INTERVIEW/Re-Joyce in translation: Scholar breathes Sinitic life into 'Finnegans Wake'

By Chao Yen-hsiang, CNA staff writer

Once deemed impossible to translate, James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" has finally received its first complete rendering for the Mandarin-speaking world.

Since its debut in 1939, the novel has challenged readers with its dreamlike stream-of-consciousness narrative, dense multilingual puns and portmanteaus (spanning more than 60 languages), and linguistic structures that defy conventional grammar.

In December 2024, Taiwan's Bookman Books published the first full-length Taiwanese Sinitic translation in the world by Joyce scholar Liang Sun-chieh (梁孫傑), marking the 16th language and 21st complete edition worldwide.

In an interview with CNA, Liang, a former president of the Irish Studies Association Taiwan, said the Irish modernist's final novel represented his ambition to rewrite human history in place of the Bible, Joyce believed that, with "Ulysses," he had not only emulated but possibly even surpassed Shakespeare.

Challenging as translating "Finnegans Wake" is, Liang said he rejoiced in the process and was even "reluctant to finish."

Here comes everybody

To tackle Joyce's "Wakese language," Liang's linguistic toolbox went beyond Chinese dialects, incorporating Kanji, Hanja, and Chữ Nôm, a classical Vietnamese script.

He also turned to ancient oracle bone script and borrowed the thunder sign commonly used in Japanese manga.

Further inspiration came from the Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰), who famously reshaped English alphabets into forms resembling Chinese characters.

Liang adopted a similar technique to bridge different linguistic traditions, coining new words by visually morphing "English" into Sinitic glyphs.

Translating "Finnegans Wake," he explained, is formidable not only because of its encyclopedic references but also because Joyce continually shifts narrators, blends fact with fiction, and weaves truth into convoluted fabrication.

"It's like a pub where people are chatting, shouting, and arguing all at once -- Joyce captures those voices and lays them all out simultaneously," Liang said.

To achieve this, Liang often expanded on Joyce's densely packed text, ensuring the layers of meaning were preserved. As a result, the original 628-page text blossomed into a three-volume, 1.25-million-character translation.

Before his latest work, Bookman Books had published a selective translation by Liang in 2017, covering only its first two chapters.

Compared with its precursor, Liang's complete translation is vastly enriched with annotations and cross-references to make it more accessible to readers.

"I think the novel is truly intriguing, and I want everyone to enjoy it rather than be intimidated by it," he said.

'Taiwanese Sinitic translation'

In the Mandarin-speaking world, Liang's effort followed the pioneering selective translation of "Finnegans Wake" by Chinese scholar Dai Congrong (戴從容), which covered the novel's first book.

However, Liang emphasized that his work is a "Taiwanese Sinitic" rather than a simple "Chinese" translation, both linguistically and culturally.

"I was fortunate to be born in Taiwan," he said, praising the island's multilingual environment and freedom for facilitating a "libertine pastiche" of languages and dialects.

"Taiwanese is my mother tongue, and I learned Mandarin Chinese and English at school. During my childhood visits to my cousin in the military dependents' village, I was exposed to various Chinese dialects.

"My parents spoke Japanese, though not fluently, and like many other Taiwanese, I read Japanese Kanji and Korean Hanja, despite their meanings not always aligning with their Chinese counterparts," Liang said.

He drew parallels between the novel's protagonist journeying from Northern Europe to Ireland and the migration from China to Taiwan, seeing in the Sinitic sphere natural counterparts for the linguistic complexity of "Finnegans Wake."

Labor of love

Liang said he first resolved to translate "Finnegans Wake" in the late 1990s after completing his PhD at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York (SUNY), home to the world's most comprehensive James Joyce archive.

However, his first attempt at reading the novel as a student in Taiwan left him baffled. Liang said he abandoned the effort within three minutes as he found no resonance with its chaotic cosmos, or "chaosmos" as Joyce wrote.

It wasn't until one night at a SUNY Buffalo reading club for the novel held at his professor's house, when all attendees of the reading group spontaneously broke into song over a passage, that he -- the only Taiwanese member -- felt a familiarity.

"I'll never forget that moment. It felt like a Taiwanese traveler abroad who doesn't speak English suddenly stumbling upon a 7-Eleven," he said, alluding to the ubiquitous convenience store chain in Taiwan.

Reflecting on the years he spent translating the novel, Liang said that whenever he was awake, he was either working or translating, and the process humbled him.

"It was only when I began translating it that I realized how ignorant I was -- pathetically ignorant," he admitted.

Fin. again?

Liang said he could translate about half a page each day. Only twice did he finish two pages in one day, but he had also been trapped by a single word for months.

Yet, he cherished the experience so much that he found himself "reluctant to finish" the work when it was mostly done.

What he has accomplished, Liang said, is just "the first step on the journey of this Irish 'Divine Comedy,'" a nod to Dante's poetic vision of spiritual ascent.

But he hopes that more Sinitic-sphere translators will be inspired to refine his work.

"The more translations of 'Finnegans Wake' we have, the more possible worlds open up for us to reimagine the future of the humanities."

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