Impossible Joyce

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has repeatedly been declared to be entirely untranslatable. Nonetheless, it has been translated, transposed, or transcreated into a surprising variety of languages – including complete renditions in French, German, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, and Korean, and partial renditions in Italian, Spanish, and a variety of other languages. Impossible Joyce explores the fascinating range of different approaches adopted by translators in coming to grips with Joyce’s astonishing literary text. In this study, Patrick O’Neill builds on an approach first developed in his book Polyglot Joyce, but deepens his focus by considering Finnegans Wake exclusively. Venturing from Umberto Eco’s assertion that the novel is a machine designed to generate as many meanings as possible for readers, he provides a sustained examination of the textual effects generated by comparative readings of translated excerpts. In doing so, O’Neill makes manifest the ways in which attempts to translate this extraordinary text have resulted in a cumulative extension of Finnegans Wake into an even more extraordinary macrotext encompassing and subsuming its collective renderings.

With her mother's passing, Alexandra Bolton gave up on love to take care of her family. Now, with the Bolton name in disgrace due to her father's profligate ways, marrying an elderly squire might be the only way to save her family from absolute ruin. But when she meets the infamous Duke of Clarewood, old dreams—and old passions—are awakened as never before. Yet she cannot accept his shocking proposition! He is the wealthiest, most powerful peer in the realm, and having witnessed the cold horror of marriage as a child, he has vowed never to wed. But Alexandra Bolton inflames him as no woman has ever done, and she also serves him his first rejection! Now Clarewood—who always gets what he wants—will choose which rules to play by. But when passion finally brings them together, a terrible secret threatens to tear them apart….

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

Joyce’s prismatic art reverberates within and across multiple genres. The essays in this volume reflect on Joycean re-tailorings, Joycean reception, and on the Joycean aesthetic metamorphosis in visual-textual imagery, visual art, music, TV and film.

"Borges and Joyce stand as two of the most revolutionary writers of the twentieth-century. Both are renowned for their polyglot abilities, prodigious memories, cyclical conception of time, labyrinthine creations, and for their shared condition as European emigres and blind bards of Dublin and Buenos Aires. Yet at the same time, Borges and Joyce differ in relation to the central aesthetic of their creative projects: the epic scale of the Irishman contrasts with the compressed fictions of the Argentine. In this comprehensive and engaging study, Patricia Novillo-Corvalan demonstrates that Borges created a version of Joyce refracted through the prism of his art, thus encapsulating the colossal magnitude of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake within the confines of a nutshell. Separate chapters triangulate Borges and Joyce with the canonical legacy of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare using as a point of departure Walter Benjamin's notion of the afterlife of a text. This ambitious, interdisciplinary study offers a model for Comparative Literature in the twenty-first century."

ISBN 9042000953 (paperback) NLG 40.00 encyclopaedias (Peter Burke).

First published in 1991. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: A Case Book was published in order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Joyce's final work with 14 critical essays and a page-by-page outline of the novel. The book includes critical approaches and interpretations in film, drama, and music. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

This set reissues 8 books on James Joyce originally published between 1966 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Joyce’s most respected works, including Finnegans Wake, Dubliners and Ulysses. As well as providing an in-depth analyses of Joyce’s work, this collection also looks at James Joyce in the context of the Modernist movement as a whole. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.