How Irish writer James Joyce became a belated bestseller in China
In space of a generation, Joyce has gone from symbol of bourgeois corruption to one of cosmopolitan sophistication, with translations of his works plentiful and plays about him well attended
Irish author James Joyce's image in China holds a strange fascination in the West. When the first third of Finnegans Wake, his last and most notoriously difficult book, was published in Shanghai in 2013, newspapers in Britain and America greeted the announcement as a momentous event.
Certainly, the salient details of the story are arresting: 72 years had passed since the publication of the novel in London in 1941; seven years had elapsed since Dai Congrong had agreed to undertake the formidable task of translation; and when the book appeared between luxuriously silky dark-green boards, heavy with pages of explanatory notes, it became an immediate commercial success.
By what miracles of linguistic mastery and literary imagination could Chinese characters be made to capture Joyce's mind-bending manipulations of the alphabet? By what subtleties of cross-cultural understanding could the specificities of Ireland and its mythologies be translated for a Chinese audience? Could the translation be trusted if it made Finnegans Wake a bestseller?
When Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, Joyce responded with delight to news that an order had been placed from China: "Ten copies to Peking!" he exclaimed. Ulysses, even more than Finnegans Wake, is alive in China today. Two Joyce-themed stage productions have recently toured major Chinese cities. Both are the brainchildren of Andy Arnold, the artistic director of Glasgow's Tron Theatre, and form part of a programme of performances for a UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange. The first, A Journey Round James Joyce, offers an elegantly devised biographical reimagining of Joyce's life in Trieste between 1905 and 1915. The second, Ulysses, is a revival of the Tron's successful 2012 production of Dermot Bolger's adaptation ( A Dublin Bloom, 1996). They performed to full and enthusiastic houses in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Jinan.