Collected Works Joyce, James: Complete Works | v.12.0 | Update 8 Apr 2018

[pynch]

Originally Posted by danutzeus

Fantastic job! Please tell me what source have you used for the Epiphanies? There is much controversy (as usual) and I am planning to translate and publish them, and I decided to use the Buffalo notebook containing only 22 of them...

Thanks

Welcome to Mobileread, danutzeus!

For the Epiphanies I have used the digitalisation from this website (and shamelessly “restored” n° 40, because the layout of the transcription cannot be displayed adequately in an epub). The texts and their order follow “The Workshop of Daedalus” (ed. by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain), a scan of which can be found here. You can find details about their sources in the introductory note.

Into which language do you want to translate them?

[pynch]

Here we go:

I could finally add the rare and out of print Volumes 2 & 3 of James Joyce’ letters (edited by Richard Ellmann, Faber & Faber, 1966), which I scanned and corrected myself, and merged them into one chronological sequence with the letters from Volume 1.

Again, I had to delete the (more than 3000) footnotes by Richard Ellmann, which, if I live that long, will be included in a 2038 update. Hold your breath.

[doubleshuffle]

The visible signs of antesatisfaction?
An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a tentative revelation; a silent contemplation.

Is it possible to conserve these for 25 years?
Absolutely.

[medard]

The visible signs of postsatisfaction?
A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a solicitous aversion : a proximate erection.

25 years are nothing..

[pynch]

Oops, I forgot to modify the stylesheet for some extra classes in the Letters section. Which is now fixed! Sorry.

[medard]

That was only four hours.

I'll go and sell my copy of the 7.0 misprint on Ebay then.

[Jellby]

Wait until it becomes a much sought-after collector's item.

[pynch]

Yeah, but you only have copies of it. (For the record: there are 23 of them out there now.) I’ll be rich, because I can sell the original!

[doubleshuffle]

Yep. The one with the aura, right?

[FlorenceArt]

Thank you so much for your work! I just found this while looking for something else. When I read Ulysses, I bought an ePub version that was full of OCR errors. So I used the Gutenberg version I think, which was not very good but at least readable. Now when I decide to read Finnegan's Wake, at least I'll know I can rely on a decent edition.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Pynch:

Are you familiar with the Paris Review Interview Series? Because we had four volumes' worth of interviews with writers in the house, I grew up reading them. If you don't know it already, I thought you might enjoy this low-key and charitable assessment of Joyce from an interview with Nabokov.

(Source)

INTERVIEWER

As an admirer of Borges and Joyce you seem to share their pleasure in teasing the reader with tricks and puns and puzzles. What do you think the relationship should be between reader and author?

NABOKOV

I do not recollect any puns in Borges, but then I read him only in translation. Anyway, his delicate little tales and miniature Minotaurs have nothing in common with Joyce's great machines. Nor do I find many puzzles in that most lucid of novels, Ulysses. On the other hand, I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.

INTERVIEWER

What have you learned from Joyce?

NABOKOV

Nothing.

INTERVIEWER

Oh, come.

NABOKOV

James Joyce has not influenced me in any manner whatsoever! My first brief contact with Ulysses was around 1920 at Cambridge University, when a friend, Peter Mrozovski, who had brought a copy from Paris, chanced to read to me, as he stomped up and down my digs, one or two spicy passages from Molly's monologue, which, entre nous soit dit, is the weakest chapter in the book. Only fifteen years later, when I was already well formed as a writer and reluctant to learn or unlearn anything, I read Ulysses and liked it enormously. I am indifferent to Finnegans Wake as I am to all regional literature written in dialect—even if it be the dialect of genius.

INTERVIEWER

Aren't you doing a book about James Joyce?

NABOKOV

But not only about him! What I intend to do is publish a number of twenty-page essays on several works—Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformation, Don Quixote, and others—all based on my Cornell and Harvard lectures. I remember with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.

INTERVIEWER

Gogol?

NABOKOV

I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is dubious and dangerous. . . .

And then Nabokov goes on to praise H. G. Wells.

[FlorenceArt]

What!!!??? Molly's chapter is NOT the weakest chapter in the book!! It's the best one!!!

[doubleshuffle]

What can you expect from an unrepentant lifelong butterfly killer? Proper aesthetic judgment? Nope.

Although you are also wrong. Ithaca is of course the best chapter of the novel!

[pynch]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Pynch:

Are you familiar with the Paris Review Interview Series? Because we had four volumes in the house, I grew up reading them. If you don't know it already, I thought you might enjoy this low-key and charitable assessment of Joyce from an interview with Nabokov.

(Source)

And then Nabokov goes on to praise H. G. Wells.

I wasn’t familiar with this, thanks, Prestidigitweeze. Is it possible that he was a little bored by the interviewer’s questions and wanted to spice things up?

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

What!!!??? Molly's chapter is NOT the weakest chapter in the book!! It's the best one!!!

The last chapter is certainly great, FlorenceArt, but my vote goes to the Ithaca episode, for finding poetry in science.

[doubleshuffle]

Ah, I see we agree on this. Nice.