Celati, stylistics and Molly's voice

Abstract

Musicality, a chaos of words, a desire to produce a melodious Ulisse: in the preface introducing his translation of Joyce's Ulysses, Gianni Celati recounts his reasons for presenting a reading experience uninterrupted by notes and interpretations, claiming that understanding everything is not essential. This essay approaches his Ulisse from the descriptivist perspective of stylistics, an approach to the analysis of literary texts that uses linguistic description, in order to look for Celati's voice, or 'thumbprint', among the many voices of Ulysses, a text known for its polyphony, its perfectionism, its incomparable play of styles. This essay will examine a passage from the last episode of the source text (‘Penelope’) and its translation, in order to take a detailed look at Celati’s translation strategies, placing them within the trends of Italian translations of modern classics. The analysis touches on issues such as ennoblissement, characterisation, register. In its nature of retranslation, any relationship with De Angelis's canonical 1960 translation, for over fifty years the Italian readers' only point of contact with the text, will also be examined.