Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes by Patrick O’Neill (review)

Something happened in the park, they say. And HCE is rumored to have been involved. Guiltless he was clearly. And yet everyone seems to be talking about him, “duddurty devil” (FW 196.15) as he is called in “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” the fragment of Joyce’s “Work in Progress” that eventually became chapter 8 of Finnegans Wake. The reference to “dear dirty Dublin” simultaneously suggests HCE’s guilty stammer and his dirty linen that is washed in at least four rivers: the Dirty Devil River in Utah, the Duddon in the United Kingdom, Dudd Creek in Alaska, and the Uda in Russia.

Although Finnegans Wake has often been declared to be impossible to translate, it is amazing how many translators have managed to realize the impossible, with versions of the entire 628-page text in Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese and with partial translations in many other languages.¹ In Impossible Joyce, Patrick O’Neill carefully examines these multiple Wakes to investigate how “impossible” translating Joyce really is. Long before the text was published in its entirety, attempts were already made to translate parts of it. The first one of the opening pages of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” was done by Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron.² In their version, “duddurty devil” became “le misérable” (“the wretch”). At first sight, this seems to be a rather reductive, impoverished translation, but as O’Neill points out, “le misérable” nonetheless introduces three new rivers, the Czech Iser, the German Isar, and the French Isère (182). When Joyce, with the help of Yvan Goll, Eugène Jolas, Paul L. Léon, Adrienne Monnier, and Philippe Soupault, reworked the version by Beckett and Péron, “le misérable” became “le mymyserable,” giving HCE his stutter and adding a reference to the Franco-Belgian river Yser.³ What this form of “would-be translation” set in motion was an impressive extension of the Wake (287). In quantitative terms, in the few brief passages from little more than one page of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” discussed by O’Neill in the chapter “Opinions Voiced,” Joyce refers to seventeen river names; all the translations of these same passages together manage to invoke more than 150 rivers (203).

But this is about much more than simply quantitative expansion. The idea behind O’Neill’s book goes to the heart of Joyce’s project. If Dublin can stand for the world at large and if every single portmanteau word is a microcosm that reflects a semantic macrocosm, the idea of translation fits in with the very mechanism that drives this expanding verbal universe. None of the translations will ever claim that it is a “faithful” or “accurate” rendering of what is happening in Finnegans Wake, but that is the whole point of the Wake: that it cannot give a precise account of what occurs, not unlike the game of Chinese whispers to which Joyce compared the mechanism of history. Thus, all of the translations of Finnegans Wake are to some extent a Winnegans Fake, as Friedhelm Rathjen brilliantly called his 2012 collection of excerpts from the Wake in German translation.⁴ O’Neill generously refers to Rathjen’s humorous title as a sort of motto for the enterprises of Wakean translators, analyzing their efforts in terms of “win some, lose some”; “however impressive their wins may be, they will also inevitably produce a Wake that is fake” (29). But this “fake” is not in any way meant in a derogatory sense. O’Neill repeatedly emphasizes that the point of his book is not to judge the quality of the translations “by their degree of perceived fidelity or lack of fidelity to Joyce’s original” (287).

Evidently, O’Neill does consider the adequacy of the translations. He also suggests a categorization, consisting of (1) explanatory, (2) imitative, and (3) competitive versions—but not without immediately adding that these categories “may sometimes be found even within the...