Old Hods Can Raise New Tricks

I've always felt FW translations tried to tame the book somehow. After succeeding at punning with two or three possible meanings for a word, the translator usually leaves the others outside his work even if he knows they were there in the original.





So I've conceived of the following trick to translate the Wake: whenever I cannot put any more meaning into the words, I draw them. Above you read the book's most famous words, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" written in Elian script. I translated them into Portuguese as "reverrio, passadelos eva e o ádamas". Reverrio does quite well for the German Erinnerung ( rever means "to see again" ), but it does not convey that riverrun sounds kinda like river-Ann and reminds us of ( well, at least insomniac FW scholars do ) a well-known passage in Kubla Khan: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree:/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran". Well, besides of the fact that my reverrio looks slightly like a woman, if you tilt your head you'll notice I drew something between a baseline Helvetica A and an eerie Borgesian Alef.

Comments

  1. Hello. I was wondering if you could tell me who is the author of the marginalia in the background image.

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  2. I really liked your use of the Kubla Khan for the riverrun reference.

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  3. Denis Rose wrote this the marked-up copy I use as my background image for his new (expensive) edition of Finnegans Wake ( http://www.houyhnhnmpress.com/finnegans-wake-prospectus ). The colors and the notes come from the (*really* expensive ) Finnegans Wake notebooks at Buffalo. Conley wrote a review of Rose's edition: http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/main/essays.php?essay=conley

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