Fictions of Hybridity

Fictions of Hybridity is the first full-length study of the famous and infamous Danish translator Mogens Boisen's translations of James Joyce's Ulysses. It is author Ida Klitgård's basic presumption that since Joyce's international outlook was that of a multilingual exile, and since the style of his major works clearly demonstrates a fundamentally foreignizing principle of linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural hybridity, his works are shaped according to, what Klitgård calls, a poetics of translation as exile. This is very much the case in Ulysses. Consequently, translators of the novel are to take this stylistic trait into account when reproducing it in their own language. In this study, Klitgård explores such hybridity in Boisen's translations. Based on a critical discussion of recent theories of translation, such as the concepts of 'domestication' and 'foreignization,' she undertakes an extensive comparative analysis and evaluation of a number of episodes in Ulysses while paying close attention to the complex networks of the novel's most important stylistic features of hybridity.