Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (review)

The new Chinese translation of volume 1 of Finnegans Wake has caused quite a publishing stir in Shanghai. The initial print run of 8,000 copies published by the Shanghai People’s Publishing House had sold out by 1 February after being released on 25 December. The translator, Congrong Dai, who spent eight years translating the book, was reported in the China Daily as saying that she “didn’t fully grasp the novel but that it was supposed to be difficult, and that she kept the Chinese version that way.”¹ The book’s sales in Shanghai in the last week of January were “second only to a new biography of Deng Xiaoping” (China Daily). The newspaper reports that some critics see the book as pandering to a “superficial demand among some Chinese for high-brow imports” (China Daily).

Translating a work, often regarded as untranslatable, that is composed of neologisms and portmanteau words incorporating words and word fragments from up to seventy languages, that describes, for many, a language of the unconscious, and that has no clearly discernible plot surely adds new dimensions to the task of the translator while testing the limits of translation itself. Because the structure and shape of the Chinese translation could never look anything like the original—partly because of the differences between the Chinese character system and the Indo-European alphabetic system—some differences between the original and the Chinese translation are evident even to a reader who does not read Chinese.

It is important to look at the translation of the title, which, in the original, embodies so playfully the themes of circularity, eternal recurrence, and the mixing of the petty and the profound that are central to the book. The phrase Finnegans Wake references the 1850s Irish folk song “Finigan’s Wake” or “Tim Finigan’s Wake” generally attributed to Tom Durnal.² The first syllable of Finnegans also puns the French word for end, fin, while the second puns “again”; these jokes work together to connote the idea of circularity or eternal recurrence. This idea is strengthened through the implicit contrast between fin and Wake. The Chinese translation gives the phonetic version of the name Finnegans followed by the three Chinese characters 守靈夜 for Wake.³ The phonetic translation of Finnegans obviously can have none of the different meanings implicit in the original title that are so important to a Viconian reading of the book.

One of the first notable structural features of the Chinese translation of volume 1 is that each two-page section is devoted to a relatively small amount of the original text. For example, whereas the first page of the original has twenty-four lines of text, the first two pages of the Chinese translation are devoted to only the first five lines of the original. The new version thus proceeds at a much slower pace. Section 4 of volume 1 that starts on page 75 of the original begins on page 278 of this translation.

The second notable structural feature here explains this somewhat slower pace. Four different series of accompanying explanatory notes or annotations are positioned within, above, beneath, and alongside the main body of the translation. The first notation system involves the inclusion of smaller groups of Chinese characters that follow the larger, main sections and are separated from the larger characters by little borders. These provide more information about the main body of the translation. The second annotation system involves the inclusion of notoriously difficult words or neologisms in their original form above the Chinese translation of these words. The third type of notation system that is added is a series of endnotes that appear on facing pages and that explain, most typically, puns and double meanings associated with particular words and neologisms. An example is the word “commodious,” which also has one of these endnotes following it. The endnote reads as follows: “commodius 解 commodious ‘~’; 也解 Commodus ‘~,’ 羅馬暴君, 180至192年在位” (3). This is...