The Chinese are snapping up copies of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a title which (reportedly) took eight years to translate. The original print run of 8,000 copies were sold in less than a month, after a Beijing marketing blitz promoted the title on billboards across the city.
Considering the difficulty many readers find with much of Joyce’s work, perhaps we should look to this new, successful translation to help make sense of the dense, semi-permeable prose?
It remains to be seen whether the Chinese readers who grapple with Finnegans Wake agree with a professor at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University: “Joyce must have been mentally ill to create such a novel.”
Well said, sir.