Introduction

Finnegans Wake is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary literary texts ever written. Its author, the Irishman James Joyce (1882-1941), had won international fame (and, in some quarters, infamy) with the appearance in 1922 of his already extraordinary novel Ulysses. The then forty-year-old Joyce had no intention of resting on his literary laurels, however, and within weeks of the appearance of Ulysses he was already at work on the vast undertaking that would eventually appear in May 1939 under the title Finnegans Wake. The process of composition had been an arduous one. Joyce's eyesight had been weak since childhood, and during the almost seventeen years he spent on the writing of the Wake it deteriorated significantly, involving periods of near-blindness on several occasions and requiring a whole series of painful operations. His daughter's increasing mental instability was a constant source of anxiety. Living in Paris, he constantly and restlessly changed his addresses in that city. He was drinking heavily. War was clearly becoming increasingly inevitable, and when it finally broke out just months after the appearance of Finnegans Wake Joyce despondently concluded that the massive work on which he had obsessively laboured for so many years would now find few if any readers. Little more than a year later, having fled the now German-occupied Paris for neutral Zurich, Joyce was dead and buried, a month short of his fifty-ninth birthday. He had worked for close to a third of his entire short lifetime on the astonishing undertaking that is Finnegans Wake. Paradoxically, given the circumstances of its composition, it is regarded by many as one of the great comic works of western literature.

The title Finnegans Wake was publicly revealed only with the actual appearance of the finished work. Excerpts from it had been appearing in a number of Parisian literary journals from as early as 1924, under the lapidary interim title Work in Progress. Readers' reactions were distinctly mixed from the beginning. There were those (like Samuel Beckett) who greeted the work as epoch-making; and there were those (like Ezra Pound, previously one of Joyce's most enthusiastic champions) who saw this latest undertaking as an incomprehensible squandering of the formidable creative powers Joyce had demonstrated in Ulysses. The two reactional extremes continue to co-exist down to the present day. There are now very many readers across the globe who consider Finnegans Wake to be one of the indispensable key works – even the key work – of international postmodernism; and there are very many readers, including highly educated readers with sophisticated literary tastes, who have never managed to progress beyond the opening page.

Ulysses, though itself very far from being a simple text, focuses in what is (at least for the most part) entirely comprehensible English on the events of a single day in the Dublin of 1904. Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, is an extended (and frankly obsessive) experiment in exchanging the relative clarity of daytime language for the complexities and indeterminacies and slippages of nighttime language, the language and languages, for example, of the dreaming mind, weaving its web of concealment and revelation, the remembered and the conceivable, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. The dreaming mind in question may be that of the central character, an entirely unremarkable middle-aged innkeeper in a suburban Dublin village; it may be that of the frenetically web-spinning narrator; it may be that of humankind itself through the ages, through languages, and through cultures.

Readers' difficulties, and most especially translators' difficulties, begin with the title already, Finnegans Wake, provocatively lacking as it does the expected apostrophe. Most obviously, it suggests " Finnegan's wake, " which, as it happens, is the title of a comic nineteenth-century music-hall song reporting the case of a drunken Irish builder's labourer, Tim Finnegan, who falls from a ladder, apparently to his death, but who revives when accidentally splashed with whiskey in the course of his wake. It could also be taken to be a call addressed to all Finnegans currently asleep (" Finnegans, wake! " ) as well as anticipating the success of that call, as " Finnegans" do indeed " wake. " Readers will only retrospectively see a reference to the legendary Irish hero Finn mac Cumhaill (Joyce's Finn MacCool), dead and buried for centuries but destined to come back to life again in Ireland's hour of need – which is perhaps right now, as in " Finn again is awake. " French fin means " end, " meanwhile, but Latin negans means " denying, " thus suggesting that what may appear to be an end may in reality also be a new beginning. The intersecting references in the two-word title to ends and beginnings, death and resurrection, sleeping and reawakening, the heroes of the past and the demands of the present, are generated by a massive set of interlinking puns – a form of comic wordplay deemed by serious-minded critics of an earlier generation to be the very lowest form of wit. (When Joyce was once accused of merely indulging himself in trivial wordplay in such cases, he reportedly replied that only some of them were trivial, while the rest were quadrivial. )

The two-word title is followed by 628 densely packed pages in similarly challenging vein – involving punning play on items of vocabulary not only from English but also from several dozen other languages. Given the resulting linguistic complexity and density ofintersecting reference, it will be quite clear that the text is in principle entirely untranslatable. There are those indeed who argue that not only can it not be translated, it should not be translated. Joyce himself chose a different and opposing principle, however, namely that there is nothing that has once been written that cannot subsequently be translated. After the separate appearance in 1928 of Anna Livia Plurabelle, a text later incorporated as the eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake, Joyce therefore organized and participated in an experimental team-translation of several pages from it into French, shortly afterwards collaborated in a rendering of shorter passages into Basic English, and finally took the lead in an exuberant Italian version of the same pages earlier rendered into French.

Translatable or not, complete renderings of Finnegans Wake have appeared (listed in chronological order here) over the intervening decades in French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, French again, Spanish, and Turkish. Further versions intended eventually to be complete are currently underway in Italian, Chinese, Turkish, and Portuguese – as well as in Andrey Rene's Russian, several chapters of which are already available online as I write. Among other languages, individual chapters or groups of chapters have also appeared in Czech, Romanian, Galician, Swedish, and Catalan, while significant shorter excerpts have also appeared in both Hungarian and Finnish.

The degree to which any one of these renderings or versions or transpositions or transcreations constitutes a " translation" in any traditional sense is a question that continues to exercise translation theorists and Finnegans Wake specialists alike. Given the enormous and comic complexity of Joyce's text, there is indeed an obvious sense in which it cannot be translated at all but can only be rewritten. There is thus also a sense in which every individual rendering or rewriting of the original text should be read less as a faithful replication of it than as a continuation of Joyce's own original process of writing, so that one can conceive of a Finnegans Wake macrotext ultimately consisting of Joyce's original text and all its numerous renderings in many languages, cumulatively constituting an ever expanding and ever changing literary universe. To date, Russian contributions to that macrotext have been limited to a collection of individual excerpts from the early chapters rendered by Henri Volokhonsky and a handful of pages rendered by Konstantin Belyaev. Andrey Rene's much more ambitioustransposition of Finnegans Wake is one that will finally enable Russian-language readers to experience for themselves, at greater length and in greater depth than ever before, the nature of the enduring appeal of Joyce's extravagant and extraordinary text.

Patrick O'Neill, Queen's University, Canada

⇐ Предыдущая 1 2 345 6 7 8 9 10 Следующая ⇒