A reading by Dominique Hurth of the last four pages of the chapter “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” (1939) translated in basic English and reconstructed by the artist based on the encounter of linguist C.K. Ogden and James Joyce in 1929.

 

An encounter, between two friends.

London, 1929, James Joyce meets Charles Ogden. He would like to record the last four pages of the chapter “Anna Livia

Plurabelle”, from the still in process “Finnegans Wake”. Joyce starts not seeing well by this point, and it is on meters and

meters of paper that Ogden copies the pages of the manuscript. Each letter is several centimetres high, this enables Joyce to read his text that he knows anyhow by heart. Once the recording is finished, Ogden does the first translation to basic English, a language of his own composition constituted by only 850 words (things and qualities), without verbs but what are called operators. Ogden publishes this text in 1932, seven years before the official publishing of the “Finnegans Wake”.