Finnegans Wake' Is Greek to Many; Now Imagine It in Chinese.

Translation of Joyce Novel in Works for Years Sells Well to Readers Craving a Challenge.

BEIJING—"Finnegans Wake" has bedeviled readers for decades, but few can claim the toil and triumph it has given to Dai Congrong.

Ms. Dai spent eight years translating into Chinese the 1939 James Joyce novel that the author's own brother described as "unspeakably wearisome." She endured low pay, a skeptical husband and the continued demands of her teaching job. That is on top of deciphering sentences like this: "Rot a peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface."

Dai Congrong, who is translating James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' into Chinese, at her office at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Her reward, to her great surprise, was success. Her translation of the first part of the book has become a modest but clear hit here in China. Chinese readers are now puzzling their way through Joyce's rhythmic stew of English, Gaelic, Romance languages, puns and layered meaning.

"It's beyond my expectations," Ms. Dai said. Local media even interviewed her 8-year-old son, she said, "though he has no idea what the book is about."

A newly affluent nation that prizes black Audi sedans and Louis Vuitton handbags has made a literary status symbol of what may well be English literature's most difficult work. Thanks in part to a canny marketing campaign involving eye-catching billboards and packaging, "Finnegans Wake" sold out the first, 8,000-volume run shortly after it was released in December. The book briefly rose to No. 2 on a bestseller list run by a Shanghai book industry group, just behind a biography of the late Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China's modern-day boom.

That isn't to say buyers necessarily love it. "I have to say it's less pleasant than I expected," said Nico Wu, a 23-year-old public-relations professional in Shanghai, who says he slogged through the first 30 of its 775 pages before giving up.

"I thought at least I could get a sense of the plot," he said. "But now, I feel it is too hard to even do that."

Ms. Dai is unfazed by that sort of response. "One has to admit that there is a group of people who bought the book out of curiosity and vanity, but there is also a large group of people who bought the book because they really want to appreciate it," she said.

James Joyce

The appetite for Joyce's most challenging work comes from a real hunger for demanding literature. A Chinese writer, Mo Yan, last year won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first for a Chinese national. But his victory only underscored China's lack of a global profile in the printed word. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution suppressed China's rich literary heritage. Continued government censorship and the lack of emphasis on reading for pleasure in the schools haven't helped.

"I am so desperate to know how it feels to read the most complicated book in the world," said He Kuang, a 50-year-old civil servant in the coastal city Xiamen, who bought the translation. "It's like an IQ test."

"Finnegans Wake" famously begins midsentence. It defies conventional narrative structure. It offers 10 different words referring to thunder, each at least 100 letters long, such as "bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunn-
trovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!" Experts are still arguing, but many believe it takes place during a shifting dream or dreams, and it involves among many other matters a bar owner and his family and an unspecified sexual transgression in a park.

Criticism dogged the book more than a decade before it was released in 1939. Joyce had been writing it for years and had published snippets in magazines and pamphlets. "I don't think it gets anywhere," H.G. Wells wrote to him in 1928 after reading part of it, adding, "you have turned your back on common men." Even Joyce's wife, Nora, once referred in her letters to "Finnegans Wake" as "that chop suey you're writing" and once asked him, "Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?"

Defenders say its power lies in how it pushes the boundaries of language. "You can read it as poetry," said Sun Ganlu, a prominent 54-year-old Chinese writer whose work has been translated into English, French and Japanese. Mr. Sun, who praises the new Chinese translation, says the book could inspire readers. "Maybe after they read it, they will start to take literature seriously or even write."

That possibility inspired Ms. Dai, the translator, an associate professor and vice dean of the department of Chinese language and literature at Fudan University in Shanghai. "The traditional writing style of Chinese literature needs to be changed after all these years," she said. "Someone needs to stand out and lead by his unique writing, like what James [Joyce] did in Western literature."

Ms. Dai, a bookish 42-year-old whose only nod to ostentation is her taste for Lancôme perfume, first discovered Joyce through Chinese translations of "Ulysses" released in the 1990s. "It lingered in my mind after I put the book down," she said. "Life is like what is described in 'Ulysses': fragmented."

"Finnegans Wake" is on another level, however. To re-create some of the sounds of the novel, Ms. Dai had to create new Chinese characters—a notable hoop to jump through considering Chinese already has tens of thousands of characters.

The first line of the novel, which begins mid-sentence, reads, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." To translate that sentence alone, Ms. Dai provides two definitions, five footnotes and seven asides in smaller type to describe its allusions to religion, memory and the 17th- and 18th-century academic Giovanni Battista Vico.

Her publisher paid her 75 yuan ($12) per thousand English words translated, meaning she needed to keep up her research duties at the university. That bothered her husband, Gu Jian, who told her he could make the same amount of money in much less time. "I don't have time to read it," said Mr. Gu. "Maybe I will try to read it after retirement."

But publisher Shanghai People's Publishing House gave the book market appeal with a slick billboard campaign in the downtown areas of major Chinese cities. A deluxe, 168 yuan version comes in a box with a slim Joyce biography and bookmark, and it shows a young Joyce standing head-cocked and confident with his hands in his pants pockets. The book was also advertised in in-flight magazines, online reading sites and stores. It got an additional boost from China's state-run media, with the official Xinhua news agency naming it one of the most influential books of last year.

As a result, the book's initial 8,000 run sold out within three weeks, according to the publisher. It has since printed 5,000 additional copies that it says have been distributed to bookstores. The publisher has committed to supporting translation of the rest of the book, says Ms. Dai, a process that she says will take at least eight more years. Mr. Gu worries that it could be longer: "It will take maybe 20 years to finish that."