James Joyce Quarterly

Winnegans Fake is obviously not quite the real thing, and the title of Friedhelm Rathjen’s book displays the paradox. We all agree that the odds against translating Joyce’s last work are overwhelming (even supposing that Literature, with a capital L, can be translated in a meaningful, satisfactory way). And yet it ought to be done and remains an ultimate challenge. After all, Joyce himself helped those who translated parts of the Wake into French and Italian and gave all sorts of advice.¹ The Wake cries out to be translated since it gestures toward universal inclusion; it might as well move beyond its already wide linguistic scope. Recently, the news of a Chinese Finnegans Wake, translated by Congrong Dai, was making the rounds.²

One might, of course, argue that the Wake does not need to be tampered with since it already internally translates itself in its multilingual overlays and the dozens of languages it assimilates. This is the saying attributed to Brian O’Nolan, although it is purely an undocumented rumor: “Which language are you going to translate it from?” After all, it is written in, inter alia, Kisuaheli, Albanian, or Swiss-German in parts—in minute parts, admittedly. For instance, “[w]arum night!” (FW 479.36) is one letter away from “warm night” and from the German “warum nicht?” and poses the question: which [End Page 870] way are we going to translate that? In “[w]as she wearing shubladey’s tiroirs?” the implied “drawers” are already given both in German (“schubladen”) and in French (“tiroirs”) (FW 511.27). But all that is small comfort for foreign readers. There is an obvious need to make Joyce’s last work available for those who do not speak English.

In the face of an impossible task, we have to be grateful for any attempt. Some heroic ones covering the complete book have been made in French, Italian, German, Dutch and, recently, Polish; all of them are, incidentally, also filled with annotations since they show how passages have been understood.³ In some perverse way, a translation of Finnegans Wake is even easier but only in the sense that—because of its intractability—it automatically comes under general absolution or, if you prefer, general damnation. Normal criteria or expectations simply no longer apply; it becomes pointless and arbitrary to determine whether something is missing, semantically and dynamically, or misunderstood—though, of course, it is possible to single out translational mistakes even in a book where nothing is right.

Perhaps this is the occasion to put on record what Stephen James Joyce wants to make known, as indicated during a recent phone call. His pronouncement is quite in tune with the remarks above and with the universal opinion—that Finnegans Wake cannot be translated. What he added is that, if it is attempted, the result should not be called a translation but something like a “version” or “adaptation.” The wish is herewith passed on, though no one has any jurisdiction on what kind of label should be attached to a book.

Friedhelm Rathjen is a German expert on Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Arno Schmidt, who, in the 1960s, promoted Finnegans Wake for German readers by offering his own translation samples.⁴ Rathjen is an independent scholar with numerous publications to his credit.⁵ As a professional translator, he has tried his hand at Finnegans Wake off and on for a long time, and he has now offered more passages rendered into German: one result of the long-awaited expiration of copyright. His book contains selected fragments in progress. Some pieces are very short, isolated snippets, while many extend over a few pages. II.2 is given in its entirety as well as a liberal chunk of Mamalujo (38–99). The intended fragmentary character is indicated by a blank space showing what has not (yet) been attempted. It amounts to a fair, representative selection of the whole.

As a tilly, the “Twilight of...