Finnegans Wake H.C.E.

by James Joyce, Luigi Schenoni (Translator), Giorgio Melchiori (Contributor)

Libro primo, capitoli I-IV con testo inglese a fronte

Finnegans Wake è l’opera più ardua di James Joyce. Un’impresa insormontabile sviscerarlo e tradurlo; esempio massimo di capolavori tanto citati quanto sconosciuti.
Il libro, alla stesura del quale Joyce dedicò sedici anni della sua vita, presenta l’ostacolo ulteriore e pressoché insormontabile della lingua in cui fu scritto. Lingua che pur partendo dall’inglese, arriva a impastarsi con un tal numero di neologismi e forestierismi da diventare padrona della lettura e del lettore.
Vengono qui presentati i primi quattro capitoli dell'intera opera, in quanto essi costituiscono un blocco compatto, non un frammento, ma uno di quei settori in ciascuno dei quali si riflette la totalità dell'opera: E' il dominio di H.C.E., Here Comes Everybody, Ognuno.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Irish Literature, Reference

173 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Yupa · Rating 1 out of 5]

A voler essere precisi, non l'ho proprio letto: ho guardato le parole. Però le ho guardate tutte.
Il libro di un otaku delle lingue e delle letterature, incomprensibile per chi non sia, a sua volta, un otaku (marcio) di Joyce, di quelli convinti che il "senso" di un'opera letteraria stia nel fatto che a pag.54 nella quarta riga ci sia una virgola e non un punto e virgola perché l'autore, così citando un saggio alchemico del XV secolo, vuole dare a intendere che una mattina di quindici anni prima si era messo i calzini bianchi e non neri, contrariamente alle sue abitudini, in quanto lievemente assonnato.

[Warren Icke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost beyond me. Took me a very long time to read. Longer to understand. One of the great pieces of literature.

[Mara]

Ci ho provato diverse volte, ma non riesco a finirlo; confesso la mia incapacità  ma dopo un po' di pagine mi blocco. Mi capita raramente di non riuscire a terminare un libro, ma Finnekas Wake e' veramente un mattone. Provero' a riprenderlo in mano fra un po' magari in inglese.

[Adrian Marcato · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Joyce is brilliant and when you finish this book you will understand his brilliance.

[Andrea Burch]

Didn't really understand anything, even though I did get a lot of the puns, foreign words etc.