Why is the parenthetic exchange at line 14 of page 52 there?
I promised to take another look at the Esperanto exchange in parentheses beginning at line 14 of page 52 in “Finnegans Wake,” the translation of which is as follows:
“A mirror doesn’t help an ugly person.”
“I believe you’re right, your dowry is your face,” replies a young lady.
Here is my best speculation as to why it is there.
In the preceding paragraph on page 51, beginning at line 17, a question is put but not answered:
“Those many warts, those slummy patches, halfsinster wrinkles, (what has come over the face on wholebroader E?), and (shrine of Mount Mu save us!) the large fungopark he has grown!”
A request for a “fully armed explanation” is put to a party smoking a fragrant calabash, who is executing with Annie Oakley deadliness empty bottles of Reid’s family stout. He has shot all but two of them—but these bottles appear not just to be bottles, but the recurring motif of the two women in the park. There “remained but two, the ones he fell for, Lili and Tutu, cork em!”
(Digression: This scene is very reminiscent of the one in “Eumaeus” in “Ulysses,” in which a sailor in the cabman’s shelter seems to recognize the name of Stephen’s father, Simon Daedalus, and says, “I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his shoulder. The left hand dead shot.”)
Our hero, having “reprimed his repeater,” speaks of Allah (“the One” and “the Compassionate”) and prepares to “call up” before the triad of precoxious scaremakers, (repeating the motif of the three soldiers in the park), the “now to ushere mythical habiliments of Our Farfar and Arthor of our doyne.” That is, he will call up Uther Pendragon, Our Father, King Arthur and the dozen knights of the Round Table!
BUT—as the narration reachest its grandest point, it is interrupted by a seemingly irrelevant exchange.
This exchange can be taken as a decision by one of the two women earlier in the paragraph to get by upon her looks. This would be supported by a passage we will come to on page 68, starting at line 1 that has one woman discovering she “stripped teasily for binocular man” and “rapidly took to necking, partying, and selling her spare favors . . . .”
However, the use of the word “scoretaking” that introduces the exchange seems to take us back to the shooting exhibition and suggests the exchange is a deflation of the grandiose images being evoked of our hero. Two women are still standing, and they say our hero behaved in an ugly way.
This reading would answer the question from the preceding paragraph: What has come over the face of our brother E? Those warts, those slimy patches, the halfsinster wrinkles and the large fungopark he has grown! Stories about “two he fell for” continue to sully his image.
I think the reason the exchange is in Esperanto is to emphasize the universality of what is being described.