From "A Book Club Took 28 Years to Read ‘Finnegans Wake.’ Now, It’s Starting Over. The group in California started on the notoriously challenging novel by James Joyce in 1995. In October, it reached the end" (NYT).
I blogged a Guardian article about this reading group last month, but this is new material.
"Oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods" — I could only think of male and female genitalia and oral sex, but a quick google tells me also to think of Ostrogoths and Visigoths. Which goes to show, it's not enough to think of one thing. You have to keep thinking.
पोस्ट्स
३२ टिप्पण्या:
I could only think of male and female genitalia and oral sex
You and every other high school boy…oh, I see you were referring to the quoted passage 😕…
…is this what goes on in book club for 28 years?
The first minute and fifteen seconds of this clip is Thomas Clancy of the Clancy Brothers reciting a passage from Finnegan’s Wake. It makes you realize how simply reading the book is useless. It has to be read aloud; preferably by someone with an Irish brogue. https://youtu.be/P5U2MH7xuKU?si=rejhr4nhOFXUTIfb
Oystrygods brings up Ostrogoths. I didn't think of Visigoths, but I did think of the gods of the Osprys killing the gods of the fishes that the Osprys eat.
Sometimes a cigar is just a banana and sometimes an orchid is a fish taco.
Cannot read the article because NYT and subscription and all, but damn...this one sounds humorous. Conceivably, a book club like this could spend a life on a couple of Joyce novels, with possibly a Thomas Pynchon novel stuffed in the middle for a 'change'.
Finnegan's Wake
Gravity's Rainbow
Ulysses
"...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
End of life.
I could only think of male and female genitalia and oral sex
Would the professor care to explain her thought process?
The words in the poem Jabberwocky are not nonsense words, they are all real words that mean things. I only learned this in my late 50s. And now you want me to understand Finnigans Wake? Maybe while solving a Rubik's Cube, tap dancing and baking a souffle? I had hoped that after age 60, translations to simple English would require no Math and no Myths.
Heh. I can just about hear my 6th Grade teacher, (an old Irish nun) Sister Mary Dolores: "mind out of the gutter, Miss Althouse!"
I asked ChatGPT to interpret that paragraph from it, and here is the nut graph of what Chat said:
In this specific passage, Joyce plays with sounds and words to evoke a sense of chaotic conflict and cultural fusion. The words "What clashes here of wills gen wonts" suggest a conflict of desires or intentions ("wills") against habits or customary practices ("wonts"). The mention of "oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods" could be interpreted as a clash between different mythologies or belief systems, perhaps alluding to the collision of the pagan and the Christian, or the primitive and the civilized.
The repeated phrases like "Brékkek Kékkek Kékkek Kékkek! Kóax Kóax Kóax!" mimic the sound of frogs, which could be an allusion to Aristophanes' play "The Frogs," thereby infusing a classical element. The chaotic nature of these sounds mirrors the tumultuous events being described.
The fish is a symbol of Christianity, and the "wills gen wonts" part is pretty good too, IMHO, for a stupid machine minimizing the cosigns of a huge bag of vectors made up conglomerations of next word probabilities.
I could only think of male and female genitalia and oral sex
Sometimes I can think of little else.
"I could only think of...."
Stay away from ink blots.
Wait...I thought Authorial Intent was killed by the gods of deconstruction and post modernism. So who cares what Joyce (thought) He was alluding to? It's irrelevant! There's just the text.
I think I'll try the German translation.
"It makes you realize how simply reading the book is useless."
That was my impression as well.
"The words in the poem Jabberwocky are not nonsense words, they are all real words that mean things."
Hmmmmm.... You're suggesting that "nonsense words" are not "real words"? Dodgson called them portmanteau words, by which he apparently meant to suggest that they combined portions of two other words. It seems there is now a whole academic theory about that. My, they do go on.
“Which goes to show, it's not enough to think of one thing. You have to keep thinking.”
Until you start thinking that there must be better things to think about than this shite.
CHatGPT's interpretation makes it sound like that masterpiece that Enderby was working on in Burgess's novel.
We used to learn about the Ostrogoths and Visigoths in school, so I got Ostrogoths immediately. It took a second to get Visigoths.
My mother, who spoke Castellano, said that calling someone a "Godo" (Goth) was like calling them a snob. My understanding is that in Latin America, a Godo is like a Peninsulare, but with a similar snobby inference.
Aggie said...
"Stay away from ink blots."
Yea, man. They shouldn't be allowed to show those dirty pictures.
Reminds me of that time Althouse turned on a 'prove you are not a bot' setting. We had to type the twisted letters a bot presumably could not read. And so, we turned it into a game. We would assume the letters were a new word that needed a definition. Good times.
"Another line: 'bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!'"
Sounds like something Biden would say.
'Which goes to show, it's not enough to think of one thing. You have to keep thinking.'
It goes to show you're a naughty girl : )
So how in the HELL does something like this ever get translated?
I'm assuming it would be impossible...
mikee:
The words in the poem Jabberwocky are not nonsense words, they are all real words that mean things.Jupiter:
Which language? Try "vorpal".
... he apparently meant to suggest that they combined portions of two other words ...
Common technique. I use it in my stories, mostly for names. Develop a clip phrase to describe, walk the pieces back through etymology making a spreadsheet of sorts of the 'foreign' words, concatenate when done based on fit and diacriticals (bounded by my language rules) and wala -> "Enveòglersécævoös", my primary female lead.
No, I won't walk that out.
Joyce was a master stylist.
His insights into human nature, however, bounce off the rocks.
He’s not worth reading.
A million monkeys banging away on a million typewriters for a million years old not reproduce a Shakespeare play, but would produce a Finnegan’s Wake equivalent approximately every five minutes.
As Chancellor Gorkon might have said on the night he was killed, "You have not experienced Finnegan's Wake until you have read it in the original Klingon.
I recall seeing a quote from Joyce to the effect that if he spent 10 years writing a book, he didn't see why a reader wouldn't take as long to read it.
I am going to guess, are the fishy gods the female genitalia?
“First we feel. Then we fall.” That’s a beautiful line.
Jupiter, Oligonicella: You are both more correct than me, both technically correct, the best kind of correct, and generally correct. Many of the apparently nonsense words in Jabberwocky are real words, such as gyre and gimble and wabe, but some are portmanteaus or onomatopoeia, introduced in the poem for the first time. I stand unchanged in my general opinion that Jabberwocky is not a nonsense poem, and that Joyce's Finnigan's Wake is very dense non-nonsense in comparison or just all by itself.
Josephbleau said...
"I am going to guess, are the fishy gods the female genitalia?"
In this context I think He meant Catholic saints.
Randomizer said...
"I could only think of male and female genitalia and oral sex
Would the professor care to explain her thought process?"
Yes, plesae. I think I'd enjoy that lecture as well.
I think the title is a joke. Dublin being considered the most sophisticated city in Ireland and then proceeding to write about everyday Irish. Who, even then, weren't considered very sophisticated or even civilized.
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