Finnegans Wake Grappa discussion

Top Sawyer shows up rather frequently. There is a Dublin upon the Mississippi which serves as adequate excuse to slip some Twain into the Wake which quite pleases me. The phrases tend to sound more like Finneganese than (Huck) Finn's tongue ; but fact is those them there words and things and such belong directly out of Mr Twain's bales of lies.

Which derives a question out of my own noggin about really in farct how much more difficult is it to be translating The Wake than it is to be translating on ole Clemens'eseses sentences therein? ya know now that every single damn word what gets uttered out of ole Huck's mouth there yonder places him precisely exactly where he dun was born in where ever it was (Missouri? i fo'get) and maybe you wanna make him sound like some hick from Bayern but ain't nohow Huck growed up on the Rhine/Moldau/Danube/(egyptian)Nile/or Nuthing. How you make a Huck-like Hick speak German without moving that poor sap outta his god-given natural habitat right there on that very Mississippi?

The innneresting thing about the impossibility of translation is the abundance of counter=evidence.

Great question/topic! I noticed this in Woods' translations of Schmidt, the way he renders the German hickdeutsch into American hickanese. I wish my German was good enough to better understand the choice involved there...

Geoff wrote: "Great question/topic! I noticed this in Woods' translations of Schmidt, the way he renders the German hickdeutsch into American hickanese. I wish my German was good enough to better understand the..."

Yep. Exactly too I had the Woods-Schmidt question in mind. I've heard some complaints exactly about Woods making that Deutschhick sound like Scotshick or some such. Absolutely no way to get around that kind of problem -- Zunge und Boden.