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  • Tales from "Finnegans Wake" by Chong-keon Kim
  • Younghee Kho (bio)
TALES FROM "FINNEGANS WAKE," by Chong-keon Kim. Seoul: Amunhaksa Books, 2015. 993 pp. ₩ 48,000 ( $40.00).

As he advanced in his writing career, Joyce was uncompromising in carrying out his literary and linguistic experiments, the culmination of which manifested itself in Finnegans Wake. This multidimensional and multidirectional text requires the similarly arduous efforts of Joycean scholars and readers who attempt to understand it. Chong-keon Kim makes such an effort in his Tales from "Finnegans Wake." In translating and introducing Joyce's last masterpiece to Korean readers, he has also been uncompromising and persistent. He acknowledges he had to reduce the number of Chinese words that were at the core of the portmanteau words of the Wake. The reduction, however, does not mean a decline in the importance of the Chinese alphabet in his thought. On the contrary, he firmly believes in its usefulness and necessity.

While admitting that the linguistic environment in Korea has been [End Page 449] rapidly changing, as fewer Sino-Korean words are used, Kim nevertheless emphasizes the necessity of borrowing Chinese letters as an aid to deciphering Joyce's language. The use of Chinese letters arises from Kim's view that its oppositional character to Korean can form a complementary relationship with the latter. The ideographic nature of Chinese characters, he claims, makes it possible to explain homonyms and what they create in the mixture of meanings and sounds (18).1 This is where Korean language, which is essentially phonetic, would be inadequate if the Wake were translated into Korean only (18). One example Kim gives us is "all thim liffeying waters of," a phrase from the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter (FW 215.33-34). To translate the phrase "exegetically," he includes the Chinese words 生跳葉 (each letter/word meaning living, leaping, and leafy respectively) right after its Korean word 리피 (880). The advantage of such a method is obvious when compared to interpretational translation. The exegetical translation that retains every connotation of a word can convey multiple meanings at the same time, a conveyance made impossible by Charles K. Ogden's interpretational translation, which focuses on the words' denotation only (882).2 Kim sees both connotation and poetic compression, which he accomplishes using Chinese, as being vital to the language of the Wake (888).

Such deployment of the Chinese language leaves Kim's translation vulnerable to two limitations. He concedes that even with the help of Chinese, the slipperiness of translation never goes away. Perhaps this is a problem every translator encounters, but it is even more the case with this modernist/postmodernist text, whose meaning is found in the process of deferring among numerous action-reaction phonemes. Kim's experience attests to such a difficulty. He admits that the exact rendering of its contents is often lost in the struggle to translate formal aspects of Joyce's language (892). The second conundrum comes from the translation's compromised accessibility to its reader. In present-day Korea, younger generations are no longer generally educated in reading and writing Chinese or otherwise exposed to the language in everyday life. Accordingly, Kim has to limit his use of Chinese words both in number and in location, and he inserts them in parentheses. His juggling seems to continue in this abridged version of the Wake, as in the full version of its translation which was published in 2002 after thirteen years of effort.3

This publication was foundational in exposing the Wake to more Korean readers, yet it did not really induce them to engage with the text. The failure to attract more Wakeans is presumably due to the inaccessibility of the translation itself. The adoption of Chinese letters, despite the translator's attempt to justify a heavy reliance on them, almost made the translation another "text" to study with a Chinese-Korean [End Page 450] dictionary at hand. A conflicted response between older and younger generations was inevitable. In 2012, in order to help readers, Kim published a revised version of the translation4 along with annotations.5 These annotations were written in a prose style but received little attention like the first...

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