Not least of the bewildering ways in which Proteus
plunges the reader into the waves of Stephen's thoughts, with
little connection to the dry land of dialogue and action, is
its refusal to translate his kaleidoscopic multilingualism
into English. In addition to lots of French, some German and Latin, and smatterings of Scots, Irish, Swedish, Greek, and Spanish, the
episode contains more than half a dozen phrases in Italian, a
language which Joyce spoke fluently. Two of the utterances
translated here come from works of literature and opera, and
are discussed in other notes. The remaining ones are
conversational.
Stephen Dedalus has studied Italian at university, and in Wandering
Rocks he will run across his maestro or
teacher, Almidano Artifoni, and hold a conversation with him
in Italian. The first paragraph of Proteus mentions
another maestro, recalling Dante's honorific phrase
for Aristotle in the Inferno: "maestro di color che
sanno," "the master of those who
know."
Stephen's next use of Italian comes as he decides to end the
experiment of closing his eyes and making the world disappear.
"Basta!" means "Enough!"
The language irrupts into the text again when Stephen
imagines his uncle Richie Goulding singing, humming, and
whistling parts of Verdi's Il Trovatore. "All'erta!"
means "On the alert!" or "On guard!" It is the basso
Ferrando's "aria di sortita" (the
song with which a given character enters), and he is telling
the troops under his command to keep a careful watch at night.
Later, as Stephen remembers trailing behind a "fubsy widow"
hoping that she will lift her wet skirts to show some calf he
thinks sardonically, "O, si, certo!
Sell your soul for that, do." The Italian could be rendered,
"O yeah, sure!" or, in an even more American idiom, "Yeah, right!"
In the same vein, he thinks later of "The virgin at Hodges
Figgis' window" that he eyed on Monday: "Bet she wears those
curse of God stays suspenders and yellow stockings, darned
with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings, piuttosto.
Where are your wits?" The Italian word means "rather" or
"quite," serving here as an intensifier.
In the midst of thinking of the sexual licentiousness of
Paris, Stephen uses an Italian word to personify the men
comically jumping from bed to bed: "Belluomo rises
from the bed of his wife's lover's wife." The word
means, literally, "beautiful man," and perhaps that is a
better translation than "handsome man," given what the
paragraph goes on to say about "curled conquistadores"
(Spanish for "conquerors").
Stephen thinks of Thomas Aquinas
as "frate porcospino" or Brother
Porcupine, the porcupine monk—because, Gifford infers,
"Aquinas's argument is prickly and difficult to attack."
And finally, near the end of the episode, he thinks "Già,"
or "Already." Gifford notes, "As Stephen uses the word here,
"Già . . . Già," it is an expression of impatience: 'Let's go
. . . Let's go.'"
