Dubliners in Brazilian and European Portuguese: The Question of Title Translation in “The Dead”1

Dubliners (1914), by James Joyce, has had four full translations into Portuguese: two in Brazil and two in Portugal. Translations of individual short stories have also been published in collections and magazines. The aim of this article is to discuss the translation of the title of the last and longest short story in Dubliners – “The Dead” – into Brazilian and European Portuguese. The form of the title in English allows a double understanding, that is, as referring to one dead person or to dead people. However, this ambiguity, able to influence the reading of the short story as a whole, is not present in the Portuguese language translations of the title. The question of translating titles may be a torturing one. Whether our translation will have made justice to the source text or not, the title alone will appear on the cover of the book or at the head of a short story or poem as a token of the success or failure of our choice. The loneliness of titles, with its tantalizing exactitude, often inspires us just as much as it wakes our diffidence. Gérard Genette affirms that the title is maybe the most problematic of all paratextual elements (59). According to his reading of Leo H. Hoek, whom he credits as the creator of modern titology,2 “the title as we understand it today is . . . an artificial object, an artifact of reception or commentary, arbitrarily separated by the readers, public, critics, booksellers, bibliographers... and titologists that we are, or happen to be, from the graphic and occasionally iconographic mass of a title page or a cover” [my translation, 59-60].

The titles chosen by James Joyce do not seem to require so deft a hand from translators -at least not from those who render his works into Portuguese. "Chamber Music", "Giacomo Joyce", "Exiles", "Dubliners", "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", "Ulysses" are not among the more difficult titles in literature to translate. Even "Pomes Penyeach" is not so challenging. A title such as "Finnegans Wake", however, is more demanding, as one can understand from the words of its Brazilian translator, Donaldo Schüler: In Finnegans Wake, one hears the sound of the language that united the Occident, the Latin of the Roman Empire: finis (end) after again in order to announce the Viconian circularity. The Latin component induces the brothers Campos to translate it as Finnicius Revém. Passing through French (rêve -dream), the translated title keeps the oneiric substance of the novel. The translator romances in the steps of the original. It is suitable to see, in the title, the Latin expression fines fluviorum, the mouths of the rivers. Can we ignore fin (end), French noun that rhymes with revém, sound link of beginning and conclusion? (15)(16) However, simple as they seem to be, Joyce's titles are not transparent at all, and one of the ways of penetrating their opacity is reading beyond their final forms. The following passage from Genette is worth reading: We must not disregard, once it is eventually given to our knowledge in the paratext of scholarly editions, the genetic pre-history, or prenatal life of the title; in other words, the author's hesitations about his/her choice, which can last long and be full of richness: the first title of Les Fleurs du Mal was Les Lesbiennes or Les Limbes . . . . No Proustian ignores today that À la Recherche du Temps Perdu could have been entitled Les Intermittences du Coeur or Les Colombes Poignadées (!), and it is relevant for our reading, just like being aware that Un Roi sans Divertissement was first Charge d'Âme -examples out of thousands, even if some of those pre-titles were not more than working titles for the author, that is, provisional titles manipulated as such, like The Process and The Trial, according to Brod, and probably like Work in Progress before becoming Finnegans Wake. Even -or most of all -as provisional, an expression is never totally irrelevant, unless it is simply a number". [my translation, 70-71] Genette emphasizes that titles may have a pre-history full of hesitations and suggests that the knowledge of that background allows us to read the main text differently. Let us consider the case of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's 1916 novel is a rewriting of the today incomplete text of Stephen Hero -which, in turn, had begun simply as "A Portrait of the Artist", an essay rejected by the editors of the Irish magazine Dana in 1904. Joycean readers will have in mind that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the result of those two previous texts, and the contrast between Stephen Dedalus as a "hero" and as an "artist", a fact suggested by the titles, will not escape the critics. It is not that the meaning of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be fully explained by the titles of its previous versions, but that it can definitely be illuminated by them.
The case of Dubliners is even more interesting. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus on 12 July 1905, Joyce declares that it was his "intention to complete 'Dubliners' by the end of the year and to follow it by a book 'Provincials'" (Joyce, Letters of James Joyce 2: 92). Joyce never wrote such sequel. In this case, we are not dealing with a hesitation about the form of a title -Dubliners. What interests us is that the existence of another title makes it possible for readers to understand how Joyce saw Dubliners: a book about Dublin, especially its urban area, not about its counterpart, the rural Dublin, which could have been the theme of Provincials, had he ever written it.
One case worthy to note is the subtle difference between the translations of the title of Joyce's first published novel into Brazilian Portuguese. While José Geraldo Vieira, in his 1945 translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, gives us Retrato do artista quando jovem, in 1992, Bernardina da Silveira Pinheiro aptly keeps the indefinite article in her rendering, hence the result is Um retrato do artista quando jovem. It is just an article, one could say, but Christine O'Neill sheds some light on the question of articles. First, she comments on the absence of an article in "Two Gallants": 'What's in an article?' one might reasonably ask. Translators add or omit them . . . . Admittedly, great mastery of all the target languages would be required to assess properly the subtleties of the usage of the article, both definite and indefinite. Joyce's omission of the article in "Two Gallants" implies that Corley and Lenehan are less exceptional than "The Two Gallants" would make them sound . . . . (65) Then the author examines the case of the presence of an indefinite article similar to that in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "'An Encounter,' although indefinite, is more specific than the bald 'Encuentro' [as it appears in Mexican and Argentinian translations], in that it expressly prepares us for an unexpected meeting that is yet unqualified: is it casual, difficult, dangerous?" (O'Neill 65).
In Vieira's translation neither the definiteness of "o retrato" (the portrait) nor the less specificity of "um retrato" (a portrait) is rendered into Portuguese. Furthermore, as Theodore Spencer puts it, while in Stephen Hero Stephen is "the average undergraduate", in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man he becomes the "all-important Stephen" (12-13). This, in the light of the above quote by O'Neill, justifies the indefinite article in the title creating in the readers an expectation about what kind of artist's portrait Joyce will provide.
As for the translations of Dubliners, nine out of the ten Italian translations bear the name Gente di Dublino; the other is called Dublinesi. The 1926 French translation was entitled Gens de Dublin. In 1974, Jacques Aubert's translation came out under the name of Dublinois, and Benoît Tadié opted for Gens de Dublin in 1994.
The German titles have their own history. In 1934, Alois Brandl published a review of the German translation of Dubliners in which he writes that "you cannot call [the stories] novellen because they are lacking in plot and also in depth of character", so "mood pictures of human individuals" would be a better characterization (76). Brandl's observation might have been triggered by the fact that Georg Goyert's 1928 translation into German had been entitled Dublin -Novellen, unlike the future German translations of 1969 and 1994, both called Dubliner. Goyert seems to have chosen this title in the strength of Joyce's refusal to accept his first suggestion. At first, the translator thought of So Sind Sie in Dublin ("What They Are Like in Dublin"). In a letter to the translator on 19 October 1927, Joyce disagreed on the title and said he would rather see So Sind Wir in Dublin ("What We are Like in Dublin"), although this translation did not please him either. In the same letter Joyce explains to Goyert that "if 'Dubliners' is not possible what about 'In Dublin Stadt" or 'Dublin an der Liffey'?", meaning "In Dublin City" and "Dublin on the Liffey" respectively (Joyce, Letters of James Joyce 3: 164).
The Portuguese language has seen four complete translations of Dubliners and two different forms, Gente de Dublin(m) in Portugal and Dublinenses in Brazil.
Since the aim of this article is to discuss the translations of the title of "The Dead" into Portuguese, let us start to narrow our focus and turn our attention to the problem of title translation in Dubliners. José Roberto O'Shea addressed the question of title translation in Dubliners in the eleventh issue of the ABEI Journal (2009). His short article "Translating James Joyce's Dubliners: Confronting Literalness and Revision" deals with his decisions in translating three titles from Dubliners (1993): "Two Gallants" ("Dois galãs"), "Counterparts" ("Cópias") and "A Painful Case" ("Um caso trágico"). O'Shea explains that his translation was non-literal and that he was concerned that Brazilian readers would efficiently receive the stories.
Joyce's letter to Stanislaus on 6 February 1907 is rich of ideas for titles. He mentions "Ulysses", a short story he would later develop into a novel, as well as other titles that never came to light, with the exception of "The Dead": "Ulysses never got any forrader than the title. I have other titles, e.g. The Last Supper, The Dead, The Street, Vengeance, At Bay: all of which stories I could write if circumstances were favourable" (Joyce, Letters of James Joyce 2: 209). What is most remarkable in the letter is the suggestion that Joyce started to write "The Dead" from its title, which allows us to confer even more importance to the title of the narrative.
It is necessary to stress that my idea of reading beyond the final form of the title, more than echoing Genette, includes the afterlife of the title through their translations. It is correct to think that the knowledge of the provisional titles of a text can influence one's interpretation. Nonetheless, it is also true that the translated forms of a title, when taken into consideration, can shed light on the meaning of a literary text, if only because it may compel the reader to investigate why that title was translated one way or another.
Patrick O'Neill, in his Polyglot Joyce, writes about the relevance of titles: Titles may be referentially descriptive, with the primary emphasis variously on theme (War and Peace), character (Madame Bovary), setting (Wuthering Heights), or action (Murder in the Cathedral); they may be self-referentially descriptive (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), intertextually allusive (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake), overtly symbolic (The Trial, Heart of Darkness), or ostensibly nonsignificant (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler); or they may be one of multiple possible combinations and shadings of such alternatives. (120) Although in the above quote O'Neill is not referring to the titles of individual short stories, he turns to the matter eventually. Besides, most of what can be said about the translations of book titles also applies to the translations of individual short stories. According to O'Neill, "the individual stories of Dubliners provide a particularly interesting area for the study of literary titles". However, he underlines that despite the "laconic opacity", which generates "indeterminacy" and "unrest", some of the titles that are highly interesting in their original form turn out to be relatively uninteresting in a transtextual context, in that they have provoked little or no difference among their translators. This is true of "The Sisters", "An Encounter", "After the Race", "A Little Cloud", "A Mother", and "The Dead". The titles of the remaining two-thirds of the stories, however, offer more than a little room for transtextual reflection. (127) So the author discusses the translations of the titles of the other nine stories in Dubliners, but does not comment on the titles of the six above quoted due to the lack of room for "transtextual reflection", which in his theory means that there is hardly any venue for the analysis of the titles vis à vis their translations. What is intriguing is that unlike what he does with the first five stories of the group -"The Sisters", "An Encounter", "After the Race", "A Little Cloud", and "A Mother" -, O'Neill adds an endnote about "The Dead", which I reproduce here with some editing: 'The Dead' is almost entirely unproblematical, as suggested by the almost complete uniformity of its translated titles . . . . While one Portuguese translation also has the corresponding "Os mortos" (Trevisan 1964), however, another has "O morto" (Mota 1963), literally "the dead man", suggesting, intentionally or not, that the Portuguese title should be read in a more restrictive sense than the original as referring exclusively to the parallel between Gretta's one-time admirer Michael Furey and her husband Gabriel. (245) This would be enough for O'Neill to integrate "The Dead" into the other nine stories that he deems richer in terms of title translation. Commenting on the two different translations of "The Dead" into Portuguese in a peripheral endnote instead of in the main body of the book is a decision that fell to the author to make, but his decision notwithstanding it is necessary to add that Trevisan's translation is not the only one keeping the plural form "Os mortos". José Roberto O'Shea's translation, mentioned by O'Neill (29,76), and Tristão da Cunha's, which the author does not consider in his study, keep it as well. Another passage by O'Neill must be carefully examined: The first translation of any of Joyce's works in Portuguese was José Geraldo Vieira's version of Portrait, published in Porto Alegre in Brazil in 1945. This was followed in 1946 by an abridged translation of Dubliners (containing just ten of the stories) by Maria da Paz Ferreira in Lisbon. The complete Dubliners was translated three times, by Virgínia Motta in Lisbon in 1963, by Hamilton Trevisan in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, andby José Roberto O'Shea in São Paulo in 1993. (76) José Geraldo Vieira's translation of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not, as the author affirms, the first of Joyce's works in Portuguese. Before that, in 1942, Tristão da Cunha's translation 4 of "Os mortos" appeared in Revista do Brasil, which probably makes it the first translation of Joyce in Brazil. Second, the complete Dubliners has been translated at least four times, not three, since Isabel Veríssimo also published a translation in Portugal in 1994. 5 In "Entitled to Translate", Christine O'Neill lists the translations of Dubliners into French, German, Italian and Spanish, and supplies the translators' choices regarding the title of the book as well as the titles of all the short stories. So we learn that the three translations of "The Dead" into French bear "Les morts"; the three in German, "Die Toten"; the ten in Italian, "I morti"; and the five in Spanish, "Los muertos". This is what Christine O'Neill says about the translations of the title of "The Dead": 'The Dead' is an accommodating title inasmuch as it is both singular and plural and, indeed, the story does move from a more general sense of all those faithful and faithless departed to one particular dead, Michael Furey, before becoming universal again in the closing paragraphs. None of the languages examined [French, German, Italian, and Spanish] can reflect such doubleness. Forced to forego the pointed ambiguity of the original, all translators chose the plural ('Die Toten,' 'Les morts,' 'Los muertos' and 'I morti'), taking it to the words primary meaning in the story, but the narrowing of meaning, though unavoidable, is regrettable. (71) In a concise and inevitably shallow way, the story of "The Dead" is the following. The Misses Morkan, Gabriel Conroy's aunts, offers their annual Christmas dinner. At the end of it, before leaving the house for the hotel where he and his wife Gretta would spend the night, Gabriel watches her on the staircase listening to Bartell D'Arcy sing "The Lass of Aughrim". He does not guess at the time what that song means to Gretta.
Only when they are in the hotel room she tells him that "The Lass of Aughrim" is the song that Michael Furey, a young man who had fallen in love with her while she was living with her grandmother in Galway, used to sing. It was winter, she was about to go to the convent in Dublin, and the young man was ill. Because Gretta was not allowed to see Michael, she wrote a letter asking him to wait until she came back to Galway in the summer. However, he did not wait. The night before she left, he escaped under the rain to see her and, already much enfeebled, died at the age of seventeen. Gretta falls asleep and the story ends with Gabriel at the window of the hotel room looking outside. This is the last paragraph of "The Dead": A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Joyce, An ambiguity lies in that the "dead" of the title may refer only to the death of only one person, probably Michael Furey -the name unburied from Gretta's past -or it can assume a universal meaning, embracing all the dead. Since the readers' interpretations may be influenced by the title, which title is the most suitable for a translation: the more limited in scope "O morto" or the further-reaching "Os mortos"? Joyce's aim at "letting Dubliners take a look at themselves" (Joyce, Letters of James Joyce 1: 63-64) does not circumscribe Dubliners to Dublin. In the same spirit, why should the title of "The Dead" be narrowed to the character of Michael Furey?
There is indeed a tendency to universality in the story. Harry Levin refers to it by convincingly connecting the end of "The Dead" with a passage in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. "The final paragraph . . . sets up, like most departures, a disturbing tension between the warm and familiar and the cold and remote. Chauncey C. Loomis, Jr. divides the narrative of "The Dead" into five sections: "the musicale, the dinner, the farewells and the drive to the hotel, the scene between Gabriel and Gretta in their room, and, finally, the vision itself", the latter defined as "Gabriel Conroy's timeless moment of almost supreme vision" in which the story culminates (402-403). Until the end of the fourth section, the narrative presents a constant increase in pace and narrowing in focus, with Joyce bringing Gabriel and Gretta to the center of the scene. In the fifth section, however, when Gabriel's vision takes over and the story assumes a universal reach, "pace simply ceases to exist in the vision . . .; Joyce reverses the process [and] the focus broadens, from Gretta, to his aunts, to himself, to Ireland, to 'the universe'. Time and space are telescoped in the final words of the story: The snow falls on 'all the living and the dead'." (406-407).

In one direction lies the Class of Elements at Clongowes Wood [in
Richard Ellmann and Allen Tate contrast the presence of the snow at the beginning and the end of the story in order to show this change from an individual to a universal perspective. According to Ellmann, the snow begins as "desirable, unattainable, just as at his first knowledge of Michael Furey, Gabriel envies him", but, at the end, "it belongs to all men, it is general, mutual. Under its canopy, all human beings, whatever their degrees of intensity, fall into union" (252). Similarly, Tate explains that at the beginning, the snow is the cold and even hostile force of nature, humanly indifferent, enclosing the warm conviviality of the Misses Morkan's party. But just as the human action in which Gabriel is involved develops in the pattern of the plot of Reversal, his situation at the end being the opposite of its beginning, so the snow reverses its meaning, in a kind of rhetorical dialectic: from naturalistic coldness it develops into a symbol of warmth, of expanded consciousness; it stands for Gabriel's escape from his own ego into the larger world of humanity, including 'all the living and the dead'. (394) According to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, plural noun phrases "with an adjective head referring to a group of people" receive a "generic 'the'" (Quirk et al. 283). This would be the case of the "the" in the title of the last short story in Dubliners: "The Dead". However, while in a longer sentence phrases such as "the rich", "the unemployed" and so forth would be understood as having a collective meaning -for example, "The poor suffer in times of crisis" -, in the title of Joyce's short story it grows ambiguous.
In the six translations of "The Dead" into Portuguese: three into Brazilian Portuguese -Tristão da Cunha's (1942), Hamilton Trevisan's (1964 and José Roberto O'Shea's (1993) -and three into European Portuguese -Maria da Paz Ferreira's (1946), Virgínia Motta's (1963) and Isabel Veríssimos's (1994) -both the plural and the singular forms have been used. What is remarkable is that all the Brazilian translations use the plural "Os mortos", while the European ones use the singular "O morto".
Have the Portuguese translators avoided the "narrowing of meaning" about which Christine O'Neill wrote by keeping the ambiguity present in the singular form of the title? After all, singular forms may have plural meanings in the Portuguese language, too. The sentence "The poor suffer in times of crisis" can be translated as "O pobre sofre em tempos de crise". Although the singular form "o pobre" is used, it is clear that it refers to a group. Yet in the title of Joyce's narrative, "o morto" leaves no space for ambiguity. What Christine O'Neill affirmed about French, German, Italian, and Spanish, that is, that it is not feasible to reflect the doubleness of Joyce's title in those languages, is also true for the Portuguese language.
Readers of the Brazilian translation will be, from the beginning, guided towards a universal interpretation, while the readers of the Portuguese translations will have to wait until the very end of the story to see the phrase "the dead" -in "upon all the living and the dead" -finally translated in the plural, creating a contrast between a singular form in the title and a plural one in the end.
Translated texts expose translators' choices, and their choices hint at their own interpretations of the text. The Portuguese translators opted for a singular meaning based on their understanding of the story. They preferred to associate the dead of the title with just one character in the story, probably Michael Furey. But we still have to consider what is behind the translators' interpretations. Is it possible that their interpretations, manifest in their choices, have been biased by previous translations of the title? Patrick O'Neill asserts that literary texts can be read "transtextually", which means to read the source texts and their translations as if they were one text, or, as he writes, "a polyglot macrotext" (10). O'Neill's transtextual model is a "particular form of intertextual reading across languages" (10). If the Brazilian and European translators of "The Dead" accomplished their transtextual readings, at least, in the frame of the Portuguese language, it is possible to believe that their choices have been guided by a certain tradition of translating "The Dead" within their varieties of Portuguese.
In other words, I am suggesting that Virgínia Motta and Isabel Veríssimo may have followed Maria da Paz Ferreira's translation. This could explain the singular form in their translations contrasting with the plural in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. The same may have happened, mutatis mutandis, with the Brazilian translators. I do not imply any kind of subservient or uncritical work. On the contrary, reading existing translations of the source text before retranslating it, if in good faith, is itself a sign of critical work.
In addition to the universality of "The Dead", another factor that should be considered is that both the first and the last story of Dubliners deal with two sisters and at least one dead person -Eliza and Nannie / Father James Flynn in "The Sisters"; Julia and Kate Morkan / Michael Furey in "The Dead". Therefore, opening and closing the book with plurals, although without Joyce's original ambiguity, reinforces the circularity of the work. As Ulrich Schneider puts it: The titles of the first and last stories, in particular, could be easily exchanged. The first story, like the last, is much concerned with death and with the interrelation between the living and the dead; the last story, like the first, is partly set in the house of two sisters. Thus the circularity of the stories is emphasized through the titles. (203) I conclude that the plural form "Os mortos", adopted by the Brazilian translators, is preferable to the singular "O morto" exactly because it emphasizes the universal dimension of the short story, chiming with the ideas of critics like Harry Levin, Chauncey C. Loomis, Jr., Richard Ellmann, and Allen Tate. It is a fact that, where there was some ambiguity, the translators had to make choices that changed the original doubleness of the title Joyce gave to his last short story. However, translations, like their originals, are made of choices.

Notes
1 I wish to thank Marlene Soares dos Santos and Roberto Ferreira da Rocha, both from the Faculty of Letters of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, for reading this text and making so many valuable comments and corrections. Any remaining mistake is, of course, mine. 2 Maiorino claims that Harry Levin coined the term "titology" in "The Title as a Literary Genre" (3), whereas Genette believes it was Claude Duchet in "La Fille abandonée et la Bête humaine, éléments de titrologie romanesque" (59). 3 Luis Gillet, in an important critique on Finnegans Wake published in Revue des deux mondes on 15 October 1931, calls the work Types de Dublin (29). Benoît Tadié explained his decision to me in an electronic message of 9 July 2010. The following quotation is a translation of his words in French, which he authorized me to quote: I have chosen Gens de Dublin for different several reasons: (1) phonetically, it is better than "dublinois", correct but rare in French; (2) it was the title under which the stories have been known in France since the 20's, so I accommodated to an old usage. However, I think Aubert is also right to have chosen Dublinois, unarguably more faithful. As his translation came just before mine, my choice was also a way of differentiating from it and offering the readers the two possibilities.
4 Considering the story unbalanced in quality, Tristão da Cunha translated only its second part, that is, from the moment Gabriel sees Gretta on the staircase, just before leaving for the hotel. 5 The printed edition does not bear any date. I am relying on Vivina Almeida Carreira de Campos Figueiredo's "Joyce em Português europeu. As funções dos paratextos em Dubliners e A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".