The work and life of Joyce is celebrated annually on 16 June, Bloomsday (the 107th anniversary of the fictional events that occur in his
Ulysses), in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.
The
Irish novelist was first a translator, a student, and teacher of modern languages. He composed
Ulysses over 8 years in exile, on the run from World War I, supporting himself teaching English to the Italian, German, and French speakers of Trieste, Zürich, and Paris. Part of
Ulysses's celebrated difficulty is its untranslated bits of these three languages, plus snatches of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Irish Gaelic, Norwegian, and more. The most remarkable episode of
Ulysses is the episode 14, Oxen of the Sun. This chapter is remarkable for Joyce's wordplay, which seems to recapitulate the entire history of the English language. After a short incantation, the episode starts with latinate prose, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and moves on through parodies of, among others, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Defoe, Sterne, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyle, before concluding in a haze of nearly incomprehensible slang.
After finishing
Ulysses, Joyce set to work on
Finnegans Wake. The entire
book is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic
multilingual puns and portmanteau words. Till now there is no appropriate
translation of
Finnegans Wake from English to foreign language.
