Translations of Ulysses

Ulysses, published in 1922, was translated into multiple languages, and was called to be one of the hardest books to translate. Several translators called it an "untranslatable" book, a "horror" to translate, Zlatko Gorjan, the translator of the book into Croatian, wrote: The Joyce scholar Fritz Senn compared the task of translation with heroic deeds of Odysseus: In Joyce's lifetime, only four translations were made: German (1927), French (1929), Czech (1930) and Japanese (1931). Joyce used Irish English, Hiberno English, and Hebrew words and phrases. One of the most convoluted chapters of the book is "Oxen of the Sun", in which Joyce parodies the evolution of English prose: and Catalan translations. Cait Murphy shows an example of just one Joyce's wordplay that poses a challenge to translate: == Overview ==

Ulysses was translated into at least 43 languages. Several languages have more than one translation, for example Italian has nine, while Portuguese has six. In some countries, translations by already well-known writers and poets became known as "classic" and gained cult-like status (see German, French, Swedish, Hungarian, Finnish); in some, sparked discussions about Joyce or the translation (see Russian and Dutch); while in some countries translations were met with indifference (see Armenian, Latvian, and Belarusian); in some, translations were heavily advertised and became a cultural event (see second Swedish). Some translators did the work because of the love to Ulysses (see Danish), while for some it was a political statement about the merits of their "minor" languages (see Kurdish, Basque, Irish, Belarusian, Galician). Translations can be unevenly divided into "early", that were done during Joyce's life (first translations into German, French, Japanese, and Czech), and "late", which benefited from amassed critical materials about the book, and often were translated from the revised editions (see Icelandic and Chinese). In several countries the publication of translation was almost impossible because of censorship: translators were arrested and executed (see Russian), the book itself was censored by omitting multiple scenes (see early Japanese, Romanian), was published abroad (see Latvian, Belarusian, Kurdish, second Arabic, Persian), or was not published before the regime's change (see Russian, Ukrainian). Multiple translators worked from exile (see Kurdish, second Arabic, Persian). In case of retranslations, younger translators often harshly criticized their predecessors (see Hungarian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese). Multiple translators were amateurs with no prior experience in translation or literature (see Spanish, Russian, Belarusian, Greek, Italian), though some were done by already famous writers or poets (see Czech, first Finnish, second German, Japanese, second Hungarian, Armenian). Some translations were done by teams (see French, Japanese, Flemish Dutch, Galician, the latest Brazilian Portuguese). Very few women translated the book (see Bulgarian, Macedonian, second Brazilian Portuguese). Some translations were done in just half a year (see Catalan, Finnish), while some translators worked on it for years (the longest one was Danish, that took it translator 18 years; the same translator then continued to work on the retranslation). ; List of languages Language (year of the first (full) published translation, number of translations) • German (1927, 2) • French (1929, 2) • Czech (1930, 2) • Japanese (1931, 4) • Swedish (1943, 2) • Spanish (1945, 5) • Argentinian (1945, 2) • European (1976, 3) • Hungarian (1947, 2) • Danish (1949, 3) • Serbo-Croatian (1957, 3) • Croatian (1957, 2) • Serbian (2001) • Italian (1960, 9) • Latvian (1960) • Finnish (1964, 2) • Portuguese (1966, 6) • Brazilian (1966, 4) • European (1984, 2) • Korean (1968, 2) • Slovene (1968) • Greek (1969, 2) • Dutch (1969, 3) • Polish (1969, 2) • Catalan (1981, 2 + 1 unpublished) • Arabic (1982, 2 + chapters) • Romanian (1984, 2) • Hebrew (1985) • Belarusian (1988) • Russian (1989 + chapters) • Irish (1991) • Icelandic (1992) • Norwegian (1993) • Slovak (1993) • Chinese (1994, 3) • Turkish (1996, 2) • Georgian (1999) • Albanian (2003) • Lithuanian (2003 + chapters) • Bulgarian (2004) • Uzbek language (2008) • Armenian (2012) • Macedonian (2012) • Malayalam (2012 + chapters) • Galician (2013) • Basque (2015) • Ukrainian (2015) • Persian (2019) • Kurdish (2023) • Estonian (2024) • Italic year means that only part of the book was translated and published. == Early translations ==

German The first German translation by was published as a three-volume edition in 1927. Though Goyert had access to Joyce for consultation, he apparently made limited use of this opportunity. A revised version of his translation appeared in 1930 in two volumes, though both editions remained expensive. The translation was called "badly botched", and Goyert's "approach was clearly in keeping with the attempts by the publishers to suggest that the German Ulysses was an expensive, well-bound, well-printed piece of pornography." In the 1930 revised edition more than 6000 changes were made. In the mid-1960s, Suhrkamp Verlag acquired the rights and commissioned Hans Wollschläger to translate Ulysses as part of their complete Joyce works edition, under 's editorship. The book was published in 1976 and became known as the "translation of the century" and "instant classic". Wollschläger was known as a "recluse genius" who never worked in a team. French The first French translation was published in 1929. It was made by August Morel, Stuart Gilbert, Valery Larbaud, and publisher Adrienne Monnier. Joyce himself assisted in translation; he was involved from the very start in 1922, and even "organized them [translators] into a team with a plan and a mission". It was the second published translation of Ulysses after the 1927 German one. It was noted for "its incredible rendering of French as it was spoken in the 1920s, to the point of being praised as an 'incredible anatomy of the French language' by André Topia". Because of that, the translation became "difficult to understand without a dictionary or without notes", as Morel used too many "contemporary idioms, idiosyncrasies and slang". The book was expensive and did not sell well. The team translated all the book's chapters except "Oxen of the Sun", that was taken from 1929 Morel's edition; according to translators, "this inscribed the history of the French translation of Ulysses within the work, making for a parallel with the particular style of the fourteenth episode, as the history of translation mirrored the history of the English language". this approach was criticized because it led to the loss of Joyce's leitmotifs. Czech The first Czech translation of Ulysses appeared in 1930, as a collaborative effort between Ladislav Vymětal and . Vymětal worked on the opening sections through "Sirens" and the final portion, starting from "Circe", while Fastrová translated the middle sections beginning with "Wandering Rocks." The next translation came from , published by Odeon in 1976 as Odysseus. Despite its substantial initial printing of 7,000 copies, the Communist regime censored it and restricted its circulation to Party members and psychiatrists. Skoumal had a personal connection to Joyce's Dublin, having visited the city in 1926. In a letter to writer Jaroslav Durych, he described Dublin as "a city of beggars, a city of poverty, dirt, dust, a city of ruined houses, a city of people who despite their humiliation have something noble (dare I say royal) about them". Skoumal's translation is notable for its "artificial" language, though it differs from Joyce's original by employing more archaic vocabulary. This choice was partially driven by the challenges of representing regional diversity in Czech, a relatively uniform language. Instead of attempting to capture locality, Skoumal opted for temporal distance through archaic language to achieve poetic effects. but the book was banned in 1934. Multiple versions of the first translation exist, with various omissions. The last volume contained multiple omissions, it was done following the ban of the first translation. == Iberian peninsula and Latin America ==

Spanish The first Spanish translation was done by , and published in Buenos Aires in 1945; revised version was published in 1952. Criticized at first, his translation got more attention later: Subirat translated the book from 1940 to 1945; he had little experience in translation and was an employee of an insurance company. He did not speak English. Besides that, he wrote several self-help books and owned a toy factory. He became mostly forgotten after his death in 1975; his biography was published in 2016. According to María Luisa Venegas Lagüéns, Subirat's translation "domesticates the source text and tends to insert too many explanations". He wrote it in an Argentinian Spanish with many regionalisms, that made it less accessible to readers from other Spanish-speaking countries, especially from Spain. It is especially evident in translation of jargon and taboo language: e.g. Subirat translated "cunt" as "concha", that means the same thing in Argentina but in Spain only means a "shell", and was a popular women's name. The second translation, made by philosophy professor José María Valverde, was published in Barcelona in 1976. The third Spanish translation was made by Francisco García Tortosa and María Luisa Venegas Lagüéns, both literature scholars, and published in 1999. Translators said in a later interview that they "don't want a translation of Ulysses in colloquial Spanish, we want it like Joyce wrote it". Another translation was done by Rolando Costa Picazo and published in 2018. Brazil The first Brazilian-Portuguese translation was completed by Antônio Houaiss in 1966. Houaiss, a diplomat who later created a major Portuguese dictionary, was "forced into early retirement" by Brazil's military dictatorship before undertaking the translation. Houaiss spent less than a year translating the book. The third Brazilian translation was published in 2012 by , who started it in 2002 as part of a doctoral thesis. He also translated other Joyce's works, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Giacomo Joyce and ''Finn's Hotel''; he also published "the first companion to Ulysses in Portuguese". He took a notably different approach to the "Oxen of the Sun" episode, creating Portuguese-Brazilian equivalents for Joyce's "literary pastiches": The translators are (Telêmaco); (Nestor); Julián Fuks (Proteu); Luisa Geisler (Calipso); (Os Lotófagos); (Hades); (Éolo); (Os Lestrigões); (Cila e Caribde); (As Rochas Ondulantes); Willy Corrêa de Oliveira (As Sereias); (O Ciclope); (Nausícaa); (Gado do Sol); (Circe); (Eumeu); (Ítaca) and (Penélope). Portugal The first translation into European Portuguese was done by and published in 1984. The second, by was published at the end of 2013. Catalan The first Catalan translation was done by writer and translator , in 1966, but was not published. The translation is kept in the General Spanish Archive () in Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. It was commissioned by the Editorial AHR; the translation was done in seven months from the Morel's French translation. The censorship office allowed the book to be published; the reason it was not published is unknown. The Catalan translation by was published in 1981. It was described as the "most significant event in Catalan intellectual circles" and received the Prize of the Generalitat and the Serra d'Or Prize. For "Oxen of the Sun" Llorach imitated various styles to show the evolution of the language, "from the troubadours to the Renaixença and Noucentisme". Galician Ramón Otero Pedrayo translated several excerpts in 1926. Often referred to simply as "anacos" or "fragments", these excerpts were published in the Galician journal ''''. The first complete Galician translation of Ulysses was published in 2013. Four translators – , , and – spent ten years on the project, working together on the entire text rather than dividing it. The team worked twelve hours daily, seven days a week. Their work was delayed by Joyce estate restrictions, and was published in 2013 when the book entered the public domain. Scholar M. Teresa Caneda Cabrera noted the long gap between translations reflected Galician language standardization problems. The translation was called "a turning point in the history of translation in Galicia". The book was called "a milestone in the literary translation to the Basque country". Olarra approached the translation systematically, consulting critical works including Ulysses Annotated, 's corrected text, and notes by Don Gifford and Sam Slote. His translation includes over 2,000 endnotes explaining cultural references, wordplay, and ambiguities. A distinctive feature of the translation is its use of Basque familiar forms () for interior monologues, notably employing (feminine familiar) for Molly Bloom's soliloquy. For the stylistically complex "Oxen of the Sun", Olarra imitated the evolution of Basque prose styles, drawing from archaic writers like Bernard Etxepare and Leizarraga to modern Basque. The translation maintains Joyce's intentional repetitions rather than using synonyms, and develops creative solutions for English and Irish wordplay without direct Basque equivalents. == Mediterranean Europe ==

Italian , there are nine Italian translations of the book. • (1960): The first complete Italian translation published by Mondadori. De Angelis worked independently, completing the translation without prior commissioning, and only later submitted it to Mondadori. Little is known about the translator; he was not an academic (he got a PhD in English in 1947, and then became a school teacher) and this is likely a reason of "standoffish treatment" from critics. A companion volume, Guida alla lettura, was published with the translation, with an introduction by Giorgio Melchiori and notes on each episode by the translator. The revised edition was done using Hans Walter Gabler's critical edition to address textual inconsistencies. Published in 1988, the second edition was criticized for its "sloppy editorial practice". with De Angelis translation as a reference. Flecchia's translation was described as "less accurate, though often quite effective and original". • and Carlo Bigazzi (2012): Published by Newton Compton Editori after copyright protection expired, this translation includes a detailed introduction, biographical note, bibliography, and critical annotations. It was awarded the Premio Napoli in 2012. Terrinoni, a Joyce scholar and noted expert in Irish literature, described his translation as "my translation is more popular/demotic, it has a language closer to how it's talked, De Angelis one was more noble and dignified". For the "Oxen of the Sun", he started with an "ancient Italian style and we show its progression". • Gianni Celati (2013): This Einaudi edition with no annotations. Celati worked for seven years on his translation. • (2020): Biondi tried to translate Ulysses in 1970s, but found it too difficult. After he became an experienced translator, he returned to the book. Published by , this annotated edition includes a map of 1904 Dublin and a detailed introduction by the translator, along with ~2,000 notes to guide the reader. It is based on corrected 1922 edition, and on the text prepared by Project Gutenberg (also based on 1922–1923 edition). • (2021): Translated by a famous poet, and published by Feltrinelli with an introductory note. • Enrico Terrinoni (2021): Published by Giunti Editore; a bilingual parallel text. It features essays, notes, Homeric correspondences, maps, and additional materials. It is an entirely new translation, distinct from 2012 translation co-authored by Terrinoni. • Marco Marzagalli (2021): An independent publication by a retired computer scientist; an "entirely annotated translation" available on Amazon. • Livio Crescenzi, Tonina Giuliani, Marta Viazzoli (2021): Published by Mattioli. According to Crescenzi, their approach to Ulysses "was a more 'formal' approach than content-based, more attentive to the technique of language and narration than to a symbolic or philosophical discourse". Greek The first translated excerpts of Ulysses appeared in Greek in 1936. The first translation of Ulysses was done by Leonidas Nikolouzos and Giannis Thomopoulos, and published in nine installments by Ekdoseis Pairidi in 1969–1976. The second translation was published in 1991, done by the film director and poet . It received mixed reviews: one noted "philological inadequacy" of the translation, Kapsaskis was awarded the European Union Translation Prize for it in 1992. == Scandinavia ==

Swedish The poet and translator Thomas Warburton, "a Swedish-speaking British citizen who was born in Finland", started to translate Ulysses in Helsinki in 1943, during the World War II, being an enemy alien in Finland. In 1944, all British citizens were evacuated to Sweden, where he continued to work on the book. Later, Warburton recalled that the translation was done in "one year of full-time work", and it was published in 1946 under the title Odysseus. Warburton was just 25 when he started to translate it. The 1946 edition had no footnotes and no foreword. He revised his translation in 1993. In the revision, Warburton introduced over four thousand changes, guided by Hans Walter Gabler's annotated edition and newer Joyce scholarship. Andersson, a Swedish author and "celebrity translator" who gained attention through his retranslation of J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, worked on Ulysses while simultaneously writing a "translation diary". In 2012, his new Swedish edition was released in a volume that deliberately echoed the 1922 Shakespeare and Company cover design, though the publisher clarifies that it was based on the first British edition. Andersson's title returned to Ulysses. This choice signaled the text's alignment with Joyce's original naming and brought the Swedish version in line with other European retranslations that had shifted to Ulysses (i.e. Dutch and Finnish). A short postscript by replaced the longer afterword found in Warburton's 1993 edition. Farran-Lee acknowledges that he is writing for readers who may have abandoned the novel partway and hopes to entice them back. Together with the novel itself, Andersson's translation diary, Dag in och dag ut med en dag i Dublin (Day In and Day Out with One Day in Dublin), was published. In 2013, an audiobook narrated by famous actor, Reine Brynolfsson, was released. Boisen's first translation of Ulysses was published in 1949, after 18 years of work, followed by a significantly revised edition in 1970 (with episodes 1–5 and 9 completely retranslated), and further revised editions in 1980 and 1986. This level of dedication to self-retranslation is exceptional both in translation history generally and among Ulysses translations specifically. It was described as "self-aware and phenomenal re-poetry". Finnish The first Finnish translation by celebrity poet Pentti Saarikoski was published in 1964, "hurriedly done" in six months and titled Odysseus. Saarikoski was 25 when he published his translation. He later wrote that he "knew English quite poorly"; he consulted with five different translations. In 2012, Leevi Lehto published his Finnish translation of Ulysses, which he began in 2001. He titled his new translation Ulysses rather than Odysseus. He commented on the previous translation that it "is what Joyce's Ulysses might have become if Joyce had let Ezra Pound have his way with it", mainly because of the Finnish modernist Tuomas Anhava's influence on Saarikoski. Lehto scanned each episode of the original and placed it in the left column of a two-column file, with Saarikoski's text on the right. He then started "systematic 'destruction of Saarikoski's text using the original text, sometimes describing this as translating "Ulysses from Saarikoski to Joyce." Lehto used Hans Walter Gabler's 1985 edition as his source text and consulted Gifford & Seidman's Ulysses Annotated, as well as the second edition of the Swedish translation by Thomas Warburton (which he called "a solid and fairly flawless text") for comparison. Norwegian In 1973, Boisen's Danish translation was published in Norway and received wide press coverage and positive reviews. Olav Angell translated the book into Norwegian in 1993, after three years of work. Around 8,000 copies were sold. He was awarded with the Norwegian Cultural Council's Translator's Prize. The translation got mixed reviews from critics, from positive to "downright brutal". == Western Europe ==

Dutch Ulysses has three Dutch translations. The first one, done by John Vandenbergh, was published in 1969; Vandenbergh called the translation "a daring act". In 2012, Robbert Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet published their translation, which they call "badly needed". They summarized their criticism of the previous translations in a subsequent article: Irish Ulysses was published in Irish translation in 1991–1992, seventy years after its original publication. The translation, titled Uiliséas, was primarily done by (Séamas Ó hInnéirghe), a retired medical doctor and former Royal Air Force officer. Henry used Irish at home and in school in his childhood, though rarely used it in his later life. == Central Europe ==

Hungarian Ulysses was first translated into Hungarian by . The book was published in 1,000 copies in 1947. This translation was both praised and heavily criticised: writer Miklós Szentkuthy, who translated the book in 1974, wrote of Gáspár's translation that it normalises', 'consolidates', 'flattens', 'dilutes', 'irons out', 'sobers up', 'tames', 'greys', 'kills' Joyce's sentences, depriving them of their poetry, playfulness, word-music and rhythm". Szentkuthy's translation of 1974 became canonical in Hungary, It was republished in 1986, under editorial corrections by . In 2012, it was revised by a team of scholars, , , and Gábor Zoltán Kiss. It is said to be "re-editing and partial retranslation based on Szentkuthy's work which occasionally refers to Gáspár's text ... the Revised text is a scholarly palimpsest written across the two previous texts". Kappanyos described previous translations and the group's motivation for a revised edition: On the black market, the book sold for up to 15 times its original price. Six episodes were previously published in magazines in 1958–1968. Słomczyński, who was also a detective fiction writer published under pen name Joe Alex, spent 13 years translating Ulysses. The second translation was done by the University of Lodz lecturer in seven years, and published in 2021. Świerkocki's version was noted for his innovative translation of puns; at the same time, he tends to simplify and over-explain some wordplay to make it more understandable to the readers. Romanian The Romanian translation of Ulysses was carried out by the poet and translator Mircea Ivănescu. Translated episodes appeared in the literary journal Secolul XX, the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in 1971, "Hades" in 1973, "Aeolus" in 1977, and "Cyclops" in 1982, before the full two-volume set was published in 1984. Ivănescu reportedly worked on Ulysses for around two decades while working on other translations. A post-1989 reprint added a few corrections, and in 1996 a single-volume edition introduced clearer divisions among the novel's eighteen chapters. Romanian critics wrote positively about the translation; Adrian Oțoiu called it intellectually rigorous and noted an "unprecedented awareness of the intricacies of the Joycean text". Ivănescu gave a controversial interview in 2010 claiming he never read Ulysses in its entirety, describing how the scholar simply assigned him each chapter to translate. He also remarked that he had read only about twenty books in his life. it is, nevertheless, called "doubtless the greatest translation achievement of one of Romania's most prominent, if discreet, contemporary poets". Slovak 's Slovak translation was published in 1993.{{cite book |url=https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/_flysystem/fedora/pdf/133387.pdf == Baltic states ==

Latvian spent around ten years on the Latvian translation and roughly 2000 Swedish kronor, and saw its publication in Sweden in 1960. Emigrant authors "reminisced nostalgically" about their earlier engagement with Joyce in prewar Latvia. Zenta Mauriņa commented in 1950 that "we in Riga were done with him [Joyce] already in 1930". This attitude, combined with exile circumstances, meant that Sodums's Ulysses never gained much readership and influence in Latvia. He was disappointed that his attempt to "shake the post-capitulation shambles of the Latvian spirit into a new shape" did not catch on. Following its release, there was little sustained conversation between Sodums and the broader Latvian literary world, and the translation's promise went largely unrealized despite the cultural significance of publishing Joyce in Latvian. Lithuanian Tomas Venclova translated three episods (1, 3, and 4) of the book in 1968; he said that it was "very difficult". According to him, Lithuanian language is well-suited for the translation, with slang being the most challenging part: For the "Oxen of the Sun", Venclova planned to use an extinct Old Prussian language. Estonian Märt Väljataga published translations of three episodes in the 1990s. The first full translation was done by Paul-Eerik Rummo, edited by Väljataga, and published in 2024. The translation was named the 2024 Language Deed of the Year. The translation has minimal number of footnotes, because according to Rummo "the book is understandable" without extensive commentaries. == Eastern Europe ==

Russian Soviet authorities considered Ulysses unsuitable for Soviet readers, making translation attempts dangerous, particularly in the 1930s; multiple fragments were translated and published despite this. Karl Radek harshly criticized Joyce during the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934: "A pile of dung teeming with worms, photographed with a cinema apparatus through a microscope – that's Joyce." Vladimir Nabokov send a letter to Joyce, proposing to work on translation, but did not receive an answer. Several early translators met tragic ends. , who published his translation of episodes four to six in 1935–1936, was arrested and executed in 1938. Ivan Kashkin's First Translators' Collective of the Union of Soviet Writers published their translation of the first ten episodes in 1935–1936. The most significant contribution was by Igor Romanovich; he was arrested and died in Gulag in 1942. started to translate the book in 1972; he died in 1981 from illness and alcoholism before completing his work. The first complete Russian translation finally appeared in 1989 in the journal "Foreign Literature" (Inostrannaya Literatura); Khinkis's translation was completed by his friend, physicist Sergey Khoruzhiy, who had no previous experience in translation or knowledge of Joyce. A debate emerged over how much of the final translation should be attributed to each translator. According to Khoruzhiy, he tried to complete Khinkis work, but eventually started to translate from scratch. "the remaining 300 copies were still kept under his bed in 1998". According to Maksymiuk, his physics training shaped his "discipline of thought", which he applied to solving translation problems, while his self-taught English skills meant he focused especially on excellence in Belarusian. His journalistic work, including four years spent translating post-Soviet newspapers for the American Embassy, slowed progress on Ulysses but provided professional experience; he also completed translations into Polish and started work on Witkiewicz's Insatiability. He planned to finish Ulysses when he can devote steady time to it, hoping one day to issue a second partthough jokingly suggesting an edition of only 50 copies. Ukrainian Fragments of Ulysses first appeared in Ukrainian in 1966, when published translations of Episodes 4, 6, and part of Episode 18 in the journal Vsesvit. A complete translation was prevented during the Soviet period, "due to the lack of thorough research, poor international contacts and, ultimately, inaccessibility of the major precedent text – the Bible – which was strictly prohibited". Terekh worked on the translation for nearly fifty years before it was completed by Oleksandr Mokrovolskyi after Ukraine gained independence. The first complete Ukrainian Ulysses was published by Vydavnytstvo Zhupanskoho in 2015. == Caucasus and Central Asia==

Georgian A Shakespeare scholar , the head of the English Department at the Tbilisi State University, began to publish his translation of Ulysses in 1971. The first ten episodes appeared in literary magazines between 1971 and 1983, when they were collected into a book. The remaining eight episodes were published in Mnatobi magazine in 1998–1999, with the complete version finally appearing in 2012, edited by his daughter, Maya Kiasashvili. The translation posed multiple challenges: Georgian lacks equivalents for European nobility and clergy titles due to different social and religious traditions, requiring Kiasashvili to either invent new words or borrow directly from English (i.e. 'yeomen'). In response to the translation of Ulysses into Georgian, wrote a poem titled "Now Ulysses Has No Readers": Armenian Armenian translation by Samvel Mkrtchyan was published in two volumes in 2012. His widow, Naira Zohrabyan, commented that "this work received complete indifference". == Balkans ==

Serbo-Croatian Ulysses was translated twice into Croatian dialect, by Zlatko Gorjan in 1957 and Luko Paljetak in 1991, and once into Serbian dialect, by in 2001. Gorjan's translation was called "excellent", and noted that he "managed to recreate the atmosphere of the original text". Gorjan self-censored sexually implicit words: i.e. "cock" was translated as "member" and not with direct equivalent. The Czech translator wrote that Gorjan's translation was done in just eight months and had multiple omissions, sometimes of the whole sentences. Gorjan himself admitted that he tried to "capture the spirit" of the book, and was less concerned with precise translation. Albanian translated the book into Albanian in 2003. Before that, he wrote a thesis on Ulysses. He received an award for his translation from the Albanian Ministry of Culture in 2004. Bulgarian The first Bulgarian translation of Ulysses was completed by and published in 2004, achieving "tremendous success" with three thousand copies sold in less than a month. == Middle East ==

Arabic Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Loutfi Goumah made the first Arabic foray into Ulysses, publishing what he managed to finish under the title «عولس» ("Aulis") in 1947 and revising it until his death. Goumah translated the first ten of the novel's eighteen episodes. It was published in 2008 by the National Center for Translation, edited by his son, Rabeh Loutfi Goumah. The first full translation into Arabic was made by Egyptian professor Taha Mahmoud Taha. He published his translation of the fourth and tenth chapters in 1964 and 1965. In 1961, Taha got his PhD in the University of Dublin, and wrote a thesis on Aldous Huxley. In 1975, he wrote Encyclopedia of James Joyce in Arabic. In 1968, he moved to Kuwait, and in 1978 the first draft of the full translation was ready, that was published in 1982. The revised and corrected edition was published in 1994. Taha later wrote that he "discovered that many of the existing dictionaries were not sufficient for the purpose, which forced me to compile my own dictionary, with all the hardship and effort that entailed, of synonyms and antonyms." and started to work on his own in 1984 to distract himself from Iraq-Iran war, while living in exile in London. It was published in three volumes in 2001, 2010, and 2014. The first two volumes were published in Damascus, the third one in Beirut. The final volume is still unpublished. According to a study, both translators primarily used literal translation with minimal changes, focusing on form rather than content. Niazi occasionally added footnotes, while Taha Mahmoud used no footnotes at all. In 2023, Amir Hlayyil, a Lebanese Maronite ethnographer and poet from Kfarshima, produced a Lebanese Arabic translation of the final excerpt of the eighteenth episode, Penelope. In translating intertextual motifs and the names of games, Hlayyil consulted reference works by Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman’s 1989 Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses and W. Thornton's 1973 Allusions in Ulysses; A Line-by-Line Reference to Joyce’s Complex Symbolism. It was published in Göttingen in 2024 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hebrew Yael Renan's translation was published in 1985 by Hotsaat Mahbarot Le-Sifrut. The work was done in twelve years. According to David Shulman, the translation is "vastly superior to the original". Renan wrote about the difficulties in translation of slang into Hebrew: she noted "the relative poverty of Hebrew in both vocabulary and stylistic differentiation", as there is almost no slang in Hebrew and no "colloquial style" different from the formal rules prescribed by the Academy of the Hebrew Language. The largest issue, per Renan, was "the lack of a continuous history of Hebrew literature", that made it hard to adequately translate historical styles in "Oxen of the Sun". Turkish Ulysses was translated into Turkish twice, first by in 1996, and then by in 2012. Ekici found the first translation to be "cold and unreadable", and stated that his goal for the new translation was "to make the Turkish readers realise the richness, humanity and humour of the book." According to Ekici, Erkmen "approaches Ulysses as a dictionary-and-puzzle man: he used to be the captain of the Turkish team that competed in the World Puzzle Championships, and he also wrote puzzle books; he is the author of the only rhyming dictionary of Turkish"; he also frequently used words from Ottoman Turkish, that were natural to the translator born in 1931, but are unknown for modern audience. The first volume was published in the UK and is distributed in Iran through underground networks. The translation received grants from Literature Ireland and the Zurich James Joyce Foundation. While facing technical challenges in translating Joyce's complex language into Persian, Pedramnia also deals with government attempts to block the work's distribution, even online. Kurdish Kurdish translation was published in 2023 by poet and translator Kawa Nemir, who started the project in 2012 to "draw attention to a language that had been the victim of nationalist politics in Turkey" and to counter the notion that Kurdish was an "inferior language". Nemir's work, influenced by his self-gathered notebooks of Kurdish expressions, required him to coin words unavailable in existing dictionaries, especially terminology related to the sea. He described Kurdish as "close to Old English" in terms of syntax, making the linguistic transition more intuitive. He also drew upon sources such as 17th-century Kurdish poetry (notably Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn) to render older literary styles in chapters like "Oxen of the Sun", which features shifting registers of English. Because Kurdistan is landlocked, aquatic references (fish and sea life) were especially challenging. The term "whale-path", encountered in Beowulf, prompted him to note "rêka nehengan" ("whale-road") as a Kurdish equivalent. The work was done in Kurmanji dialect. Besides searching dictionaries like Ferhenga Biwêjan a mezin, Nemir relied on colloquial usage, consulting prisoners in Mardin for phrases about drinking and gambling. He recorded "bûye pilot", a term describing "someone ready for action in all hours of the day", to represent the alcoholic decline of Bob Doran. Frequent political unrest compelled him to move from Diyarbakır to Mardin for safety; after 2015, ongoing conflict prompted him to depart Turkey. A documentary film about his work, Translating Ulysses, was refused screening in Turkey. As of 2023, Nemir continued drafting a ''Kurdish readers' guide to Ulysses'', including references and a detailed preface, while maintaining that the distinctive grammar of Kurdish qualifies it for the full linguistic complexity of Joyce's text. == East Asia ==

Korean The first Korean translation of Ulysses by Kim Chong-Keon was published in 1968. Kim spent seven years on it, following his master's degree in 1962. The translation faced significant linguistic challenges due to the differences between Korean and English. Hangul has 8 vowels and 16 consonants; the sentence structure in Korean is nearly opposite to English. Particular difficulties arose in translating the varying styles of episodes like "Oxen of the Sun". While Chinese characters incorporated into Hangul could sometimes help convey meaning through their visual effect, finding equivalent Korean dialects and slang proved challenging. The translator aimed for word-for-word translation of approximately 3,000 words from the original text, the challenge that he described as "almost an impossibility". Kim retranslated it in 1988. The second Korean translation by Lee Jong-il was published in 2023. Chinese The translator Jin Di translated one episode in Chinese in 1981, and several other episodes in 1986 and 1988. In 1990, Yilin Press commissioned writer and translator Xiao Qian and his wife, translator Wen Jieruo, to translate Ulysses into Chinese. Xiao's early interest in Joyce dated back to his postgraduate studies at Cambridge. In 1946, Xiao visited Joyce's grave in Zurich, and remarked: "Here lies the corpse of someone who wasted his great talents writing something very unreadable." After the translation work was done, Xiao called it "quite monumental". Mandarin allows "only 404 possible phonetic combinations"; wordplay is hard to translate because of ideographic nature of Chinese; Chinese is a tonal language; and proper names are rarely translated "syllable for syllable". The husband and wife team started to work on their translation in October 1990. They used multiple sources for the translation: "Gifford's annotated Ulysses ... consulted the Chinese Catholic Church, foreign-language specialists, geologists, doctors, and others for specialized knowledge. The Irish Embassy helped with specifically Irish references." "Joycean quirks" were explained in 5,991 footnotes. Xiao and Wen tried to create a "reader-friendly" book, and strived to make it comprehensible to the reader. Jin Di wanted his translation to be as accurate as possible and faithful to the original. In 1994, 85,000 copies of Xiao and Wen's first volume were sold in China; the second and third editions followed in 1995. Xiao viewed the translation as China's re-opening, writing "I feel that this translation of Ulysses signifies that China at last has opened herself not only in technology and science but also in literature". The third translation by Liu Xiangyu was published in 2021. In his translation, Liu wanted to "make detailed interpretation on Irish history and culture". Liu spent twenty years on translation. Malayalam Chitra Panikkar, who interpreted the book as a postcolonial text, translated seven chapters of Ulysses to Malayalam, which were published in the Keralakavita journal in 1990–2002. Full Malayalam translation by Moosakkutty N was published in 2012. == Further reading ==