"О Финнегане!" - A New Russian Interpretation of the Title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

This paper proposes "О Финнегане!" as a new Russian interpretation of the title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The proposed title deliberately omits a comma, mirroring the missing apostrophe in Joyce's original. This creates multiple possible readings: a narrative about Finnegan without a fixed temporal perspective, an invocation addressed to Finnegan, and a collective address to the imagined "Finnegans" as a people. The letter "О", visually resembling a circle, additionally symbolizes the cyclical structure of the novel, in which the ending flows directly into the beginning. The proposal aims to preserve the linguistic ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning, and circularity of Joyce's original title.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-11-11
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24124090
Primary Topic
Translation Studies and Practices
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

"О Финнегане!" - A New Russian Interpretation of the Title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Ivan Bratash Kolchevski
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Translation Studies and Practices
article

"О Финнегане!" - A New Russian Interpretation of the Title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake

Ivan Bratash Kolchevski
article en

Abstract

This paper proposes "О Финнегане!" as a new Russian interpretation of the title of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The proposed title deliberately omits a comma, mirroring the missing apostrophe in Joyce's original. This creates multiple possible readings: a narrative about Finnegan without a fixed temporal perspective, an invocation addressed to Finnegan, and a collective address to the imagined "Finnegans" as a people. The letter "О", visually resembling a circle, additionally symbolizes the cyclical structure of the novel, in which the ending flows directly into the beginning. The proposal aims to preserve the linguistic ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning, and circularity of Joyce's original title.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Translation Studies and Practices
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