Counterparts and Crosses: Styles of Joycean Doubling (20)
Chair: Maria DiBattista (Princeton University)
Contributors:
- Jay Dickson (Reed College): “Doubling Entendres: Robert McAlmon, James Joyce, and Camp”
- Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State University): “Nighttown, Naked Nymphs, and Naughty Nicknames: Pornographic Joyce in the 1970s”
- Scott Klein (Wake Forest University): “The Man Who Fell to Earth: Stephen Dedalus and the Afterlives of Icarus”
- Eliana Rozinov (Princeton University): “The Mirror, the Razor, and the Boot”
Before Dublin was “Dyoublong”—less a place name than a question Joyce puts to its denizens—it was Dui blind, a dark pool. This panel scrutinizes the images Joyce saw mirrored on the shadowy surfaces and within the murky depths of Dublin’s dark pool, images of himself as an artist eager to take flight but also of the disaffected beings islanded in its dusky waters. It will examine how future artists recast Joyce’s narrative and linguistic figures to dramatize their own struggles to “belong” to themselves as artistic and sexual beings.
Scott Klein launches our inquiry by considering the modern career of Icarus, Joyce’s first mythical counterpart, as he is doubled in his various afterlives—as a scarcely noticed marginal phenomenon in W. H. Auden; as a farcical character escaped from a novel in Raymond Queneau; as an extraterrestrial in Nicholas Roeg, through the source novel by Walter Tevis; and as a potentially healing model for a wounded father/daughter relationship in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Klein demonstrates how these Joycean reincarnations, simultaneously tragic, ironic, and farcical, hopeless and potentially redemptive, are catalyzed in and by crosscurrents of personal and national striving.
Eliana Rozinov identifies an allied form of baffled striving in the gender politics that cross over from “The Dead” to Ulysses. She posits that the chiasmus that concludes “The Dead” is recalled in the novel’s opening image of “Buck Mulligan…. bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” This cross, however, does not symbolically belong to “stately, plump” Buck but rather to the “slight and graceful” Gerty MacDowell, who embodies the dilemmas of gender and sex, purity and impurity, figure and disfigurement that haunt “The Dead” and plague Ulysses.
Jay Dickson then takes up the gender crossings imagined by Joyce’s American friend Robert McAlmon. Particularly noteworthy are McAlmon’s short stories “Miss Knight,” “Distinguished Air,” and “The Lodging-House,” stories depicting the Berlin sexual underground of the 1920s that show a clear obligation to the nocturnal chapters “Oxen of the Sun,” “Circe,” and “Penelope.” The exuberant camp idiolects of these “grim fairy tales,” as McAlmon called them, display a Joycean ability to ground queer self-fashioning in linguistic excess.
As Jonathan Greenberg details, the excitement but also the anxiety provoked by the sexual explicitness and gender fluidity of Joyce’s writing took on a new cultural charge with the 1974 Broadway revival of Ulysses in Nighttown that featured Fionnula Flanagan playing Molly in the nude. Flanagan’s controversial performance (like the publication of Joyce’s explicit letters to Nora a year later) boldly suggests that a male author, even one raised with retrograde attitudes towards female sexuality, might summon as a counterpart a figure of feminist self-possession.
In tracing Joyce’s islanded figures and their rippled reflections, these papers deepen our understanding of Joycean doubling as a means of discovering (often uncovering) who one is and where one—rightfully, finally—belongs.
Defences and Indictments: St. Patrick, the Archdruid, and Finnegans Wake (43)
The “St. Patrick and the Archdruid” episode of Finnegans Wake is a key component of James Joyce’s process in composing the book. This was one of the Wake’s earliest four “sketches,” composed in 1923, and it therefore belongs to what David Hayman called the “armature” of the Wake, its “nodal macrosystem,” its “signifying skeleton.” Patrick reappears repeatedly throughout the work, and Joyce developed many larger themes from it. When he wrote to “Harriet Shaw Weaver that it was “a piece describing the conversion of S. Patrick by Ireland,” he was inverting the conventional historical understanding of what happened at Tara on Easter 432, thereby suggesting the characters of St. Patrick and the Archdruid were doubles; indeed, these figures eventually become stand-ins for the twins Shem and Shaun. As he did with the other sketches, Joyce placed “St. Patrick and the Archdruid” to one side and did not work it into the Wake proper the late summer of 1938, when he placed it at the climax of Book IV. After final publication, Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen: “Much more is intended in the colloquy between Berkeley the arch druid and his pidgin speech and Patrick the arch priest and his Nippon English. It is also the defence and indictment of the book itself, B’s theory of colours and Patrick’s practical solution of the problem.” These questions have proven so tantalizing that Joyce scholars have never stopped trying to extrapolate their meanings. The papers in this panel will therefore explore some of these questions and consider various interpretations of this “defence and indictment.”
Chair: Nathan Wallace
Contributors:
- Lorenzo Peyrani: “A Rainbow Without One Colour: The Logic of the Green World in Finnegans Wake”
This essay focuses on the issue of the six colours of the spectrum that we do not see as distinct from the one colour that we do perceive; he associates Patrick with the latter and the druid with the colour spectrum, but argues that Patrick, in his empirical victory, is forced to acknowledge the reality of the underlying chromaticism that is the basis for all perception of colour.
- Terence Killeen (The James Joyce Center, Dublin): “The Conversion of St Patrick: How Patrick and the Druid evolved”
The paper will deal with the development of the piece from the very early sketch stage — one of the first pieces Joyce wrote — through its textual stages to its “finished” condition, and what the development tells us about Joyce’s conception of the piece. It will also consider how it ended up so late on in the book, having been written so early.
- Nathan Wallace (The Ohio State University): “A Game of Reconstructions: Saint Patrick and the Archdruid”
The paper will survey the history of the episode’s interpretive summaries and argue the wide range of demonstrated possibilities suggests Joyce designed this episode (a microcosm of the book) as a game whereby readers would be obliged to engage in speculative reconstructions of “original” plots and meanings, much in the way scholars of Joyce’s time were speculatively reconstructing the historical Patrick from surviving medieval texts
Dyoublong in the Margins? Joyce, Gender, and Community (Panel 4)
This panel brings together three papers that approach the subject of ‘belonging’ in Joyce studies through the twin lenses of gender and community. Moving from microcosmic readings of discrete works and institutional settings to more macro questions of identity and community formation, the papers interrogate gendered literary practices and map the margins of belonging in Joyce’s life, work, and afterlives in the ‘Joyce community’. Together, the contributions probe the limits of communal identification in a modernity shaped by sexual regulation, institutional segregation, and cultural anxiety, suggesting that Joyce persistently locates community not at the center of Dublin’s social life but in its uneasy margins.
Chair: Casey Lawrence (she/they)
Contributors:
- Katherine Ebury (University of Sheffield): “The Limits of Feminist Belonging in ‘Circe’ and Beyond”
Important scholarship in the recent ‘Women’s Issue’ of the JJQ by Vike Plock has addressed the theme of female solidarity within Joyce’s work and in the wider Joyce community. My paper will further develop this idea by examining the theme of feminist belonging in relation to the brothel space depicted in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses. I further examine the critical history of the episode in order to test and evaluate possibilities for feminist solidarity in our wider field.
- James Green (Wake Forest University): “Reading Access: James Joyce and Mary Colum at University”
Friends later in life, James Joyce and Mary Colum both attended the same undergraduate institution, the Royal University in Dublin—albeit in a gender-segregated manner. Drawing on Colum’s valuable insights into their undergraduate years in Our Friend James Joyce and Life and the Dream, I take a comparative approach to the turn-of-the-century Irish university and ask how this gendered environment informed their respective reading practices. Joyce’s ‘feminine’ degree choice (Modern Languages), scandalously coed peership, and extracurricular studies will be contextualised alongside Colum’s account of university education as an entry point into a pre-revolutionary intellectual community.
- Casey Lawrence (Trinity College Dublin): “Joyce’s Male Loneliness Epidemic”
Joyce’s male characters hunger for physical and emotional intimacy but are trapped by queer panic and the fear of being misinterpreted post-Wilde. Focusing on the Cranly–Stephen–Buck love triangle, Bloom’s infamous ‘undercurrent of homosexuality,’ and James Duffy’s epiphany in Dubliners that ‘[l]ove between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse’, I will investigate how Joyce anatomises modernist gendered subjectivity as a ‘male loneliness epidemic’ stemming from the double-bind of a fin-de-siècle ideal masculine that demanded male–male intimacy while simultaneously policing those bonds.
Dyoublong: Do You Belong? (Panel 50)
Our panel will explore divisions between the literal and the metaphysical, the real and the projected, as well as divisive issues of belonging and exclusion—national, racial, sexual, class—issues of human and civil rights.
Chair: Ellen Carol Jones
Contributors:
Ellen Carol Jones: “Blood and Belonging” (opening remarks)
- Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin): Ghostly Traces: The Stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Joyce’s Dubliners
Joyce’s Dubliners stands apart from the Irish short story tradition. But it is also inherently connected to the work of several predecessors. This paper sets out to explore the connections between the ghost stories of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Dubliners. Le Fanu is an important predecessor as his tales, such as “The Watcher” and “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”, establish the ghostly as emanating from the history and geography of Dublin. Further, spectres in Le Fanu are situated between the literal and the metaphysical, the real and the projected, the explicable and the unfathomable. Joyce, it will be shown, inherits and redisposes many of the uncanny effects and preoccupations of Le Fanu’s tales and also reconfigures their core tropes such as social degeneracy, the resurrected patriarch, and the confessional heroine. Like in Le Fanu, lines of division in Joyce’s stories between haunter and haunted are resolutely and disturbingly blurred.
- Agata Szczeszak-Brewer (Wabash College): “Gendered Nationalisms in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk”
Ireland’s James Joyce and Poland’s Witold Gombrowicz were critical of institutionally sanctioned “national” literatures and refused to use the language prescribed by the so-called patriots. Joyce’s Molly and Leopold Bloom and Gombrowicz’s Gonzalo as well as the character named Witold Gombrowicz (after the author) are outside the nationalist framework because, among other things, they are outside Irish and Polish gender orthodoxies. In Ulysses (1922) and Trans-Atlantyk (1953), ethnic deracination is often deeply rooted in nonconforming gender traits and sexualities. In societies where illicit sexual fantasies are projected upon ethnic others, heteronormativity is synonymous with patriotism. Women have been only symbolically incorporated into the narratives of nation-states as mother-figures and domestic laborers, but Joyce’s and Gombrowicz’s novels consciously elide even a symbolic national representation of the sexually ambiguous or unorthodox characters. Since the economy of symbol relies on the arbitrarily established clarity of its referent, gender ambiguity signaled by bisexual and gay citizens defies this clear-cut symbolic transaction.
- Vincent J. Cheng (University of Utah): “Doubling, Belonging, and Otherness”
What does it mean to be, say, American? Who qualifies as “American”? Does a Somali or an Afghan person, even if born in the USA, qualify? Who belongs, and who should be expelled or deported? Indeed, who qualifies as “British”—and what does it mean to be British? Or German? Or Polish? “Whose land” (U 7.271) is it anyway? And “Dyoublong?” (FW 13.04) These issues, so pertinent and heatedly contested in our own contemporary debates around immigration, naturalization, birth citizenship, indeed around who is sufficiently and authentically native to belong—were also crucial questions in Joyce’s time: what does it mean to be Irish? Who qualifies as being “truly” Irish?
I want to explore the issue of belonging in Joyce’s works (particularly in Finnegans Wake) by looking at Joyce’s insistent—actually, ubiquitous—treatment of doubling (“dyoublong”: doubling and belonging). For the logics of exclusion (from belonging, from citizenship, from the patria) depend on a series of binaries that Joyce explodes—binaries such as native versus outsider, authentic versus inauthentic, white versus black, and so on. Rather, Joyce employs the particularly insistent motifs of doubling in the Wake in order to suggest the instability and inauthenticity of binary essences, that unstable logic used to distinguish between the authentic and the contaminated, between the citizen and the immigrant, between them and us.
Georgian Odyssey of Ulysses: Celebrating the Centenary of Nico Kiasashvili (Panel 19)
Chair: Irakli Tskhvediani, Akaki Tsereteli State University (Georgia)
Contributors:
- Eliso Pantskhva: “Translating Narrative Duality in Joyce’s “Nausicaa” Episode into Georgian”
- Nino Tsurtsumia: “Urban Toponyms in the Georgian Translation of Ulysses”
- Irakli Tskhvediani: “Translating Ulysses into Georgian: Nico Kiasashvili and the Art of Joyce Translation”
Dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nico Kiasashvili, this panel revisits the Georgian translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses as both a singular translational feat and a foundational moment in the history of Georgian encounters with European modernism. By situating Kiasashvili’s work within broader debates on literary modernity, linguistic experimentation, and cultural transfer, the panel highlights translation as a critical site of literary innovation.
Approaching Kiasashvili’s work from complementary perspectives—narrative form, urban space, and translation methodology—the panel foregrounds the translator’s role as an active interpreter of Joyce’s modernist experiment. Together, the three papers trace a Georgian “odyssey” of Ulysses, revealing how Joyce’s stylistic plurality, spatial precision, and linguistic radicalism are reconfigured within the Georgian language and literary tradition.
The first paper, “Translating Narrative Duality in Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa’ Episode into Georgian” by Eliso Pantskhava, focuses on one of the most structurally and ideologically complex episodes of Ulysses. “Nausicaa” is defined by a sharp narrative bifurcation between Gerty MacDowell’s sentimentalized, romance-inflected discourse and Leopold Bloom’s fragmented, corporeal interior monologue. This duality operates across stylistic register, syntax, lexical choice, and ideological positioning toward gender, desire, and embodiment. The paper examines how Kiasashvili negotiates Joyce’s parody of popular romance fiction—largely absent from nineteenth-century Georgian literary tradition—while maintaining cultural intelligibility. It analyzes whether the translation evokes analogous sentimental registers from Georgian prose and poetry or adopts a foreignizing strategy that foregrounds cultural difference. The paper further explores how Georgian’s flexible word order and rich derivational morphology enable, yet complicate, the rendering of Joyce’s syntactic fragmentation and bodily frankness in Bloom’s monologue.
The second paper, “Urban Toponyms in the Georgian Translation of Ulysses” by Nino Tsurtsumia, shifts the focus to Joyce’s meticulously mapped Dublin, often described as the novel’s true protagonist. Through an analysis of street names, landmarks, and spatial references, the paper investigates how Kiasashvili translates Joyce’s urban hyperrealism into Georgian. It examines strategies of retention, transliteration, and adaptation, showing how Dublin’s toponyms undergo a process of linguistic and cultural doubling: they must preserve Irish referentiality while becoming readable within Georgian phonetic, semantic, and cultural systems. Drawing on semiotic approaches to urban space, the paper asks whether Joyce’s symbolic geography can be reconstituted in translation without losing the dense historical, political, and cultural associations embedded in the city’s topography.
The third paper, “Translating Ulysses into Georgian: Nico Kiasashvili and the Art of Joyce Translation” by Irakli Tskhvediani, adopts a broader methodological perspective. It situates Kiasashvili’s translation within translation studies and Joyce scholarship, examining his long-term translational strategies, engagement with stylistic multiplicity, and negotiation between fidelity and innovation. Emphasizing translation as a sustained intellectual and creative process, the paper reflects on Kiasashvili’s legacy and his decisive role in shaping the Georgian reception of Joyce and literary modernism.
Together, the panel offers a multifaceted reassessment of Nico Kiasashvili’s Georgian Ulysses, honoring his centenary by foregrounding translation not merely as transmission but as interpretation, transformation, and cultural authorship. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing international conversations about the afterlives of modernist texts and the creative agency of their translators.
Morris Beja in Memoriam (Panel 25)
Chair: John McCourt (Università di Macerata; IJJF)
This panel gathers friends and colleagues who wish to remember with affection and gratitude Morris “Murray” Beja: distinguished scholar, teacher, mentor, and long-serving servant of the International James Joyce Foundation. A former IJJF President and Executive Secretary for twenty-seven years, Murray helped shape and sustain the Foundation for more than half a century. His scholarship on Joyce, modernism, literature, and film was marked by clarity, generosity, and intellectual depth, while his personal kindness, humour, wisdom, and devotion to students and colleagues left an enduring mark on all who knew him. This session will honour both his remarkable scholarly legacy and the human qualities that made him such a beloved presence in the Joyce world.
Contributors:
- John McCourt (Università di Macerata; IJJF)
- Ann Fogarty (University College Dublin)
- Ellen Carol Jones
On Joycean Difficulty (Panel 22)
Chair: Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin)
Contributors:
- Teresa Prudente (University of Turin):“Unnarrated but existent by implication”: Multiplying Fictional Minds in Ulysses
- Federico Sabatini (University of Turin): “We are circumveiloped by obscuritads”: Syntax and Shadows in Joyce and Bruno
- Tim Conley (Brock University): “The Simulchronic Flush in His Pann”
- Sam Slote (Trinity College Dublin): Narrative Minimalism and Mimesis in Joyce
Joyce is renowned (and dammed) as a “difficult” writer, but how and why, exactly, are his works difficult. This panel will look at the ways Joyce poses difficulties, from the representation of the consciousness of fictional minds, to mimetic minimalism, to syntax, to encyclopedism, to simultaneity.
Reverberative Doppelgängers (Panel 10)
Chair: Barry Spence
Building on what is now a tradition of IJJF Symposium panels together – for a long-time exploring relationships connecting Joyce’s works with classical texts – we propose a panel focused on the dynamic of doubling and its various forms in Joyce’s and related works.
- Anne MacMaster (Millsaps College), Michael Gleason (Millsaps College): “Every Man His Own Doppelgänger: Gabriel Conroy and Gustav von Aschenbach”
This paper analyzes autobiographical doubling in The Dead and Death in Venice. We argue that James Joyce and Thomas Mann turn their lives into their art by reproducing and reshaping themselves in deeply vulnerable ways as the protagonists Gabriel Conroy and Gustav von Aschenbach. Initial similarities are well-known. Like Gabriel, Joyce, married to a woman from Galway, wrote columns for The Daily Express; while von Aschenbach’s literary achievements neatly match in topic and genre the successes of Thomas Mann. Yet neither Joyce’s nor Mann’s novella is a roman a clef, since both transcend the fertile detail of their individual lives. As we examine the relation between author and protagonist, the protagonists likewise see themselves in others, for Michael Fury serves as doppelgänger for Gabriel just as the Dionysian “red-haired” men reflect the Apollonian Aschenbach’s alter ego. Layered “doublings” enable Joyce and Mann to delineate the inextricable tensions between death and life, between passion and self-knowledge, between our individual ideals of love and the fact of our shared mortality.
- Stephanie Nelson (Boston University): “Doppelgängers in Ulysses and the Metamorphoses”
Questions of identity and doubling are basic to both Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloom’s explanation of metempsychosis, for example, sounds as if it comes directly out of Ovid:
– Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for instance. What they called nymphs, for example.
(U 4.375-377)
Similarly, Bloom’s multiple identities echo the many doubled transformations of the Metamorphoses, where, for example, no less than three separate individuals named “Cycnus,” Greek for “swan,” become just that. This paper will look more specifically at Bloom’s second identity as Henry Flower, in comparison to Ovid’s stories of Hyacinthus (Met 10.162-19) and Adonis (Met 10.708-38). The stories reflect each other, as Apollo and Venus respectively lose a lover through accident, who then becomes a flower and is remembered in a festival, and as such are used to open, close, and also reflect Orpheus’ lament over Eurydice. The stories’ theme of death and rebirth also appears in Ulysses, for example in Bloom’s death in Circe as “Mr Flower” (U 15.3212) and rebirth to encounter the Nymph (U 15.3230-3480) as well as in the appearance of Rudy at the end of the episode. Even more significantly, just as Hyacinthus and Adonis reflect their “author,” Orpheus, as he comes to terms with the loss of Eurydice, so Bloom reflects Joyce, no longer “the author as a young man” but now a middle-aged man with children, confronting his own and their mortality. This paper will explore these parallels and their significance in their respective works as well as Joyce’s use of the Metamorphoses more generally.
- Barry Spence (University of Massachusetts Amherst): “Doubling, Juxtaposition, & Montage in Finnegans Wake”
Drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s characterization of one of Joyce’s principal innovations as being a special dual-level method of writing, this paper considers the complex methods of juxtaposition at play in Finnegans Wake and theorizes them in terms similar to cinematic montage. The paper argues that the novel’s printed pages use juxtaposition and doubling to deliver a dynamic interplay of visual and audial channels whose effect on the reader is akin to certain varieties of montage in cinema.
The Poetics of Doubling in “Sirens” and Finnegans Wake (Panel 41)
Chair: Thomas Gurke
Contributors:
- Thomas Gurke (University of Minnesota): The ‘Unsung’ Dimension of “Sirens”
- Roger Lüdeke (Heinrich-Heine-University): A Socio-Poetics of Doubling in “Sirens”
- Gavin Young (University of Alabama in Huntsville): What’s the Word on the Wake?: Material and Virtual Doublings in Joyce’s ‘Word in Pregross’
This panel reads Joyce’s “Sirens” episode of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as creating a poetics of doubling in which meaning and relation emerge not as fixed objects but as resonant, processual events.
Thomas Gurke traces musical doubles in “Sirens” – from Douce and Kennedy’s nearinterchangeability (“Bronzedouce communing”, U.11.398) to “Doublebasses” (U.11.1053), recurring instruments (“Piano again”, U.11.573), and “longindying” dopplers (Echo. How sweet the answer. (U.11.634–5), A call again. […] You hear?, (U.11.313–316) – to Joyce’s larger acoustic field of return and delay. If indeed “language doubles the flow of images on another level” (Massumi 2002, 26), the ‘unsung’ dimension of “Sirens” lies in its production of affect through patterned recurrence: repetition diffuses one poetic layer into another, generating emergence and invariance as in music. Yet what is at stake is not merely aesthetic form, but the question of how community is built and maintained — and at what cost: “Sirens” is saturated with nationalist, pro-Irish conviviality from which Bloom remains structurally excluded; communal attunement is staged as a rhythmic sorting of “Bloowho” (U.11.86) belongs.
Against readings that begin from twoness, Roger Lüdeke’s paper foregrounds a prior threeness: with Nancy’s Listening, timbre (tympanon) names the resonant medium in which “self” and “world” sound within one another. This triadic scene of resonance is, in Nancy’s terms, a condition of comparution—co-appearance without synthesis, a being-with articulated as exposure and attunement. Read through Simmel and Girard, however, the same triadic openness also names the proto-social nucleus in which mediation and attachment take form, yet where mimetic intensification can precipitate alliance, rivalry, and even scapegoating. Musical attunement in “Sirens” thus carries the same ambivalence: it enables intimacy and shared rhythm as protosocial attachment, while remaining charged with the potential for misattunement, escalation, and fracture.
From twoness – the book and the text – to the multivalent, this paper discusses the interrelationship between the book as ground for manyfold interpretations and the text as a limit phenomenon at the edge of possibility. Gavin Young utilizes Charles S. Peirce’s theory of signs and thereby establishes a principle of doubling whereby readers are forever making second-order maps that are supposed to be mappable to an incommensurable signifying landscape. Confronting scholarly examples of a supposed immediacy or presence of Finnegans Wake qua text, the paper uses the work of Georges Bataille on limits and rupture to instead theorize reading as a project of doubling without promise or already-present foundation, valuable precisely for its processual and ceaseless nature.
Translation I: Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in Latin America—Translations and Other Intertextualities (Panel 34)
Chair: Vitor Alevato do Amaral
Contributors:
- Vitor Alevato do Amaral: Echoes of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in Latin American Literatures: Portuguese and Spanish
- Tarso do Amaral de Souza Cruz: Translations of Finnegans Wake in Latin America
- Luísa de Freitas: Translations of Ulysses in Latin America
Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have a stimulating presence in Latin American literatures through translations and other forms of intertextuality. Although Ulysses is the work that first comes to mind when one thinks about the influence of Joyce over Latin American writers — the example of Jorge Luis Borges’s translation of the last page of the novel in Proa (1925) is paramount —, Finnegans Wake has given an equally rich and deep contribution to Latin American literatures, both in Portuguese and Spanish.
Latin American writers have established a strong connection with both of these publications, so much so that several of their works can be unmistakenly characterized as Joycean. It is important to note that the fingerprint of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can be traced beyond the more obvious Boom literature of the Spanish-speaking countries and the Concrete Poetry movement of Brazil.
David B. Vela, in “James Joyce in Latin American Literature” (James Joyce Broadsheet, no. 18, Feb. 2021), provides a helpful synthesis of Joyce’s presence in Latin American literature. Unfortunately, his article presents the cases of Spanish-speaking writers only. As commonly happens, Brazilian Portuguese was not mentioned.
The following are some of the works written under the sign of Joyce that are better known among Joyce scholars: Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers), by Guillermo Cabrera-Infante (1967, Spain); Cristóbal Nonato (Cristopher Unborn), by Carlos Fuentes (1987, México); Adán Buenosayres (Adam Buenosayres), by Leopoldo Marichalar (Argentina, 1948); and Rayuela (Hopscotch), by Julio Cortázar (Argentina, 1963). Not so frequently mentioned outside Brazil are the poem Galáxias (Book of Galaxies, 1963–1976), by Haroldo de Campos, and the novel Catatau (Chitchat, 1975), by Paulo Leminski, to mention two Brazilian works.
Translators, too, have played a significant role in choosing to translate Joyce’s works as well as incorporating the translation into their own literary projects, as was sometimes the case. Inadvertently to, or rather in defiance of Cabrera-Infantes’s caveat that “puns are the wine of literature: they do not travel well” (apud Jörg Drews, in A Collideorscape of Joyce, 1998, by R. Frehner and U. Zeller), literary translators have enriched Latin-American literatures by coping with Joyce’s puns, calques, borrowings, and neologisms.
Of special interest are the inspiring, door-opening translations by José Salas Subirat, Ulises (Argentina, 1945); Antônio Houaiss, Ulisses (Brazil, 1966); Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos, Panaroma do Finnegans Wake (Brazil, 1962); and Salvador Elizondo, the meticulously annotated translation of the first page of Finnegans Wake in the magazine S.Nob (Mexico, 1962).
This panel intends to provide a panorama (or a panaroma) of the intertextual flowers that have blossomed in Latin American literatures by the inspiration Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Given the extension of the corpus, some works will be selected for closer examination.
Translation III: Translating the Wake into Chinese (Panel 52)
Chair: Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Perugia)
Panelists:
Congrong Dai (Nanjing University)
Sun-chieh Liang (National Taiwan Normal University)
This panel brings together the two authors of the most recent Chinese translations of Finnegans Wake, Congrong Dai and Sun-chieh Liang, for a rare and timely conversation on one of the most challenging acts of literary translation. The panel will focus on the extraordinary linguistic, cultural, and theoretical problems posed by the Wake when translated into Chinese. The translators will discuss their methodological choices, linguistic strategies, and interpretive frameworks, addressing issues such as multilingual wordplay, portmanteau words, phonetic experimentation and intertextual density. This is a moderated discussion between the translators, moderated by Enrico, so there won’t be individual paper titles.