Oh, Come the Fuck on with Finnegan's Wake Already

I've read Portrait of the Artist as Young Man several times and prolly will again, but Ulysses is another matter altogether.  Like Finnegan's Wake I've never even bothered trying to understand it when reading, but from time to time I pick it up and flip to a random page to read just for that smooth rhythm of Joyce's.  I can think of no other author for whom I do such a thing.  I don't know what the hell's going on and I don't give a shit; it's like loving a song when you don't really know or care what the words mean. - XMASTIME

VIA SULLY we read about the Chinese translation that's a *bit* of a bear to put together:

Dai’s translation only covers the first third of the book and clocks in at 775 pages; for comparison, the full English text is 676 pages long. Most of the extra pages can be attributed to footnotes and annotations, which were needed to make sense of the novel. According to the Wall Street Journal, the first sentence of Dai’s translation is accompanied by two definitions, five footnotes, and seven asides that explain the possible intended meanings for the word “riverrun” and the allusions to an 18th century academic named Giovanni Battista Vico, and for later sentences in the book Dai had to create new Chinese characters to capture sounds from the novel. Talking to Reuters after the book’s release, she said she started having doubts early on, when after two years of work she had yet to translate one word.

My bold. I mean, come the fuck on - after TWO years, she STARTED to have doubts?!?!?!?! At some point, this cannot in any way be even remotely enjoyable to read, but merely some fucking mathematical puzzle to be put together. ie, the opposite of how I choose to read it.