MCLC: Finnegan's Wake in Chinese

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Han Meng <hanmeng at gmail.com>
Subject: Finnegan's Wake in Chineses
***********************************************************

Source: Wall Street Journal (3/31/13):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324000704578386381373928300.h
tml

'Finnegans Wake' Is Greek to Many; Now Imagine It in Chinese
Translation of Joyce Novel in Works for Years Sells Well to Readers
Craving a Challenge

BEIJING—"Finnegans Wake" has bedeviled readers for decades, but few
can claim the toil and triumph it has given to Dai Congrong.

Ms. Dai spent eight years translating into Chinese the 1939 James
Joyce novel that the author's own brother described as "unspeakably
wearisome." She endured low pay, a skeptical husband and the continued
demands of her teaching job. That is on top of deciphering sentences
like this: "Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by
arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the
aquaface."

Her reward, to her great surprise, was success. Her translation of the
first part of the book has become a modest but clear hit here in
China. Chinese readers are now puzzling their way through Joyce's
rhythmic stew of English, Gaelic, Romance languages, puns and layered
meaning.

"It's beyond my expectations," Ms. Dai said. Local media even
interviewed her 8-year-old son, she said, "though he has no idea what
the book is about."

A newly affluent nation that prizes black Audi sedans and Louis
Vuitton handbags has made a literary status symbol of what may well be
English literature's most difficult work. Thanks in part to a canny
marketing campaign involving eye-catching billboards and packaging,
"Finnegans Wake" sold out the first, 8,000-volume run shortly after it
was released in December. The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a
bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a
biography of the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's
modern-day boom.

That isn't to say buyers necessarily love it. "I have to say it's less
pleasant than I expected," said Nico Wu, a 23-year-old
public-relations professional in Shanghai, who says he slogged through
the first 30 of its 775 pages before giving up.

"I thought at least I could get a sense of the plot," he said. "But
now, I feel it is too hard to even do that."

Ms. Dai is unfazed by that sort of response. "One has to admit that
there is a group of people who bought the book out of curiosity and
vanity, but there is also a large group of people who bought the book
because they really want to appreciate it," she said.

The appetite for Joyce's most challenging work comes from a real
hunger for demanding literature. A Chinese writer, Mo Yan, last year
won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a Chinese national.
But his victory only underscored China's lack of a global profile in
the printed word. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution suppressed China's
rich literary heritage. Continued government censorship and the lack
of emphasis on reading for pleasure in the schools haven't helped.

"I am so desperate to know how it feels to read the most complicated
book in the world," said He Kuang, a 50-year-old civil servant in the
coastal city Xiamen, who bought the translation. "It's like an IQ
test."

"Finnegans Wake" famously begins midsentence. It defies conventional
narrative structure. It offers 10 different words referring to
thunder, each at least 100 letters long, such as
"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" Experts are still arguing,
but many believe it takes place during a shifting dream or dreams, and
it involves among many other matters a bar owner and his family and an
unspecified sexual transgression in a park.

Criticism dogged the book more than a decade before it was released in
1939. Joyce had been writing it for years and had published snippets
in magazines and pamphlets. "I don't think it gets anywhere," H.G.
Wells wrote to him in 1928 after reading part of it, adding, "you have
turned your back on common men." Even Joyce's wife, Nora, once
referred in her letters to "Finnegans Wake" as "that chop suey you're
writing" and once asked him, "Why don't you write sensible books that
people can understand?"

Defenders say its power lies in how it pushes the boundaries of
language. "You can read it as poetry," said Sun Ganlu, a prominent
54-year-old Chinese writer whose work has been translated into
English, French and Japanese. Mr. Sun, who praises the new Chinese
translation, says the book could inspire readers. "Maybe after they
read it, they will start to take literature seriously or even write."

That possibility inspired Ms. Dai, the translator, an associate
professor and vice dean of the department of Chinese language and
literature at Fudan University in Shanghai. "The traditional writing
style of Chinese literature needs to be changed after all these
years," she said. "Someone needs to stand out and lead by his unique
writing, like what James [Joyce] did in Western literature."

Ms. Dai, a bookish 42-year-old whose only nod to ostentation is her
taste for Lancôme perfume, first discovered Joyce through Chinese
translations of "Ulysses" released in the 1990s. "It lingered in my
mind after I put the book down," she said. "Life is like what is
described in 'Ulysses': fragmented."

"Finnegans Wake" is on another level, however. To re-create some of
the sounds of the novel, Ms. Dai had to create new Chinese
characters—a notable hoop to jump through considering Chinese already
has tens of thousands of characters.

The first line of the novel, which begins mid-sentence, reads,
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle
and Environs." To translate that sentence alone, Ms. Dai provides two
definitions, five footnotes and seven asides in smaller type to
describe its allusions to religion, memory and the 17th- and
18th-century academic Giovanni Battista Vico.

Her publisher paid her 75 yuan ($12) per thousand English words
translated, meaning she needed to keep up her research duties at the
university. That bothered her husband, Gu Jian, who told her he could
make the same amount of money in much less time. "I don't have time to
read it," said Mr. Gu. "Maybe I will try to read it after retirement."

But publisher Shanghai People's Publishing House gave the book market
appeal with a slick billboard campaign in the downtown areas of major
Chinese cities. A deluxe, 168 yuan version comes in a box with a slim
Joyce biography and bookmark, and it shows a young Joyce standing
head-cocked and confident with his hands in his pants pockets. The
book was also advertised in in-flight magazines, online reading sites
and stores. It got an additional boost from China's state-run media,
with the official Xinhua news agency naming it one of the most
influential books of last year.

As a result, the book's initial 8,000 run sold out within three weeks,
according to the publisher. It has since printed 5,000 additional
copies that it says have been distributed to bookstores. The publisher
has committed to supporting translation of the rest of the book, says
Ms. Dai, a process that she says will take at least eight more years.
Mr. Gu worries that it could be longer: "It will take maybe 20 years
to finish that."

—Lilian Lin and Carlos Tejada