Fennigen de Shouling Ye (Finnegans Wake) by James Joyce (review)

This translation of the first book of Finnegans Wake, volume 1, took about six years to produce, longer than Leo Tolstoy worked on War and Peace. If past performance can serve as an indicator of future results, some twenty-four years will pass before all four books are completed, seven years longer than it took Joyce to compose the original text. Congrong Dai’s translation is thus very much a work in progress. Even after the remaining three books are finished, the translation will still be in progress; it could be described as a preliminary or introductory version. Translating the Wake into Chinese involves that many difficulties.

These begin with the title, which Dai renders as Fēnnígēn de shǒulíng yè 芬尼根的守灵夜. The first three graphs or characters attempt a phonetic rendering of “Finnegan” (though they do have these meanings individually—“fragrant, Buddhist nun, root”—the difficulty of construing the meaning of the three graphs together is a clue that they transliterate a non-Chinese word or name). The fourth graph is a possessive marker similar to the apostrophe used in English. The last three graphs in the title mean “night vigil” (or, more darkly, “night deathwatch”). It is possible to render the title without the last graph meaning “night,” yielding “Finnegan’s Vigil,” as some Chinese scholars have done. Dai says she considered leaving out that last character. After all, the original title does not explicitly mention a time of day. In her introduction, Dai says that she chose to add “yè” to the title because “night” connotes not only finality but also the expectation of daybreak (35).

The positive connotation Dai points out compensates for the loss in translation of the sense of festivity associated with Irish wakes: shǒulíng by itself does not imply the opposite of sleep or suggest resurrection or revival, in accord with what happens in the song “Finigan’s Wake.”¹ The positive connotations of the translated title would have been be stronger had there been some way to preserve the grammatical ambiguity of the original title, which can be understood not as two nouns but as a plural noun acting as a subject for a following verb. Fēnnígēn can be interpreted as plural since Chinese nouns generally do not have singular and plural forms, but neither shǒulíng nor shǒulíng yè can be read as a verb.

Problems similar to those just described, resulting from differences in syntactic structures and lexical connotations, would also arise for translators of the Wake into western languages. Other translation difficulties, however, are more specific to Chinese. These arise largely from the differences between an alphabetic or phonetic script and a logographic one (in which graphs, singly or in combination, represent words, not a phonemes).² With a logographic script, a translator cannot engage in the sort of wordplay that Joyce does through deviations in orthography.

As readers of the Wake know, Joyce’s alterations of spelling are sometimes minor—a single change in a vowel or consonant can be enough to achieve the desired effect, as in the case of “rest” to “rust”: “oranges have been laid to rust upon the green” (FW 3.23). In other instances, the alterations are more complicated. For example, the phonetic resonances of Joyce’s “bluddle filth” (FW 10.08-09) suggest “battlefield” as the base with a substitution of a consonant cluster for the initial consonant, a shift in the first vowel, a voicing of the dentals, a shortening of the second vowel sound, and a substitution of an unvoiced dental fricative for the final voiced dental stop. What results is a commentary on the consequences of warfare. The orthographic and phonetic play that was possible for Joyce in working mostly with western languages is difficult to replicate in Chinese. Dai renders “bluddle filth” primarily as “zhànchǎng 战场,” “battlefield...