Mikhail Vizel. Finnegan's Awakening

Finnegan's Awakening
Mikhail Vizel

Publication date: March 1, 2004

At the very end of February, Henri Volokhonsky presented the “Wake of the Finnegans” to the public. This is exactly how, with a small letter, the poet and translator, musicologist and kabbalist Volokhonsky called his “experiments of fragmentary transcription in the Russian alphabet” (also his expression) of the famous novel by James Joyce for its unreadability and untranslatability.

It turned out quite well: “ The quickie, he ruffled the husks of her playful caresses and pleasant pyrrhic. Overgrown, overgrown, but she’s just a fidar-haired, this snaking crop! From three pierres in the zoo in ambush. Weave, veil, in the centuries of lovers! She, she surpassed everyone "Knock on the nose, knock on the tail. Hohobrya! Of course it was her, not us! "

Or here’s another: “ It was in the darkness of times long past, in the ancient Stone Age, when Adam was still diving with a hoe to his madam, and she was turning a spindle in the muddy streams, and everywhere there was a smell of plowing, when the primordial, genuine, drunken robber drank and licked so that his eyes were bleeding from passion, and not from old age ."

One can imagine what wave of rejection and even indignation this painstaking work of Henri Volokhonsky, which, according to his admission, took five years, could now cause. And the indignation, we note, is completely justified. After all, a prose translator, by virtue of his very position, must be extremely conservative, be not in the vanguard, but in the rearguard of the language and literature of this language. He does not explore new paths, but consolidates and codifies his findings. Roughly speaking, a word, construction or phrase enters the language not when the original prose writer comes up with it or uses it on a grand scale, but when the translator decides to insert it into his text.

But there probably won't be any outrage. Because Henri Volokhonsky transferred his creation to a different context. And, it must be said, the translator chose a form for presenting his work to the public that was even more bizarre than its content itself: “Wake of the Finnegans” was released in the form of an “audiobook” - a disk (in an unusual cardboard cover that smelled strongly of some kind of impregnation), on which expressive author's reading is accompanied by quiet and unobtrusive music.

This is where the fun begins. The fact is that the role of “sound designers” was taken on by Leonid Fedorov and Vladimir Volkov . The first is a rocker, the leader of "Auktsion", the second is a new jazzman and member of numerous ensembles, two well-known and sought-after musicians by their audience.

As a matter of fact, when it became known that the leader of "Auktsion" was releasing a disc with "Finnegan's Wake", it turned out that these same Volokhon's "Wake..." - that is, "Wake of the Finnegans" - were published a long time ago, already in 2000 " Mitya magazine" and the publishing house "Column". They are completely available on the corresponding website and are even, in principle, sold - for example, on Ozone .

But the fact of the matter is that this became known to the public (we would even venture to say: the general public) only after the stunning news of such an incredible project spread.

What prompted these three creative people to release an unusual audiobook? Is it really just a desire to “get promoted”? One can still suspect Henri Volokhonsky of this (purely theoretically, of course, just keeping in mind the “cui prodest”), but certainly not Fedorov. If the track with Volokhonsky’s voice, which appeared “in the epilogue” of Fedorov’s penultimate disc “There Will Be No Winter,” could be perceived as a cute, but generally unnecessary “homage”, a tribute to the author of “City of Gold,” then this new disc is simply suicide, both from a commercial point of view, and from the point of view of the loyal and already accustomed fans of "Auktsion"..

The answer is in another audiobook by Volokhonsky and Fedorov - “Mountains and Rivers”, released simultaneously with “Wake”. It's half as long (a little over half an hour), and there's more music. Volokhonsky recites there his “Catalogue of Mountains and Seas” (“ Beyond the southern sea, west of the Red River, east of the Quicksand, three green animals live. Their bodies are fused. That’s why they call them “Sroshi... ”), hums poetry to the cracked old man voice and reads aphorisms.Two of them provide the answer to the sacramental cui prodest.

“ The current culture is a culture in the same sense in which known garden crops are crops”; “Perhaps a person’s main occupation should not be art. Just what ? ”

This is what Fedorov, a rocker who is tired of being “just” a rocker, and Volokhonsky, a translator who can no longer be “just” a translator, are trying to find. It is very difficult to write about this elusive “ what ” that arose at the intersection of different genres and even different cultures. But it is necessary. Finnegan either comes to life or awakens. And, I would like to hope, it’s about to start dancing.