Translation functions as an intermediary space where languages and cultures encounter one another, generating new meanings through their interaction. In Joyce's Dubliners, such encounters occur primarily on a personal level; in Finnegans Wake, however, they are amplified to a global scale, where the West and the East converge. If each Wakese word may be understood as a world with a distinct culture, then the ceaseless collision and fusion of linguistic elements in the Wake mirrors the very dynamics of translation itself.
This dynamic can be illuminated through the concept of shiangji (相即, interbeing), a central idea in Tiantai Buddhism. Shiangji does not merely describe a harmonious synthesis of heterogeneous or even diametrically opposed elements; rather, it posits that such oppositions are originally and essentially non-dualistic—that they are, at their deepest level, one and the same. The Wakese “wor(l)d)” manifests precisely this condition of primordial non-differentiation.
By examining examples from Finnegans Wake at the levels of sound, sense, and visual shape, this paper argues that Joyce's multilingual wordplay enacts a state of interbeing in which linguistic and cultural differences coexist without hierarchy, revealing translation not as mediation between separable entities but as the unfolding of their inherent shiangji.