The 4th of September second-hand bookshop Rönnells in Stockholm
(http://www.ronnells.se) invited all interested in James Joyce to a very
special lecture, about what was called "The Joyce of Side Effects".
It was the legendary Swiss Joyce researcher Fritz Senn who would talk. Senn
has published A Wake Newslitter - "from the start almost a fanzine" Rönnells
presentation says -, The James Joyce Quarterly, he founded the Zurich James
Joyce Foundation with a big collection of Joyce material and he is thrice
honorary doctor.
Senn was born in 1928 and despite some 88 years he looked like a little kid
when talking about what one would guess is his favourite author. He spoke with
great energy and enthusiasm for 1.5 hours. Literature can keep you young,
perhaps?
(He had a packed programme. Next day he'd lecture at Stockholm university -
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4m374v_WgxMJ:http://www.english.su.se/about-us/events/research-seminars/higher-literary-seminars/higher-literary-seminar-fritz-senn-1.293151%2B%22joyce+of+side+effects%22&num=50&safe=off&hl=en-SE&gbv=2&ct=clnk
- and during his visit he'd be busy meeting joyceans.)
I have several roads into Joyce. I know the latest Swedish Joyce translator
Erik Andersson (an old science fiction fan; a review, in Swedish:
www.dn.se/dnbok/bokrecensioner/james-joyce-ulysses/) and my friend Bertil Falk
has translated parts of Finnegan's Wake (the bottom of this page:
https://zenzat.wordpress.com/zen-zats-julbocker/ ;) which is considered
extremely difficult to tackle. Erik did Ulysses, which is easier, but tough
enough; I got a signed copy of his book about translating Joyce (titled, in
translation: Day Out and Day In With A Day In Dublin, review in English:
http://www.swedishbookreview.com/show-review.php?i=388) when I heard him
lecture on the subject, and I attended the Swedish-Finnish Joyce Society when
Bertil presented his Finnegan's Wake translation.
Senn became interested in Joyce on a visit to Britain in the early 1950's. He
had studied English and picked up a book to train his English skills. This book
happened to be by Joyce. He became fascinated.
It's difficult to summarise all he had to say. He jumped between different
aspects of Joyce. A bit of his general idea was, I think, that Joyce is an
author of contradictions, opposites. He was catholic but also blasphemous. He
is seen as "high-brow" literature but wrote about simple people and dirty
streets. (Ulysses was originally banned as some sort of pornography in the US
and UK.) He is difficult to read, but in other ways easy. You don't understand
Joyce, but at the same time you do. He is a hero but was also a bit of a
scoundrel. Joyce is like a smörgåsbord: offers a lot of things and you can pick
whatever you like.
His language is of course of special interest. Joyce mixes high and low like
few others. Advanced references to the classical antiquity but also street
slang. You may know of course that it's from Finnegan's Wake the word "quark"
comes. Joyce thus even connected literature with advanced particle physics...
Joyce introduced a new way to write, but didn't become the big literary star
very fast. English publisher rejected Ulysses, which was instead published by
the Shakespeare & Co bookstore in Paris. The interest in him began to grow
after his death (1941). Bloomsday, June 16th, the day Ulysses takes place,
didn't become a big thing until the 1970's. The Swedish Academy of course
missed him for the Nobel Prize.
The language is, in a sense, "not English". It's a mix of everything.
English, slang, Latin, concepts Joyce has invented. A lot depends on "internal
translations", ie you have to do your own interpretation. You can choose how
you want to read Joyce, and in Ulysses all chapters have their own
characteristics of moods, perspectives, styles and other features.
A foreign reader or a translator may have an advantage. An English-language
reader will already have fixed ideas of what is being said, but a non-English
reader may approach the text with more open eyes. Joyce often doesn't say what
you first think. (That's why Erik Andersson took four years to translate
Ulysses.)
One thing impressive with Ulysses, Fritz Senn said, is the exact knowledge of
Dublin that Joyce has. The buildings, people, alleys, shops... There's a
butcher shop still existing today which is mentioned in Ulysses, for instance.
Joyce is very scathing about this butcher, but they are still proud just to be
mentioned... But everything isn't obvious and "up front". The book starts in a
tower, but it takes several pages until we know what it is and where we are.
Senn talked about much more, but had little time to take everything down and
my small pieces of paper began to be full. He talked about Joyce and sex,
religion, Ireland, about the work in the James Joyce Foundation, and manyother
things.
That's at least a few things Fritz Senn had to say, during an inspiring
lecture. My notes became cramped, fragmented and partly unreadable - maybe a
little bit like Finnegan's Wake itself...
--Ahrvid
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