Interlingual Metempsychosis: Translating Intertextuality in James Joyce‟s Ulysses

Abstract

Highlighting in its very title the unlimited dimensions of intertextuality, James Joyce‟s Ulysses selfconsciously establishes itself as a text that seems impossible to translate without losing essential elements. Ulysses, (in)famous for its multiple styles that in themselves seem to give shape and content to the various themes at hand, is a text for which the term „intertextuality‟ seems to fall short. With a particular eye for the problems that occur when translating intertextual elements of Ulysses into Dutch and other languages and following Fritz Senn‟s coinage of the term „interdynamism‟, this article sets out to investigate a handful of examples from Ulysses that pinpoint the problematic nature of the various echoes and allusions in it.