Finnegans Wake Grappa discussion

Finnegans Wake: The Obliquity of Trans-Lations by Laurent Milesi


https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Comp...

Lots of interest here. What do we think?

Fun facts ::

The Chinese translation was a bang! hit.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...

Joyce coolaberration'd on a French translation thing ; very early on and only a portion. Of course he couldn't resist rewriting it into French ; as if it had originally had its home in French. Since learning of his monkeying with his own novel-in-trans, I've never trust'd authors messing with things like this that's no of their busyness (I'm luking at you Nabbie and Beckie and Federie!)

Tranit to Deutsch in 1993. [Ach!! du Scheiße! :: I've got a review from Die Zeit right here next to me and I've never actually read it but I look and I see Zettels Traum erwähnt ; I could've been a Schmidthead muchymuchy sooner!

Into Dutch circa 2005 for which certain textual problems (in the Anglo-text) were cleaned up and you'll find some of those in the McHugh, corrects in angle=brackets<>.

There are a few others.

My score yederday at The Village Bookbindery ::

Anna Livia Plurabelle

Several German trans', Ogden's Basic Englishing, and Beckett's French attempt. Imagine a compilation of the Anna Livia trans' today : It'd be a book 500 pages fat! and perhaps contain two dozen lunchuages. (!)

From the German wikipedia for Finnegans Wehg ::
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegan...

Complete translations:
French (Philippe Lavergne 1975/1982, frequently criticized on account of its large untranslated sections).
Italian (Luigi Schenoni 1982).
German (Dieter H. Stündel 1993).
Japanese (Yanase 1993, Miyata 2004).
Spanish (Alberte Pagán 1997).
Korean (Chong-keon Kim 1998).
Dutch (Erik Bindervoet und Robbert-Jan Henkes 2002) [these are the guys who edited the OUP edition of FW]
Polish (Krzysztof Bartnicki 2012).

Extensive partial translations ::
Hungarian (Endre Bíró 1992).
Polish (Maciej Slomczynski 1998).
Russian (Andri Volkhonskii 2000).


Add to these the recent Chinese.

I don't think I'm using this thread as Jonathan had intended.

Here's why German books are better than English books. Sehe Photo :: http://antoinemalette.com/site/?p=2690

A hipster-ish, know-betterism article from the lrb about the Chinese translation and how untranslatable it is and how the first print run ran out because -- Chinese Hype Machine!!! Anyways, hat the attitude of contempt in this piece ::


"Short Cuts" by Sheng Yun
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n07/sheng-yu...

[btw, I didn't know that the Chinese translation is partial ; between a third and a half ;; but since the article=writer knows better than to open The Wake, we don't know which chapters are translated ;; All of Part I? Parts I & II? What? Can you say anything about what is inside of the damn book and not just repeat the old cliches about untranslatability and nothing but an elaborate code etc etc etc etc]

"Perhaps our literary taste has suddenly become sophisticated, but I worry that we’re just poseurs and getting better at it by the day. A book by Joyce looks good on your shelf but vanity alone can’t account for the success of this edition." -- yeah, right, who's posing here please I wanna know. [the Chinese Hype Machine accounts for its popularity ; but no wait, compared to Harrius Potter it's not really all that pop-ular, etc etc etc]