Translation of an Excerpt from Anna Livia Plurabelle’s Final Monologue

Abstract

This is a translation of an excerpt from the last three pages of Finnegans Wake (FW 626.30 – 628.16), in which the river-character Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) presents a bitter farewell monologue, motivated by the abandonment of her family and the supposed betrayal of her mountain-husband Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) with her cloud-daughter, young Issy. While remembering the past, ALP feels old, alone and without the strength to continue, disintegrating herself from a world in which she no longer fits. She, who monologues at the same time that her family sleeps, goes to meet the father-sea in a flow that closes the last page of the work with the excerpt “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (no period). However, this absence of punctuation provokes a circular movement that takes the reader back to the initial page, which begins with the word riverrun, in lowercase, which connects itself with the incomplete sentence “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” from page 628. In this way, what seemed to be the end of the character and also of the book soon becomes the restart of both. It is as if the river-woman who disappears into the sea evaporates herself and reappears on the front page after raining from her cloud-daughter, being vigorously reborn through her rival.