NP - Finnegans Wake

[Jed Kelestron]

I'm currently working my way through an excellent Japanese translation.

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 4:50 AM, Heikki Raudaskoski
<hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>
>
> Thanks for your "self-promo", Bekah. And congratulations from me too!
>
> For this non-native English speaker, Finnegans Wake is a bit too much.
> Quite a bit too much, actually. This wonderfully aural flood or
> portmanteau words, puns, macaronic words etc: I get the feeling of
> being excluded. I'm not saying that it is not difficult for you native
> speakers too, but at least you are given a fairer chance... I do admire
> the book, but from a distance that feels unbridgeable.
>
>
> Heikki
>
> On Mon, 19 Dec 2011, Bekah wrote:
>
>> Self-promo time, I suppose.   I just finished FW  yesterday.  It took me 7 months with about 10 weeks off for a vacation.  I read a very little bit at a time - maybe 1 or 2 pages -  two or three times a day -  it became like a little meditational for me.  It's so disjointed that this method worked and I can't really think of any other book which is so language oriented you honestly don't have to follow along with any idea, theme or  plot.  Maybe the Bible. ?
>>
>> I enjoyed it muchly.  It's very rich in it's own way but it sounds like a bunch of gobbeldy gook at first.  For me it was like a very thick Irish brogue with an abundance of word-play and phonetic spellings from a narrator who is sleeping and maybe half drunk to boot.   The narrative clears up and then fogs over again like the narrator/protagonist is going into deeper sleep and then coming back out of it and so on with his language just flowing on like a river - stream of SUBconsciousness.   Here's a clip of how it does that (page 409/Penguin):
>>
>> Goodbye now, Shaun replied, with a voice pure as a church-mode, in
>> echo rightdainty, with a good catlick tug at his coco-moss candylock,
>> a foretaste in time of his cabbageous brain's curlyflower. Athiacaro!
>> Comb his tar odd gee sing your mower.  O meeow? Greet thee Good? How
>> are them columbuses! Lard have mustard on them! Fatiguing, very
>> fatiguing. Hobos horn-knees and the corveeture of my spine. Poumeerme!
>> My heaviest crux and dairy lot it is, with a bed as hard as the
>> thinkamuddles of the Greeks and a board as bare as a Roman altar.
>>
>> Bekah
>> http://beckylindroos.wordpress.com/
>>