His language, so familiar and so foreign. . . .

Most of those whose native language is not English and who still want to weather Joyce's works will have asked themselves resignedly whether they have a chance to cope at all. The obvious answer, in one essential sense, is No; a handicap, not to be overcome, will remain. But it is a "No, But. . . ." And it is the various buts which will be butted about here.

As a rule, foreign readers will deviate to that substitute for the original text which replaces each of its single items and turns the whole into quite a different arrangement of letters and sounds while pretending to retain somehow its soul or spirit. What happens in translation will therefore deserve some passing attention here. In a much larger sense, everything Joyce wrote has to do with translation, is transferential.

Joyce had to read Homer in English, but he learned Norwegian to study Ibsen, applied his poor German to read Gerhart Hauptmann, while his Italian gave him access to Giordano Bruno and Vico. Foreigners are underprivileged, but they have one advantage: they know that the language is strange and has to be looked at very closely. A few close looks will be spread out here in the following pages as examples of the sort of naive wonder which native speakers may well have lost. Anything watched from a distance, from outside, can be exotically fascinating. Joyce felt this fascination himself and made others feel it. He profited from it. He fared better, on the whole, with friends in Trieste, international refugees in Zurich, or a mixed clique in Paris than with his compatriots, say Dublin cronies or English publishers. The roll call of early perceptive foreign readers includes Italo Svevo, Stefan Zweig, Valery Larbaud, Louis Gillet, Ernst Robert Curtius, Carola Giedion-Welcker, Bernhard Fehr, Hermann Broch, et al(ieni) and is proportionally impressive, especially in an early stage, that is, before Americans reclaimed him for the English--speaking world.

The foreign observer is an old literary device, since the outsider notices what is taken for granted by the member of a community. Joyce has varied this theme in all his works. Leopold Bloom is by no means the only one within this tradition, nor the first one in the canon.

Part of the fascination of these three uncanny verbal beings is their primary opaqueness. (Have in mind also that one would not be sure, offhand, how to pronounce any of these words; Father Flynn, similarly, had to instruct the boy in proper Latin pronunciation.) They appeal to one's curiosity, a curiosity which has yielded rich critical rewards. In fact, a reader/critic has a way of becoming a gnomon right away: "an examiner, a judge, an interpreter." ³ Joyce opens with an appropriate conjunction: geometrically, "gnomon" is defined by something missing. The knowledge of an examining reader is indeed defective, incomplete. More mysteries remain unsolved in the story than there are reliable facts.

Once we inspect foreign territory we tend to find, or construe, more than we originally suspected. In Joyce's prose, this is a characteristic experience. Simony takes us straight to the account in the Acts of the Apostles and to Simon, who was one among about a dozen biblical persons of that name, a very common one. The name incidentally is based on a Hebrew verb for "hear": Sim(e)on is one who hears or obeys. Should we therefore deduce that hearing is particularly important? Maybe not, but the story is full of strange sounds, much hearsay and rumor, and contains audible silences. Our Simon, distinguished as "Magus," had his name perpetuated because of his misdeed and became famous, perversely, by doing wrong. The story of Father Flynn, too, is worth telling because something went wrong in his life. Immediately before Simon Magus is introduced into the biblical report, we read that "unclean spirits . . . came out of many that were possessed . . . and many taken with palsies and that were lame, were healed . . ." ( Acts 8:7-8). Now "unclean spirits" -- pneumata akatharta in the original ⁴ --can be interlaced with another foreign term in the story, Old Cotter's "talking of faints and worms" ( D10). "Faints" in distillery terminology are "impure spirits." Such alignment may amount to nothing more than a circuitous reconfirmation of some spiritual debasement in Father Flynn's career, but such subterranean short-circuiting is typical of Joyce's later work. The English "palsies" in the passage quoted derives from paralysis; the original used a participle paralelymenoi, whereas the Vulgate retains paralytici. So the words brought together in the protagonist's mind by chance association are contextually related in a source--as though a minor New Testament cluster were somehow buried within the story's opening signals, concealed by conspicuous foreignness.

Naturally this whole reading is foreign in yet another, radical sense: a foranus was someone who was foras, "outside of the doors," an outsider who is likely to use all his wits. Like a boy, for example, who, as he cannot know what goes on inside, "studied the lighted square of window" ( D9), as the second sentence in the story puts it.

Much of Joyce's meaning is, and has been from the start, somewhat outside the doors or at least a trifle removed. A near synonym of "foreign(er)" is based on the same spatial metaphor: Stranger, French étranger, derives from Latin "extraneus," external, from "extra," outside, without. Joyce's works are very much the saga of those without, of outsiders. It has become customary to refer to a certain kind of outsider by a different term stressed by Joyce: exile. The image is similar: an exile sits (or leaps) outside.

In view of what Joyce was to do later with names, we may think it remarkable that Simon, right after his ill-conceived offer of money for spiritual power, was rebuked by Peter himself ( Acts 8:20-21), Peter on whose own name "the whole complex and mysterious institutions of the Church" were to be founded, as Joyce often rubbed in. ⁵ What makes this intriguing is that the misguided sorcerer and new convert was told off by a namesake, for Peter himself was also called Simon ( Mat. 4:18). Father Flynn in the story seems to have hovered between the polar opposites of Simon Peter, first pope, and Simon Magus, an early debaser. The name Simon, at any rate, was to be carried over into the next two of Joyce's novels.

In A Portrait Stephen Dedalus has to face strange phenomena and strange languages. It is a discovery in itself that there are other languages. "Dieu was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying . . ." (P 16). One may be punished for not knowing the plural of the Latin noun mare. ⁶ But one's own language can be just as mysterious. "Suck," an ugly sound, like dirty water going out of a washbasin, is "a queer word," especially when applied to a "fellow" called Simon Moonan (P 11).

Like hardly any previous novel, A Portrait weaves the difficult empirical processes of learning the names of simple things and the curious ways in which grownups use words. We may overlook such an everyday quality as "nice," which clearly means something good or pleasant. Mother has "a nicer smell" than father; it is "nice and warm" to see a light. But there is more. "Rump" is "not a nice expression" (P 9), an unpleasant one, perhaps, but there intrudes an uneasy feeling of morality, of a superior world's rulings which may appear capricious; this world rules that reality will divide into things and into words for them, some of which are approved and some of which are not. It is not always an obvious distinction. When a pious relative, Mrs. Riordan, in angry conflict calls a snappy reply to a priest "A nice answer," surely she cannot approve? And her savage reduplication, "Very nice! Ha! Very nice!" (P 37), undoubtedly means that she is outraged about Mr. Casey's spitting tobacco juice into the eyes of a devout Irish woman. Young Stephen, a shocked and terrified listener, realizes that words can mean their own opposite, miraculously. Not all cultures, we know, allow for this kind of rhetoric. We could discover more linguistic runs in the novel hinging on other adjectives; an instructive one is "right" in the first chapter. Only trial and error teach us to handle or understand such labels. It is part of our survival strategies to master the use of words.

That we learn to master words is brought out in what is probably the most condensed summation of a learning process in all fiction, the opening section of A Portrait. An abridgement of early impacts, it moves rapidly from words for simple things, easy to verify in the outside world--like "Moocow" (an animal identified by its sound "moo" happens to be named "cow"--a descriptive ad hoc composite well adapted to a child's mind), "road," or "lemon platt"--to something as unreal and recondite as "Apologise" (P 7-8). The syntax has moved along with it, just as fast, and with it the thinking ability from impressions to generalizations. "Apologise" is quite an achievement, not easy to grasp by any standards: it is unEnglish in sound and appearance, of four syllables and of obscure meaning, but very powerful. It stands in fact for the alternative for some traumatic punishment that could happen to him because of an unintended offense. It is possible to ward off some awesome consequence by saying appropriate words. As it happens, all of this is even contained in this word, though Stephen does (and the reader need) not know this. To apologize is a procedure of doing away (apo-) some effect by words/ speech (logos). Its effective and etymological potency alone would qualify the word for Stephen to linger over it and the author to put it at the end of his first movement.

That apologia (a speech made in one's defense, as the ancients used it) also figures in the title of an influential self-justification by a famous Jesuit convert and founder of Dublin University may add resonances later on when John Henry Cardinal Newman is named as one of the inchoative artist's self-appointed models. A Portrait has been taken to be Joyce's fictionalized Apologia pro Vita Sua (as a young man), a partial truth. Perhaps it is more an "apologuise," in the more precise version of Finnegans Wake ( 414.16), a work which always tries to excuse itself for its own deviate existence and which, to go back to origins, manages to undo the import of its words by disturbing semantemes: apo-logia in this meaning too.

In a conversation much later in the novel a highly articulate Stephen Dedalus says of a Jesuit theologian, Suarez, that he "apologised" for Jesus, who "seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy" (P 242). Here too the term goes beyond a vague sense of making excuses; it resurrects accurately an explanation of the apparent rudeness of Jesus Christ's remark to his mother: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" ( John 2:4). In the original, so the defense by Suarez and other commentators goes, this remark was polite and respectful, but when an Aramaic idiom has to be given in Greek or English, something may happen to its tone and its understanding. No translation is free of such alterations, and A Portrait indirectly acknowledges that fact. What the Wake calls Shem's "root language" ( 424.17) is at work early on, in the foreignness of a loan word like "apologise" with its unrestful implications.

What a foreign reader, teased and frustrated, tends to notice much more is that words are words, the only prime reality in literature. This makes non-natives akin to Stephen, a wary reader of all sorts of signs and signatures. It is brought home to him in a wellremembered scene that the language of the Irish is not theirs, is the Englishman's ". . . before it is mine." Stephen feels "unrest of spirit," the causes of which are partly political and historical. The natives were forced to adopt the language of the conqueror, so much so that in the end their own had to be revived artificially. Of course they also changed the language which was imposed upon them; they unwittingly kept a substratum of Gaelic patterns and evolved many idiosyncratic uses, so that English as We Speak It in Ireland (as a namesake, P. W. Joyce, called it) remains noticeably distinct: "His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech" (P 189). His soul frets "in the shadow of his language."

English was always an acquired speech for Joyce, and a shadow of this is over all of his works. Any foreign reader will sympathize. But the coerced have sneaky ways. Stephen Dedalus, Shem, or Joyce (a personal union is allowed this time) went to revert all this, perhaps an Irishman's revenge. His English, that of the works to follow, will appear more and more odd to the English masters; there will be more and more foreign matter, unfamiliar liberties, outlandish features, unknown arts. All the major works, incidentally, were written while Joyce himself was a foreigner in "Trieste-Zürich-Paris," a condition which the course of the twentieth century turns more and more into a norm rather than an exception.

Ulysses, when it made its much-heralded appearance in Paris, 1922, was certainly considered chaotic and exotic and was accepted, if anything, more readily on the Continent than in Ireland or Great Britain. That Ireland had made "a sensational re-entrance into high European literature," as Valery Larbaud announced, must have sounded much more convincing to international groups in Paris or Berlin than to literati in Dublin like Shane Leslie, who replied with an outburst of invective at the book itself as well as at its foreign admirers. He emphasised "devilish drench . . . muckwritten tide . . . or vomit," but did find consolation in the fact, taken for granted, that the general reader was "in no danger of understanding" the book and might escape corruption. ¹³ There was clearly a linguistic basis for this reaction too. A novel written in English and dealing with Irish matters was, by and large, pronounced less accessible by those for whom its language was not an acquired one. It was thought to be European, and the dispute over this in itself proves a blurring of national borders.

There is no reader of Ulysses for whom some passages are not, literally, foreign and for whom many have not remained unfamiliar for a long time. Ulysses is in need of glosses and many of them mere translations of alien phrases, and those published have not always been outstandingly reliable. Readers and characters often go wrong, often without noticing. Ulysses creates numerous situations that are akin to those of its readers. Examples could be picked almost at random.

Bloom holds forth on the beauties of the Italian language, which he does not understand, and has to be told that the speakers he overheard were "haggling over money." He reacts in two ways well known to foreigners. The first is disappointment, a sigh of resignation "at the inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were absolutely necessary." He also recognizes the strange fascination, "the southern glamour that surrounds" Italian. This very quickly leads to Stephen's generalization that sounds, like names, are "impostures" ( U621-22).

Leopold Bloom's own plucky shot at the glamorous foreign tongue, Belladonna voglio," does not parse too well but reveals separate items which the reader has been conditioned to spell out in the course of the novel. "Voglio" is a verb which makes it possible for Bloom to stave off nightshades, painful emotions, behind a concern for correct pronunciation. Bloom's Italian radiates psychologically: we translate the Italian into fears and hopes. A related worry interferes with an attempt to digest an opera passage, also in Italian: "Don Giovanni, a cenar teco/M'invitasti" ( U179). One word proves intractable: "What does that teco mean? Tonight perhaps." This is doing reasonably well; it is how we ourselves often read, unaided, out of context: "tonight" often goes with "come to supper." But from our vantage point, we know what looms in his mind within "tonight's" expected events. We may also find that teco (with you) is a way of implying the old wisdom (which has been reapplied by psychoanalysis as well) that de te fabula narratur. Our thoughts are determined by our problems.

Molly Bloom is not alone in interpreting "polysyllables of foreign origin . . . phonetically or by false analogy" ( U686). Bloom misinterprets Fergus, mythological figure from a Yeats poem, as "Ferguson . . . Some girl. Best thing could happen him" ( U608-9). Readers are not immune to such imaginative leaps. Let us return to Bloom in the mortuary chapel as he watches the priest and tries to assimilate some of the Latin from the sermon in between. "Dominenamine. Bully about the muzzle he looks. Bosses the show" ( U103). One might be forgiven for imagining, one moment, some Latin ox or cow (bos) in "Bosses," for which there is no philological foundation; and one might wonder if there is an accidental bull in "Bully." A native reader, if asked, most probably would "know" instinctively whether there is or not. What does Bloom have in mind? The Oxford English Dictionary notices that "popular etymological consciousness" tends to connect the two words.

Readers can shrug their shoulders and go on, but not so translators; they have to put something down and therefore must make decisions. Of the two authorized translations, the German one keeps close to the animal while still getting the impression of someone powerful and overbearing: "Ums Maul sieht er bullig aus." The French version is based on quite different considerations: "Un fort en gueule, ça se voit." Nothing bullish there; the characterization stresses grossness and even verbosity. A later Italian translation suggests a blustering fellow: "Ha un muso di prepotente." This triple divergence proves nothing more than potential ambivalence; associations detected in the sentence are magnified.

The "correct" solution, one might argue, is the one provided in a reference work, Eric Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, which says: "bully about the muzzle. 'Too thick and large in the mouth'. . . dog-fanciers' . . ." ¹⁶ So the phrase predates Bloom and had become stereotyped. There is a certain probability that originally the dog-fanciers who coined the saying were struck by a bull-like appearance. Tossing a phrase about, we may notice here, usually leads not to more clarity but to more complexity. The results of the above probe are merely that a word may well participate in two semantic activities. "Bully" would go well with Father Coffey as a "muscular christian"; "bull-y" contributes to a cluster of animal imagery for the priest (who doubles as Cerberus in Hades): "his toad's belly . . . said the rook . . . a fluent croak . . . Bully . . . (Bosses?) . . . sheep . . . poisoned pup" ( U103). It occurs midway between a dog transformed by Stephen's mind in Proteus and the animal metamorphoses of Circe.

All the speculations just given as mere illustrations may appear a trifle less gratuitous when we find a passage much later which looks like--but cannot realistically be--a reshuffling of Bloom's thoughts spiced by dog Latin. In Oxen of the Sun, where avatars tend to be bovine, a long tale about Pope Hadrian's generosity to England is spun out, and in it an initial papal bull is turned into a browsing animal with features of a bullying John Bull. In the course of this homonymous festival we come across "the famous champion bull of the Romans, Bos Bovum, which is good bog Latin for boss of the show" ( U401). This appears as though the bodies of words had changed from Dublin street wear to Roman togas or priestly vestments--transformations that do occur in both Oxen and Circe. Or words here change their nationality (as Bloom's father did). In Finnegans Wake something like "bull, a bosbully" ( FW 490.35) would cause little surprise and only show once more that words have turned this condition into a way of life.

Since Ulysses transversally encloses a cheeky permutation of "Bully: bull: boss: bos," we may digress for a while to observe what happens when such a process itself has to be translated. Since the two passages are so distant and the connection tenuous, chances are that translators did not recognize it and (let us bear in mind) perhaps need not acknowledge it in their assessment of priorities. To give a better idea of what dexterity would ideally be called for to recreate a text's low-key correspondences, two more instances of "bully" are listed, one in the Library episode, where Stephen gives examples of "Women he won to him. . . . bully tapsters' wives" ( U193). In this phrase "bully" is a character trait, and the translations consulted all agree that it qualifies "tapsters" and not their wives. In themselves versions like "des épouses de cabaretiers brutaux," "spose di rozzi tavernieri," or "prahlender Zapfkellner Weiber," would not be worth much comment. Only the second German rendering ( 1976) retains the adjective which was used by Bloom in the morning, "bulliger Zapfkellner Weiber," and it alone would catch a potential Pasiphaean echo, if there should be one (to reinforce Stephen's "queens with prize bulls"-- U207). What all foreign renderings miss, however, is what in this chapter may not be negligible--that in older, and Shakespearean, parlance, "bully" was also a term of endearment.

The dispersed bits of text and how they appear in several languages are tabulated here (pp. 96-97) for convenient comparison. The focus is on one of Bloom's thoughts and how it seems to radiate. The sample translations are arranged vertically in chronological order.

Given the tremendous odds, the translations emerge with credit. We see more awareness of transverse links in later renderings, when the novel was better known and the importance of correspondences more recognized. But in any foreign tongue Ulysses becomes less interstructured. Much of the bovinity which shapes Joyce's ends does not travel too well. ¹⁸ What translation can deal with least is translation itself, like "boss--bos," where an identical choreography of equivalents is excluded by a different vocabulary. We may appreciate French "latin de latrine," which imitates "bog Latin" as derived from "bog(-house)," privy, by substituting latrine for a more current "latin de cuisine." A felicity like the original phrase itself, which suitably brings dog Latin home to bogland ( Ireland), can hardly be expected.

The do-it-yourself exercise attempted here is intended also to show native readers that, while they try out switchboard connections and are forced to reflect on what the text may try to say, they are in fact behaving like foreigners in search of sense and meaning. The perspectives given here, and the way the cards have been stacked against translators, are highly unfair and amount to a falsification. The bullockbefriending collocations may be valid by being part of the novel's intricate potential, but they are only a few among many. The above approach is as instructive and as misleading as any other. The translations should therefore be appreciated by quite different criteria, such as "accuracy" (by now, it is hoped, a somewhat shaky notion), tonal effect, or idiomatic punch.

Up to a point, Ulysses makes stridently clear (in the original or in translation) that we are all foreigners lost in a labyrinth. The main characters feel unacclimatized at best. Marion Bloom, with an obscure Spanish-Jewish mother named Lunita Laredo, is apt to pass judgment on Dublin in view of her childhood memories in colonial Gibraltar. Bloom's lost roots go back to Hungary and a Jewishness from which he is also excluded. Stephen Dedalus sees himself dispossessed. These topics need no further elaboration in 1982. In dayto-day transactions it is not so much the lack of foreign languages that causes misunderstanding, but our different perspectives or expectations, the various codes existing side by side. Dialogues are often at cross purposes (Stephen and Mr Deasy; Bloom and Bantam Lyons; much of the talking in Barney Kiernan's). This becomes most poignant when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are finally brought together (which, in our novel -- reading code, should become a climax) and some talk is attempted, largely by Bloom, but little communication occurs. Some of the conversation might almost be conducted in different languages.

cult word of Greek origin to his wife, a word he first has to extract from a Mollyesque assimilation, "Met him. . . ." He first chooses a key too high and intellectual, "transmigration," which is scoffed at ("O rocks! . . . tell us in plain words"). Then he solicitously prepares for another hard word, "reincarnation," by homely phrasing ("some people believe . . . that we go on living in another body after death. . . .") while thinking of a suitable graphic illustration (U 64-65). In the, Eumaeus episode with roles reversed, this considerate man, usually so much aware of the grasp of his audience, is exposed to statements jerkily expressed by Mr. Dedalus, poet and professor, who all along has shown supreme disregard for his listeners. So paternal Bloom misses the patristic jargon of "soul" as "a simple substance," and responds in terms of X-rays and "simple souls" (U 633-34). Let us try to imagine just what it might be that Bloom actually registers when he is treated to the following discourse:

the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter Lane near Gerard the herbalist, who anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus, an instrument he was contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch . . . and Farnaby and son with their dux and comes conceits and Byrd (William), who played the virginals . . . and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and John Bull. (U 661-62)

We have it on good authority that Bloom is understandably misdirected by "John Bull." As for the rest we can only guess. Bloom is "not perfectly certain" (U 662); he must be shut out, "out of doors," from most of this. The Latin is beyond him (might he hear something like "lewdhouse"?); "dux" is likely to sound like something in English which it is not; and what is a casual listener to make of fetter, bird, or toys? In one wrong sense, "conceits" is right. The names themselves must be cryptic. "Farnaby and son" sounds like a Dublin firm and not like historical composers. As Bloom is not an expert on ancient instruments, nor a reader of Joyce "Letters" or Richard Ellmann's biography, he has no way of knowing who Arnold Dolmetsch is. ²⁰ It is a tantalizing touch that, when so much non-communication is around, Joyce throws out the name of a real person whose name in German, if it were understood, would mean exactly what at this juncture is most needed between the two, an "interpreter."

When in the next chapter some interchange of speech and of ideas finally does occur between the two different temperaments, it is ironically removed from our reach by its presentation in a form of abstract, scientific, unfelt English which is pointedly written, never spoken. We will mentally change this language into the sort of idiom which it is meant to replace. Runs like "disintegration of obsession" (U 695) will normally be rendered into something else within the same language, something very painful and direct. One psychological justification for "Ithaca" is that it keeps emotions at a Latinate distance. The mode of "Ithaca" is one last variant of the many intralingual translations in Ulysses. The book exposes not only a wide range of languages, but also the regional, temporal, social, and hierarchical width of the English language. Joyce in particular adds historical diversification. In one episode which describes a librarian as "bald, eared and assiduous" (U 190), it is odd to come upon "singular uneared wombs" (U 202). We get an almost surrealist effect. This is continued two chapters later with similar anatomic confusion: "womb of woman eyeball" (U 286). But, naturally, "uneared" does does not denote an absence of the organs of hearing but is an obsolete recall, through a Shakespearean echo, of an IndoEuropean verb for ploughing (cognate with Latin arare). The semantic shock will spur us on to translate it into our own time. ²¹

Ulysses is probably the first consistently intertransferential fictional work. Oxen of the Sun manifests this aspect best and most irritatingly, in a historical series of literary devices and linguistic growth. Not only have morphology and syntax changed over the centuries, but also customs and mores, attitudes, conventions, epical techniques and narrative emphases--the most radical, continuous intratranslation. No wonder this chapter is still the least assimilated one, and one impossible to translate "adequately." In some critical dismissals of its idiosyncracies we may still detect a streak of that mentality which Joyce, after all, has thematized, that whatever is foreign is unnecessary or arbitrary, if not downright inferior.

The chapter modes of Ulysses are, in the view presented here, so many different translations, renderings in keys that could be labelled breezy, gastronomical, literary, locative, orchestral, polyphemous, daydreamy, etc., and the separate labels matter less than the idea of a conjugation of all of language's potential and all stylistic ranges. We do not need Introibo ad altara Dei as an initial pointer, nor a blatant hybrid like "Deshil Holles Eamus" as a midway reminder, nor a farewell display of "Ronda. . . . posadas" (U 782), to learn, the hard way, what Bloom has always known, that we are in certain constellations aliens and fumbling outsiders. The foreign reader simply notices this plight a trifle more tangibly.

As always, proportions change when we come to Finnegans Wake. There non-English readers are truly lost, especially since they rely on their eyes and their ability to spell out graphic shapes more than on their ears for hidden sounds in hidden words. The lack of childhood echoes, sayings, songs, nursery rhymes, etc., is a severe drawback. Foreigners may take some slight comfort in the fact, freely confessed, that native readers remain in the dark as well when they have to sort out so much that is unfamiliar and alien, and above all when they have to extract their own language from the circumambient verbiage. In a conglomerate like "perensempry sex of fun to help a dazzle off the othour" (FW 364.24), we may detect Latin words, sex, perhaps saxophone, long before the author's dazzle also reveals a homely phrase, "six of one and half a dozen of the other." At least it is indicated by ancillary works that such back-renderings are indeed necessary. ²²

Paradoxically, the Wake is the most forbiddingly xenophobic of all prose works, and yet at the same time it extends a catholic welcome to all foreigners by meeting them on their own territory, and very specifically. It often says so, in "wordloosed . . . in cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript" (FW 219.16) addressing the Indo-European family; in other parts it speaks Japanese or Maori. It offers foreign readers snippets which perhaps only they can understand. A Swahili speaker can count ALP's children in "meanacuminamoyas" (FW 201.30), which somehow adds up to 111, and there is confirmation in Hebrew numerology appended: "Olaph lamm et, all that pack." An Irish reader would be struck by an ironic interjection, "-moya," which throws doubt on whatever was said before; that too is a Wakean linguistic caution. A Swiss, coming upon "mean fawthery eastend appullcelery, old laddy he high hole" (FW 586.27), may wonder what is being told about apples and celery in the eastend, but may recognize at some moment that the whole also transliterates a familiar dialect song, "Min Fatter ist en Appezäller," which simply says that "my father is from (the canton of) Appenzell." To detect something familiar in an exotic guise is a basic pleasure and an incentive. A little bit of rummaging may turn up the appropriateness of the name leading back to Latin "abbatis cella," the cell of the abbot (and abbas of course means father). The historical abbot in question was Irish, St. Gall, who was sent east to convert the heathen. Actually there is not just one canton called Appenzell, but two: the father's cell split up during some wars over religion, and a Wakean family configuration is here echoed in Swiss history and geography. Both Appenzells, looking almost fetally entwined on the map, are moreover wholly surrounded by the canton of St. Gall, like "wrestless in the womb" (FW 143.21)--all of which merely exemplifies Finnegans Wake's outstanding obligingness. A perfect provincial miniature has been integrated, which serves well to demonstrate to a purely Swiss audience some of the overall themes and dynamics. The next line will nationalize a standard figure of the Wake with more local colour: "Seekersenn" (FW 586.28) contains a name, Senn, which is very common (especially in the cantons mentioned), and also a noun which immediately evokes images of cows, cheese and butter (Senn is an alpine cowherd). This connects with a Swiss German incarnation of Shaun ( Haensli) and Shem ( Koebi) within the Burrus-Caseous entanglement (FW 163.5). The song which triggered off all these associations continues, as every Swiss would know, with the Appenzell father eating cheese. From all of this, meanwhile, the non-Swiss reader is largely excluded but will at least instantly click into tune when "old laddy he high hole" is revealed to be the yodelling refrain.  

Of course the distinction between native and foreign has by now become very questionable and idle. Dublin is a good city, and Ireland a much-afflicted country, to bear this out. Finnegans Wake unravels and re-entangles colonial sedimentation through language. When native and invader crosstalk in French, donsk, scowegian, or anglease, and excheck a few strong verbs (FW 16.4-5), discrimination between settler and intruder, inhabitant and conqueror, seller or buyer, guest or enemy, is instantly rendered futile. A later reenactment of a similar encounter, this time garbled by Muta and Juva, is similarly confused and polyglot (FW 609-10). Certainty becomes a matter of betting: "Tempt to wom Outsider!" (FW 610.18). Everyone--Firbolg, Milesian, Celt, Viking, Norman, Sassenach, or Jew--was once an outsider. "Paybads floriners moved in hugheknots" (FW 541.14) refers to a specific historical occasion, but it seems to generalize that foreigners, often refugees, have difficulties with their currencies and may be a nuisance or poor risks. It is again interesting that the Huguenots, a dispersed minority, got their name from a word meaning confederates (by oath, German Eid-genoss). Contrary to this implication, they were disbanded and persecuted, but then found new homes and, on the whole, adapted very well and were beneficial to their new communities. Words can have similar divaricating careers.