Translating Baby Tuckoo: Portraits of the Artist as a Very Young Man

A comparative reading across several different languages of the opening sentences of Joyce’s text suggests the possible interpretive implications of a macrotextual Portrait.

The first three sentences of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) focus on how the strangely named budding artist Stephen Dedalus, who will continue his artistic development in Ulysses, acquired one of his earliest names. The present discussion involves an exploration of textual effects generated by what I have elsewhere called a transtextual reading, a reading, that is to say, across languages, of competing and complementary translations of those three sentences in a variety of versions and languages. The aim of the exercise is not to pronounce on the merits and demerits of individual translations, but rather to explore how Joyce's original text is extended and ramified by its cumulative translations, growing in the process into a multilingual macrotext. 1 For purposes of comparison, we shall examine three versions each in German, Italian, and Portuguese; two versions each in Dutch, French, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish; and single versions in Catalan, Danish, Galician, and Irish. All translations are quoted in full for each of the passages concerned, so that interested readers may test my interpretive comments against their own feeling for the respective languages and consequently for the translated texts. Other readers' reactions may of course very well be quite different from my own, but this is entirely to be expected, since we all, as readers, inevitably bring different backgrounds and inclinations and abilities, linguistic and otherwise, to the texts we read in whatever language, whether our own or another.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. (7) Joyce's narrative portrait of the artist as a young man begins with a very young man indeed. The reader who approaches the text for the first time (in any language) may be mildly disoriented by the first sentence (who is speaking?), before being quickly reoriented by the second ("His father told him that story"). On later readings, we realize that the reorientation is actually rather less than complete, in that the opening sentence is in fact embedded in no fewer than four separate narrative presentations, involving two separate voices and two separate (and different) visions: the narrating voice of Stephen Dedalus's father; the remembered consciousness of the very young Stephen (perhaps only two years old) as listener; the remembering consciousness of the older Stephen; and the voice of the primary narrator, the teller of the telling, who may or may not (for all we know at this point in the story) turn out to be identical with the older Stephen, the artist no longer quite so young a man. (We find out only later, of course, that the protagonist is called Stephen Dedalus; so far there is no hint of his name or his identity, other than that, in this opening sequence, he is a baby -more specifically, "baby tuckoo.") A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as the title already suggests, and as befits a Künstlerroman or novel of artistic development, is a highly self-aware artistic construct. The narrative begins with an ironically self-conscious mise en abyme, an incomplete (and ostentatiously fictive) narrative listened to by the very young Stephen; it will conclude almost 300 pages later with another incomplete narrative, the older Stephen's journal of some twenty years later. The opening formula -"Once upon a time" -also makes an immediate and artfully doubled reference -"and a very good time it was" -to the importance of narrative time, an essential armature of any Künstler -or Bildungsroman. Joyce's Portrait opens with the remembered narrating voice of Stephen's father; it will end with Stephen's own voice invoking his "old father, old artificer" to stand him "now and ever in good stead" (253). Stephen's reference, as he prepares to leave home and country and set off to make his way alone and abroad as (he hopes) a writer, is not to father Dedalus of Dublin but to father Daedalus of Greek myth, but it also, and of course ironically, brings us back to the narrating father Dedalus of the first sentence.
Three versions -Alonso's and Ingberg's Spanish versions both with "en otros tiempos," Araguas's Galician with "noutros tempos" -make the specific point that these mythical times were "in other times," times unspecified but far distant both chronologically and experientially, in which things might well have been expected to function quite differently. Some versions interestingly add a suggestion of spatial as well as temporal indefiniteness: the most overt of these are Atterbom's and Olofsson's Swedish "i världen" (literally, "in the world"), but Alonso's Spanish "allá," Araguas's Galician "alá," and Henry's Irish "ann" all literally mean "there" -Henry's succinct rendering "tan ann" translating idiomatically as "there was a time," literally as "time (tan) there (ann)."

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and a very good time it was Savitsky (French, 1924): dans le bon vieux temps, Savitsky/Aubert (French, 1982): et c'était une très bonne fois, The phrase "and a very good time it was," while once again merely a standard story-telling formula, also hints already at the element of reconstructive nostalgia in all remembrances of things past, whether of Stephen's father's squandered but retrospectively heroicized past or of Stephen's own impoverished youth, out of which he is portrayed as growing towards man's (and possibly, but only possibly, also artist's) estate. Most of our translators are enthusiastically nostalgic: Capodilista's "bei tempi andati" ("good times past"); Vernet's "and how good they were, those times!"; Vieira's "and what a good time it was!"; Franken and Knuth's "and how good those times were"; Brusendorff's "and how good everything was in those days"; Henry's "and it was a very good time." While most versions, as one would expect, use terms literally meaning "good," several contribute to a range of connotational variety: Vieira's Portuguese "linda" ("lovely"), Margarido's Portuguese "doce" ("sweet"), Goyert's German "herrlich" and Schuchart's Dutch "heerlijk" ("splendid"), Brusendorff's Danish "dejligt" and Brøgger's Norwegian "deilig" ("lovely") all ring adjectival changes on just how splendid and splendidly different those other times once were, or need to be imagined as having once been. The idiomatic use of the negative rather than the expected positive, however, in three separate translations -Vernet's Catalan "n'eren" (literally, "were not"), Franken and Knuth's Dutch "niet" ("not") and Brusendorff's Danish "ikke" ("not") -to reinforce just how good the good old days really were adds a distinctly wistful note (at least for the non-native reader of those languages) to all such memories of days (mythical or not) long gone beyond recall, thus adding a note unsounded either in Joyce's English or in any of the other translated versions of it.
Three translations, however (Oddera's, Atterbom's, and Olofsson's), for whatever reason or combination of reasons, refuse to be seduced by sentimental memories of the alleged goodness of the good old days, simply omitting the phrase and the wistfully remembered good old days altogether. The omission is a not insignificant one, not only increasing as it does the pace of the narrative, but also removing a very early proleptic hint, however whimsical, of the comfortably self-indulgent nostalgia of Stephen's father for all things past, including especially the increasingly golden-tinted days of his own indulgently remembered youth and prime.
A letter of 31 January 1931 from John Stanislaus Joyce to his son James, the original Baby Tuckoo, asks: "I wonder do you recollect the old days in Brighton Square, when you were Babie Tuckoo and I used to take you out in the Square and tell you all about the moo-cow that used to come down from the mountain and take little boys across?" (Joyce 1966, 3: 212). The moocow's motives are left somewhat uncertain: on the one hand it might not necessarily have been a wholly benevolent creature, apparently coming down from the Wicklow mountains to carry off little boys from the genteeler Dublin suburbs for unspecified purposes. As opposed to such a worry, however, Don Gifford notes that versions of this story can still be heard in the west of Ireland, involving a supernatural white cow that "takes children across to an island realm where they are relieved of the petty restraints and dependencies of childhood and magically schooled as heroes before they are returned to their astonished parents and community" (131). Various critics (including Gifford) have also suggested that the moocow can be read as evoking the traditional poetic image of the "silk of the kine" (Irish síoda na mbó, the "the most beautiful of cattle"), an allegorical epithet for Ireland that a grown-up Stephen Dedalus, still a would-be artist, will briefly recall twenty-odd years later in Ulysses during his stay in the Martello Tower in Sandycove (12). For our present purposes, the degree to which the moocow coming down along the road is thus already a prefiguration of that intellectually stifling Ireland that Stephen will eventually feel compelled to flee is a question that need not detain us here.
Olofsson's Swedish version is the only one to leave the "snäll liten gosse" ("nice little boy") without any name at all. In compensation for this, however, his version is one of four that establish a stronger verbal relationship between "moocow" and "tuckoo" than is immediately apparent in Joyce's English. Brøgger's Norwegian goes its own way by giving "baby tuckoo" the name "Tassen," which not only also connotes smallness, "Tiny Little Boy" or the like, but retrospectively draws attention to the moocow's now corresponding name, the rhyming "Bassen" ("Great Big Thing"). Franken and Knuth, Atterbom, and Olofsson all adopt a more subtle approach to suggest a similar linkage, Franken and Knuth establishing a rhyme between Dutch "moekoe" and "baby toekoe," Atterbom and Olofsson independently providing a similar rhyme between their Swedish "kossa" ("moocow") and "gosse" ("boy"). These four versions, and especially Brøgger's, implicitly strengthening an element of potential threat (or at least mock-threat) already present in Joyce's English, could indeed be said to hold the greatest potential narrative interest of all our translations at this point -for all that in Brøgger's case the translator's particular strategy will certainly not meet with every reader's (or every translation theorist's) approval. 3
In Joyce's English, the parallelism of the three clauses is emphasized by the somewhat unusual punctuation. Each of the three begins with its subject: "his father," "his father," "he." More than half of our twenty-odd translators echo this childishly simple syntactic structure; but five (Oddera, Alonso, Vieira, Araguas, and Brusendorff) choose to introduce a less childish relative clause instead, and in the process also shift the opening emphasis from the teller to the tale, each translating "That was the story his father told him." Vieira, for his part, chooses to introduce a different relative clause and also to alter the sequence of the three clauses: "That was the story his father told him, with that hairy face of his that looked at him through spectacles." "His father looked at him through a glass" introduces an early element of uncertainty into the account: the English-speaking reader may be momentarily uncertain as to whether the reference is to a (perhaps broken) piece of glass, a drinking glass, an eyeglass of some kind, or even a mirror -invitingly echoing St Paul's "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face." The previous verse in St Paul reads "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things" (1 Corinthians 13:11). As always in Joyce's writings, the uncertainty is functional rather than incidental.
Discussing this particular biblical echo, Fritz Senn (105-06) also points out that none of the existing translations of Portrait makes a similar gesture towards St Paul -a gesture that implicitly thematizes the difficulty of reading, whether the child Stephen's reading of his father's story or our own reading of Joyce's text, "through a glass, darkly." Roughly half of our translators succeed, however, in reproducing the overall ambiguity at least partially: "a glass" is thus translated by Savitsky/Aubert as "un verre," by Capodilista as "un vetro," by Alonso as "un cristal," by Vernet as "un vidre," by Reichert and by Rathjen as "ein Glas," by Franken and Knuth as "een glas," by Atterbom and Olofsson as "ett glas," and by Brusendorff, Brøgger, and Svenkerud as "et glas," each of which seems to allow either for a drinking glass or an eyeglass.
Four translators choose to reduce the uncertainty, without eliminating it entirely. Savitsky thus has Stephen's father look at him through "un morceau de verre," Margarido likewise through "um pedaço de vidro," Goyert through "ein Stück Glas," and Schuchart through "een stuk glas," in each case, that is, through "a piece of glass," making an eyeglass of some kind more likely than a drinking glass, while retaining some of the uncertainty in the form of the very young child's inability to name the object. who had a hairy face. Joyce's calculated laconism evidently troubles his translators, the great majority of whom add some element of emphasis or word order that makes clear the difference. Of the twenty-odd translations, in fact, only seven faithfully reproduce the lack of emphasis: Alonso, Ingberg, Vernet, Pinheiro, Araguas, Reichert, and Rathjen. Olofsson limits himself to "He himself was the boy." Vieira, aiming for clarity at all costs, expansively specifies that "he was the baby tuckoo who had met the moocow." The macrotextual Portrait suggested by our transtextual reading of the first three sentences is thus by and large a considerably disambiguated one, with perceived roughnesses silently evened out in the interests of a smoother reading. There are one or two exceptions: the Norwegian pairing of "Bassen" and "Tassen," for example, definitely introduces possibilities that -legitimately or not -go well beyond Joyce's English. Assessing the overall effect of this particular group of translations, however, it is clear that the text has been simplified, downshifted towards the more reader-friendly end of the range, translators in various languages evidently seeing their task as not just to translate but also, in varying degrees, to explain Joyce's text.
What does all this go to show? Multiplicity in unity is one thing that is certainly shown. Some translations simplify, and others complicate. Some explain what must have happened, and some anticipate what is going to happen. Some arguably don't go far enough, and some arguably go too far. We do not really know exactly what "baby tuckoo" means, and some score or more of translators, who are of course no less puzzled, provide almost as many suggestions. Translations in a different selection of languages would undoubtedly have left some of these points unanswered and would equally undoubtedly have offered answers for other points left unanswered by the present selection. Our attempts at a macrotextual reading in one sense simply replicate on a larger scale all the uncertainties and indeterminacies, the shrewd guesses and false moves, the gaps and questions and solutions of the act of reading itself as practised by any individual reader in any individual language. It will nonetheless be clear that the competing and complementary versions cumulatively constitute an extension of Joyce's original text. Since these few sentences, moreover, constitute the opening gambit of the narrative to follow, the implication for the reader (in whatever language) is quite clear from the very beginning: caveat lector, let the reader beware.

Notes
1 The concept of macrotextuality in this sense was introduced in my book Fictions of Discourse (O'Neill 1994: 135-54). Two later books employed a macrotextual approach to Joyce's writings, focused in each case on a series of transtextual readings (O'Neill 2005(O'Neill , 2013. 2 My thanks are due to Friedhelm Rathjen for helping me to locate his translation. 3 My reading of the Bassen/Tassen pair draws on a linguistic clarification kindly provided by Bjørn Tysdahl.