Finnegans Wake becomes a hit book in China
By Jonathan Kaiman in Beijin
After spending eight years translating the first third of James Joyce's famously opaque novel Finnegans Wake into Chinese, Dai Congrong assumed it was a labour of love rather than money. The book's language is thick with multilingual puns and brazenly defies grammatical conventions.
So the 41-year-old professor at Shanghai's Fudan University was incredulous when the translation became a surprise bestseller in China after hitting shelves last month. Backed by an elaborate billboard ad campaign, the first volume of "Fennigen de Shouling Ye" sold out its first run of 8,000 copies and reached number two on a prestigious bestseller list in Shanghai, second only to a biography of Deng Xiaoping. Sales of 30,000 are considered "cause for celebration" according to Chinese publisher Gray Tan, so 8,000 in a month has made Joyce a distinctly hot property.
"At first I felt very surprised, and I feel very surprised now still," says Dai. "I thought my readers would be scholars and writers, and it wouldn't be so popular."
Dai ventures that Chinese readers may appreciate Joyce's rumination on the cyclical nature of history, the relationships between his male and female characters, and the sheer challenge of interpreting his prose. She describes translating Joyce's famous stream-of-consciousness writing style as an enormous challenge.
"The things I lost are mostly the sentences, because Joyce's sentences are so different from common sentences," she says, adding that she often broke them up into shorter, simpler phrases – otherwise, the average reader "would think that I just mistranslated Joyce. So my translation is more clear than the original book."
Yet she took great pains to remain as faithful to the original as possible. "For example, there was a phrase in Finnegans Wake that said 'sputtering hand', which might mean shaky. If I translated it as 'shaky hand', that would be OK – in Chinese it's a good sentence. However, I just translated it as 'sputtering hand'. Sputtering and hand cannot be put together in Chinese grammar, but I put the two together anyway."
"Finnegans Wake made me believe that Joyce is a writer who is never satisfied with what he's already accomplished," she continues. "His spirit is very strong." That is one thing they have in common.
KAIMAN, Jonathan. Available at: www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/05/finnegans-wakechina- james-joyce-hit (Adapted).
Why the translator affirms that her translate is “more clear than he original book”?
