Edward Said, in his essay “Thoughts on exile,” famously describes our age as “the age of refugees, displaced persons, and cultural migrations” (2015:188). Indeed, we are going through a time when exile is a personal reality for some people and a social reality that has become mandatory for others. Although it contains deprivation, loss, pain, and sadness, the exile motif has been used as one of the motifs of interest in literature from the ancient period to the present day. Many writers and poets, from Ovidius to Dante and Joyce to Nâzım Hikmet, lived a life of voluntary or compulsive exile and managed to turn this situation into the product of their creative genius. As a result of the technological progress brought about by modernity, along with the revolutionary developments in the field of transportation, the concepts of travel, exile, and dislocation have undergone major changes and become a rich motif in modernist literature. Being written in a voluntary exile, James Joyce's Ulysses, one of the most famous texts of modernist literature, stands out as one of the interesting examples of coexistence between exile and literary creativity for centuries. In addition, the definition of “translated culture” used to describe the age of exile and metaphors such as exile, hybridity, otherness attributed by post-colonial theories to translation draw attention to the close relationship between “exile” and “translation”. We can metaphorically relate translation that symbolizes a transition between different national languages, cultural discourses, different categories of time and space, and movement, as Walter Benjamin put it, the transition “to the other side,” to the state of exile. Like the state of exile, translation involves forced assimilation and strives for perching itself into the local, to find a new voice, a new identity, and expression there. After drawing a historical and critical general framework of the exile motif that motivated the author's creativity, the purpose of this study is to demonstrate the relationality between literature and translation and the state of exile that Joyce physically experienced and employed in Ulysses.
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Journal Section | Research Articles |
Authors | |
Publication Date | December 30, 2020 |
Submission Date | December 1, 2020 |
Published in Issue | Year 2020 Volume: 1 Issue: 2 |