Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations by Patrick O'Neill

Abstract

Reviewed by: Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations by Patrick O'Neill Ceren Kuşdemir Özbilek (bio) TRILINGUAL JOYCE: THE ANNA LIVIA VARIATIONS, by Patrick O'Neill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. 226 pp. $55.00. An amazing year for Turkish Joyceans occurred in 2016 when the first volume of the Turkish translation of Finnegans Wake, Finneganın Vahı, by Umur Çelikyay was published.1 In 2012, we had been blessed by a brand-new and modernized translation of Ulysses by Armağan Ekici, and the first FW translation, however partial, completed another piece of this dream.2 Finally, the goal was fully realized by the complete translation of the Wake by Fuat Sevimay, Finnegan Uyanması, in late 2016.3 The second and the final volume of Çelikyay's translation came out a year later and gave Turkish Joyceans a gift to cherish forever. It is already an arduous task to read the Wake in its original, but it is doubly difficult to read it in Turkish, from which the English language considerably differs in phonology and word order: words in the Turkish language are read as they are written unlike English; vowel harmony is a must in Turkish, which is not a problem with random vowel sounds in polysyllabic English words; the lack of consonant sounds /θ/ ('th' in 'think') and /ð/ ('th' in 'the') and consonant clusters in Turkish makes it difficult for readers to get used to English phonetics; and last but not least, the subject-object-verb word pattern in Turkish confuses many Turkish learners of English. While still trying to digest the brilliance of both Wake translations, I volunteered to review Patrick O'Neill's monograph Trilingual Joyce: The Anna Livia Variations. Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle (hereafter ALP) is known for its inclusion of river names, which, according to some critics, might be as high in number as 1,200, and its water-like, flowing narrative (9). It later became the eighth episode of Finnegans Wake. O'Neill's task in Trilingual Joyce is to study comparatively the three translations of ALP: the Basic English one of the closing pages by C. K. Ogden, which was published in transition in 1932; the French version by Samuel Beckett in collaboration with Alfred Péron, Paul L. Léon, Eugène Jolas, Ivan Goll, Adrienne Monnier, and Phillipe Soupault, which was printed in its entirety in 1931 in La Nouvelle Revue Française: Revue Mensuelle de Littérature et de Critique; and Ettore Settanni's (and Nino Frank's, in a disputable tug of war) Italian translation, whose first installment appeared in Prospettive in 1940.4 According to O'Neill, Joyce provided his own alternatives to Beckett's French version to a considerable degree, and Settanni tried to soften Joyce's flamboyant Italian (187, 52). O'Neill's argument builds around the fact that French and Italian translations by Joyce, Beckett, and Settanni contribute to "an Annalivian macrotext" and are extensions and re-creations of the [End Page 452] original ALP rather than just rewritings or translations (39). He microanalyzes approximately fifty selected excerpts from these translations together with the original ALP. With this rigorous comparative and translational analysis, O'Neill certainly fills an important gap in Joyce studies. The book consists of ten chapters, an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix that brilliantly traces the chronological adventure of ALP and the Wake, including translations in more than fifteen different languages, arriving as late as 2017. The introduction gives information on the three translations of ALP, briefly sketching the history of the versions. The following ten chapters combine rigorous textual and linguistic analysis of the translated excerpts with cultural and contextual investigation. These begin by outlining the summary of the corresponding portion of the original ALP since it is, at times, quite difficult to grasp what is being said in the long dialogue between the washerwomen. Then the chapters focus first on the French translations of the excerpt under analysis by Beckett and compare it with Joyce's French version. The same inquiry is carried out for the Italian version by Joyce and Settanni's emendations of it. Comments and contexts sections at the end of each...