Finnegansscribbleshake
Sreda, 23. maj 2007Za vse, ki vas zanima moje razmerje z dotičnim romanom. Tukaj je moj leto star članek.
On storyline transparency in translations or transpositions of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
By
Jure Godler
The everlasting problem of Finnegans Wake in my view is not the dream language but the dream storyline, which by far stands out as the most complicated element of the book. The question is; how can we transpose rather than translate the book into another language keeping the story intact for the recipient of the transposition. I do not believe that the solution to this problem is worth looking for in transferring the book to a different cultural background, namely that corresponding to the language in which we are transposing it, but all the attention should be diverted to the storyline itself, and any linguistic action should find its counterpart in the basis of the storyline. Such course of action, however, leads to different problems. We are confronted with a choice; keeping the story intact or choosing to pay more attention to the puns and allusions, which to a great extent form the story of the novel by themselves. In a translation or a transposition we cannot profit from both, for it is the language, one of a different origin than the language of the translation or transposition, which does not allow obvious similarities between them. Furthermore, we are confronted with the onomatopoetic characteristics of the text. Considering the fact that we have two (possibly more) choices of transferring FW into another language, translating or transposing, the first thing that comes to mind is an equation, which would generally specify a norm according to which we could tackle such a task. It is essential that we know the definition of transposition as opposed to translation. As in music transposition, in our case literary, should stand for a piece of linguistic material remote from its “natural environment”, yet unchanged in all other aspects. Since the “natural environment” of FW is its dream language, in the case of transposition another dream language must be invented in order to accommodate the needs of our transpository demands. However, the apparent differences between English (regarded as the root language of FW) and in our case Slovene, may not allow such a simple transposition to take place (N.B. the differences regarded here are those of morphological and grammatical structures). The new dream language-background cannot function unaffected and independently of the laws of the source dream language. The solution to this problem should be solved if we incorporate into our translation attempt different means of translation methods. Therewith we should not only be transposing it into a different environment but we would employ methods of making the book “Slovene” as well - a very common expression in Slovene is “posloveniti”, which literary means: making something Slovene. Again, to only “posloveniti” FW will result in a dead end. Here is an example why:
deepbrow fundigs 006.25
Let us listen to this pronounced. We get very close do “de profundis”, psalm 130. And that is only a piece of the puzzle in this case. We will call this “implied meaning”. The phrase has four roots or morphemes; deep, brow, fun and dig, morphemes that will not yield “de profundis” in another dream language. So any traditional translation in this case is bound to be off by miles - there are absolutely no phonetic or written similarities between deep and “globok”, brow and “obrv”, fun and “zabava” or dig and “kopati, jama”, nor do these counterparts in Slovene offer any chance of implying “de profundis” in any way imaginable. What is there to do? Hard to say. It would seem fair that a native English speaker should have to consult the dictionary an equal amount of times as the reader of the translation would. The answer lies in the invention of a special type of translator’s matrix.
