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Articles & book chapters by Boriana Alexandrova-Isgate

This article comparatively examines the two major Russian translations of Joyce's Finnegans Wake:... more This article comparatively examines the two major Russian translations of Joyce's Finnegans Wake: Henri Volokhonsky’s Weik Finneganov (2000, Tver, Kolonna Publications) and Konstantin Belyaev’s Anna Livia Plurabelle (2000, a partial translation of Book I, Chapter 8 of the Wake published as part of an article entitled “Pominki po Finneganu: An Apologia for the Translation” in the literary newspaper Soyuz Pisatelei) as a unique critical intervention into the only known transpositions of Joyce’s infamously impenetrable multilingual text into Cyrillic. I explore the stylistic and linguistic particularities of each translation through a close reading of a number of prime textual examples and consider the practical, literary, theoretical, and (implied or stated) ideological concerns arising from each translator’s distinct translatorial methodology. Crucially, this comparative analysis develops a theoretical language and approach to render these largely unknown Wake translations accessible to Anglophone scholars, and helpfully positions them in relation to more widely known, western translations of Finnegans Wake, such as Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes’s renowned Dutch translation. My theorisation of the translatorial methodologies implemented in these Russophone texts raises pertinent issues as to the theory and practice of translation that bear significance for Joyce and Wake scholarship, Slavonic studies, as well as the field of translation studies more broadly.

a long the krommerun, Jun 2016

This essay takes a multilingual-ethical approach to Finnegans Wake's internal system of mapping, ... more This essay takes a multilingual-ethical approach to Finnegans Wake's internal system of mapping, and perpetually decentring, language, space, temporality, and character through the phonological signatures of its major actors. I explore ALP's "pigeony linguish" (FW 584.04) and Issy's "little language" as distinct registers that trouble notions of syntactical, phonological, and ideological wholesomeness in (literary) language. This essay tackles some of the critical and ethical implications arising from the reader's negotiation with the Wake's destabilising multivocity, which disturbs our singular pronunciation habits and ideological preconceptions towards off-beat language forms. I exercise a readerly ethics of embodiment to ultimately demonstrate how a multilingual reading can carve out unprecedented opportunities for creative and political engagement with the text.

Book Reviews by Boriana Alexandrova-Isgate

James Joyce Broadsheet, 2017

Published in The James Joyce Broadsheet no. 106 (February 2017)

PhD thesis by Boriana Alexandrova-Isgate

The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text d... more The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text difficult and perplexing, and even inessential to some readers and translators who have chosen to iron it out of their plot summaries and translations. Because the work has a reputation for impenetrability and inaccessibility that at times borders on discursive incoherence, its political value has chiefly been related to its rebellion against linguistic order—specifically the structural, historical, and ideological rule of the British Empire’s primary language, English—rather than its capacity for literary pleasure, inclusivity, and illumination. This project critically complicates established assessments of Joycean multilingualism and develops innovative transdisciplinary approaches to the Wake’s multilingual design in an effort to do scholarly, creative, as well as ethical, justice to the text itself as well as its variously diverse global readership.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore the stylistic particularities of the Wake’s multilingual design from the perspective of linguistics and second-language acquisition. These chapters engage with the poetic materiality of Wakese and explore the role of readers’ diverse and variable accents, creative choices, multilingual repertoires, and overall cultural, subjective, and bodily singularities in the text’s capacity to generate multiple semantic and narrative layers. Chapter 1 tests the various material aspects of Wakean multilingualism, including but not limited to phonology, considering the various creative effects of embodied readerly engagement with it. It demonstrates that multilingualism is not only a tool for productive linguistic estrangement but also enables a peculiarly intimate access into the language of Joyce’s text. Chapter 2 focuses more specifically on the Wake’s multivalent stylistic uses of inter- and intralingual phonologies, beginning with an exploration of the soundscapes, phonotactics, and cultural signifiers of different languages, such as Russian, Swahili, German, and Irish English, and moving onto the book’s internal, fictionalised multilingual system of sound-symbolism, materialised through phonological patterning and the “phonological signatures” of archetypal characters such as ALP and Issy.
While the first two chapters explore how the multilingual text operates across different reading spaces and bodies, chapter 3 looks at how translators engage with it in their capacity as readers and (re)writers. I discuss how Wakean multilingualism challenges assimilative and corrective methods of translation and how the act of linguistic transfer inevitably triggers a cultural and material transformation as well. My case studies in this chapter are the two most important Russian translations of the Wake, which are virtually unknown in Anglophone Joyce scholarship. I place the Russian translations in a Western scholarly context, assessing their translatorial methodologies in relation to other important projects of Wake translation and exploring how they handle its multilingual design, considering the particular effects of transposing the text not only from an Anglophone to a Russophone linguistic and cultural space but also from Roman into Cyrillic script.
Finally, in chapter 4, I argue that the Wake’s multilingualism, as a performative literary manifestation and invitation to difference, variability, and changeability, makes it an intrinsically ethical text: its political value simultaneously honours its Irish postcolonial heritage and has a global historical and multicultural reach. The chapter engages with concepts from feminist, queer, and disability theorists towards the development of new theoretical approaches to the political and ethical value of Wakean multilingualism in a contemporary global context.

Books by Boriana Alexandrova-Isgate

Papers by Boriana Alexandrova-Isgate

The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text d... more The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text difficult and perplexing, and even inessential to some readers and translators who have chosen to iron it out of their plot summaries and translations. Because the work has a reputation for impenetrability and inaccessibility that at times borders on discursive incoherence, its political value has chiefly been related to its rebellion against linguistic order—specifically the structural, historical, and ideological rule of the British Empire’s primary language, English—rather than its capacity for literary pleasure, inclusivity, and illumination. This project critically complicates established assessments of Joycean multilingualism and develops innovative transdisciplinary approaches to the Wake’s multilingual design in an effort to do scholarly, creative, as well as ethical, justice to the text itself as well as its variously diverse global readership. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the stylis...

This article comparatively examines the two major Russian translations of Joyce's Finnegans Wake:... more This article comparatively examines the two major Russian translations of Joyce's Finnegans Wake: Henri Volokhonsky’s Weik Finneganov (2000, Tver, Kolonna Publications) and Konstantin Belyaev’s Anna Livia Plurabelle (2000, a partial translation of Book I, Chapter 8 of the Wake published as part of an article entitled “Pominki po Finneganu: An Apologia for the Translation” in the literary newspaper Soyuz Pisatelei) as a unique critical intervention into the only known transpositions of Joyce’s infamously impenetrable multilingual text into Cyrillic. I explore the stylistic and linguistic particularities of each translation through a close reading of a number of prime textual examples and consider the practical, literary, theoretical, and (implied or stated) ideological concerns arising from each translator’s distinct translatorial methodology. Crucially, this comparative analysis develops a theoretical language and approach to render these largely unknown Wake translations accessible to Anglophone scholars, and helpfully positions them in relation to more widely known, western translations of Finnegans Wake, such as Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes’s renowned Dutch translation. My theorisation of the translatorial methodologies implemented in these Russophone texts raises pertinent issues as to the theory and practice of translation that bear significance for Joyce and Wake scholarship, Slavonic studies, as well as the field of translation studies more broadly.

a long the krommerun, Jun 2016

This essay takes a multilingual-ethical approach to Finnegans Wake's internal system of mapping, ... more This essay takes a multilingual-ethical approach to Finnegans Wake's internal system of mapping, and perpetually decentring, language, space, temporality, and character through the phonological signatures of its major actors. I explore ALP's "pigeony linguish" (FW 584.04) and Issy's "little language" as distinct registers that trouble notions of syntactical, phonological, and ideological wholesomeness in (literary) language. This essay tackles some of the critical and ethical implications arising from the reader's negotiation with the Wake's destabilising multivocity, which disturbs our singular pronunciation habits and ideological preconceptions towards off-beat language forms. I exercise a readerly ethics of embodiment to ultimately demonstrate how a multilingual reading can carve out unprecedented opportunities for creative and political engagement with the text.

James Joyce Broadsheet, 2017

Published in The James Joyce Broadsheet no. 106 (February 2017)

The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text d... more The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text difficult and perplexing, and even inessential to some readers and translators who have chosen to iron it out of their plot summaries and translations. Because the work has a reputation for impenetrability and inaccessibility that at times borders on discursive incoherence, its political value has chiefly been related to its rebellion against linguistic order—specifically the structural, historical, and ideological rule of the British Empire’s primary language, English—rather than its capacity for literary pleasure, inclusivity, and illumination. This project critically complicates established assessments of Joycean multilingualism and develops innovative transdisciplinary approaches to the Wake’s multilingual design in an effort to do scholarly, creative, as well as ethical, justice to the text itself as well as its variously diverse global readership.
Chapters 1 and 2 explore the stylistic particularities of the Wake’s multilingual design from the perspective of linguistics and second-language acquisition. These chapters engage with the poetic materiality of Wakese and explore the role of readers’ diverse and variable accents, creative choices, multilingual repertoires, and overall cultural, subjective, and bodily singularities in the text’s capacity to generate multiple semantic and narrative layers. Chapter 1 tests the various material aspects of Wakean multilingualism, including but not limited to phonology, considering the various creative effects of embodied readerly engagement with it. It demonstrates that multilingualism is not only a tool for productive linguistic estrangement but also enables a peculiarly intimate access into the language of Joyce’s text. Chapter 2 focuses more specifically on the Wake’s multivalent stylistic uses of inter- and intralingual phonologies, beginning with an exploration of the soundscapes, phonotactics, and cultural signifiers of different languages, such as Russian, Swahili, German, and Irish English, and moving onto the book’s internal, fictionalised multilingual system of sound-symbolism, materialised through phonological patterning and the “phonological signatures” of archetypal characters such as ALP and Issy.
While the first two chapters explore how the multilingual text operates across different reading spaces and bodies, chapter 3 looks at how translators engage with it in their capacity as readers and (re)writers. I discuss how Wakean multilingualism challenges assimilative and corrective methods of translation and how the act of linguistic transfer inevitably triggers a cultural and material transformation as well. My case studies in this chapter are the two most important Russian translations of the Wake, which are virtually unknown in Anglophone Joyce scholarship. I place the Russian translations in a Western scholarly context, assessing their translatorial methodologies in relation to other important projects of Wake translation and exploring how they handle its multilingual design, considering the particular effects of transposing the text not only from an Anglophone to a Russophone linguistic and cultural space but also from Roman into Cyrillic script.
Finally, in chapter 4, I argue that the Wake’s multilingualism, as a performative literary manifestation and invitation to difference, variability, and changeability, makes it an intrinsically ethical text: its political value simultaneously honours its Irish postcolonial heritage and has a global historical and multicultural reach. The chapter engages with concepts from feminist, queer, and disability theorists towards the development of new theoretical approaches to the political and ethical value of Wakean multilingualism in a contemporary global context.

The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text d... more The multilingualism of Finnegans Wake has been widely regarded as a feature that makes the text difficult and perplexing, and even inessential to some readers and translators who have chosen to iron it out of their plot summaries and translations. Because the work has a reputation for impenetrability and inaccessibility that at times borders on discursive incoherence, its political value has chiefly been related to its rebellion against linguistic order—specifically the structural, historical, and ideological rule of the British Empire’s primary language, English—rather than its capacity for literary pleasure, inclusivity, and illumination. This project critically complicates established assessments of Joycean multilingualism and develops innovative transdisciplinary approaches to the Wake’s multilingual design in an effort to do scholarly, creative, as well as ethical, justice to the text itself as well as its variously diverse global readership. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the stylis...