Prevajanje Jamesa Joycea v slovenščino

In Slovenia, James Joyce (1882-1941) was an unknown author until around 1930. The reception of his work and its translation was hampered by the ideological rejection of modernism in contrast to the prevailing social realism in the period before and just after the Second World War. In 1955, the first Joyce translation was published, Dubliners was translated by Herbert Grün, arousing interest and a desire to translate other works by Joyce. Two leading Slovene translators undertook the task: in 1964 a translation of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was translated by Jože Udovič, and in 1967 Ulysses was translated by Janez Gradišnik, who wrote also an in-depth commentary and added notes to his translation. Subsequently, Joyce was finally recog­nized in Slovenia as a leading European modernist writer. The following decades were characterized by critical examination and the publication of Joyce’s body of work, including a revised translation of Ulysses (1993), and a new translation of Dubliners (Tina Mahkota, 2012). In 2022, when the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses was celebrated, the entire body of Joyce’s fiction had been translated, even a few excerpts from the “untranslatable” Finnegans Wake (trans. Andrej E. Skubic, 2000). As for the future, the question will certainly arise as to whether it would be apt to translate Joyce’s final novel in its entirety, or to publish new translations of his earlier works. Admittedly, these will be not only challenging and time-consuming, but also very costly publishing projects.