The Department of Translation, Terminology and Interpreting Studies and the Department of Italian,
together with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, invites you to a Public Lecture by Prof. Enrico Terrinoni of the Università Per Stranieri di Perugia on the work of James Joyce translated into Italian.
“JOYCE, BRUNO, AND INFINITRANSLATION,
OR
JOYCE AND/IN THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE”
On Wednesday 13th February at 6.30pm
At the Arts Library, Faculty of Arts, University of Malta.
The lecture will be followed by light refreshments.
Joyce’s relation to Italian is deep and goes back to his early readings of Giordano Bruno back in Dublin during his youth. While his fondness for Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600, is well-known and deeply studied, the influence of Bruno on Joyce has often been confined to the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of the opposites (which he derived mainly from the intuitions of Nicholas of Cusa) and to his own defiant version of the non serviam [“I will not serve."]. Bruno’s shadows, however, permeate Joyce’s theory of the language, and in his works it proves to be a hidden presence almost everywhere. In fact, Joyce’s debt to Bruno has to do primarily with questions dealing with the capability of our language – through continuous transformations and transmutations – to capture the “plurability” of the universe, in an equation between the infinite spaces of the “chaosmos” (one of Joyce’s invented words) and the “infinibility” of the mind. This directly leads to Joyce’s conception of the language as an “infinite translation”; and the very fact that Italian was one of "his languages" (he spoke it with his children at home) makes it of paramount importance to the world-wide dissemination of his works. Actually, the last thing Joyce published, in 1940, was his Italian translation of a passage from Finnegans Wake, done in collaboration with Nino Frank and published in "Prospettive”. The lecture will deal with Joyce’s Italian and Joyce in Italian, as issues of translatability are crucial in any approach to Joyce’s textuality.
The lecture is in English.
Short biography
Professor Terrinoni is Full Professor of English Literature at Università Per Stranieri di Perugia. He holds a PhD from University College Dublin where he studied under Declan Kiberd. His doctoral thesis was on Joyce and Neoplatonism. He was a Research Fellow at Indiana University and Marsh’s Library, Dublin, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Keogh-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. He has translated such authors as Francis Bacon, Brendan Behan, Muriel Spark, John Burnside, BS Johnson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alasdair Gray, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Lee Masters, and James Joyce. His Italian translation of James Joyce's Ulysses won the “Premio Napoli” for Italian language and Culture in 2012, and the first volume of his Italian translation of Finnegans Wake (with Fabio Pedone) won the Annibal Caro Prize in 2017. The last volume will be out on May 4, 2019. He’s the author of several books and articles on Joyce, Irish literature, and translation theory. He is working on a book of translation philosophical theory titled Oltre Abita il Silenzio. Tradurre, trasumanare. Professor Terrinoni has given talks and lectures in many countries, including Ireland, the UK, USA, Spain, France, Chile, Hungary, Belgium, and Romania.
