3. James Joyce Interpreneur

James Joyce’s role in enterprisingly interpreting Europe began with a missed opportunity for Ireland, and the Irish Revival. The adolescent’s keen interest in the continental drama is well known, as is the youthful Joyce’s determination to acquaint himself with it at the source. He taught himself Norwegian to read Ibsen in the original, and well before he was twenty, he had acquired a good sense of who the important dramatists were in continental Europe, and what the theatre scene was like in Paris or Berlin. He spoke up publicly in ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, taunting his fellow Irishmen for either not knowing, or worse, rejecting Ibsen, or Sudermann, or Giacosa, or Maeterlinck, or Strindberg, or Hauptmann.1 At the age of nineteen, a sense of excitement had reached him from Berlin about Gerhart Hauptmann, the avant-garde dramatist, whose plays dealt with youth’s revolutionary spring awakening, as well as with some of the most burning social questions that had arisen in Germany’s (somewhat belated) industrial revolution towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the summer of his twentieth year, Joyce treated himself to an autodidactic crash course in German that put him in the position, to the best of his belief, to translate two Gerhart Hauptmann plays: Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise) and Michael Kramer.

Joyce set great store by his translations, copying them out calligraphically in black and purple ink. His heart may have failed him, however, when it came to submitting them to the Irish National Theatre in 1901—or he may have resisted the idea of gaining a name as a translator before making his mark as a dramatist in his own right. This latter conclusion might be drawn from the peroration to ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, the essay that the University College magazine St Stephen’s refused to print and that Joyce therefore published privately in October 1901; here, he mentions Ibsen who lies dying in Christiania, and who ‘has already found his successor in the author of Michael Kramer, and the third minister will not be wanting when his hour comes. Even now that hour may be standing at the door.’ (Barry, p. 52) It was eventually only in 1904 that Joyce took his Hauptmann translations round to William Butler Yeats, to be considered for the Abbey Theatre. Yeats gave them back to him, somewhat condescendingly remarking: ‘You know of course that you are not a very good German scholar’; and also, and more decisively: ‘We must get the ear of our public with Irish work.’2

As regards Joyce’s command of German, I am afraid, Yeats was absolutely right. I do not think I have ever laughed as much in a library as during the couple of hours I sat over the manuscript of Before Sunrise at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. Just picture to yourself the young man [says Gabler, somewhat condescendingly in his turn] who had been trying to learn German for his dear life, only to find himself in the woeful plight of having to make sense of a German text written obscurely in the Silesian dialect. The howlers fall thick and fast, confounding anyone who assesses the English rendering, dictionary in hand, for faithfulness and adequacy. However, Yeats missed a truly amazing quality in Joyce’s rendering (perhaps because he did not yet know to look out for it). By sheer intuition, as it appears, Joyce grasped that the essence of the original play texts lay in Hauptmann’s naturalistic employment of dialect speech. For this, Joyce invented an Irish equivalent out of the Anglo-Hibernian vernacular spoken all around him. Here are a few examples:

“me old cockey ‘a bet ‘at wus”

“such a hell iv a lot as them miners booses!”

“Clear the room! Every manjack a yez, clear!” [the original, tersely: “Räum ab!”]

“Dus ‘a want jolly people to become mollies at home?”

“Thar’s a crool twest on et … thar es … an’ no mistake!”3

Without precedent, he thus already created the stage language that Synge, independently after him, invented a second time and (rightly, of course) takes credit for having publicly introduced.

Had the Abbey Theatre—let alone the Irish National Theatre before it—played Joyce’s translations, Synge’s revitalising of the Irish drama would have followed in the footsteps of the Joycean linguistic invention, nurtured by his ardent desire to bring the continental drama to the Irish stage. Yet through Joyce’s own hesitation to go to the Irish National Theatre with his Hauptmann texts, and subsequently through Yeats’s rejection of Joyce’s bid—however understandable that rejection—the Irish Revival missed the opportunity, as one might say, of opening itself to the avant-garde movement of continental drama and theatre. What we are left with, therefore, is to appreciate the nature of Joyce’s heroic effort, and beyond that only the effect it might have had (to which Joyce criticism to this day, however, has not given its due). We can do this because the manuscript of the Vor Sonnenaufgang translation, at least, has survived (and has also been published in the edition cited above). Of the whereabouts of its companion piece, however, the translation of Michael Kramer, we know, alas, no more than that it is secreted in Mr Duffy’s desk in ‘A Painful Case’: ‘In the desk lay a manuscript translation of Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer, the stage directions of which were written in purple ink’ (D-G 11, 21–22).

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The link of this prologue to my topic ‘James Joyce Interpreneur’ comes from the question of languages, on which Joyce’s abortive attempt to set his youthful mark on the dramatic scene of the Irish Revival already so virulently turned. Even as he was trying out new ways of making characters speak on the Irish stage, English was the language he was experimenting with. Whether or not he might even have wished to write in Gaelic, we would not know. Anyhow, how could he? Whatever smatterings he may have had of it, he did not know it sufficiently well to use it. It had not been a language of his childhood, he did not learn it in natural surroundings in his youth (there were no such natural surroundings in Dublin), and he resisted learning it in his student days—though the resistance was probably less against the Gaelic language than against the nationalist fervour of its propagators and the parochial insularity and isolationalism into which, in his view, this led, both politically and culturally. At the same time, we know that he allows his persona Stephen Dedalus to feel keenly that he is living familiarly in a linguistic exile. In the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he makes Stephen interpret to the Dean of Studies, an Englishman, in assumed Anglo-Saxon, something that the Dean knows only by a word of French origin. (Anglo-Saxon is what Stephen, as the haughty young man that he is, takes to be the Englishman’s root tongue.) What the Dean can merely label with the name of ‘funnel’, is, as Stephen gives it to him, a ‘tundish’—a dish through which to fill up a tun: ‘It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen laughing, where they speak the best English.’ (P-G 5, 519–20)4 Stephen goes on to reflect:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (P-G 5, 553–59)

This, surely, is not only a meta-fictional, but presumably even an authorially auto-reflexive utterance. A linguistically split consciousness, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man shows Stephen to be aware of, may even have been a germ and main spring for the Joycean Pentecostal miracle of Wakese. Yet I do not wish to pursue, on the one hand, Stephen Dedalus’s self-indulgent suffering from his non-command of Gaelic, or his suffering under the usurping sway of the English language, and of English speech; nor, on the other hand, do I wish to engage with that fascinating topic of Joyce’s speaking and writing in many tongues in Finnegans Wake.

My immediate subject are Joyce’s writings in Italian. They came about, as we know, because, in late 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle emigrated to Trieste. The circumstances of the new life that Joyce created for himself when he decided to leave Ireland appear to have induced in him some significant linguistic repositionings. If we accept that a real-life time in Joyce’s biography stands behind the fictional biography of Stephen Dedalus, then we can say that, in terms of that real-life time, it was shortly after the Dublin period bracketed into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that James Joyce set out on his moves through Europe—where, to earn a living, his first concern was the teaching of English as a foreign language. In terms of his linguistic awareness, this cannot have failed to strengthen his sense of the interpretative functions of language and languages—a sense that, as we have seen, was already budding in Joyce’s attempts to translate Gerhart Hauptmann, and in Stephen Dedalus’s urge to teach the Dean of Studies English.

Linguistically, in Trieste, Joyce rapidly adapted to the exile he had chosen. He adopted the language of the people. He had resisted Gaelic in Ireland (which, if it was not the language of the people, was at any rate there propagated as such). In Trieste he now trained himself, Nora and the children to Triestine Italian (Giorgio and Lucia, as they were growing up, would conveniently of course have been the natural family coaches). The language of the usurper—which was German in Austro-Hungarian Trieste—he shunned. That of the coloniser in Ireland, namely English, usurped him now no longer. Freed from the Irish sufferance of the British dominion in language as in all else, he outgrew Stephen Dedalus’s ‘unrest of spirit’ and embraced English wholly as the original language of his writing, and, far from merely accommodating himself to it, infused it with the fresh originality of his art.

This can be thoroughly substantiated. Leaving aside his early lyrics, the Chamber Music poems and his ‘Epiphanies’, as well as the early pieces of occasional criticism (which included some essays for newspapers and a few public lectures), what Joyce had written towards his main oeuvre before he left Dublin was no more than an initial seven chapters of Stephen Hero, plus three short stories, two of which actually saw publication in The Irish Homestead. But it was in fact only in Pola and Trieste that his sustained fictional writing began in earnest. This meant initially that he carried forward Stephen Hero, which by the summer of 1905 reached its twenty-fifth chapter, before it was abandoned. But very soon his short stories also began to accumulate. At first they did so concurrently with Stephen Hero; yet from the second half of 1905 onwards he gave them his single-minded attention, as they took shape towards a collection, to be called Dubliners. By the time that, after the completion of Dubliners, he retrenched his novelistic ambition and set about writing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Trieste from 1907 onwards, it was indeed in retrospect that he composed that ‘portrait of a young man’.5 What Stephen Dedalus was so sure of: ‘His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words’, was what James Joyce was now leaving thoroughly behind. In real life, the attitude and the sentiment were no longer his.

In the exuberance of the situation, and with a steady consistency over the middle period of his Triestine years, Joyce also took to writing in Italian. His main impulse in this, it appears, was interpretative: He assisted in the translation of Synge’s Riders to the Sea, he lectured in institutions of adult education in Trieste, and he wrote articles on a variety of Irish subjects for the newspaper Il Piccolo della Sera, all with a desire to bring things Irish—history and politics, myth and religion, culture and lore—to the knowledge and appreciation of his fellow Triestines.

The project of interpreting Ireland through articles in the Piccolo della Sera was not entirely original to James Joyce. The request for contributions on Irish matters came through Roberto Prezioso, acting for the paper. But the ways of executing the project in three articles in 1907, two in 1909 and another four in 1912, were very much Joyce’s own.6 The first two pieces, ‘Fenianism: The Last Fenian’ and ‘Home Rule Comes of Age’ (to give them here their English titles), addressed political questions of the day and were somewhat tentative exercises in the medium, the journalistic mode (though this was not new to Joyce), and the Italian language. The third essay of 1907, ‘Ireland at the Bar’, even as it tells a story and articulates a message, is fully assured in what it is doing, and it uses story and message to reflect on its own literary nature and journalistic purpose. The narrative has two central characters, a man by the name of Joyce, and an interpreter. (In fact, apart from the interpreter and the judge, who is the third character in the cast, just about everybody else in the story, dead or alive, bears the name of Joyce.) Here are story and message—and since we really have so little experience of reading and hearing James Joyce in his own Italian, I give the Piccolo della Sera original:7

L’IRLANDA ALLA SBARRA

Parecchi anni or sono si tenne in Irlanda un processo sensazionale. Nella provincia occidentale, in un luogo romito, che si chiama Maamtrasna, era stato commesso un eccidio. Furono arrestati quattro o cinque villici del paese, appartenenti tutti all’antica tribù dei Joyce. Il più anziano di loro, tale Milesio Joyce, vecchio di sessant’anni, era particolarmente sospetto alla gendarmeria. L’opinione pubblica lo giudicava allora innocente ed oggi lo stima un martire. Tanto il vecchio quanto gli altri accusati ignoravano l’inglese. La Corte dovette ricorrere ai servizi di un interprete. L’interrogatorio svoltosi col tramite di costui ebbe a volta del comico e a volta del tragico. Dall’un lato vi era l’interprete formalista e dall’altro il patriarca della misera tribù, il quale, poco avvezzo alle usanze civili, sembrava istupidito da tutte quelle cerimonie giudiziarie.

II magistrato diceva:

—Chieda all’imputato se vide la donna quella mattina.

La domanda gli era riferita in irlandese e il vecchio prorompeva in spiegazioni intricate, gesticolando, facendo appello agli altri accusati, al cielo. Poi, sfinito dallo sforzo, taceva e l’interprete, volgendosi al magistrato, diceva:

—Afferma di no, “your worship”.

—Gli chieda se era in quei pressi a quell’ora.

Il vecchio si rimetteva a parlare, a protestare, a gridare, quasi fuori di sé dall’angoscia di non capire e di non farsi capire, piangendo d’ira e di terrore. E l’interprete, di nuovo, secco:

—Dice di no, “yo[u]r worship”. Ad interrogatorio finito si dichiarò provata la colpabilità del povero vecchio, che fu rinviato al tribunale superiore, il quale lo condannò al capestro. Il giorno dell’esecuzione della sentenza, la piazza davanti al carcere era gremita di gente che, in ginocchio, ululava in irlandese preghiere pel riposo dell’anima di Milesio Joyce. La leggenda vuole che neppure il carnefice potesse farsi comprendere dalla vittima e, indignato, desse un calcio alla testa dell’infelice per cacciarla nel nodo.

La figura di questo vecchio inebetito, avanzo di una civiltà non nostra, sordomuto dianzi il suo giudice, è la figura simbolica della nazione irlandese alla sbarra dell’opinione pubblica. Essa al pari di lui, non può fare appello alla coscienza moderna dell’Inghilterra e dell’estero. I giornali inglesi fanno da interpreti, fra l’Irlanda e la democrazia inglese, la quale pur dando loro di tratto in tratto ascolto, finisce coll’essere seccata dalle eterne lagnanze dei deputati nazionalisti venuti in casa sua, come ella crede, a turbarne l’ordine e a estorcere denari. All’estero non si parla dell’Irlanda se non quando scoppiano colà tumulti come quelli che fecero sussultare il telegrafo in questi ultimi giorni. Il pubblico sfiorando i dispacci giunti da Londra, che pur mancando di acredine, hanno qualche cosa della laconicità dell’interprete suddetto, si figura allora gli irlandesi come malandrini, dai visi assimetrici, scorazzanti nella notte collo scopo di fare la pelle ad ogni unionista. E al vero sovrano dell’Irlanda, il papa, tali notizie giungono come tanti cani in chiesa; le grida, infiacchite dal viaggio lungo, sono già quasi spente, quando arrivano alla porta di bronzo: i messi del popolo che non rinnegò mai nel passato la Santa Sede, l’unico popolo cattolico per quale la fede vuol dire anche l’esercizio della fede, vengono respinti in favore dei messi di un monarca, il quale, discendente di apostati, s’apostatizzò solennemente nel giorno della sua consacrazione, dichiarando in presenza dei suoi nobili e comuni che i riti della chiesa romano-cattolica sono “superstizione ed idolatria”.8

In English, I have cited this essay in the narrative immediacy of its opening in the preceding essay ‘He chronicled with patience’. It is in its argumentative continuation that James Joyce comes to the fore as the cultural interpreter (as well as the satirical moralist) that he is:

The figure of this stupefied old man, the relic of a civilization which is not ours, deaf and dumb before his judge, is the figure of the Irish people at the bar of public opinion. Like him, it cannot appeal to the modern conscience of England and foreign countries. The English newspapers act as interpreters between Ireland and English democracy, which though now and then it lends an ear, ends by being wearied by the eternal eloquence of the nationalist deputies, who have come into its house, as it thinks, to trouble its order and to extort money. […] The public, skimming through the telegrams which arrive from London and which though without acrimony, still keep something of the laconicism of the above-mentioned interpreter, then imagine the Irish to be robbers with misshapen faces, who go raiding by night, in order to kill off unionists. And the news reaches the real monarch of Ireland, the Pope, like the yelping of dogs in Church. The cries, faint from the long journey have already almost died down when they arrive at the bronze door and the messengers of the country that in past times never denied the Holy See, the only Catholic country for which faith also means the practice of that faith, are rejected in favour of the envoy of a monarch who, the descendant of apostates, solemnly apostatized himself on the day of his coronation, affirming before his nobles and the Commons that the rites of the Roman-Catholic Church are “superstition and idolatry”.

The article itself ends in a relatively pedestrian manner with statistics about the distribution of Irish people over the world, reflecting on the six hundred years of military occupation that Ireland has been subjected to, deploring everybody’s incapability of understanding the intricate problems connected with the Irish situation, and rejecting categorically that Ireland is a country of exceptional criminality: ‘This is a most erroneous opinion. Criminality in Ireland is inferior to that of any other country in Europe; organised criminals do not exist in Ireland; when one of those facts happens, which Parisian journalists with atrocious irony call a red idyll, the whole country is shocked by it.’

Yet, this anticlimactic ending apart—anticlimactic, that is, in aesthetic terms—it is with ‘L’Irlanda alla Sbarra’ that Joyce found the mode most congenial to him for his journalism in Il Piccolo della Sera on behalf of Irish causes. If poor old Miles Joyce is, as the text says, ‘the figure of the Irish people at the bar of public opinion’, then ‘L’Irlanda alla Sbarra’ in turn configures a pattern for James Joyce’s ‘most trenchant rendition’ of Ireland to the Triestines—to which ironic allusion to Tom Kernan’s phrase (U 11, 1148), I would add seriously that Joyce’s use here of the term ‘figure’ has of course the scholastic ring—if not the true scholastic stink (P-G 5, 1439)—of medieval theological usage. The argument follows a transparent strategy. It depends on narrative: the story told figures forth the subject and theme; and the rhetorical persuasion derives from a most fetching art of language. The moral to be drawn from the sensational story of a sordid court case in the remote westerly provinces of Ireland is brought home with a consummate mastery of register and style. Thus, the text I have quoted at length is in fact essentially structured like an emblem, where the story corresponds to the emblematic image and the peroration to the moralising subscription obligatory in pictorial emblematic art.

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The blend of rhetorical devices is not always as effective and successful throughout the Piccolo della Sera contributions as it is in ‘L’Irlanda alla Sbarra’. The point I am trying to make, however, is that the emblematic story-telling accomplished here may be taken to represent the mode Joyce found for himself of translating into journalism the messages, opinions and analyses that he wished to convey to his Triestine readers. Seen against the wider background of his writing, none of the parameters of his journalistic mode are, of course, entirely new. The studied, and at times turgid, abstract language which characterises the initial Piccolo della Sera pieces, and which persists as an ingredient in all of them, harkens back to the ways Joyce had with language in his Dublin years before he became a writer of fiction. The emblematic narratives, by contrast, are of the family of the Dubliners stories (perhaps their minor relations). What they signify is the delight Joyce here takes in adapting his literary art to his temporary trade of journalistic writing, discovering for himself a common trade secret of journalism, namely that to reach an audience, you must translate and interpret. A main vehicle for such translation and interpretation is the narrative invention, conveying message and argument through a fictionalised indirection. What the fictional encoding reciprocally relies on is then of course the epiphanic decoding, and the release of receptive energy that this implies. That the process of reception should thus be an active process of insight was, we may confidently posit, a thoroughly Joycean assumption about the nature and purpose of his art.

On at least one occasion in the course of his writing for Il Piccolo della Sera we may observe, in addition, that Joyce took the process a step or two further towards self-interpretation and self-insight. At any rate, this is what I believe can be made out behind the veil—or is it the seven veils?—of the manifest text of ‘Oscar Wilde: il poeta di “Salomè”’—‘Oscar Wilde: the poet of “Salome”’. What occasioned the article was the first performance in Trieste, in March 1909, of Richard Strauss’s opera to the text, in a German translation, of Oscar Wilde’s original French version of Salome—yet another instance of ‘interpreting Europe’. There is nothing in Joyce’s piece, however, either of Salome, or of the languages—whether French, English, or German—of its texts, or of the opera, or of Richard Strauss, its composer. It is an article on ‘Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. Such were the high-sounding titles which he, with juvenile arrogance—no: “in the pride of his youth” (as an interlinear revision in an unidentified hand has it)—had printed on the title-page of his first collection of poems, and with that same arrogance with which he thought to emblazon his name he carved, perhaps symbolically, the signs of his vain pretentions and the destiny that already awaited him.’ Thus the exordium. And at once, Wilde becomes the vehicle by which to communicate, to the Triestine readers, a piece of Irish mythology that already, in turn, mythologises Wilde’s own life:

His name stands as a symbol for him: Oscar, the nephew of King Fingal and Ossian’s only son in the amorphous Celtic Odyssey, treacherously killed by his guest’s hand while he was sitting at table: O’Flahertie, the ferocious Irish tribe whose destiny it was to assail the gate of medieval towns, and whose name, striking terror into the peace-loving, is still recited at end of the old litany of the saints together with the plague, the wrath of God and the spirit of fornication: “from the ferocious O’Flaherties libera nos Domine”. Like that Oscar, he too, in the prime of his life, was to meet his civil death, while sitting at table, crowned with artificial wine-leaves and discoursing of Plato: like that wild tribe he would break the lance of his paradoxical eloquence against the band of useful conventionalism: and hear, an exiled and dishonoured man, the chorus of the just rehearse his name coupled with that of the impure spirit.

What a delicious Joycean text, if you come to think of it. In terms of Ulysses, we are close to ‘Cyclops’. Would Joyce have written up such a mythicised ancestral tree in Dublin? It is hard to imagine. Among revivalists, he would have been too much in danger of being taken seriously. To be taken straight in Trieste was no threat; it would not put him in the wrong camp. Thus, he could present his readers with a cameo of Irish mythic idealising, and at the same time have a good chuckle with his brother Stannie over how well he had done it.

Which is not to say that the story of the wronged and exiled Dublin-born English writer did not, in the telling, increasingly get under his skin. The story begins with Wilde’s parents (the father a scientist of renown, the mother a spokeswoman of the literary-revolutionary movement of 1848 who would so have wished Oscar to be a daughter); and the boy’s growing up ‘in an atmosphere of excess and extravagance’. Wilde’s Oxford years in the Ruskin circle are touched on, and his aestheticism in poverty as well as affluence in London evoked: ‘Wilde, carrying on that literary tradition of Irish playwrights which stretches from the time of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, came, like them, to be the court jester for the English.’ And then his downfall: ‘His fall was greeted with a howl of Puritan joy’; his humiliation, ignominy, and death: ‘he died a Roman Catholic, adding to the failure of his civil life his own denial of his proud teaching. After deriding the idols of the market-place, the man who was one day the singer of the divinity of joy, bent his knee, a pitiable and sorrowful figure, and concluded the chapter of his rebellion of the spirit with an act of spiritual surrender.’

The biographical sketch, extending to about two thirds of the article, proves yet to be only the prelude to the harsh criticism of the British educational and legal systems and of the social realities in England that follows, and which leads to reflections on the perverse Christianity—‘the throbbing centre of Wilde’s art: sin’—underlying the conflict between the turn-of-the-century society and the non-conforming, ‘sinning’ individual. There is great empathy in the conclusion. For all the ironic distance from its subject with which the article begins, it ends in lucid appreciation of Wilde’s exceptional stature and a nearly felt comprehension of the existential threat that lies in moral and literary non-conformism and in personal exile. Interpreting Oscar Wilde to his Triestine readers, Joyce interprets to them—or at the very least, to himself—also something of himself:

In his last book “De Profundis” he bows down before a gnostic Christ, that had risen from the apocryphal pages of “A House of Pomegranates”, and then his real soul, tremulous, timorous and sorrowful, shines through the mantle of Heliogabalus. His fantastic legend, his work, which instead of being a revelation of his soul is a polyphonic variation on the theme of the relations between art and nature, his golden books, sparkling with those epigrammatic phrases which made him, in the eyes of some, the wittiest speaker of the last century, are now a divided booty.

A line from the book of Job is carved on his tomb in the poor churchyard in Bagneux. It praises his eloquence, “eloquium suum”, the great legendary mantle which is now a divided booty. The future perhaps will carve there another line, less proud and more piteous: “Partiti sunt sibi vestimenta mea et super vestem meam miserunt sortes.”

‘I may not be the Jesus Christ I once fondly imagined myself, but I think I must have a talent for journalism’, as Joyce, much satisfied with his Piccolo della Sera contributions, commented to his brother Stanislaus (cf. Barry, p. xiii). In Portrait, as we know, it is Stephen Dedalus who acts out the identification. Here, by means of the imagined future inscription on his gravestone, it is displaced onto Oscar Wilde. The cadence of the Italian text is palpably rhythmical in the article’s last sentence: ‘Il futuro potrà forse scolpire là un altro verso, meno altiero, più pietoso: “Partiti sunt sibi vestimenta mea…”’, etc. The rhythm is virtually identical in Italian and in English: ‘The future perhaps will carve there another line, less proud and more piteous’.

Or, to take the opening of the penultimate paragraph: ‘Nell’ultimo suo libro “De Profundis” si inchina davanti ad un Cristo gnostico, risorto dalle pagine apocrife della “Casa del Melagrani” ed allora sua vera anima, tremula, timida e rattristata, traluce attraverso il manto di Eliogabalo.’ The shift into the non-native language notwithstanding, we recognise this as Joyce’s own text, whose rhythms and phrasing in Italian such as ‘…allora sua vera anima, tremula, timida e rattristata, traluce attraverso il manto di Eliogabalo’ configure that peculiar lilt of Pater-Wildean poeticisms reminiscent of the fourth chapter (especially) of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (and this in an article on Wilde: not for nothing was Samuel Beckett to assert in later years that Joyce’s writing ‘was not about something; it was that something itself’).

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But who, we must still stop to wonder, wrote the English equivalent: ‘and then his real soul, tremulous, timorous and sorrowful, shines through the mantle of Heliogabalus’; and who, in the article’s final paragraph, speaks of the future line on Wilde’s gravestone, ‘meno altiero, più pietoso’ as ‘less proud, more piteous’ (for all that it is the cognate of ‘pietoso’, ‘piteous’ is very much an adjective in the style of Joyce, the artist as a young man)? Who did truly write and rhythmicise in English the peroration to ‘Ireland at the Bar’ that we quoted, giving it not only its irresistible rhythmic drive, but also varying the double ‘i messi’ … ‘i messi’ of the Italian to ‘the messengers’ … ‘the envoy’? Who, similarly, was responsible for driving home the article on ‘The Shadow of Parnell’ with ‘In his intimate fiery appeal to his nation he implored his countrymen not to throw him to the English wolves who were howling around him. It redounds to the honour of his countrymen that they did not fail him at that desperate appeal. They did not throw him to the English wolves; they tore him to pieces themselves.’9 And just who worded Dublin’s readying itself for the Annual Horse Show: ‘La città […] si veste da sposa novella’ as ‘the […] town arrays itself as for a bridal’ (‘Arrayed for the bridal’ is the aria Aunt Julia sings in ‘The Dead’ [D-G 15, 585–86]); or who decided, for the essay ‘The City of the Tribes’, and in talking about the house of the Lynches in the central street of Galway: ‘il triste e scuro castello che ancora nereggia nelle via principale’, to abandon the Italian description of it as ‘blackening the street’ and instead to say ‘a bleak, dark castle which still stands a black mass in the main street’—and so echo Eveline’s ‘glimpse of the black mass of the boat’ at the end of her Dubliners story (D-G 3, 145–46)?

No, do not anticipate me wrongly: I am not arguing that the translation fragments in typescript that have survived from the Triestine years of the Joyces are hitherto unrecognised or unacknowledged translations that James Joyce made himself of his Italian writings. I have quoted above from these translations,10 and not from either the Mason/Ellmann mid-twentieth century/mid-Atlantic version,11 nor from the more recent translation prepared by Conor Deane for the World’s Classics (Barry) volume, because not only are the translation fragments in typescript closest in time, and thus in English usage, to the Italian originals, but I also suspect that in the course of an effort that is likely to have involved a team of collaborators from the Triestine circle of family and friends, James Joyce himself also worked over intermediate stages of the translated texts. There was the opportunity, and there was a hoped-for occasion. Giorgio Melchiori has established that there was an attempt to collect Joyce’s Italian pieces in book form, but that the intended ‘socialist Genoese publisher, Angelo Fortunato Formiggini’, eventually declined to undertake the venture. The next plan was to publish the collection in English.12 Let us assume that the typescript fragments that survive represent traces of this attempt. It would stand to reason that James Joyce—while undoubtedly not the main translator—was also himself involved. In the end, however, here was another opportunity missed: Joyce was, alas, never given the chance of making his Italian writings known in English, so as, through his Irish indirection, to tell the Brits what he thought of them. But the unpublished translation fragments, while collaborative, are very likely genuinely related to the Joycean oeuvre. Within it, they manifest, with his immersion in Henrik Ibsen and his translations of Gerhart Hauptmann, James Joyce’s interpretative awareness across pre-World-War-I Europe.

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