Kelly and Dermot are joined by translator Kenji Hayakawa to discuss the gargantuan task of translating Finnegans Wake into Japanese. We discuss Naoki Yanase’s translation of Joyce’s classic novel into Japanese, creating special software Japanese characters to tackle Joyce’s various coinages, why Japanese is an ideal language in which to read Finnegans Wake, why only translators truly understand Finnegans Wake, the sadism of Finnegans Wake, the influence of Harriet Shaw Weaver, and how Finnegans Wake is the antidote to book club hierarchies.
No need to speak Japanese or have read Finnegans Wake!
July 2020 Update
Thus spake Kenji: “In this podcast, I mistakenly claimed that 50% of the kanji in Yanase’ translation were invented by Yanase himself. This was an error. In fact, Yanase only invented two characters. 50% of the characters are obsolete, not invented, including the ‘ya’ that we discuss, which is found in an old transcript of the lotus sutras.”
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Further Reading
For more information on Yanase’s Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13844245._Yanase_Naoki
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