"Mszasakrada" : jak dziennikarze (s)potykali sę z "Finneganów trenem"?

Abstract

The author of an essay looks at the press reception of the translation of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce published at the beginning of 2012. It was translated by Krzysztof Bartnicki under the title of Finneganów tren (Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art). None of the journalists, writing about this editorial and translational event, took pains to read the whole or at least one of 17 chapters. What proves it is the fact that the function of the Silesian dialect in the translation of Joyce’s last work was unnoticed. The author of the article claims that Finnegans Wake as a text strewn with storied (polysemantic) puns is generally speaking untranslatable, and recommends reading Ada, an erotic novel by Vladimir Nabokov on a complex and intricate structure yet clear despite numerous puns on words, including multilingual puns explained by Nabokov and his excellent translator Leszek Engelking. Nabokov’s book was written as a novel competing with Finnegans Wake.