Do you know who is the new translator,JC? Last year someone subscribed to LitNet claiming that he was a Joyce translator and I was very curious. But he disappeared again.Originally Posted by JCamilo
Do you know who is the new translator,JC? Last year someone subscribed to LitNet claiming that he was a Joyce translator and I was very curious. But he disappeared again.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
http://alias.estadao.com.br/noticias...ao,10000098586
O outro tradutor era o Caetano Galindo.
Thanks, JC. I vaguely remember the name of Galindo, I donīt think it was he that registered in the forum last year.
I donīt know the lady, but Iluminuras is a good editor.
I prefer reading the original though. In that kind of translation so much can get lost or changed.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
In the case of Finnegans, any translation is complicated, after all, Joyce combination of different languages is near impossible to achive.
Finnegans Wake might be a good one to let Google translate. The English words that can be recognized would be translated over and the other stuff left the way it is.
If I could only get Google to translate that book into English first, I might be able to read it.
Last edited by YesNo; 02-15-2017 at 08:58 AM.
I think there probably are Google translations of the book in the web.
The point is IMO, the complexity of the text is not aleatory. It is a meaningful although complex work. The problem is that its complexity limits its accessibility.
That is why I like to compare it to a mathematical construction.
To an outsider like myself, an equation looks like an complicated and unecessary play with numbers destined only to make school children suffer.
But to a Mathematician it certainly makes sense.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
Double again
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
It's true that both a mathematical text and Finnegans Wake are difficult for some people to understand. However, that is where their similarity ends.
Theoretically anyone can read a mathematical text (or other scientific text) and understand it. They will even be able to come to an agreement with others what the text actually said without ambiguity. It just takes learning the technical vocabulary. It is a lot like reading a program for a computer someone has written. It can be done if one learns the technical language of the program which can be very boring and not worth doing. I only know a very few such technical languages. There is no technical language to learn that will let me read Finnegans Wake if I am willing to spend the time to learn that language. True, there are pieces of information that might help me guess what Joyce is saying, but that is all it would be in the end--a guess. Others would disagree with me.
I have enjoyed some of Joyce's writing. The first part of Ulysses comes to mind as very enjoyable writing. I suppose I might be able to finish Ulysses but it gets very cryptic. I don't think that I would be able to read Finnegans Wake. That book reminds me of talking with someone who has a mental illness or someone who is being deliberately perverse trying to make sure I do not understand what is being said. I can forgive the person with a mental illness, but when I know a person is deliberately trying to make me not understand I view it as verbal abuse. Some poetry is written like this. I discuss poems with a few friends. We read each others work and give comments. Most of them I can comment on constructively, but a few seem to think that writing a poem is meant to be an act of non-communication. I want to give them a comment. They would be offended if I did not give them a comment, but I have no clue what they said.
I see what you mean and your own poems are very transparent.
But some types of poetry are more cryptic than others and can be read in several ways. Sometimes even every day prose. I have a German internet aquaintance who comunicates though links.
He wants people to infer what he wants to say. I love to read his comercial letter because they are "normal comunication".
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
I was thinking more about how a mathematics text and Finnegans Wake might be related now that you've mentioned it, Danik. There is a way this might work that I didn't think of before. Perhaps Joyce intended his text to be "meaningless", basically something just to look at, but not read in the way we normally read for meaning.
The reason there might be a link is because during the early 20th century there was a dream that mathematics could be mechanized to the point that human beings were not needed to develop it. This resulted in "mathematics" being a set of symbols or texts which a human being would not read, but a machine would generate. The symbols were to have no meaning. In contrast to this mathematics was "metamathematics" which was a way to make what the machine generated useful to us.
This mechanization is not a bad thing. There is a lot of tedious computation in mathematics that a machine does better. Much of the interest in fractals today is because computers have visualized these for us. Also mechanization is good in many other contexts. I prefer having a machine wash my clothes and maybe in the future drive my car. The human chore of washing clothes has been "dehumanized" today. In the early 20th century, some hoped that mathematics could be dehumanized as well so that it could be done without any need for a human being to add meaning to the task. That dream was shown to be impossible by Godel, Church and Turing.
It is possible, but I don't know any of the history about Joyce, that he was aiming to create a "dehumanized" story that did not require human beings to understand it. I would still think one would need a "metastory" that would explain the meaningless story to a human being. If that is what Joyce was trying to do, then what Google outputs as a translation should be adequate. All of that is just speculation on my part. I don't know what Joyce thought he was trying to achieve.
I think it was the other way round, Yes/No, he wanted to write a text with several layers of meanings. Joyce and other writers of the 20 C were adept of experimental literature. The important thing for them was not only what they wanted to say but how they would say it. They experimented with form, exploring different meanings of words and languages, often inventing their own grammar and their own sintax, thus creating multiple levels of significance.
Here are some interpretations of the first sentence of the text:
"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."
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t6441.htm
I think that among other things, probably all those interpretations make sense, the sentence refers to the complex movement of the text itself, like the great river of human tradition which started with Adam and Eve, but also that smaller Dublin river they refer to that passes the Church of Adam and Eve. And he is warning that it is a circular and ciclic narrative where there will be repetitions. The great pulse of life including the smaller cicles of human lives and among them this Finnegan.
Yes, I think it has a "metastory" level, but the idea seems to be to defamiliarize the usual concepts of narrative, text and language.
Last edited by Danik 2016; 02-15-2017 at 10:45 PM.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
Saying it is mathematical is just a metaphor. It is fine, but we should not be picking at straws. It is not meant to be a perfect relation, just a suggestive one.
Also, Finnegans Wake and Joyce - despite the huge problem the language itself in the work is for us - is hardly the only text that people read and cann't come with a meaning that is not ambiguous or agree with that. This works with Kafka, which style is very simple, yet there is no agreement in the world about the exactly meaning. And hardly something unread in art. Music for example (and since Finnegans Wake is a experimetation with sounds, it is very appropriate to remind of music) is not meant even to be decoded and understood to be enjoyed.
If Finnegans Wake intentionally had layers of meaning then it would not be related to what mathematicians hoped to achieve in the early 20th century. So my guess was wrong. They hoped that mathematics would be able to be constructed unconsciously, once and for all, by a machine and have no meaning whatsoever. "No meaning" and "layers of meaning" are opposite goals. The "metamathematics" texts would contain the inevitable layers of meaning that arise when different people read those texts over and over again each time a little differently.
The reason mathematicians wanted to remove human subjectivity from mathematics was to remove those layers of meaning that will inevitably occur when a human being is confronted with any text. If a machine (not a theoretically conscious AI robot) constructs mathematics it is like a washing machine doing the laundry. The clean clothes are the "mathematics". The human being wearing those clothes enjoys meaningful "metamathematics".
All stories, as I see it, contain potential layers of meaning which are recreated by the subjectivity of the conscious human being while reading the text. If a reader does not understand what an author wrote, the reader will make up meanings for the text which could be simply that the author is mentally ill or verbally abusive depending on how hostile the reader is toward that author.
Last edited by YesNo; 02-16-2017 at 12:20 PM.
Or they will say, as I once saw, that Voltaire in Candide wanted to postpone the idea that Ignorance is a Bliss. Voltaire defending Ignorance.
The easier way to say, is that the meaning construction is not sole dependent on the artwork/text, but in a interation with other chains of significance. They have a meaning (positive, valid, even if wrong).
It is also notable, the idea a text have layers and layers of meaning is old and the idea Finnegans Wake cannot be understood because of the language is different from Joyce word-plays has no logic (it has, more close to music, a language very few people can understand).
"All stories, as I see it, contain potential layers of meaning which are recreated by the subjectivity of the conscious human being while reading the text. If a reader does not understand what an author wrote, the reader will make up meanings for the text which could be simply that the author is mentally ill or verbally abusive depending on how hostile the reader is toward that author."
I agree with you and Camilo that the text depends on the interaction with the reader. But some texts permit a greater quantity of interpretation than others. Personally I prefer texts that defy me. Finnegans Wake is an extreme case, maybe the most extreme case there is.
Of course one must consider also the musicality of a poetic text. There is the flow of FW, the running of the river of words. But only musicality is not enough for me.
Last edited by Danik 2016; 02-16-2017 at 09:39 PM.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
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