Reconsidering a Wehg Less Traveled: Another Look at Stündel's German Finnegan

Abstract

Arguments concerning the translatability of Finnegans Wake have long turned on the question of whether there exists a ‘‘standard’’ from which the text should be approached. Fritz Senn, the ever-pragmatic denizen of all matters Joycean and translational, suggests that we not adopt Joyce’s professed preference for ‘‘sound’’ over ‘‘sense’’—or any other rule—too dogmatically, instead applying these as guidelines in each contextualized case.2 Over and again, Senn’s has been the voice reminding readers, translators, and scholars that Finnegans Wake is only an extreme case proving the rule that there can be no ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ translation, that there is no escaping some sort of reading model, that in translation as in reading, the being of the text is less important than ‘‘what happens there.’’3 In calling for readers and translators to focus recursively on the minutiae of the text4, Senn’s theory of translation as regards the Wake seems to echo the nearly contemporaneous words of T. S. Eliot—‘‘we shall not cease from exploration . . .’’5—even as it mirrors the Viconian structure of Joyce’s own work. Yet in discussing translation, Senn (admittedly) has a ‘‘reading model’’ of his own, and this is, as Patrick O’Neill has pointed out, Joyce’s original text itself.6 That would seem to go without saying, yet various scholars