Singing Finnegans Wake: A Key to Samuel Barber’s “Nuvoletta”

Samuel’s Barber’s 1947 “Nuvoletta,” the only freestand-ing song of the composer’s maturity, derives its text from the most famously arcane novel in the literary canon, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Musicologist Pollack dissects the text in a literary analysis, but also showing how its vivid imagery and lyric resonance is treated in Barber’s musical setting, thus offering performers crucial preparation for its performance.

1. A publication in post-First World War Paris

‘A publication in post-First World War Paris’ provides an overview of James Joyce’s major works, including Ulysses, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wake. The theme of exile is central to much of Joyce’s work, as well as questions of sexuality and the rejection of the Catholic Church. The concern with sexuality led many to try and censor Joyce’s work. Thus, his work was often subjected to censorship and criticism. Despite being considered to be the greatest master of prose fiction writing in English, Joyce’s work had to overcome innumerable legal difficulties to find an audience.

James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction

James Joyce: A Very Short Introduction highlights one of the most influential writers of the 20th century: James Joyce. He is best known for his complex style, reinvention of language, and depiction of contemporary Ireland. Yet at the time of writing his work faced intense criticism, and his modernist epic Ulysses was banned for over a decade in Britain and America for obscenity. This VSI explores Joyce’s major works including Ulysses, Dubliners, and Finnegans Wake. It considers the contemporary significance of Joyce’s examination of sexuality and nationalism, and places Joyce’s works in the context of his life as well as the historical moment in which they were written.

5. Finnegans Wake

‘Finnegans Wake’ assesses James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). In Finnegans Wake, Joyce attempted to write a book which would take all history and knowledge for its subject matter and the workings of the dreaming mind for its form. Four themes surround the book: language, the family, sexuality, and death. In Joyce’s attempt to break away from the ‘evidences’ of conventional narrative with its fixed causality and temporality, two Italian thinkers, Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, were of profound importance in the writing of Finnegans Wake. Bruno and Vico are used in Finnegans Wake to aid the deconstruction of identity into difference and to replace progress with repetition.

Finnegans Wake: Beyond the Limits of Translation

Many deem James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake an untranslatable novel. Despite this, the characteristics that appear to obscure its meaning, such as semantic multiplicity and experimental syntax, also make it particularly open to interpretation and resignification—thus, to translation. The present paper proposes a flexible, creative, playful, and free approach to its translation. I discuss the possibilities derived from such an approach through the analysis and translation of fragments of Finnegans Wake into Spanish, and I support this approach to the translation process with some of the most prominent research on the translations of Joyce’s works, up to date scholarship from Translation Studies, and relevant testimonies from Joyce himself and from translators and writers who have studied his literary production. I argue that Finnegans Wake is a text that tries to capture language itself, transcends linguistic barriers by resisting rigidity of meaning, and achieves an “openness” and freedom that, paradoxically, have somewhat limited the efforts to translate it. Therefore, I propose that if Joyce did not limit himself in his creative process, it is necessary that we, as readers and translators, accept without fear the challenges presented to us by Finnegans Wake and dare to create new art from it.

“Haven’t I told you every telling has a tailing”: la oralidad y la escucha en Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake suele ser considerada como una de las obras de más difícil lectura en la historia de la literatura. Se han derramado incalculables ríos de tinta para descifrar las miles de alusiones incorporadas en el libro con el fin de encontrar una llave maestra que permita la comprensión del texto. En este artículo, se propone una lectura de Finnegans Wake desde la escucha, ya que la obra misma constantemente invita a una lectura que privilegie el oído sobre el resto de los sentidos. Al introducir la dimensión aural de la novela, también se debe considerar el plano oral de Finnegans Wake, ya que la novela se nutre de la oralidad para darle vida a la escucha. Más allá, la novela presenta la escucha y la oralidad como una dualidad que se opone a la lectura y la escritura. Del mismo modo que es imposible entender la dimensión aural de Finnegans Wake sin considerar su dimensión oral, es imposible pensar la dupla anterior sin contrastarla con sus opuestos. En este artículo sostengo que el capítulo I.8 de Finnegans Wake logra la reconciliación de los opuestos oralidad/escucha contra escritura/lectura; Joyce establece este vínculo gracias al uso de recursos prosódicos de la poesía oral, así como por la incorporación de la dimensión performativa de la voz en su escritura.