I've always felt FW translations tried to tame the book somehow. After succeeding at punning with two or three possible meanings for a word, the translator usually leaves the others outside his work even if he knows they were there in the original. So I've conceived of the following trick to translate the Wake: whenever I cannot put any more meaning into the words, I draw them. Above you read the book's most famous words, " riverrun, past Eve and Adam's " written in Elian script. I translated them into Portuguese as "reverrio, passadelos eva e o ádamas". Reverrio does quite well for the German Erinnerung ( rever means "to see again" ), but it does not convey that riverrun sounds kinda like river-Ann and reminds us of ( well, at least insomniac FW scholars do ) a well-known passage in Kubla Khan: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree:/ Where Alp h, the sacred river, ran ". Well, besides of the fact that my
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