What Joyce wrote was poetry, not prose, meant to be read with that particular Irish inflection and lilt. As you read, let his voice come into your head. Then it becomes more meaningful and shines more brightly..
Thank you! The ranks of the philistines will always deride this work as recondite at best or nonsensical at worst. They think it a failed attempt at innovating a novel form of prose. But once we hear the language in Joyce's mouth, we suddenly get the sense of a lost and ancient style of expression. It is arcane only because it is old and forgotten. We hear the spirits of his ancestors speaking through him; he is merely a vessel for the fragile and fading soul of a forgotten culture. There is nothing pyrotechnical or indulgent in his attempt to preserve these traditions. There is only the aching sense of something deeply atavistic in these lines.
This is captivating rendition... I've just rereturned to FW and went searching for the speaking of it as it was the speaking of it round midnight in Sydney years ago round Bloomsday that gave me a flavor of its humor that made the book less bookheavy and more lightly lively. The talking head and the words is such an effective means of sharing the unique wonder of this dreamwork.
It is astonishing how much more sense the text makes when read out loud by someone who has the cadence and rhythm of Hibernian English! It feels significantly more accessible like this. So regrettable that he didn't record the entire thing.
@@gearaddictclimber2524 with human input as to where it was going wrong it could be close to what he might have read, a rake of experts and money would have to be involved but it is possible, some day ;)
He sneaks lots of world rivers into this passage. Yangtze, Irawaddy, Orinoco, Krishna, Limpopo, Indus. Doubtless others I missed. Then near the end, the Liffey itself. riverrun
Well yes. It has always been maintained, even as early as 1943 by Joseph Campbell that to read the texts out loud illuminate the singsongy nature of the texts and absolutely help in uncovering the inner workings of it. I personally do feel adding an Irish or Scottish accent to it absolutely illuminates the more dense and harder to read passages of the book. On genius.com I have detailed what I believe are codes to decipher it. The first paragraph being basically a skeleton key to the ways Joyce uses language to build. the first few words specifically. Also listening to Terence Mckenna's Surfing Finnegans Wake is indispensable. Also, and it pangs me to even have to mention this but somehow in this social media driven world some are oblivious to this- it is absolutely imperative that one OWNS AND READS a hard copy of this work to even begin to appreciate the complexity and thoroughness (with regards to the inclusiveness of the texts regarding everything. Ever. There is one chapter with a reference to every single recorded military battle in history) Finnegans Wake possesses. They had heard or had heard said or had heard said written.
Audible finally has a beautiful version of Finnagen’s Wake, just released yesterday. You can put it on at night as you fall asleep and listen to the dreamy book while you dream. And then you will be able to say with honesty that you have read Finnegans Wake
He is reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle section about two old washer women washing clothes along the Liffey, in it all the rivers of the world are mentioned in homage. The new language in FW is basically one word invades another word full of puns and uses 60 different languages. The first part is about early Irish history Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru ambushed in the bath (Tolka river), Finnegan was a brick layer who fell off a ladder and in the fall has a dream, a comic history of Ireland. The next section is about his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and his sons Shem and Shaun. A leitmotif HCE keeps appearing in the book, can be Having children everywhere, or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker etc an archetype. FW is a comic novel written in dense puns.
Thanks for creating this vid. Having just set this section to music and recording the reading of it (not with an Irish accent), I finally get it, and really appreciate Joyce's reading. It's spectacular.
how can finnegans wake ever be topped? how can there ever be another work which eclipses it? joyce grabs a fistful of beauty and absconds with it, blasting off from the clutches of language itself in a rocket fashioned from components we can recognize individually yet are nonetheless arranged in a way nobody but joyce could ever hope really understand... if even he can. joyce channels something temporally nuanced and steeped in his own personal experience, yet which nonetheless manages to feel hauntingly familiar -- universal, even. if god lays claim to any one language, joyce is the closest any has come to actually speaking it, however haltingly.
This is simply captivating. Love your concept. Have returned to this video countless times, always on Bloomsday. PS: It is my understanding that this recording of Joyce's recitation was recorded in 1936.
I hear this and I hear Pound. Those words 'lowp ower the years' are quite magical. Certainly rewarding. Joyce certainly delights in language but also the language of places and atmospheres now lost. As if with a childs ear; hearing but not understanding.
I think Finnegan's Wake is an epic, meant to be spoken aloud like the Iiliad or the Odyssey, or even Beowulf. I think most people don't understand Finnegan's Wake because they don't read it using Irish English, for those of us who are conscious's allows us to read the inner monologue in an Irish accent it works
This man has such a wonderful voice it goes so well with the book's rhythm. Anybody know how I could contact him to do a reading of Ulysses for my book club?
His stream-of-consciousness is flowing unimpeded. Remember, he is universally accepted as the greatest author of the 20th century...and yes I said yes I will yes.
So that’s it: Grand Theory meets Darby O’Gill. Love the way JJ’s poetic rendering of the two washerwomen gets murdered by the awful American speech recognition/ closed caption AI: Geritol is my favourite, followed by Yankee for “yangseen’s hat” - JJ would have loved it
'I Knew Right Away...' I had heard that the intonations of a native Irish English speaker can shed an entirely different light on the meaning of this text. I was a little doubtful of this view, but I decided to give it a try, if only briefly. I was amazed to find it was true beyond my wildest imagination- from even the first 15 seconds of the video clip I realized that this was not only a different accent or dialect, but an entirely different language altogether- one that sounded very much like chirping birds. I then signed up for a course in Irish linguistics, which I knew would be a requisite preparation for further Joyce studies. Have any of you others managed to make any progress in deciphering this 'chirping birds' style of Irish English?
Are you sure you're not associationally confusing the chirping birds in the background with the recording? Nothing about Joyce's lilt sounds remotely chirpy to me tbh
this is absolutely fantastic. I'm particularly interested in how you did it. It would take forever to do an actual claymation, so I'm guessing a green screen of an actual person and then a program like blender or maya. Are you willing to divulge the secret? Thanks!
Does anyone know if there's a cleaned up version of this audio out there? I have auditory processing problems and this is just a little too muffled for me to parse
I'm kinda confused, are the subtitles what he actually wrote or what they thought he was saying. Cause I understood most of it but it was written as gibberish
+Megan Ryan if you mean the subtitles that are baked into the video, and not googles auto-generated ones (which are also gibberish but definitely worth a look :) then yes, thats exactly how it appears in the book. pages and pages of gibberish, but it starts to make a bit more sense once you read it out loud and listen to the words instead of trying to understand it by looking at them.
+Megan Ryan the whole point was he was writing about everything that nobody wanted to see. why do you think he was in exile? why do you think Ulysses was not allowed in several countries? It was just too much. That Is why I constantly write. then when people ask me to speak they act all shocked because I give them the truth. That's what James Joyce did ( in my opinion). But who knowa
+Megan Ryan I have a friend who was the editor for the publication of "The James Joyce Chronicles" I started reading my book to him and he said "I didn't come here to think, I came here to relax." it made me think.
i mainly used "crazy talk" but also photoshop to cut out each head from the background so that the background would move when animating. then i put the finished crazy talk animation back onto the background in Premiere. i made this a long time ago though so there might be better options around these days. it didnt take too long, except the mouth animation. the controls for that part are really hard to work with in crazy talk
i never copped that! i was worried for a second i had botched the subtitles but its "gammer and gaffer" in any of the texts i can find. this recording was done 10 years before the book was published though so he might have changed that bit around later on. either that or it was the stress of having a microphone shoved in his face :D
@@electronicalmonocle Wow that's so interesting. It seems like the most probable option is that he purposefully chose to switch those words around in the text. If that's true his attention to detail is incredible.
You have to be Irish to understand this ... for the rest of us ... it is like learning Russian ... when you hear it ... you have to cut apart (i.e. separate) each word from another to ... slowly understand it.
if that had been around at the time i might have used it! what i used to make this was crazytalk v6 and unfortunately it wasnt very easy :) trying to get the mouth to sync with the audio was the most tedious part and i had to play through it so many times that i nearly started to crack up a bit towards the end haha
Listen to it as you read. If you're reading silently, with this book above all others, you are missing out. It's much easier to understand it with your ears than your eyes.
Ask an old Irishman for directions in the west of Ireland and you'll hear something similar to this.
that's the old upholstery
I know a few bars in downtown manhattan that sound exactly like this every morning at four a.m.
This is such a funny comment
''And old Johnny Mcdougall along with them''
probably one of my cousins you'll meet
Finally, an author who makes sense.
Such n easy book, written over a period of 17 years about a dreamy Night.
Shut your eyes and see
Say sike right now
yes
Just when you think it's too boring/ridiculous/indulgent it gets unbelievably beautiful
What Joyce wrote was poetry, not prose, meant to be read with that particular Irish inflection and lilt. As you read, let his voice come into your head. Then it becomes more meaningful and shines more brightly..
you wouldnt read beethoven's scores in silence
no more should joyce be read rather than performed
“...What he wrote was POETRY...” finally!..the voice crying in the wilderness...
real
But what do if you're not a medium???
Thank you! The ranks of the philistines will always deride this work as recondite at best or nonsensical at worst. They think it a failed attempt at innovating a novel form of prose. But once we hear the language in Joyce's mouth, we suddenly get the sense of a lost and ancient style of expression. It is arcane only because it is old and forgotten. We hear the spirits of his ancestors speaking through him; he is merely a vessel for the fragile and fading soul of a forgotten culture. There is nothing pyrotechnical or indulgent in his attempt to preserve these traditions. There is only the aching sense of something deeply atavistic in these lines.
He didn't sound anything like that - he was a Dublin man. That accent is country / West.
@@paulfogarty7724This is an actual recording Joyce did to be sold on record. Just the visuals have been engineered. Joyce sounded like we hear here.
Calling people philistines is not going to help your argument. More than likely you’re just proving their point.
Thank you for your insight, friend.
did you just get a new thesaurus?
This is brilliant. I am awed. I am 70. You rocked my tiny world, just as the author did. Blessings....
This is a gem. I should return via commodious vicus to this daily
surely
Delightful. For anyone who struggles with the later Joyce, here is a perfect opening to the riches within. Thank you.
the riches within indeed sir
Well said. It's better than music, though his wife wanted him to play the guitar and sing in pubs.
For anyone who's struggled with later Joyce perhaps consider struggling with earlier Joyce 😊
This is captivating rendition... I've just rereturned to FW and went searching for the speaking of it as it was the speaking of it round midnight in Sydney years ago round Bloomsday that gave me a flavor of its humor that made the book less bookheavy and more lightly lively. The talking head and the words is such an effective means of sharing the unique wonder of this dreamwork.
Come here every Feb 2 for my favorite authors birthday - happy trails Mr Joyce!
Lovely animation, and hearing how soulfully Joyce reads this I can now read the damn thing without the feeling that he was just taking the mickey.
well put
He WAS taking the mickey! But in the most bizarre way imaginable.
@@jeroenbuysse9454 Someone once said that this book was basically one big literary equivalent to a shitpost and I still think about that to this day
I think he said it all and the book keeps saying it to this day. Parts of it makes me cry
well phrased
The last couple pages always get me
I thought I was the only one...and I don't know why it makes me feel like that?
@Tony The story is the medication
that last paragraph will always give me chills.
properly registered the everlasting ephemeral
It is astonishing how much more sense the text makes when read out loud by someone who has the cadence and rhythm of Hibernian English! It feels significantly more accessible like this. So regrettable that he didn't record the entire thing.
Maybe artifical intelligence can resurrect his corpusnmentus and let us ear in agin!
@@CharlieOBrienTFMy thoughts exactly! It’d sure give us an idea even though it would lack the organic creativity of Joyce’s actual reading.
@@gearaddictclimber2524 with human input as to where it was going wrong it could be close to what he might have read, a rake of experts and money would have to be involved but it is possible, some day ;)
He sneaks lots of world rivers into this passage. Yangtze, Irawaddy, Orinoco, Krishna, Limpopo, Indus. Doubtless others I missed. Then near the end, the Liffey itself.
riverrun
Really reminds me of the old scealtoirs in the corner of the pub in the early hours of the morning! Beautiful. True Irish storytelling!
scealtoirs? please tell me now what that word means
@@hamunderhill2062 Its an Irish word for someone known for being a good storyteller
words don't often make me tingle like this!
you have it within you to listen to a climax
So it's supposed to be read in an Irish accent, makes much more sense now
Well yes. It has always been maintained, even as early as 1943 by Joseph Campbell that to read the texts out loud illuminate the singsongy nature of the texts and absolutely help in uncovering the inner workings of it. I personally do feel adding an Irish or Scottish accent to it absolutely illuminates the more dense and harder to read passages of the book. On genius.com I have detailed what I believe are codes to decipher it. The first paragraph being basically a skeleton key to the ways Joyce uses language to build. the first few words specifically. Also listening to Terence Mckenna's Surfing Finnegans Wake is indispensable. Also, and it pangs me to even have to mention this but somehow in this social media driven world some are oblivious to this- it is absolutely imperative that one OWNS AND READS a hard copy of this work to even begin to appreciate the complexity and thoroughness (with regards to the inclusiveness of the texts regarding everything. Ever. There is one chapter with a reference to every single recorded military battle in history) Finnegans Wake possesses.
They had heard or had heard said or had heard said written.
@@dr.galapagoats9596 Okay, I guess I'll set up my printer to print it out so I can better appreciate it.
Not THAT much more sense though lol
It happens naturally if you try reading it out loud, there are spellings that make you say words in an irish accent
@@dr.galapagoats9596
I got Finnegans Wake when I was 15 lol, shit made no sense.
Thank you. This is truly a labour of love and very beautiful.
art is a labor of love yes sir
imagine having the video of him reading this into a microphone. especially when he says, "you deed, you deed, I need, I need"
Audible finally has a beautiful version of Finnagen’s Wake, just released yesterday. You can put it on at night as you fall asleep and listen to the dreamy book while you dream. And then you will be able to say with honesty that you have read Finnegans Wake
If we ever send more human audio recordings on another interstellar-bound probe, let's put this on the playlist
Great job...the poetry of the work flows well with your treatment..
He is reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle section about two old washer women washing clothes along the Liffey, in it all the rivers of the world are mentioned in homage. The new language in FW is basically one word invades another word full of puns and uses 60 different languages. The first part is about early Irish history Battle of Clontarf, Brian Boru ambushed in the bath (Tolka river), Finnegan was a brick layer who fell off a ladder and in the fall has a dream, a comic history of Ireland. The next section is about his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and his sons Shem and Shaun. A leitmotif HCE keeps appearing in the book, can be Having children everywhere, or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker etc an archetype. FW is a comic novel written in dense puns.
No, an Innkeeper
Here Comes Everybody.
What a strawng man! Very well capable of any and all such universalizations
Chair Governors ,
sorry error made in scrolling replies
Thanks for creating this vid. Having just set this section to music and recording the reading of it (not with an Irish accent), I finally get it, and really appreciate Joyce's reading. It's spectacular.
What a treasure this is! Thanks so much for uploading it.
I love the way Joyce says "Peppers."
Truly extraordinary. Thanks for animating this and posting it!
how can finnegans wake ever be topped? how can there ever be another work which eclipses it? joyce grabs a fistful of beauty and absconds with it, blasting off from the clutches of language itself in a rocket fashioned from components we can recognize individually yet are nonetheless arranged in a way nobody but joyce could ever hope really understand... if even he can. joyce channels something temporally nuanced and steeped in his own personal experience, yet which nonetheless manages to feel hauntingly familiar -- universal, even. if god lays claim to any one language, joyce is the closest any has come to actually speaking it, however haltingly.
new, by the Fine Bros: Kids React to Joyce's Love Letters
stay out of his private affairs follow the rules of his art
This is the most beautiful video on youtube. Thank you for making this.
This is simply captivating. Love your concept. Have returned to this video countless times, always on Bloomsday. PS: It is my understanding that this recording of Joyce's recitation was recorded in 1936.
very good animation & thanks for putting the subtitles on
+Kevin Salt agreed. Good production.
Brilliantly conceived and created. What a puurfeect way to feel FW.
I hear this and I hear Pound. Those words 'lowp ower the years' are quite magical. Certainly rewarding. Joyce certainly delights in language but also the language of places and atmospheres now lost. As if with a childs ear; hearing but not understanding.
A masterpiece by the greatest writer since William Shakespeare.
this is the most fun book to read out loud
I think Finnegan's Wake is an epic, meant to be spoken aloud like the Iiliad or the Odyssey, or even Beowulf. I think most people don't understand Finnegan's Wake because they don't read it using Irish English, for those of us who are conscious's allows us to read the inner monologue in an Irish accent it works
so wonderful. Thank you so, so much for this
Genius! Reminds me of the jabberwock's poem...
as it should
Beautiful work! Thanks a lot.
Jung said it could easily be read backwards as frontwards. JJ seems to be speaking to a generation in our race many generations from now...
That just blew my mind
Very beautiful work. Thank you!
Legend says that if you get to the middle of the book, you will wake up from the matrix.
Thank you for this
Beautiful! Thank you!!
This man has such a wonderful voice it goes so well with the book's rhythm. Anybody know how I could contact him to do a reading of Ulysses for my book club?
This is the funniest thing I'm ever seen on TH-cam!
And to think somebody was only asking him for directions.. And they got this. Sure the fella's away with the faeries so he is.
I come to think of Salad Fingers. ”You’re just a sticky river”.
"Wasn't it the truth I told you? Lots of fun at Finnegan's Wake!"
His stream-of-consciousness is flowing unimpeded. Remember, he is universally accepted as the greatest author of the 20th century...and yes I said yes I will yes.
Joyce > Shakespeare.
Wrong book.
acceptance matters but he created his readership
@@kelman727 James Kelman swoops in to be a net troll. Marvellous! :)
@@alphonseelric5722 I'd argue they are equally profound, influential and talented visionaries.
very powerful, thank you
Super cool - thank you. A wonderful combo
tfw we'll never have a full audiobook narrated by joyce
Mon dieu! This is an oeuvre d’art supreme. Felicitations!
When you stare into the abyss...
It’s like he’s spamming the keyboard suggestions.
Someone once said this book was the literary equivalent to a shitpost and that's basically the case
Take your anorak. You'll be glad you have it.
Wow...that is amazing!
Shakespearean Sonnet on a line from Finnegan's Wake that might raise a smile. th-cam.com/video/ZmmZtupNdkU/w-d-xo.html Remember this bit?
He sounds more like a rural north county Cork accent, I know his father was from Cork, he probably imitated his father’s voice.
So that’s it: Grand Theory meets Darby O’Gill. Love the way JJ’s poetic rendering of the two washerwomen gets murdered by the awful American speech recognition/ closed caption AI: Geritol is my favourite, followed by Yankee for “yangseen’s hat” - JJ would have loved it
'I Knew Right Away...'
I had heard that the intonations of a native Irish English speaker can shed an entirely different light on the meaning of this text. I was a little doubtful of this view, but I decided to give it a try, if only briefly. I was amazed to find it was true beyond my wildest imagination- from even the first 15 seconds of the video clip I realized that this was not only a different accent or dialect, but an entirely different language altogether- one that sounded very much like chirping birds. I then signed up for a course in Irish linguistics, which I knew would be a requisite preparation for further Joyce studies.
Have any of you others managed to make any progress in deciphering this 'chirping birds' style of Irish English?
Are you sure you're not associationally confusing the chirping birds in the background with the recording? Nothing about Joyce's lilt sounds remotely chirpy to me tbh
That was deep
Awesome! Leaves me wanting more ,,,
The text read by Joyce shows a few differences with the definitive version as exposed in the subtitles.
Awesome! More people need to read Finnegans Wake, I included :).
To be sure twas grandly spoken!
ufer and ufer..... tremendous
Thank you!
Exquisite
What a poet.
Hey, Vineland's mentioned. Very Thomas Pynchon.
No Irish were injured during the making of this. Wait. Of course they were. Slainte!
I hate that this is probably gonna be thought of as an AI video soon. PLEASE MARK THIS VIDEO AS NOT AI
Honestly this makes just about as much sense as any ai generate nonsense anyway
Godhead
this is absolutely fantastic. I'm particularly interested in how you did it. It would take forever to do an actual claymation, so I'm guessing a green screen of an actual person and then a program like blender or maya. Are you willing to divulge the secret? Thanks!
Somehow the accent helps it make some sense
Day for Night
hc eh?
Joyce, the master of prolix.
pathos for the fading presence of those with dimentia
animated the work of joyce & beckett
Does anyone know if there's a cleaned up version of this audio out there? I have auditory processing problems and this is just a little too muffled for me to parse
He sounds like a retired Irish jockey.
I'm kinda confused, are the subtitles what he actually wrote or what they thought he was saying. Cause I understood most of it but it was written as gibberish
+Megan Ryan if you mean the subtitles that are baked into the video, and not googles auto-generated ones (which are also gibberish but definitely worth a look :) then yes, thats exactly how it appears in the book. pages and pages of gibberish, but it starts to make a bit more sense once you read it out loud and listen to the words instead of trying to understand it by looking at them.
+Electronical Monocle thanks, cause I can understand what he's saying but I don't know why nobody decided to spell it in English 😂
+Megan Ryan the whole point was he was writing about everything that nobody wanted to see. why do you think he was in exile? why do you think Ulysses was not allowed in several countries? It was just too much. That Is why I constantly write. then when people ask me to speak they act all shocked because I give them the truth. That's what James Joyce did ( in my opinion). But who knowa
+Isaiah Harrell *knows
+Megan Ryan I have a friend who was the editor for the publication of "The James Joyce Chronicles" I started reading my book to him and he said "I didn't come here to think, I came here to relax." it made me think.
How do you do this animation, and how long does it take?
i mainly used "crazy talk" but also photoshop to cut out each head from the background so that the background would move when animating. then i put the finished crazy talk animation back onto the background in Premiere.
i made this a long time ago though so there might be better options around these days. it didnt take too long, except the mouth animation. the controls for that part are really hard to work with in crazy talk
grazie
I wonder why he switches the words Gammer and Gaffer at 6:15, is it a mistake in the subtitles or a choice by him to read it opposite of his book?
i never copped that! i was worried for a second i had botched the subtitles but its "gammer and gaffer" in any of the texts i can find. this recording was done 10 years before the book was published though so he might have changed that bit around later on. either that or it was the stress of having a microphone shoved in his face :D
@@electronicalmonocle Wow that's so interesting. It seems like the most probable option is that he purposefully chose to switch those words around in the text. If that's true his attention to detail is incredible.
i've been reading this for 50 years... then i find out he meant all his books be read aloud. there's laughter reading this. none in Ulysses...imo
Was it raining outside or was Joyce waiting for the bacon to fry while he read?
which language is this?
engliss
All of them.
Joycean
You have to be Irish to understand this ... for the rest of us ... it is like learning Russian ... when you hear it ... you have to cut apart (i.e. separate) each word from another to ... slowly understand it.
You used Adobe Character Animator :) It's pretty easy isn't it. :D
if that had been around at the time i might have used it! what i used to make this was crazytalk v6 and unfortunately it wasnt very easy :)
trying to get the mouth to sync with the audio was the most tedious part and i had to play through it so many times that i nearly started to crack up a bit towards the end haha
Sounds German accent to me. Is it normal?
Fernando Graça
Irish.
Some English words are purposefully mixed with German words or are supposed to sound like them, so, Fernando, you're right in a certain sense!
Is this truly the animator? Is the uploader The Animator?
What I can decipher centers very much in sexual maters.
muy lindo
What the fuck, I actually understand what's being said. Maybe I should give Finnegans Wake a go, it doesn't seem that hard.
You'll find it has no plot, no chronology, no real characters per se. Give it a rip. It's hilarious.
Listen to it as you read. If you're reading silently, with this book above all others, you are missing out. It's much easier to understand it with your ears than your eyes.
It's the most liberating thing you'll ever read. Most else in literature comes off as coercive
It is less intelligible to me than the Jabberwocky.
:-(
Nice animations though!
:-)
Joyce was a middle-class Dubliner so where did he get that bizarre accent? 😊