prose of "Sirens". James Joyce Quarterly, 61(3-4), pp. 277-298. ISSN 0021-4183 [Article]

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Official URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/80/article/941498

Abstract or Description

The challenge in any translation, but especially in translations of Joyce and of Ulysses, is that a work of art is never one voice, one utterance, but is built upon an entire literary tradition in the postmodern intertextual process. In this essay, we focus on the case of "Sirens," an episode in which the undertone of the textual surface is not only literary tradition but, intermedially, the forms, signifiers, and experience of music. In the thinking of Roland Barthes, a musical text, or writing aloud, includes phenotext, the regular mode of communication, and genotext, which refers, without denotation, directly to the body. This, according to Barthes, causes friction, the grain of the voice. In this essay, we examine how (re)translations of "Sirens" into Swedish, Italian, and Finnish recreate this friction in their respective literary horizons, through their different linguistic possibilities. We find that, in their performances of the geno-song and pheno-song of the musico-literary intermediality of Joyce's "Sirens," the Swedish, Italian, and Finnish translators either stop to explicate the symbolic in the mode of pheno-song or convey the semiotic in the legato line of geno-song, but rarely are they able to include both and convey the grain of "Sirens." Our contention is that "Sirens" should not be reduced to symbolic denotation, but that the musical aspect of the episode should also not be emphasized in an overly analytic, formal way. Through examples of i) verbal music, ii) fragmented polyphony, and iii) microstructural analogies to music, we argue that the target-text reader should hear the grain of fictive language against the musical voice.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1353/jjq.2024.a941498