On Bloomsday, Some Thoughts from Keri Walsh on Translating Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses is set on one day: June 16, 1904. In honor of its main character, Leopold Bloom, the date is celebrated around the world as Bloomsday. Fordham English Professor Keri Walsh--editor of the Broadview Press edition of Joyce's Dubliners as well as of The Letters of Sylvia Beach--today published a piece on the Literary Hub site titled "The Horrors and Pleasures of Translating Ulysses: Finding the Polylingual Pleasures of Joyce's Prose in French Translation."  Professor Walsh's piece begins:

Bloomsday—June 16th, 1904—is the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Among the usual annual commemorations of the date in Dublin, New York, Trieste, Sydney, and beyond, Bloomsday will also be celebrated in Paris, the city where the book first appeared. The American Library in Paris, an institution that was founded two years before Ulysses was published in 1922, will play host to the 2016 festivities.

French speakers have been able to read modernism’s magnum opus in their native tongue since its first translation in 1929. The French Ulysses, called Ulysse, was produced by a team… [read more]