NEWS. Thirteenth Annual Trieste Joyce School. Trieste, June 28 July 4, 2009

Transcription

1 Papers on Joyce 15 (2009): NEWS Thirteenth Annual Trieste Joyce School Trieste, June 28 July 4, 2009 U nlike James Joyce, who left Trieste in 1909 for a summer visit to Dublin, a large group of Joyceans gathered in this Italian seaport to attend the Thirteenth Annual Trieste Joyce School a hundred years on. Over seventy participants attended the 2009 edition of the Joyce School, attracted by the combination of an ambitious academic programme and an entertaining social and cultural programme. Two venues were offered for the School s academic activities, holding afternoon seminars at the University of Trieste while morning lectures took place in the Auditorium of the Revoltella Museum. The Auditorium was also chosen for the School s opening on June 28, in a reception hosted by the Irish Ambassador to Italy, Sean Ó húiginn. The School organizers, John McCourt and Laura Pelaschiar, presented the lectures and activities planned for the week and highlighted the presence of scholars from all over the world. The variety of nationalities and languages joined for the 2009 edition was made visible with the reading of the participants translations into their own languages of a same fragment from Giacomo Joyce, a poem set in Trieste. On Monday the 29 th, the morning session started with Laura Pelaschiar s Joyce s Spectro-Poetics, which foregrounded the relevance of Gothic elements in Joyce s work. Although Pelaschiar also analyzed the use of such conventions in A Portrait and Ulysses, it was Dubliners that provided the clearer instances of a Gothic turn in Joyce s

2 writing. Pelaschiar compared the 1904 version of The Sisters as published in The Irish Homestead to the version Joyce rewrote in Trieste and which appeared in 1915, evincing that the main stylist change between the two had been the addition of Gothic elements, such as the suspended sense of unfinished sentences or the night scene. The dark tone continued in Tom Rice s Cannibalism and Cultural Transfer, or, James Joyce Learns to Spit, which resorted to the Spitting Cannibal figure of the 16 th century as a forefather of postcolonial artists. Rice extended the cannibalistic metaphor to Joyce s process of literary creation, which included the consumption and incorporation of other texts, and to his works noting the fixation with transubstantiation present in A Portrait and viewing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as dismembered pieces the reader may cannibalize. With the Spitting Cannibal, Rice brought the audience towards the Caribbean and the morning s last speaker, Maria McGarrity kept them there. Her lecture, Joyce in the New World: Portrait, Ulysses and the Atlantic Archipelago, examined the influence of geography in cultural identity and creativity, highlighting the presence of the island imaginary in Joyce s work. McGarrity pointed to the irony of Stephen s hydrophobia in a novel permeated with a sea/water motif which underlines Ireland s position as an island, in the margin of a continent and, hence, in the margin of power relations. For the duration of the week, the School offered a choice of four afternoon seminars devoted to Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and Beckett (and Some Joyce) in which participants had the chance to discuss Joyce s works at greater length and in smaller groups. The academic offer was completed with a second seminar on Joyce and Genetic Studies which provided all participants with some notions regarding the history of this approach and its multiple possibilities when studying the work of the Irish writer. Once the first sessions of these seminars were finished on Monday, the School members were treated to a trip to the Carso Triestino, where they had dinner at a traditional Karst Farm. 146

3 On the following day, Paul Fagan provided a rough guide to the reading of Finnegans Wake in nat language at any sinse of the world: the Linguistics of Wakese. Fagan presented Joyce s work as a cryptic crossword where the reader is encouraged to look for synonyms, homonyms and echoes. He also pointed to the importance of an anagnostic approach to a work to which readers may change signification with every subsequent reading. The following lecture, Ilaria Natali s Joyce l italiano and the Hans Jahnke Bequest: Preliminary Remarks described Joyce s professional and personal relation to the Italian language. Natali noted Joyce s use of Italian on the personal correspondence included in the Hans Jahnke bequest to the James Joyce Zurich Foundation. She also presented a study of an Italian translation of On the Beach at Fontana, which allowed to see Joyce s translation as rather a rewriting which had expanded the original text creating new associations for the Italian readership. Lastly, Mark Thompson s lecture Joyce, Danilo Kiš, and the Nightmare of History, traced Joyce s influence in the work of the Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kiš. Thompson was also the guest for a question and answer session later in the day, in which he talked about his work as author of A Paper House and The White War. There was also time in the afternoon for a walking tour of Joyce s Trieste, which took school members pass the most relevant places related to Joyce s working and personal life in the city and finished by the author s statue looking out in the Trieste harbour as he crosses the Ponterosso Bridge. On Wednesday morning, Geert Lernout offered James Joyce and the Trinity, a lecture which brought forward Joyce s interest on theology and the (im)possibilities to discuss the sacredness of the Church s liturgy in his time. The eerie feeling of this lecture prevailed as well in Luke Thurston s Hosts, Guests and Ghosts: from The Dead to the Wake. Thurston s lecture foregrounded the confusion of guests and ghosts in the last story of Dubliners, where a link is established between ghosts, music and theatrical imposture, and traced the appearance of ghostly voices throughout this story and later 147

4 Joycean works. Jolanta Wawrzycka brought the audience to more solid ground in Bonding/Binding; Serving/Severing: Dilemmas of Translation. Her lecture pointed to Joyce s engagement with translation as a way of enriching the English language. Wawrzycka also looked at the translated Joyce, presenting some of the complex problems faced by translators when trying to reproduce the Irish author s rhythm, syntax or invectives. On Wednesday evening, the School members applauded enthusiastically the one-man performance Jimmy Joyced!, a memorable tour of Joyce s experiences during 1904, first written to commemorate the Bloomsday Centenary and performed brilliantly by Donal O Kelly, who joined the school activities for the remainder of the week. On Thursday the 2 nd, the morning session was opened by the Argentinian author Carlos Gamerro, whose lecture on Joyce and Borges traced Joyce s influence on Borges s story El Aleph. Gamerro pointed that Borges s fascination about Ulysses resided in his search for a total book, an all-enclosing literary infinite. He also commented on the coincidences between these two authors, who positioned themselves in the margins be them Dublin or the Aleph and turned them into a new centre. The Hispanic flavour continued in Teresa Caneda s Joyce's Young Man in Havana: Reading A Portrait in Revolutionary Cuba. Caneda highlighted the decontextualization and recontextualization of Damaso Alonso s canonical translation of A Portrait in the background of the Cuban revolution. She commented on Eduardo Desnoes s revised translation and prologue in order to reveal the mechanisms whereby political discourse may permeate the critical assessment of literature. Caneda also contrasted Joyce s rejection by the socialist block in Europe on account of his non-realism and Desnoes s successful appropriation of the Irish author as a role model for aspiring revolutionary writers. The analysis of confluences and connections with other literary traditions was continued in Barry McCrea s Joyce and Proust. McCrea described the parallels between the two most famous figures in Modernist Paris, pointing to their deliberate 148

5 rejection of biological family ties, which they replace with ties created in the apparently random meetings that take place on street walks. McCrea also remarked the potential of Joyce s and Proust s major works to extend the past infinitely. Later on the day, the School members were up to a late night which started with the already traditional Evening of Wine, Pasta, and Song where the participants showed their knowledge of traditional Irish music. The night took a babelian turn when the musical repertoire was enriched further with the participants additions of popular songs from all corners of the world. The session on Friday morning started with Bill Brockman s Sincerely yours : Reading Joyce Through His Letters, which pinpointed the importance of Joyce s personal correspondence for Joycean scholars. Brockman regretted the hindrances related to ethicist and copyright issues which keep a veil on a material that would offer a privileged insight into Joyce s mind, his views on his own work and his social and financial context. Liliana Ina Gjurgjan s comments on the emptiness of the revelatory sight in her lecture Negative Epiphany and Joyce s Dubliners preceded the last lecture of the academic programme, Fritz Senn s Weaving & Unweaving Leopold Bloom. Defining himself as a textual primitive, Senn challenged the audience with a set of mysteries regarding Bloom s life and mind, clearing the path for the participants cogitations on what the text of Ulysses tells us about Bloom, or rather, on what it does not tell. The day ended with At the Cinema with Joyce, where the centenary of Joyce s involvement with the Volta Cinema in Dublin was recollected through the projection of a short documentary of its commemoration in Trieste earlier in the year. After that, the participants were treated to a recreation of the 1900s cinematic experiences with the projection of three silent films accompanied by live music. The last day of the School was devoted this year to the Festa del Livro, an event open as had been some of the earlier cultural activities to all Triestines. It was celebrated on 149

6 the Sala Maggiore of the Chamber of Commerce, the very same place where Joyce offered his lecture Ireland, island of saints and sages in The Festa appropriately opened with John McCourt s Joyce s Irlanda: isola dei santi e dei savi, an account of the circumstances that surrounded this lecture. McCourt highlighted the importance of seeing Joyce s words in their actual context: a room full of Triestine irredenti who saw in Ireland a parallel for their own situation. After a book launch that presented a series of new books on Joyce, there was time to have two question and answer sessions with writers Barry McCrea and Carlos Gamerro who discussed and read from their fiction works, delighting an audience of Triestines and Joycean scholars alike. The last event in the programme for those attending the School was a dinner in privileged surroundings overlooking the Gulf of Venice and the Adriatic Sea. It was an opportunity to thank John McCourt and Laura Pelaschiar for an edition that managed to run an extraordinarily high achieving programme, which shows that the Joyce-Trieste connection is not diluted by time but rather gains strength every year. Thanks to their tireless search of perfection as organizers, the Thirteenth Annual Trieste Joyce School s participants were able to identify with Joyce s remark that he had experienced in Trieste more kindness than ever before or since in his life. VANESSA SILVA FERNÁNDEZ 150