Then, how can the “grammatically and syntactically disintegrated text” be translated into another mono-language? Should the translator faithfully put it into a disintegrated language even if only a very limited number of readers can understand it? This paper aims to introduce and examine two Japanese translations of: Naoki Yanase (1991-93) and Kyoko Miyata (2004).has been considered to be "untranslatable" or one of the most difficult books to translate. But now we can enjoy it in many languages-- French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, etc. The principal language ofis doubtlessly English, and most of the dominant languages Joyce used in the text are European. Joyce's knowledge about Asia was very limited, however, he inserted supposedly about 80 Japanese words or elements into 1) As Umberto Eco argues in, “takes language beyond any boundary of communicability” (Eco 61). Joyce seems to have created the “Joycean language” based on English and a compound from a list of 40 languages around the world (63.343). The “Joycean language” is a fertile bed of multilingualism whose ambiguity enables the reader infinitely to interpret each word, phrase and sentence Joyce interweaved in the text. It is very difficult to readwhich always leads readers to its hermetic linguistic woods. Needless to say, translating the entire text into one single language has been long considered to be almost impossible before Philippe Lavergne’s complete French translation was published in 1982. 2) Naoki Yanase, the Japanese translator, was challenged to complete his translation into Japanese. Of course some of the rich ambiguity of the original may have been lost, but using a variety of paper and CD-ROM dictionaries he succeeded in conveying the atmosphere and tone of the original. He even created numerous new Japanese words and phrases to translateYanase's translation is a novel in its own right and a great masterpiece of Japanese literature. However, his translation is too esoteric for the general reader: only a very limited number of academic and patient readers could finish it.In June 2004, another translator, Kyoko Miyata, published a more readable Japanese translation ofHer abridged translation, about half the quantity of the original, with her introduction of each chapter and detailed notes for Joycean words (curiously the same 628-pages as the original), is much more understandable than Yanase's, and plays another role for prospective Japanese readers.Eun-Kyung Chun comments that she likes Miyata's translation since it is more accessible to the general reader: “The accessibility does not mean a "low" level at all; it means the translator considers readers and tries to find her own way to deliver the content and spirit ofto readers. Additionally, my father [Ho-Jong Chun, Professor Emeritus of American Literature] likes her method of presenting (introducing)to Japanese readers.” 3) Her comment exactly points out the major difference of the two translations.





I. Historical Order of Japanese Translations of Finnegans Wake



In translation process, translators are expected to “change into another language retaining the sense” (OED 2) and also to convey the original meaning to readers neatly. In this sense, Finnegans Wake has been considered to be "untranslatable" or one of the most difficult books to translate, because it was written in multiple languages. As listed by Joyce, Finnegans Wake contains 40 languages including Japanese and Chinese, but how can translators transpose the multilingualism Joyce used or the Joycean compounded words? Of course, translators can abandon Joyce’s multilingualism and translate it into a single language to encourage mono-lingual readers to read Finnegans Wake. To do this, the translator must select the surface meaning of each word and phrase to transcribe it into one language, which is considered to diminish greatly the literary value of the multilingualism Joyce employed in Finnegans Wake. Joyce needed to use multilingualism for Finnegans Wake to accomplish his final goal, the deconstruction and recreation of English which is not “his language,” as Stephen Dedalus tells in his interior monologue in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, although it was definitely his native tongue long before he was born. 4) On the European Continent where not so many people use English as their daily language, Joyce earned his living by teaching English. But his incompatibility or feeling of unbelonging with English language while living on the Continent could be redoubled by the deconstruction.

Finnegans Wake is a work of fiction which consists of deliberately incorrect misspellings. Unlike Chinese characters or “kanji,” which express their meanings with symbols, the alphabetical letters express only how to pronounce the words, which enables us to interpret each word of FW infinitely. Among many translations, the Korean and Japanese complete translations are unique in not using the Roman alphabet.

Unlike the majority of world languages which normally use the common basic word order, that is, “Subject, Verb and Object,” Korean and Japanese languages belong to the same linguistic group, the Ural-Altaic family which includes Mongolian, Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish which employ the basic word order, “Subject, Object and Verb.” Recent linguistic research, however, has been proving that there is no clear similarity in lexica among Ural-Altaic languages, but that they are agglutinative languages in word structure using affixes, especially suffixes to the root.

The Japanese written language consists of three elements, “hiragana,” “katakana” and “Kanji” or Chinese characters. “Hiragana” is a much smoother script, full of loops and curves. There are 46 basic “hiragana” characters, each one having a counterpart in “katakana.” All sounds in the Japanese language can be expressed with just hiragana (Sterzinger). After the Meiji Restoration in 1869 the new government impelled the Japanese people through sudden westernization to catch up with the Great Powers of the world. Then people gradually came to use “katakana” for foreign, especially Western words. Chinese characters or “Kanji” is the most complicated script in Japanese. “Kanji” characters are Chinese ideograms and number in the thousands with each one representing a different idea, but most of “kanji” characters have more than one possible reading (Sterzinger). So Japanese writers often put what we call “Rubies” or “furigana” onto kanji characters to indicate the right pronunciation for readers. This complicated writing system, however, enriched Japanese, especially in translation process, as we will see later.

The history of translating FW into Japanese can be traced back to the year 1933. After six more partial translations, Naoki Yanase finished the first complete Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake in 1993:

1.

Nishiwaki, Junzaburo. Anna Livia Plurabelle (FW196.01-19 & FW213.11-216.05) in

Joyce Shishu (The Poetical Works of James Joyce).

Tokyo

: Daiichi-shobo, 1933.

*Nishiwaki translated it wiith the guide of C. K. Ogden's “Basic English” translation. *Nishiwaki translated it wiith the guide of C. K. Ogden's “Basic English” translation.

2.

Osawa, Masayoshi, Shigeru Koike, Junnosuke Sawasaki & Motoi Toda. “Shem the

Penman” (FW169.01-170.24) with detailed notes in Kikan Sekai-Bungaku (World

Literature Quarterly, No.2, Winter 1966), B1-12.

Tokyo

: Toyamabo, 1966.

3.

Osawa, Masayoshi & Junnosuke Sawasaki. FW I.8 (FW206.29-207.20), III.1

(FW418.10-419.08) & IV (FW627.34-628.16) with detailed notes in Shueisha’s

“Gendai Shishuu” (“Collection of Modern Poems”) of Sekai Bungaku Zenshuu 35

(The Selected Works of World Literature, vol.35).

Tokyo

: Shueisha, 1968.

4.

Osawa, Masayoshi, Kyoko Ono, Shigeru Koike & Junnosuke Sawasaki, Kenzo Suzuki

& Motoi Toda. Anna Livia Plurabelle I ~ VII (FW196.01-208.05) with detailed

notes serialized in Kikan Pædeia (Pædeia Quarterly, nos.7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13 & 15).



Tokyo

: Takeuchi-shoten, 1970-1972.

5.

Suzuki, Yukio, Ryo Nonaka, Koichi Konno, Kayo Fujii, Tazuko Nagasawa & Naoki

Yanase. FW I.1-3, Finnegan Tetsuyasai sono-1 (Finnegans Wake 1) (FW003-074).



Tokyo

Waseda

Bungaku (Waseda Literature) from Feb. 1969 to Dec.1974. : Tokyodo-shuppan, 1971. *Part of the translation serialized in) from Feb. 1969 to Dec.1974.



& Motoi 6. Osawa, Masayoshi, Kyoko Ono, Shigeru Koike, Junnosuke Sawasaki, Kenzo Suzuki& Motoi

Toda. 5 fragmental translations of FW (FW169.01-170.24, FW206.29-207.20, Toda. 5 fragmental translations of169.01-170.24,206.29-207.20,

FW418.10-419.08, FW593.01-18 & FW627.34-628.16) with detailed notes in

Sekai no

Bungaku

(World Literature) vol.1.

Tokyo



in Chikuma Sekai : Shueisha, 1978. Recollectedin

Bungaku-taikei

(Chikuma Institution of World Literature) 68:

Joyce II / O'Brien (

Tokyo

Chikumashobo, 1998).

7. --------. Anna Livia Plurabelle (FW196-216) in Bungei-zasshi Umi (Literary

Magazine

Umi), (Dec.1982), 288-305. With some of Joyce’s related letters

(trans. Masayoshi Osawa)

Recollected in Chikuma

Sekai Bungaku-taikei (Chikuma and Osawa's essay (306-328).Recollected in

Institution of World Literature) 68: Joyce II

/O’Brien (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1998). (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1998).

8. Yanase, Naoki. Finnegans Wake I-II.

Tokyo

: Kawadeshobo-shinsha, 1991.

--------. Finnegans Wake III-IV.

Tokyo

: Kawadeshobo-shinsha, 1993.

*The paperback edition (3vols.; I, II &III/IV) was published in “Kawade-bunko”

by Kawadeshobo-shinsha in January-March 2004. *The paperback edition (3vols.; I, II &III/IV) was published in “Kawade-bunko”by Kawadeshobo-shinsha in January-March 2004.

9. Miyata, Kyoko. An Abridged Translation of Finnegans Wake.

Tokyo



2004. : Shueisha,2004.

An abridged translation with detailed notes (628 pages); about half-

length of the original text.

A succession of Japanese translators have exerted themselves to translate Finnegans Wake into Japanese. Nishiwaki, the first translator, decoded the Anna Livia chapter with the guide of C. K. Ogden's “Basic English” translation. The second group, Osawa, Koike, Sawasaki and Toda first decrypted “Shem the Penman” into Japanese with detailed notes. Their method in expressing the multiple meanings of each Joycean phrase is to transfer its surface meaning into readable Japanese text and make endnotes to explain its lower- layered meanings, historical background, etc. The same method was basically employed by the third group led by the late professor Yukio Suzuki. Naoki Yanase first learned of Finnegans Wake by joining Suzuki's reading group, which published the fifth partial translation in 1971. They translated the first three chapters and added footnotes.

After that, Yanase left the group and began to translate Finnegans Wake alone in 1986. He published the first half of the translation (Books I and II) in 1991 and the other half (Books III and IV) in 1993; he took seven and a half years to complete the translation. He did not add a translator's note, although he had to make some fragmental notes later at the requests of readers. Although it is still the only complete Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake, general readers often complain that it is too difficult to follow the supposedly main plot because of the very complex usage of Japanese Yanase employed to express Joyce's multilingualism or multi-layered meanings of each word and phrase of the novel. Probably most readers would give up reading Yanase's translation in the first few pages. Yanase made a great effort to duplicate Joyce's original text into Japanese: but Yanase's new Japanese usage cannot be a Creole to communicate between Joyce and common Japanese readers.

Kyoko Miyata's style of translation makes it much easier for general readers to access the text as Eun-Kyung Chun suggests. Miyata, impressed with Michel Butor's introduction to the French translation of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” that can be summarized that “when reading, the reader consciously or unconsciously makes one choice among mass of meanings of words and phrases.” 5) Then she thought that there is a limit in translating multiple (much more than two or three) meanings of Joycean words into Japanese: so she decided to take care of how to select one (or two) meaning(s) of each word and translate it into the easiest Japanese as she could, and to indicate the ambiguities in notes (Miyata 673). However, it was not so easy, as she confessed in the afterword of her translation (Miyata 673).

Miyata carefully followed the first layered plot to transcribe it into easy Japanese as best she could and put detailed notes at the foot of each page for the general reader; she explained the (at most three) implications of each entry in order to save paper space. Miyata mainly consulted Bernard Benstock’s “A Working Outline” and also looked through Anthony Burgess's A Shorter “Finnegans Wake” to decide which parts to select to translate for her 628-page-long translation (same as the original text length). 6) Her translation includes every beginning and ending part of each chapter, and also contains hard-core episodes, important passages to show the novel's themes and other motifs that Miyata chose. She put her interpretations before and after the translated parts, explaining the meanings and significance, and their context. She hopes that her translation is much more understandable to general Japanese readers. She wished to Finnegans Wake, “as an organic whole, to bring in relief this thin but surely existing flow of narrative.” 7) She uses Eco’s three phrases from The Aethetics of Chaosmos for her translation7s endorsement with his permission: “an enormous ‘world theater,’” “a clavis universalis,” and “a ‘mirror’ of the cosmos” (Eco 73). 8)