Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations by Patrick O'Neill (review)

Some readers still await an English translation of Finnegans Wake, Patrick O'Neill has quipped. The Wake is often considered completely untranslatable, but O'Neill's eye-popping appendix to Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations, his third recent book about translations of James Joyce's final work, tallies thirty-one versions of book one, chapter eight, in sixteen different languages.

Finnegans Wake appeared in 1939. Joyce published four "work in progress" versions of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" ("ALP"), the Wake's best-known chapter, between 1925 and 1930, and translators produced seven versions of parts or all of the chapter during his lifetime. In Trilingual Joyce, O'Neill focuses on five of these versions: Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron's partial French version (1930), Joyce and three colleagues' French version, partially based on Beckett and Péron (1931), the closing pages in Basic English by C.K. Ogden, assisted by Joyce (1931), Joyce and Nino Frank's partial Italian translation (1937–38), and Ettore Settanni's revision of this Italian version (1940). O'Neill briefly mentions translations of the complete chapter into Czech in 1932 and German in 1933.

After the introduction, which maps out the historical context of these translations, O'Neill analyses and compares over fifty sentences and other short segments, arranged into ten chapters. Each unit first presents Joyce's original version and then gives comparative analyses of four translations. O'Neill considers each English, French, and Italian version as "at once both a separate individual text and a separate individual component of a combined trilingual macrotextual ALP." His analyses offer concise summaries, sometimes paraphrases, of the contents of each passage, along with discussions that emphasize the metrics and rhythms of each language and also river references. (Joyce built around a thousand river names into the chapter's twenty pages, with the French and Italian translations supplying yet other names.) Each chapter ends with a "Comments and Contexts" section that summarizes some of the analyses' highlights, and the book's conclusion provides a similar service for the entire study. The chronological five-page appendix lists published versions of "ALP" in English and other languages from 1925 to 2017, and a fifteen-page bibliography includes both studies that O'Neill cites and a range of other materials on the topic.

The analyses follow a pattern that quickly becomes routine: first, a short discussion of Joyce's original version of a passage, followed by considerations of the two French and two Italian versions. (In the last two chapters, Ogden's Basic English replaces Beckett and Péron's French.) For each translation, O'Neill considers the text on its own and then highlights the text's metrics and prosody and the river names. He often helpfully back-translates the French and Italian texts into English.

Despite its predictable structure, or perhaps because of it, Trilingual Joyce is fascinating. With his ability to discuss Finnegans Wake acutely, clearly, and intelligently and also to deal with the Wake in several languages, O'Neill offers true comparative studies of the original and its various translations and also of those translations in relation to each other. As he considers the river names in one phrase, for example, he finds three in Joyce's original text, three different ones in Beckett and Péron's French, yet two others in Joyce's French, and, in what he calls "a bravura display of hydronomous flamboyance," thirteen in Joyce and Frank's Italian, and one more in Settanni's revision. In another chapter, he uncovers nineteen river names in Beckett and Péron's single word, "dandelinant."

O'Neill repeatedly demonstrates how, in rendering passages of "ALP" into French or Italian, Joyce paid more attention to the language's sound and rhythm than to the original content. He cites a description of Joyce's French translation as "far less a translation than a recreation," and commentators on Joyce's Italian text, including O'Neill himself, call it...