Talk:Finnegans Wake

message: I've never even read "Finnegans Wake", and yet I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention the "ten thunders" at all. For example, Marshall McLuhan thought they were pretty important, and so does his son Eric. — Scott • talk 19:49, 9 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Thunders 

message: "Tim Finnegan, born "with a love for the liquor", falls from a ladder, breaks his skull, and is thought to be dead."
de:WP Vico falls from a ladder, breaks his skull and remained unconscious for hours.
de:WP"In seiner Autobiographie schrieb Vico, dass er im Alter von sieben Jahren von einer Leiter gefallen sei, sich einen Schädelbruch zugezogen habe und fünf Stunden lang bewusstlos gewesen sei."--91.34.206.127 (talk) 09:27, 21 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vico || Tom Finnegan 

message: Even these are a red herring, really. It's important to bear in mind that it is an Irish novel written in English.
""Joyce's method became one of "increasingly obsessional concern with note-taking, since [he] obviously felt that any word he wrote had first to have been recorded in some notebook." As Joyce continued to incorporate these notes into his work, the text became increasingly dense and obscure."" Another way of saying this is that Joyce did a huge amount of SHOE-HORNING, and this is how the wake reads. I read it in 1985, then I spent 30 years learning 9 or 10 European languages (well enough to read Proust twice in the original, for example). I've just re-read the first 150 pages of the wake. My reception of it is no different from 30 years ago. The interesting thing about the obscurity is that it is possible to read things in it that Joyce didn't intend but welcomed anyway. So if you look up mishe-mishe in Finneganswiki you'll see lots of possibilities, but no guarantee that Joyce was aware of half of them. And in fact, mishe mishe is always paired with teufteuf - French for choochoo train, at least I've noted it on pages 3, 145, 203, 225, 240, 249, 277, 290, 291. Finneganswiki doesn't seem to have cottoned on to this coupling). At the end of Watt, Samuel Beckett ambiguously writes "no symbols where none intended". In the case of FW, "no puns where none intended" would not be true! Dreams? See p.293 - "the death he has lived through becomes the life he is to die into". I think that expresses it better. The repeated cultural references may well all stem from Jung. It's easier to criticise the Wake if, as I do, you think Ulysses is a curate's egg. I think it's also important to realise that perhaps the Wake is becoming old-fashioned. I first became interested in Joyce 40 years ago, when the Wake was about 40 years old. It has doubled its age since then! And Joyce's Ireland is the Ireland of Queen Victoria, or Edward VII, if you are precise about Joyce leaving it behind in 1904 (and dreaming about it for, coincidentally, nearly 40 years).
:He would ask friends for lists of words in languages they knew and then stick them in randomly. QuentinUK (talk) 11:20, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  multilingual puns 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Reference to where the Chinese version is abridged? It's not yet **complete** as only Part 1 is published (and annotated like mad), but the assertion that Dai's translation is abridged seems unfounded. L talk 10:10, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multilingual versions 

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message: Should we allow partial translations?  Compare this entry by  with this one by . 
I don't think we should include partial translations.  What is the cutoff for size? How important are they?   Kablammo (talk) 15:10, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Previous edit was surely inadequate in not indicating Dai Congrong's (ongoing) Chinese translation as partial. I would suggest an exception should be made; this is a significant work, the first volume of an intended full-text translation, and not partial as in abridged or excerpted; the very substantial attention it has received in China and internationally leave this section otherwise rather incomplete. Tosk Albanian (talk) 15:21, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I would have no objection to mentioning an ongoing, active project translating the entire work.  Kablammo (talk) 23:48, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I would restore Turkish as the end of the sentence and add a new sentence that the first volume of what is expected to be a multi-volume translation into Mandarin (Chinese, if you prefer) sold out its first print run within a month and reportedly was surpassed in sales only by a biography of one-time leader Deng Xiaoping. This sounds like the start of a monumental work in progress, if you'll excuse the pun, not just a translation. (775 pages for just the first volume!) — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 01:24, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: If exception is made for the Chinese FW in progress, then, for consistency's sake, dozens of other attempts should be allowed for as well. [Why not Russian? Catalan? Italian? Hungarian? Another Japanese? Several in German?] Btw, the "first print" report, as it comes from the Graniaud, amounts to 8.000 copies, which is hardly an impressive number given the population of China.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wikibidd (talk • contribs) 11:45, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: If there are other on-going efforts to translate FW that are note-worthy, I think they should be included as well. Partial translations, in my opinion, should not be added. As far as how many books were involved, I don't know the typical size of a first printing in China of a translation of a 75-year-old foreign work that has international notoriety for being "difficult"—do you? That's why I rely on reliable sources like the London Review of Books instead of guessing. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 03:45, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Partial translations? 

message: The article mentions the "Norwegian influence", that is, the allusions Finnegans Wake makes to Norway and its language. While this seems to be true (as I don't speak Norwegian, these allusions are among the ones I miss), Norwegian is not the only language the books frequently alludes to. It is rife with Dutch, German, French, Latin, Irish, Spanish and other puns, and as a Ducthman I don't miss references to Dutch topography either. So why include a separate section specifically about Norwegian influence? Steinbach (talk) 10:48, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: James Joyce learnt Norwegian so that he could read the works of Henrik Ibsen in the original. He knew a few other languages, he did not really know more about the world's languages than that, but he knew smatterings of many other languages. Vorbee (talk) 18:47, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: But Verbee, Ibsen wrote his plays in Dutch.Forthooster (talk) 07:44, 1 June 2020 (UTC)

text:  He wrote in Danish.  But your point stands. 14:14, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Norwegian influence? 

message: There has been deletion, reinstatement, and now some deletion (by me) of many external links. Can we discuss what external links are needed here, in light of wikipedia policies?  I've expresses some opinions in my recent edit summaries.  Kablammo (talk) 23:15, 6 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: In general the less the better. They need to add something that the article does not have or that can not be easily presented in the article. A well developed article (which this is) should not have many links at all as the information a reader needs will be found in the article. I am happy to go through each individually if you want. Each link should be justified in some way.  I have no problem with being reverted, but an edit summary would be nice as to why. FWIW I was just responding to the tag that had been there since 2014 and have had no other personal interest in the article. AIRcorn (talk) 00:35, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed the link to James Joyce reading a portion of "Anna Livia Plurabelle", because I uploaded a version of that file from the Internet Archive to Commons last month. There's no need to have links to two different versions of the same audio file. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 02:04, 7 April 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed a couple of links; I could remove more I guess. I did cite RS but external links may not need be a RS. Blogs are probably not a good idea even for external links especially with something as obtuse as Finnegan's Wake can be where oversight for accuracy might be a best idea.(Littleolive oil (talk) 16:44, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links 

message: Is FW translatable into other languages? Has it been attempted?
:- see Finnegans Wake#Translations and derivative works - Epinoia (talk) 14:23, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is FW translatable into other languages? 

message: This article says the term "quark" originates from Finnegans Wake. Should it also say that the word "quark" should be pronounced to rhyme with "sharK"? Vorbee (talk) 18:33, 23 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Term quark

message: I had to click on 4 of the linked articles to be able to understand the following sentence:
"The entire book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, which blends standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words to unique effect"
And I still don't really understand what it's trying to tell me within the context of the novel. It's an impressive sounding statement but can someone please simplify it for those of us who aren't language majors? I think there might even be a wiki rule about simplicity if I'm not mistaken. I'm going to continue reading the article but this was really a put-off of an introduction.
*It's an absolutely clear, readable, logical sentence that is eminently understandable, and explains a complex idea in relatively simple, easy-to-grasp terms. And I'm not a language major!  (I'd maybe replace the first "and" in the sentence with a comma, though.)  24.251.5.213 (talk) 21:59, 16 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sentence complexity 

message: I just really cleaned up the page and some Wikipedia bot flagged it and deleted it. Just felt like commenting on this. 2A02:3034:10:3A04:FC1D:6214:CB75:FDA0 (talk) 19:55, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated significantly and a bot undid it 

message: Finnegans Wake has come up a couple of times in some research I'm doing on irony. Wayne Booth dubs it "The Encyclopedia of All Ironic Wisdom" at p.212 of A Rhetoric of Irony. Northrop Frye calls it "the chief ironic epic of our time" at p.323 of his Anatomy of Criticism. I popped over here to see if there was an appropriate place to incorporate one or both of these references (I'm not a fan of decontextualized critical pronouncements, even when the author is famous). To my surprise, a search on the term "irony" brings up only one hit, and it's in the bibliography (so there is at least one actual Joyce scholar who thinks this is important enough to include in a monograph subtitle).
My knowledge of the secondary literature is mostly limited to weekly reading assignments given over a one-semester seminar during which we also read the entire book (!). I don't remember any of it being expressly on irony. Does this feature of FW seem to others like it deserves a paragraph somewhere? Any article-length reading suggestions?
Cheers, Patrick J. Welsh (talk) 19:22, 21 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irony