Re: CHAT: Joyce

Oh, I read it about 20 years ago, and in French, I'm
afraid. My impression ? It's that it is a major book,
kind of a reference one. Usually, I sell again all the
novels I buy, in order to be able to breath in my
flat. But dictionaries and other reference books,
normally I don't sell. And books like Ulysses,
neither. I just keep them at hand. So the Ulysses I
bought 20 years ago is still on my shelf, a little
more yellowish for sure (paperback). It stands very
close to Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (because of
alphabetic order of authors) and not too far from
Conrad (Lord Jim), Swift (Gulliver), Sterne (Tristram
Shandy), and Gertrude Stein; to speak only about
Anglo-Saxon authors.

I never read the English version, but it seems to me
that the translation I got is not too bad ("traduction
d'Auguste Morel, revue par Valery Larbaud, Stuart
Gilbert et l'auteur"), anyway it doesn't remind you
every two minutes that this is not the original one.

I know I had to try to find Finnegan's Wake,
preferably in a bilingual version if this exists, but
I'm afraid it will be just too much and I'll miss a
lot of it, being not perfectly bilingual myself. So
maybe I'll try when I retire from work. Or write it
myself :-)

--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
> Philippe Caquant scripsit:
>
> > It was a real discovery. (Another discovery,
> > later, was Joyce, of course).
>
> Did you read him first in French or in English?  If
> the former, what's
> your impression of the French _Ulysses_?

=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


	
		
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