Epifanie by James Joyce, and: Finneganów Tren by James Joyce (review)

"Catalogue these books" (U 17.1361)

Two beautiful books in Polish grace my desk: translations of James Joyce's epiphanies and Finnegans Wake. Adam Poprawa's Epifanie features a black cover from which emerges a dark-greenish wall that frames a bluish-hued window with images of two faces, Egyptian and Greek; I learned from Poprawa, the author of this artwork and an avid photographer with a soft spot for urban windowscapes, that they belong to the Art Institute of the University of Wrocław. The cover of Krzysztof Bartnicki's Finneganów tren reproduces the brown-maroon color and yellow-gold lettering of the first edition of Finnegans Wake. Remarkably, the publishers also managed to come very close to replicating the page-by-page layout of Joyce's text; I learned from one of them that it took months of labor-intensive work to align Bartnicki's pages with the original. The pay-off is that it is thus possible to use Roland McHugh's Annotations to "Finnegans Wake" should a reader wish to locate and cross-reference Bartnicki's lexical solutions with Joyce's original formations.¹

The two translations represent texts that are Joyce's artistic bookends. Though the epiphanies were never published as a separate volume in English, they had, by the end of 1902, "attained the status of a manuscript collection, to be passed around to admiring friends or shown to literary figures such as George Russell, who had been given a set before Joyce left for Paris."² That the epiphanies were "recorded" (Workshop 4) rather than composed by the young Joyce stands in sharp contrast to Finnegans Wake's constructed lexical semantifying idiolect, one that is invested in an altogether different epiphanic "manifestation … of the mind itself" (SH 211). And if working on the epiphanies helped the young Joyce hone his artistic vision (forged and re-forged in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), his progress on the Wake allowed the mature artist to blast through—and leave in the dust—the boundaries of what counted as language, causing some head-scratching even in the camps closest to him.³ It is quite a challenge to write about the two works together, so vastly different are their programmatic and artistic agendas. Considering them here in terms of translation additionally complicates the task, particularly since translatorial philosophies and methodologies declared by Poprawa⁴ and Bartnicki⁵ cannot but amplify those differences. I opt to be descriptive here, and my interest is to highlight the virtuosity of the two translations, with a few brief recourses to textual obstacles that have nevertheless been solved to the satisfaction of the Polish reader.

Poprawa's translations of the epiphanies read remarkably well; a high degree of plasticity in his language heightens Joyce's imagery in both the dramatic and the lyrical/prose epiphanies. For instance, in Epiphany 3 (Workshop 13), Joyce's "brown horses" are transformed into evocative "kasztanki" (Epifanie 7),⁶ where "kasztanek" (a diminutive of "chestnut") also names a chestnut-brown horse. In Epiphany 10 (Workshop 20), O'Mahoney's "that little priest that writes poetry" is rendered as "księżulek który uprawia poezję" (Epifanie 14). "[K]siężulek," again, a diminutive formation, carries the dual charge of the English "little priest," leaning towards the negative in this context (reinforced by the sarcasm of "uprawia," or "cultivates," for Joyce's "writes"). The result is unmistakably biting, and the presentation of the "little priest" is scrupulously mean, a style to be further developed in Dubliners.⁷ A balance of diminutives and augmentatives is well maintained in Epiphany 15 (Workshop 25), where the Lame Beggar wields a stick and threatens to harm the two children. Joyce's "stick," the Polish "kij" in its first appearance, becomes twice a diminutive "kijaszek" when the...