JJQ

I’m happy to announce that a new special issue of JJQ on “Joyce’s Lives” is now in the mail.  It features a variety of biographical essays on Joyce that range across topics like fatherhood, alcoholism, stardom, and even advertising.  The contents include:

• Joseph Kelly on Joyce’s maturation as a father and an artist;
• Austin Briggs writing about Joyce’s often profligate and self-destructive drinking;
• Gordon Bowker expanding on his new biography with a piece about Joyce’s career in England;
• Eleni Loukopoulou on Joyce’s widespread publishing network in London and the way it organized and sustained his reputation;
• Catherine Gubernatis Dannen’s essay on Joyce’s (mythical) work as an advertising copywriter for Guinness–and what it tells us about the author’s changing reputation in Ireland.

These essays are featured alongside our usual collection of notes, commentary, and book reviews.  The journal is available in print or electronically at Project MUSE.

In JJQ‘s recent special issue on translation (46.4), Congrong Dai describes some of the difficulties she faced in trying to produce a Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake.  In December, she brought this long project to conclusion and it turns out that the book has rapidly gained a strong following in China, having sold out its initial print run of 8,000 copies in under a month.  News media, including the BBC, have picked up the story and we will link to the reports they appear.

As Congrong wrote in JJQ, translating the Wake posed enormous difficulty: puns, portmanteau words, and the echoing density of its phrases cannot be easily carried over from English into Chinese.  To deal with some of these challenges, she initially planned to create a series of entirely new Chinese words, a process that yielded fascinating results: “In the Chinese language a word can be the combination of several characters.  For example, ‘wake’ (the ritual meaning) would be translated into a word with three characters” that would combine the meanings of “vigilance,” “awake,” and “rebirth.”

Conrong goes on to note that process of inventing words in Chinese is incredibly complex and would require a knowledge of history, linguistics, and tradition so deep as to rival Joyce’s own command of English.  She has thus opted to begin with a more traditional style of translation, which will often limit the multifold meanings of the original text.  She still plans to release the more ambitious version–replete with its array of new Chinese words–at some point in the future.  Given the immediate success of this initial endeavor, however, it’s clear that her decision to begin more simply was a good one.  And it’s a real pleasure to know that Joyce’s final work has now gained an even broader global audience.

The House of Breathings has just announced the publication of a six-volume edition of the papers and notebooks for Ulysses held by the National Library of Ireland.  Edited and annotated by Danis Rose, this collection includes several notebooks for Ulysses as well as drafts of some of the major episodes including “Cyclops,” “Sirens,” and “Circe” among others.  Much (though not all) of this material came from the Alexis Léon papers purchased by the NLI in 2002.  The individual volumes themselves are relatively expensive, ranging between $100 and $330 individually, or $1060 for the entire set.

Rose offers a detailed explanation for his decision to bring these notebooks out now including an extended comment on their copyright status.  As he notes (and as JJQ’s Copyrights Editor recently pointed out to me), there is a strange wrinkle in EU copyright law: when a previously unpublished work enters the public domain, the first person to publish it gains a new copyright of twenty-five years in the material.  This means that when these notebooks appear, Rose will own this EU copyright.  (The provision and thus this copyright does not exist in US law.)  After describing this situation, Rose writes that he wants to assure open access to these works and thus  “I will make over to the Irish State such rights in the Joyce text in the Ulysses documents that I have acquired.”  His own annotations and editorial matter, of course, are not covered by such a promised license.

We clearly find ourselves in exhilarating if uncertain times as Joyce’s published and unpublished works fall unevenly into a patchwork public domain that varies widely across national borders.  For the moment, I happily greet the arrival of this publication and hope that all institutions and rights holders endeavor to make Joyce’s published and unpublished works widely available to a global audience of teachers, critics, scholars, and readers.

JJQ has requested review copies from the House of Breathings and hope to publish a full review essay as soon as we can.

Over the years JJQ has received a steady trickle of submissions from scholars working in Iran where copies of the journal surprisingly seem to make their way through the regime’s censors.  Although (to my knowledge)  there have not yet been Persian translations of either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, much of the rest of Joyce’s corpus is available to Iranian readers in their own language.  This includes A Portrait, several of the short stories, and even Exiles.  This week also saw the release of a translation of several poems in a volume entitled She Weeps Over Rahoon.  The work was done by Payam Fotouhieh and published by Afraz.  These efforts are encouraging and we certainly look forward to the time when all of Joyce’s works can be read in Persian.