Uzun yıllardır çevrilemezliği ile bilinen Joyce'un magnum opus'u Finnegans Wake, Umur Çelikyay'ın terscümesi ile nihayet Türkçede. Dilimize Finneganın Vahı adı ile kazandırılan eser, Aylak Adam Yayınları tarafından 3 kitap olarak yayımlanacak. Bir çeviri girişiminden çok, bir terscüme denemesi ya da bir tür Türkçeleştirme yaklaşımıyla ele alınan Finneganın Vahı, yıllardır süren bir bekleyişi nihayet sonlandırıyor.
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
Bilerek puanlama yapmadım cunku tam anlamıyla "anlamadığım" bir kitaba puan vermek ukalalık olurdu.
Öncelikle bu kitabı çevirmeye cesaret etmek iyi veya kotu ortaya bir ürün koyup Türkçeye kazandırmak buyuk bir başarıdır. Bu konuda yayım evini ve çevirmeni tebrik etmekteyim.
Çeviri icin iyi veya kotu diyemem cunku günümüzde konuşulan hatta var olan bir dilde bile yazılmış bir kitap degil. Joyce'un kendi ürettiği bir cok dilden harmanladıgi kelimeler kısaltmalar hatta daha da otesi seslerden oluşan bir kitap. Haliyle "tam anlamıyla" çevirmek imkansız.
Konuya gelince açıkça belirteyim ki kitabı okumadan önce eğer Hakkında yazılmış makaleleri okumasaydım anlamazdım. Kısmen anlayabilir veya tamamen yanlış degerlendirebilirdim. Bu sebeple okumak isteyen bir kişinin mutlaka onceden kitap hakkinda joyce uzmanları tarafından yazılmış makaleleri okumalarını tavsiye ederim.
Okurken cok zorlandım ama bir kere bile bırakmayı dusunmedim. Akıcı ve kitabın derinlerine inerek okumanız imkansıza yakın ama olaya eğlence olarak bakarsaniz kitabı tamamlayabilirsiniz. Önemli olan joyce'un boyle ozel bir kitabını ana dilinde deneyimlemek. Olaya bu acıdan bakarsaniz elinizde cok keyiflime okuyabileceginiz bir kitap olur.