„ღამისთევა ფინეგანისათვის“ მეექვსე თავის თარგმანის სირთულეები

Abstract

The notion that Finnegans Wake is “untranslatable” has become something of a cliché in Joyce scholarship. Umberto Eco even claimed that Finnegans Wake is “pointless to translate” because, by virtue (or vice) of its multilingualism, it is already translated. Nevertheless, Finnegans Wake has been translated into numerous languages. The paper deals with the difficulties of translating Chapter Six of Book I in Finnegans Wake into Georgian. The chapter consisting of twelve questions and answers, including James Joyce’s peculiar and hilarious re-telling of Aesop’s ancient fable of ‘The Fox and the Grapes’, as well as how Burrus and Caseous “sort-of-nineknived and chewly removed Cheesugh”. One of the core diffi culties while translating Finnegans Wake is the language, as Georgian does not belong to the family of Indo-European languages, thus while Joyce is trying to make a pun using different languages or nations or traditions, which make perfect sense it is quite challenging in Georgian. For example, the word “grandsumer” (FW 152:21), where “sumer” can be understood as Sumerians as well as summer, whereas in Georgian Sumerian is “Shumeri” and summer “Zapkhuli”, and therefore the translators task is to find an adequate translation – or namely to invent a new word that will fit in Georgian. Another difficulty despite the numerous and extensive material and commentaries on Finnegans Wake doing commentaries is still rather hard work, because it is an attempt to show the Georgian readers, what is in the original and how it is being transformed in the translation. As Fritz Senn wisely put it “FW is impossible to translate and therefore it has to be attempted. A sort of Beckett syndrome: Try to fail better!” Therefore, the Georgian translation of Finnegans Wake is an attempt to fail, but fail better in another language.