"Finnegans Wake" Libro Terzo, Capitoli 1 E 2 (Finnegans Wake III, 1-2), by James Joyce (review)

In a letter to his son Giorgio in 1935, Joyce wrote in Italian: "Ho gli occhi stanchi. Da più di mezzo secolo scrutano nel nulla dove hanno trovato un bellissimo niente" ("My eyes are tired. For over half a century, they have gazed into nullity where they have found a lovely nothing") (LettersIII 359, 361). Nulla and niente are synonyms in Italian, but like all twins, they are, in fact, different in their identicalness. Joyce "creates" the difference by simply playing with articles: in the middle of the nothingness (nullity), we might well discover a nothing.

The passage above shows just how well Joyce understood the subtleties of Italian, and it is indeed fortunate that, after many years of silence, the Italian publisher Mondadori has decided to resume the unfinished project of translating Finnegans Wake. The work was abruptly interrupted in 2008 when the late lamented translator, Luigi Schenoni, passed away after translating the first two volumes. It took several years to find translators who could rise to the challenge of completing his job and thus give Italy the first complete translation of the final work of such an important "Italian" writer as Joyce—because he was to some extent an Italian writer. It was Giorgio Melchiori who first used the term "Joyce scrittore italiano" back in 1998 with regard to his Italian writings: the texts of the Trieste conference and the Piccolo della Sera articles.¹ On reading the new Italian translation of Finnegans Wake (Book III, chapters 1 and 2) carried out by Enrico Terrinoni and Fabio Pedone, however, it is Joyce's other major Italian text, his incredibly imaginative translation—undertaken with Nino Frank—of the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter of book I, which immediately springs to mind.²

The new pair of translators—themselves different identical twins (Terrinoni the author of an acclaimed Italian version of Ulysses carried out with Carlo Bigazzi,³ and Pedone a literary critic, translator, and scholar of Italian Studies)—seem to have taken Joyce's self-translation as their main source of inspiration. As with the excerpts of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" and "I fiumi scorrono,"⁴ this new translation is a very Italian one, although foreign markers are also pervasive, either in the translation itself or in the enormous quantity of narrative annotations.

The Italian reader will rediscover a sense of humor that had been partially lost in the final volumes of the previous translation; those were indeed pioneering and masterful works in many respects, but they were carried out from a different perspective. While Schenoni aimed at reproducing the original more or less faithfully, particularly in regard to the "linear" disposition of the elements of the sentence, this new work privileges the principle of semantic compensation.

For example, during the so-called via crucis in book III, chapter 1, where the original reads, "For his root language, if you ask me whys, Shaun replied, as he blessed himself devotionally like a crawsbomb, making act of oblivion, footinmouther! (what the thickuns else?) which he picksticked into his lettruce invrention" (FW 424.17-20), the Italian translators have: "Per via della sua lingua rudice, se mi chiedi i perché, replicò Shaun, facendosi devotaventre il pagnotto della croce come un flagellante, con l'atto di obliazione, zoppinbocca! (che altro, diamente?) che lanciacci sui novultima lettruga" (45). The humorous tone of the translation is self-evident, and Terrinoni and Pedone also clearly have the music of Finnegans Wake very much in mind; they aim to produce a text that is as musical as possible, while also being as comical and as philologically accurate as possible. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note how meanings have been displaced in the sentence. "Devotionally," which is generally translated as devotamente, becomes devotaventre, thus incorporating one of the meanings of "craw," the stomach, which in Italian can be ventre. By the same...