Joyce, James. Finnegans wake. (London : Faber & Faber ; New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1939). [Geschrieben 1929-1939].
"Pure chingchong idiotism with any way sords all in one soluble. Gee each owe tea eye smells fish. That’s U" : In Joyce's notes yü 魚 = fish, is romanized as ü.
Chinese sounding syllables : "Tsing tsing !"
Chinese pidgin : "checking chinchin chat with nipponnippers".
"Hell's Confucium and the elements" : confusing the works Confucius' Analects and Euclid's Elements.
Joyce Sinicizes not only the language of his characters, but also the Irish landscape : Huang He, the Yellow Rivers appears several times in Irish settings : Bygmester Finnegan is seen piling "buildung supra building pon the banks for the livers by the Soangso". "Or where is it ? Lying beside the sedge I saw it. Hoangho, my sorrow, I've lost it !"
Joyce introduces the Yangzi : "And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland"s Vineland beyond Brendan"s herring pool takes number nine in Yangsee's hats."
He transports Beijing's Huang cheng (Imperial City) to Ireland by inserting the word "hill" : "seaventy seavens for circumference inceptive are your hill prospect. The word "hill prospect" allude to an artificial mound outside Beijing. The mound is known as "king shan" as it appears in notes Joyce took shortly before modifying the sentence : meaning "prospect hill".
"Son-yet-sun" = Sun Yat-sen.
"The buxers" = The Boxers.
Joyce use of the Chinese words for 'country', kuo and for 'king', wang embedded in "kuang".
At the time Joyce was revising the "St. Patrick and the druid" episode, he was reading about Confucius. He relied on Carl Crow's Master Kung [ID D3398] : "the most conical hodpiece of confusianist heronim and the chuchuffuous chinchin of his is like a footsey kungoloo around Taishantyland".
Cordell D.K. Yee : Transformations of Ireland into China may have been gratuitous, as one might infer from their scattered and often isolated occurrences. When Joyce incorporated them into Finnegans wake, perhaps he was merely clowning, indulging his penchant for play. It seems that by 1938 he had dropped enough hints of Ireland's identity with China to feel a need to justify them, to demonstrate the validity of the identification. Joyce may have felt an affinity with Confucius, who exiled himself from his native state because his ideas were being ignored. Confucius becomes a personal case of metempsychosis, suffering the same fate as Joyce : he is restored to his original obscurity. I suspect that Joyce consulted the Chinese classics by James Legge, Crow cited Legge in his preface and used a lot of Legge's material. Joyce does occasionally refer to Confucian principles expounded in the Zhong yong : "A good plan used by worried business folk who may not have had many momentums to master Kung's doctrine of the meang or the propriety codestruces of Carprimustimus is just to think of all the sinking fund of patience."
In a reversal of the 'St. Patrick and the druid' episode's original outcome it is now St. Patrick who proves superior, and the druid who goes to ruin. The downfall of the sinicized druid is foreshadowed by allusions to China's Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan : "Genghis is ghoon for you" and to the Jurchens : "Confindention to churchen".
Literature : Occident : Ireland