『피네간의 경야』 읽기

Abstract

In the year of 2002, the first Korean translation of Finnegans Wake was published for the first time after much meandering of effort and encouragement. During the long assignment of translating Joyce’s work, the great Human Comedy, the translator was “torn by conflicting doubts” and indeed tormented with the struggle between body and mind. Yet, despite it all, today in Korea the highbrow readers as well as the common ones have found the translated text very difficult and obscure to read and understand. This is largely due to the translated work like the original’s expansive linguistic experiments and its abandonment of the conventions of plot and character construction. So far, the Korean work remains largely unread by the general public. This unreadability mainly and surely comes from the translator’s faithfulness of enlivening and restoring Joyce’s original literary style and technique. Sometimes using certain Chinese characters that the Korean alphabet “Hangeul” incorporates can prove to be very helpful because of their spontaneous, compact visual effect. This macrocosmic lyric, Finnegans Wake, is the text of “the ineluctable modality of the visible” and “the ineluctable modality of the audible.”In consequence, the translator once again did his best to conquer these difficulties and obstacles, and to make the work readable as he once did to Ulysses. A saying comes to his mind: “The general principle of my life is labor.” To this writer reading and translating Finnegans Wake has been catharsis for him. In order to conquer these handicaps and to enrich our reader’s understanding and appreciation of the translated work, he once again has recently published his new revised edition of his former translation, as the work has to continue because it is the art possibility. This time, he inserted many extra explanatory notes and hints in the brackets into the translated text, which, as a role of a useful vertical rudder, will help the competent keyless reader proceed “from the known to the known through the incertitude of the void.”Furthermore, he published another new and additional companion-book of annotations to the version which ties up all the fragments of such a huge mosaic and the most monstrous hybridization of “soundsense” masquerading as a dream. This book includes a brief outline and commentary of each page. The quoted last page (FW 628), from “ALP’s monologue, will hopefully demonstrate the translator’s above mentioned purport: videlicet text, C. K. Ogdenian Basic English(Matrix), translation, notes, criticism, etc.