James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study

name Joyce pronounced with three syllables: Gi-la-bert) was an Oxford-trained lawyer who had served as a judge in Burma and who was devoting himself to explicating and translating Ulysses. Gilbert's French wife, Moune, a small lively woman, was active in publishing. She soon became one of Nora's best friends.

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In the afternoon Stuart Gilbert came over from his boarding house, and the two men worked on Gilbert's study of Ulysses, which was to become for many readers an indispensable, if humorless, guide to the difficult book.

In the course of his long study of Homeric origins M. Bérard demonstrates that the poet of the Odyssey must have had access to, and carefully studied, some Phoenician record of voyages in the eastern and western Mediterranean, a pre-Achaean "Mirror of the Sea". A very large number of the Odyssean place-names are of Semitic origin; these were the names under which the places came to be known to the earliest Greek navigators. The latter translated the names into their own tongue, and so each place had a pair of names-the Phoenician and the Greek. For instance (Odyssey X, 135) Circe's island is named Aiaie. The "island of Circe" is an exact translation of the Semitic compound Ai-aie...

Obviously the value of such a work as this depends on its authenticity, and "authenticity" in the present case implies that the ideas, interpretations and explanations put forward in these pages are not capricious or speculative, but were endorsed by Joyce himself. Thus it may be of some interest if I describe briefly the circumstances leading up to the writing of this book and those under which it was writ-ten. It was when I was assisting MM. Auguste Morel and Valéry Larbaud in the translation of Ulysses into French that the project suggested itself to me. In making a translation the first essential is thoroughly to understand what one is translating; any vagueness or uncertainty in this respect must lead to failure. This applies especially when the texture of the work to be translated is intricate, or the meaning elusive. One begins with a close analysis, and only when the implications of the original are fully unravelled does one start looking for approximations in the other language. Thus I made a point of consulting Joyce on every doubtful point, of ascertaining from him the exact associations he had in mind when using proper names...