On the untranslatability of Finnegans Wake (and its semiotic consequences)

Considered not only untranslatable, but also unreadable, ’Finnegans Wake’ (FW), the last book by James Joyce, has been the object of a series of translational attempts. What I want to suggest here is that: even the English reader is forced to “translate to themselves” the text (from so–called Finneganian to English); source oriented translations simply do not make sense (as they sabotage the very generation of meanings nested in the text); the only possible form of translation for a text such as this is re–creation (due to its polyglot nature and the consequent structural polysemy). FW stands not so much as a finished literary work, but rather as a heuristic model, a project in the making, a “work in progress” (as maintained by its provisional title): a puzzle that needs to be re–started every time, inviting the reader to complete it in order to appropriate it, always partially, in a diverse, idiosyncratic, and idiolectal fashion. The project designed by FW is that of a text that truly lives in its pragmatic dimension only and in the transtextual adventures activated, within the “limits of interpretation”, by the “intention of the reader”. It is no coincidence that Umberto Eco theorized the “open work” and the processes of “interpretative cooperation” starting from this book. A communicative limit object, FW should be taken as a model, instead of being dismissed as an exception, by every discipline interested in meaning–making.