Translators up a (plum)tree: (food)Notes to the Translation of the ‘Sandwich Passage’ into Hungarian and Romanian

Resumo

From the perspective of translation, Lestrygonians is a chapter that goes in the face of linguistic norm, subverting expectations of standard language use. The chapter consistently shows meaning to be unstable, self-generating along lines of flight, mushrooming around nodes of (semantic) tension. The cohesion of the text, as shown in the sandwich’ passage, depends on a series of such nodes, of linguistic occasions, associations and interfaces; Bloom’s associations and bricolage (or, to use Jean- Michel Rabaté’s pun, brick-holing)1 of words which direct and channel the text’s movements are called forth by the shape of phrases, homonymy and polysemy. Such instability of meaning and of the directions of the production of meaning certainly musters and breeds translation problems: the translator would have to aim at finding/ creating analogous interfaces in the target language (TL) that could account for, and function as points of departure for Bloom’s strings of associations, for the text’s nodes of meaning and tension.