Sneak Preview of A Stretch of the Imagination

Visit Bloomsday's forthcoming fundraiser on You Tube

www.youtube.com/embed/LWFHf_lLZ8s

Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination pays homage to Joyce

Photograph by Bernard Peasley

Monk O'Neill (played by Wayne Pearn) is a reader of Joyce. 

Bloomsday in Melbourne

proudly presents

Jack Hibberd's iconic (Irish) Australian play

A Stretch of the Imagination

Two performances only

When: 19 November at 2.00pm for 2.30pm  and 5.00pm for 5.30pm 

Have a drink before the show!

Where: The Amphitheatre, 5 Courbrant Court, Mont Albert North.

come dressed for outdoors (jacket and hat, and hopefully not umbrella)

Easy reach of buses along Belmore Rd. 201, 302 (ask to be let down near Boondara St.)

Cost: $25. All proceeds to Bloomsday

BOOKINGS essential as space is strictly limited.

 A Stretch of the Imagination is the first offering of the Bloomsday season, a fundraiser with all proceeds supporting Bloomsday 2014.

The very gifted WAYNE PEARN (Hoy Polloy Theatre)  first played Monk O'Neill nearly two decades ago, and is embracing the virtuoso role again with unconcealed enthusiasm, relishing not having to whiten his hair and being able to draw on those extra dimensions of understanding that twenty years brings. It's a play very much about ageing and dying, though it's far from being sad or solemn. It is an over-the-top celebration of life itself, or at least of a certain kind of life - Monk is a recluse, a misanthrope, a would-be Don Juan, a misfit.

Wayne Pearn as Monk O'Neill                                    Director, Renee Huish, at the first rehearsal.

Photographs by Bernard Peasley     

Jack Hibberd's iconic (Irish) Australian play of the 70s is widely regarded as a masterpiece, and has attracted some of Australia's finest actors to the role: Peter Cummins and Max Gillies among them. It ranges broadly, and it dips its lid to Joyce quite explicitly but also implicitly. Monk is as richly a man who lives in his body as Leopold Bloom does. His fantasies may not be quite as florid, but the play does demand a certain stretching of credibility as one enters Monk's libidinal and fervid memories of women he's known, friends who have let him down, books he has enjoyed, opportunities to live the high life relived.  He may have started his career at Xavier and clearly is well-read if not well-educated, so the journey to One Tree Hill and his lonely is all the more intriguing. His is a body in the advanced stages of decay, and these are dealt with comically and graphically, and sometimes for maximum comic shock-value. He is the kind of man who rages against the failing of the light and who will not go gently into the pit.

Come early and enjoy a drink and a nibble, and enjoy a play in the open air. Please pray for good weather!

BOOKINGS essential as space is strictly limited.

or Phone Bob on 03 9898 2900

Joyce News from Melbourne

The Joyce world in Melbourne has been bopping since I last blogged. Very happy to report a fantastic Bloomsday with the very talented Wayne Pearn in charge of theatrical activities.  You'll be pleased to know that he is also a very fine actor, and we now have the rights to do Jack Hibberd's A Stretch of the Imagination,  a classic Irish-Australian  comedy, and a one-hander, and one of the finest plays to emerge from the Australian Performing Group from the glory days of the Pram Factory. Watch out for notices ahead of the middle of November. We plan to stage it in the amphitheatre at 5 Courbrant Court, Mont Albert North.

Bloomsday itself is more than geared up, with the first draft of next year's script almost completed. We have a few new hands on board on the script-writing team, and the plan is to bring you a short version of the whole of Ulysses. It's a very ambitious project and more about that as it unfolds. As you know, it's a very long and intricate novel, and we're committed to doing more with it than just dramatising its plot. We want Joyce's poetry to be full-frontal and bold, which is a bit of a challenge.  But it's proving fascinating to work on.

Bob and I just back from the Edinburgh Fringe, where we took in Dermot Bolger's adaptation of Ulysses in a bold new production by Tron Theatre Glasgow.  A fuller account of that experience (and an account of another Irish play) is to be found in the (free) online Irish Australian magazine, Tinteán  (why not subscribe to the magazine while you're there?). We loved it, and our few reservations will hopefully show in our own attempt to do something similar. Ulysses in 90 minutes is a big ask.

In Tinteán  too, you will find that there's a Joyce symposium happening on 3-6 October in Dunedin at the University of Otago.

The U3A group at Melbourne City has girded its loins for the third short course (8 weeks) this year on Joyce, what we're colloquially calling the 'Super-Advanced' class, focussing on the Stephen chapters. It has gathered up previous students from classes in 2011 and 2012, and it truly flies with what is very difficult material. Students are volunteering to give short presentations, which I think is a measure of their growing confidence with the material. The first four were terrific. We began with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and on Friday next we start where I quixotically advise students never to start on a first reading, with Ch.1 of Ulysses. One of the attendees lives in my house, and I'm hearing dark mutterings about how opaque it is. Let's hope the class opens it up for everyone.

Bloomsday will also offer its own Beginners' and Advanced Joyce course in February 2014. Please phone 03 98982900 or email our secretary Sian (sian.cartwright@mceecdya.edu.au) if you'd like to join the class.

Bloomsday thanks its web designers, Ben and Maireid of Lyrebird Media for revamping the website 3 years ago.  It's a very pleasing site which gives a lot of information and is easy to use and we're very grateful for their input. They have become busy with their business, and so Bloomsday is looking for assistance with website maintenance.  If you can help, please let us know (03 9898 2900). It's now our main way to reach our community and to draw new people, so Ben and Maireid will be much missed.

  

Colum McCann's tribute to Joyce

Colum McCann,  Irish-American novelist of distinction, has penned a superb tribute to Joyce in the Irish Times, 'The Home Place: Coming home'.

What Joyce would make of becoming a new form of communion ritual can only be imagined. What McCann has to say about his friend's intention and desire to read Ulysses  is moving, as is his way of sending off his friend.  Hope you enjoy it.

Thanks, Rita Crispin, for alerting me to it.

James Joyce's Voice

Simon McGuinness, Bloomsday's very first director, has alerted me to a piece in the Irish Times. It's an article about a recording made at Sylvia Beach's instigation in 1924 (and produced in 1926) to promote Ulysses. It struck me as particularly interesting because of the accent (mid-English Channel?), and also because of the power of the voice (I'm familiar with the older man's voice reading Finnegans Wake). This is a younger confident man. The dates are also interesting - the novel was still banned in US, and effectively then in UK. The passage chosen is quite tame, perhaps for that reason.

How is it that in the month before Bloomsday, these treasures seem to resurrect themselves to be auctioned?

Bloomsday has fond memories of writing Her Singtime Sung around a  missing letter of the raunchy correspondence between Nora and Joyce (inventing a fictional letter to fill the gap), only to have such a letter surface for auction at Sotheby's in 2004, and sell to an anonymous bidder for much more than the deluxe first edition. We felt our play was quite prescient!

Bloomsday in Melbourne festival begins on 12 June at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne.

New York on Broadway

Daniel Pecoraro of Symphony Space, home of New York on Broadway,  recently sought, for the first time in their 32-year history, to partner with groups outside New York. He was keen to learn about Melbourne's history, and conducted a long interview. He was interested to discover why Bloomsday in Melbourne stages, rather than just reads Joyce.



Listen to interview by clicking here. 

Why turn Joyce's novel into theatre?

'I've a seeklet to sell thee', Kevin Dee (as James Joyce)
and Stephanie Lillis (as muse and daughter Lucia)

I was asked recently by an interviewer from Bloomsday on Broadway (congratulations to them on 32 years of Bloomsday readings), why we presented our Joyce as theatre, rather than as readings. It got me thinking.....

Bloomsday in Melbourne is, I think, unusual around the world in having been engaged in turning Joyce's text into theatre  for so long (20 years). It is proud to have created original plays and/or adaptations on an annual basis, mainly because it likes the challenge of coming at Joyce from a different angle.

It's certainly true that elsewhere in the world various sections of the novel have often received theatrical treatment, and Penelope comes to mind as a favourite of actors (usually female). Melbourne remembers with affection Fionnuala Flanagan's glorious and provocative strip-tease (ever so tasteful!) at the National, and Maggie Millar's bedbound Molly, and many, many of our own (Multiple Mollies, and especially male Mollies, take a bow!). What a gift to women actors (of all ages!) is the  dame from Eccles Street.  Circe also lends itself to drama, but it's generally select and doable bits, like the encounter between Bloom and Bella Cohen. Melbourne's more intensive engagement ratchetted it up many notches by seeking to deal with the phantasmagorical in the chapter (and not just the ghost), in 2010, takes a bit more doing and quite a lot of theatrical nous (Tinteán, issue 13, p.34).

Typically, Melbourne Bloomsday has taken two approaches to the material: it writes

1. An original play (this year's, The Seven Ages of Joyce, is a typical example; Her Singtime Sung is another) by taking a topic and writing our own material around Joyce's fiction. Such an approach allows us to ask probing questions of him.  How does the creative artist use the material to hand, in this year's case, his life, and transform it? What are the goads to creativity? What can one do artistically with intense suffering and emotions like jealousy and grief and guilt? And make living the ordinary life a celebration? Does the great writer have the right to cannibalise family and friends? Would this man have been bearable to live with?

or

2. A theatrical adaptation of a chapter or thematically linked passages from all over the novel.  This approach has the merit of leading deeply into Joyce's subject matter, but it presents its own challenges, as the chapters may or may not have a good shape for theatre.

Some chapters have their inbuilt climaxes and closure (Circe and Penelope), but many do not (Cyclops, Wandering Rocks) and theatre demands at least some journey, some discernible trajectory, and a climax, if it is to rise above simple readings. One wants to send the patron out of the theatre with some form of closure, something that Joyce frequently short-changes one on, with his equivocal and sometimes abrupt endings. We've done some chapters that on the face of it look unplayable: Ithaca (1999), Oxen of the Sun (2003), Cyclops (2011), and I think they have provided much artistic satisfaction for the scripting team. Solving the problems of how to end something that is not an end in itself is inevitably a portal of discovery. Sometimes actors have themselves come up with the outrageously inevitable (the end of Oxen comes to mind).

Sitting as I do alongside directors and actors, with a view to explicating the material and filling in the background, it's always fascinating to watch productions unfold like flowers in bud, feeling the heat of the sun, the rain and buffeting winds.  The same question always arises: how to make the material comprehensible to the Joyce virgin?  It's a mission Bloomsday in Melbourne has always embraced enthusiastically.

How does theatre help communicability of a dense literary text? The first and most obvious answer is giving breath to words creates meaning (what's not to understand in Penelope once one supplies the breath-stops?), and Ulysses is a triumphantly vernacular text, built as it is out of Joyce's memories of how Hiberno-English is spoken on the streets of Dublin. The music of the language is easy for actors to grasp, and although it may be unfamiliar, Melbourne Bloomsday usually use Irish accents, and mix Irish accents with others to tune up the ears of non-Irish actors, or, if necessary, invite in an accent coach. Beyond this, the language of gesture, lighting and blocking also add immeasurably to feeling states and meaning, and it cannot be ignored that Joyce often alludes to theatrical idioms of his day - vaudeville, and melodrama, in particular, and these modes are often resorted to to build climaxes. Lighting and makeup (whiteface) in particular helped contradistinguish the naturalistic in the brothel scene (Circe) from the phantasmagorical. This year, one of the many challenges is signalling a shift from the life of Joyce to his semi-autobiographical fiction based on the life. You'll have to wait to see how it's handled.

Perhaps the single most important meaning-making strategy is electing to play the text for its comedy.  Too often, I find, readers and viewers approach Joyce with too much solemnity (after all, it's a great work!) and reverence. It sometimes takes a few minutes for audiences to find that they are allowed to laugh;  in fact, being invited to laugh. A rule of thumb that the scripters have developed is this: if in workshopping scripts, we're not laughing our heads off, it's probably not communicating. So, the gestural language of comedy, often broad farce, is energising when bringing Joyce to the stage. A fine example of this would be the occasion when the Citizen (Jase Cavanagh) played his own poetic dog, Garryowen. The canine curse, following 'the metrical system and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn,'  was truly horrifying interrupted by howls and yelps - superb comic doggerel, and a splendid sideways characterisation of the hard-drinking,  anger-driven, victim-burdened Citizen.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of staging Joyce is the mercurial character of the writing.  He is the master of bathos, the quick and comically unexpected dive into the depths after reaching for exaltation, as for example happens at the end of Ch. 12, when Bloom, who has been implicitly compared to Elijah in his chariot. and Christ, in his dramatic escape at a 45° angle from Barney Kiernan's, suddenly plummets, 'like a shot off a shovel'.  When it's verbal, as in that example, the humour speaks for itself, but when the change has an emotional dimension or one wants to sit with a poignant moment, it can be disconcerting for an audience, which has to be quick-witted in the first place to appreciate the transformation of the moment, or be prepared to cut Joyce slack on the twists and sudden turns of his emotional roller-coaster.The transitions from high seriousness to low comedy and back again to the loftiest romanticism we found disconcerting when playing Molly last year. Emotional states are highly labile in Joyce - they provide opportunities, however.

I may not give too much away about this year's show, The Seven Ages of Joyce, but it's always interesting to watch actors new to Joyce slowly realise that they are dealing with sly and sometimes rambunctious comedy, bordering on farce. Bloomsday has a long tradition of not taking Joyce at his own valuation. The play we took to Dublin in 2004, Her Song be Sung, in having characters and figures from Joyce's real life round on him and take him to task, perhaps set the scene. In this year's play, Nora and Stanislaus don't have the last word, just as his quite cruel treatment of his own father is probably not the last word on that subject either, but Joyce's unwavering conviction about his own abilities (and aren't we pleased he was not deflected from his purpose), did take its toll, especially on Nora and Lucia, and probably Giorgio as well, not to mention Stanislaus and his mother. Some pretty passionate debates are happening among the actors about the characters they are playing. Currently, Lucia is pretty angry with Nora, and marvelling at the idea of possibly being a co-dependent co-creator of Finnegans Wake. One has to feel for the good-cop father (JJ) who is powerless to help, despite insistent strategising, and also for the mother (Nora) who is forced to be the disciplinarian in an era when a psychiatric label could be a death-sentence. The tussle between reality and desire in every life is one that Joyce knew well.

The Seven Ages of Joyce is structured around Jacques's (and ultimately Shakespeare's) designation of the seven stages of a man's life. Within that basic structure, which fits the life well (except for the fourth age when battle is with the censors and social conventions rather than warfare, though of course it deals with his flight to Zurich during WWI), we gave ourselves the liberty of moving between the life and the fiction.  Joyce's life was not nearly as orderly as his systematic, highly organised big baggy monsters of novels (we range at will over the poetry, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) and the contrast in itself between the life and the art is intriguing, especially when the real-life characters are free, in a non-naturalistic play, to interrogate the architect of the fiction.

To return to the question: why put Joyce's novels on the stage?  I hope because intelligent actors with a respect for Joyce's language and the astonishing perspicacity of his characterisation,  and direction which can help actors unpack that, really can cast more light on works that are not easy to grasp. That's my hope, at any rate. And that's what people tell us Bloomsday does for them.

Chookas to the actors and Director.  Great to see you playing with Joyce.

International Ventures for Melbourne Bloomsday

Bloomsday in Melbourne, in the year it runs its twentieth theatrical celebration of Bloomsday, is involved in two very exciting international ventures. We have always enjoyed cordial relationships with Dublin and Toronto and Bloomsday in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia, and greetings are always exchanged on Bloomsday for this important secular feast-day, but this year ratchets up the intensity quite markedly.

New York Bloomsday this year notches up 32 years of Bloomsday on Broadway at Symphony Space.  It is seeking a partnership with us, the first time they have sought to make connections outside their own operation. They typically do celebrity readings from Joyce, and last year it was Sirens.

In an interview with them, they were very curious about why we turn Joyce into theatre. We are unusual in doing this, and it's set me thinking about why turn a perfectly wonderful novel into theatre? You'll hear more of this in the leadup to Bloomsday!

Watch this space for the interview.

A second major international event  in which Bloomsday in Melbourne is involved is an international streamed video reading of the novel organised out of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin. It goes under the grand title of The Global Bloomsday Gathering.  The reading will start in Auckland at 6am their time, and Melbourne picks up the batton at 8am, and will be reading some of Proteus, Calypso and part of Lestrygonians from 8am.  It's an ambitious venture and we wish Yvonne Thunder and her team all the luck in the world as they negotiate barton-changes and daunting technical issues. It will be launched in Dublin and be streamed live on the web, so tune in for a cornucopia of accents and a feast of the big book.

In Melbourne, we are very lucky to have found a tech-savvy enabler in the undauntable Stuart Traill who will oversee a team of radio interns to set up the internet connection and to field directions from the nerve-centre in Dublin. We'll be working out of a ZZZ studio.  We're expecting it will be a blast!

Meanwhile a team of readers is assembling to rehearse the readings and it is exciting - Renee Huish, Silas James, Deirdre Gillespie, our new director Wayne Pearn, Eugene O'Rourke,  maybe Ted Reilly and myself. Proteus has its challenges, being a Stephen chapter, and full of poetry, and French, Latin and German, but it's a gift. Calypso and Lestrygonians are simpler to get the tongues around. We will all have to keep ourselves nice at the dinner the night before!

More on the Joyce coin

Philip Harvey, very familiar to Melbourne Joyceans, comments further on the debacle of the Joyce euro, which, by the way, has sold out!

He made a further pungent point in an email to me, when he says:

“Wild sea money” is there in the same passage, meaning the hard objects on the beach that you get for free, unlike the silver objects from the Irish bank.

STOP PRESS: Bloomsday 2013 details now online

20 years of Bloomsday are being celebrated in Melbourne in 2013. It's a big one. On Thursday 18 April (just a week away), there will be a Launch of the season with the Director, Wayne Pearn, and a Retrospective, with a gathering of actors, directors, performers from the past.  We're hoping many people will come in costume, as there is a significant prize (two tickets to the Preview) for the best one. Only 60 spots, and we need to advise the venue on Monday 15th of numbers for catering purposes, so please enrol soon.

Of course, the annual ritual celebration began some time before that, probably with Ainne Szymanski, and Collected Works Bookshop, which continues to mount all-day readings on 16 June.

Bloomsday in Melbourne began its theatrical/performance-style Bloomsdays in 1994, under the aegis then of the Yeats Society. Something of the story of those days is told through images in our Gallery (it has to be said that, until recent years, we have usually been too busy - and lacked the expertise - to take photos - you can't let a tripod get in the way of a performance!), and a fuller account with Reports on each year can be found in Bloomsday's Archive, with full reports and responses and reviews on most year's performances.  Six directors and hundreds of actors over 20 years. There is a lot to celebrate.

Performing Joyce has been a painstaking but exhilarating journey of understanding.   There is no better way to get into Joyce's big baggy novels than through the ear, and the eye, and actors and directors have added a lot to our understanding, and to our audience's enjoyment. So much of Joyce is obsessed with inhabiting a body, and actors inhabit both bodies and space in quite remarkable ways, and directors draw nuance and meaning from words on a page, which can startle even those who think they know what the page means.

Bloomsday in Melbourne in 2013 is an extended programme at fortyfivedownstairs (45 Flinders Lane): 5 performances of an original play, The Seven Ages of Joyce, beginning on 13 June and ending on 16 June, instead of our usual 2. We'll be working in the best theatre we've ever had the privilege to be in - fortyfivedownstairs at 45 Flinders Lane.  It's a dramatic expansion of our horizons, and of course quite risky for a small group like ours, but we're told and are hoping that the show more than warrants the risk.

The Seven Ages of Joyce is a rumbustious comic biographical play which shows how Joyce drew on his life to make his art. It's irreverent, fun and very moving, and a challenge to stage. I'll keep you posted as rehearsals gather more pace. The Director, Wayne Pearn, has been carefully putting his team together, and putting individuals through their paces.  The whole team meets in the next few days to put a collective shoulder to a big wheel.

We're also excited about the Seminar, 'The Obstetrician and the Psychiatrist Examine Joyce's Ulysses', featuring Dr. James King and Dr. Jo Beatson.  We've never drawn on medicos for insights into Joyce, and given his background (both Joyce and his father began but failed medical training), and he clearly knew more than most about such matters, it's not before time to draw on medical expertise to read Ulysses.

The Dinner also represents a break with tradition, as it will occur on 15 June rather than 16 June. Sunday night in the city many restaurants (of sufficient size and suitable for the traditional concomitant entertainment) close. Our patron, P. J. O'Brien's Irish pub at Southbank, happily have opened their doors, and have produced a great buffet menu for us. Relax in comfort at P.J.'s after an energising walk or a more sedate tram ride from the theatre. Or go to Dinner on Sat, and do the other 2 events on Sunday. Eamonn Hennessy, the Manager,  has set aside the dining room, a private space, for our comfort. It will be lovely to enjoy the dinner without having to rush off to the next show, something we've never ever been able to do.

Further, because it is a festival and we want as many folk as possible to be able to access it, we're doing a series of Free Readings at the Gallery at fortyfivedownstairs on 12 and 13 June. More details about this as they come to hand.

REJOYCING again.....

Frances.

Expensive error

Rita Crispin has alerted me to this article in the British Daily Telegraph:

Ireland's central bank misquotes James Joyce on limited edition coin

Wave goodbye to the Suzy Bernstein Therapy Group

Congratulations to Renee Huish and Bloomsday Players (left to right, Gerry Halliwell, Silas James, Deirdre Gillespie, therapist Rose Marfleet, Liam Gillespie, Nate Troisi, and Edwina Rushe). Their production of I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Fell by Bernard Farrell (performed under licence to Rosica Colin), was well-attended and much appreciated by Bloomsday patrons and many newcomers. It engaged because of what it had to say about that '70s and '80s phenomenon, the Encounter Group. The satire was registered quite subtly by the down-to-earth janitor (Gerry Halliday), and there was fun to be had at the expense of the young man (played by Liam Gillespie) who was addicted to the encounter group experience and substituted them for real relationships, and the irrepressible giggles of the young matron (Edwina Rushe) married to an insensitive bully (played by Nate Troisi). The dramatis personae was cleverly built around six very different characters: in addition to those already mentioned, there was the older woman (Deirdre Gillespie) who expected an encounter group might be like a seance, and the young man (Silas James) whose sister had been damaged by her experience The culture of these groups where one was supposed to divest oneself of one's hangups is indeed strange, and made stranger by Bernard Farrell's play, which was written at the height of the craze for them. The naive optimism of the therapist  (Rose Marfleet) that the 'family' could sort out everything, was a source of continuing wonder. One has to ask if indeed the harm that Farrell suggests actually did happen more than most realised at the time.  The play had some memorable moments:  a bomb threat and a well-choreographed fight-scene; and some terrific monologues/revelations.  One felt that as much energy was invested in hiding uncomfortable truths as exposing them.

A big thanks to the production manager and assistant to the director, Roisin Murphy, who worked tirelessly on costumes, putting as authentic a '70s set together as possible, and on front of house. And also thanks to Chas who made the set secure with his practical wizardry.

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching director and cast winkle the humour from this script and it was good to see it crackling and sparkling for three memorable performances.


Thanks, too, to the Celtic Club, and especially La Tache and Peter, and also Helen. It is good to have a home for Irish plays, and we hope that it won't be too many years before there is a theatre at the Club.

Daragh Kan and the team at the Mercat Hotel also need our thanks for storing large set items, and for making us welcome after hours, after the final show.

A warm farewell to a play we learned to admire and enjoy by bringing it to life.

Rose Marfleet as the therapist energises the 'family'

Silas James, incendiary participant. 

Joe (Silas James) and Roger (Liam Gillespie) explore their differences 

Liam Gillespie expatiating on 'touch therapy'

Renee Huish, our collegial director.

Photos by Maireid Sullivan, Lyrebird Media.

From the Director's Chair

Patrons of Bloomsday might like a taste of our forthcoming moved play reading, I Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Fell (by Bernard Farrell) (performed under licence to Rosica Colin).  I've been going to rehearsals, and it's coming up marvellously.  It's a wicked satire.  In this piece,published in Tinteán, the Irish-Australian magazine, Renee Huish gives us a preview of the play.

See Tintean

A review of the latest biography of Joyce

Hello, Joyceans,

following our recent Introduction to Ulysses course, a participant, Dennis, sent me a link to the quite sharp New Yorker's review of Bowker's biography of Joyce. You might like to read it:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/07/02/120702crat_atlarge_menand?currentPage=all

'sputtering hand' : FINNEGANS WAKE IN CHINESE

Philip Harvey writes:

When Georges Perec’s French novel La Disparition, a text missing the letter E, was translated into English (‘Anglais’ preferred in this context), many people asked, Why? The literary challenge of writing a book without the main vowel was one of Perec’s interests. Indeed, it was his purpose, because it drew attention to something overwhelmingly vital that was actually missing. One never reads the book in French without thinking that the main letter isn’t there, which is what Perec wanted his reader to think. This absence was a reminder of other absences in postwar France that haunted Perec and his audience. He draws attention to absence through the artifice of his book, and by its very linguistic structure.

An English translation in which E has been elided might seem perverse. Has the translator served literature well, or simply gone to excessive trouble to repeat a trick that could not repeat the hidden message on the French absence? Translation is always going to lose something from the original, this is a given, but how can anyone translate such a deliberately contrary piece of literary writing without in fact creating a new work that has only remote resemblance to the original?

These thoughts went through my mind when reading online about Professor Dai Congrong’s newly published translation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into Chinese. She spent eight years translating the first third of the book, reminiscent of the Italian release of their Finnegans Wake into recognisable sections over a protracted period of time. Anna Livia Plurabelle is gorgeous in Italian, confirming that rivers of the world have different ways of flowing. The report in last week’s Guardian reminds us “the book’s language is thick with multilingual puns and brazenly defies grammatical conventions.” That’s just for a start, some would say.

The question with a Chinese Finnegans Wake is not whether one can be faithful to the original, or work with approximations, or at least give the gist, but whether one is in fact writing a whole new work. How on Earth does a Chinese translator get at the hundreds of multiple meanings, many of them operating across several European languages, existing on a single page?  Not to mention the notgoaheadplot itself, where characters have no sooner formed some sort of identity than they morph into someone else, or something else like a rock, have their name changed for them without consultation, or speak in a non-cohesive fashion? Dai Congrong explains her approach in an interview:

"The things I lost are mostly the sentences, because Joyce's sentences are so different from common sentences," she says, adding that she often broke them up into shorter, simpler phrases – otherwise, the average reader "would think that I just mistranslated Joyce. So my translation is more clear than the original book."

Yet she took great pains to remain as faithful to the original as possible. "For example, there was a phrase in Finnegans Wake that said 'sputtering hand', which might mean shaky. If I translated it as 'shaky hand', that would be OK – in Chinese it's a good sentence. However, I just translated it as 'sputtering hand'. Sputtering and hand cannot be put together in Chinese grammar, but I put the two together anyway."

I wonder which signs in Chinese she used for ‘sputtering hand’ and what those words mean in turn in the original Chinese language. How many meanings are there in the Chinese that are not even in the Wakese? Are the myriad short phrases in Chinese (her solution) a new form of Chinese poetic prose? Where is all of this cross-fertilisation going?

Hugo Rahner, the brother of the German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, once remarked of that theologian’s at times difficult writing style, that one day someone will translate him into German. Then, by implication, we will all understand. This anecdote occasionally comes to mind when reading Finnegans Wake, a book that starts making more sense the more we translate it back into the English it is supposed to be written in. We accept that English is the language platform and operating system upon which Finnegans Wake does its performances. We can at least see English in there amidst the vocabulary, which is helpful sometimes. But if it has to be translated into English, what happens in Chinese?

Apparently the first volume of Fennigen de Shouling Ye has “sold out its first run of 8,000 copies and reached number two on a prestigious bestseller list in Shanghai, second only to a biography of Deng Xiaoping.” Reactions to the book may prove to be as distraught and confused and amused as those of the Parisian intelligentsia (bourgeois through and through, not a Maoist in sight) who first came to terms with Work in Progress through the 1920s and 30s. I like the translator’s cautious promotion of the book for her native readers: “Dai ventures that Chinese readers may appreciate Joyce's rumination on the cyclical nature of history, the relationships between his male and female characters, and the sheer challenge of interpreting his prose.” This suggests that there is a readership in China for Joyce at his craziest and most dextrously linguistic. This is good news, I would suggest. It is welcome to know that her contract covers the remaining two-thirds of the novel, and that Dai has no qualms about continuing.

But beyond its immediate impact on Chinese readers, I keep thinking of something once argued by Joyce’s rumbustious colleague in Paris, Ezra Pound. Pound himself had translated from the Chinese, some think it is amongst his greatest work, and he held as a tenet that English literature is nourished by translation and that the great ages of English literature are great ages of translation. Dai’s is a truly awesome achievement. After the hubbub of first release subsides, I think one of the most interesting things that will come out of this work will be its impact on literary Chinese. The translator has possibly contributed greatly to the poetic of 21st century Chinese literature. Dai Congrong has contributed to Chinese literature itself by presenting a book like no other, an imaginative expression of time and human behaviour like no other. Its real impact will be long-term on other writers in Chinese, who stand to benefit by Dai’s play with Wakese. As she says, “I think it's a very great book – after I read Finnegans Wake… I'll think oh, this writer used a sentence that's too traditional, too simple, and if he can experiment more with his sentences then he might be able to express different things."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/05/finnegans-wake-china-james-joyce-hit

Chinese Translation of Joyce

Peter Gavin, one of our patrons, has kindly alerted us to a BBC report about a new translation of Finnegans Wake.  Enjoy the wit of this.

What's Happening between Now and Bloomsday?

Happy New Year to our patrons! And to Joyceans everywhere!

Bloomsday in Melbourne begins to prepare the next Bloomsday the minute the last one ends, and sometimes even before that. There's a lot going on until we reach our 20th Bloomsday on 16 June.

This communication provides information about the four events planned for January-June 2013, a year which promises to be our best yet.  We invite you to participate in all of them.

1.      Penetrating the ‘Impenetrable’: A Course for Beginning Readers of Ulysses, 17 Feb. 2013, 10am – 5pm at the Celtic Club. Places still available. This one-day intensive course is being repeated at the request of patrons. There may be a follow-up advanced course, if called for. See curriculum, below.

2.     A Moved Reading of Bernard Farrell’s  subversive comedy about encounter groups, I do not like thee, Dr Fell, directed by Renee Huish at the Celtic Club on Friday 22^nd and Saturday 23^rd March at 7.30pm and Sunday 24^th March at 2.30pm.  See description below and flyer.

3.     A launch-and-remember party at P. J. O’Brien’s, Thursday 7.30pm, 18 April 2013 to celebrate 20 years of Bloomsdays and to launch Bloomsday 2013 with our director and actors past and present. Details to be advised by email and on website by the end of February.

4.     Our main event for the year, Bloomsday, on 16 June, marks our 20^th successive celebration of Bloomsday. It will be an extended programme run over four days from 13-16 June. We will be collaborating with fortyfivedownstairs, the bijou, arts-focussed independent theatre in Flinders Lane.  Details on email/website from end of March.

In addition, we include material relating to the Australia Business Arts Foundation (ABAF). You will be pleased to hear that we have again secured tax-deductibility status with this Australian-government-auspiced organisation.

For more details see the flyer and the description of the play below.

Bookings for all events:  can be made online,  or you can phone 03 9898 2900

IN MORE DETAIL........

 1.    Course: Penetrating the ‘Impenetrable’:

A Beginner’s Guide to reading Ulysses.

When?                                      10am-5pm, 17 Feb. 2013

Where?                  2^nd floor, Celtic Club, Latrobe and Queen Streets, Melbourne. 

Cost?                        $60  ($40 for students, health-card holders)

To Book:                 Phone Bob on 0398982900, or http://www.trybooking.com/BVLB

Classes will be restricted to 20 students and a waiting list will be kept. If demand warrants, a second class may be formed.

The course will be delivered by Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass (Ph.D., ANU), who has been the Director of Bloomsday since its inception in 1994, and who has taught Joyce at tertiary and other levels since 1980. She is a member of the College of Distinguished Deakin Educators, and the recipient of national and university teaching grants and awards.

Curriculum

This is an intensive course for perplexed beginning readers. James Joyce’s Ulysses has an undeserved reputation for being impossibly difficult to read. Having said that, it is demanding, and is better done with a guide in the first instance.  This course aims to demystify the novel, make it less formidable and intimidating, and to create enjoyment of its riches, in particular its subversive but wise comedy. The style of the course is a mix of lectures and discussion, and participants are encouraged to bring their own copies of Joyce, preferably an annotated edition (the Penguin Student’s edition, or the Oxford University Press editions are both excellent, or alternatively, if you are using an unannotated edition, you might consider purchasing Gifford and Seidman’s Ulysses Annotated, cheaply available from good bookstores and Amazon).  

            

In More Detail.....

The curriculum will focus on the simpler chapters of Ulysses and has the following main components:

·       Session 1, 10am -1pm: The Architecture of a ‘baggy monster’

·       Joyce’s principles of organisation. Having a sense of how minutely and interestingly organised the novel is a key strategy for understanding. Various ways of analysing its structure, some authorised by Joyce, will be undertaken.

·       Session 2, 2-3.30pm: Getting up to speed on narrative techniques in Ulysses – how the novel teaches you to read it.

·       Learn about free indirect discourse

·       Varieties of stream of consciousness technique

Starting with Bloom, and culminating in Molly’s great soliloquy. All sessions will be a good introduction to Bloomsday 2013 which ranges widely over Joyce’s works, but especially Ulysses.

·       Session 3, 4-5 pm: The Comedy of Joyce

Practising reading the user-friendly chapters  Calypso 4, Hades 6, Penelope 18. Having pre-read these three chapters will make the course more profitable for students. At 5pm, the Bar calls.

2.    About our Autumn Fundraiser: I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell 

I Do Not Like Thee, Dr Fell, a play by contemporary Irish playwright Bernard Farrell, has a star-studded cast, and includes many of the actors from last year’s smash hit Big Maggie. It will be directed by Renée Huish, who has brought us The Christian Brother and Big Maggie, and frequently been a Bloomsday Player.

Dr Fell premièred at the Abbey Theatre Dublin in 1979, and enjoyed overnight success, which was repeated around the world. The action centres on a group therapy session in a Dublin attic where all participants are encouraged to ‘relax, relate and communicate’.

Hang ups and neuroses abound in the group. There is Joe (Silas James), a likeable character, in spite of his efforts to completely derail the group, and Suzie (Rose Marfleet), the group therapist, who does her best to keep it all on track. The urbane Roger (Liam Gillespie), an aficionado of group therapy, kicks off proceedings with many twists and turns before the end. Husband and wife team, Peter (Mike Gillis) and Maureen (Edwina Rushe), have come along to inject some zest into their marriage, with outcomes of which neither would ever have dreamt. The last to arrive is Rita (Deirdre Gillespie), who has ably switched from the role of Big Maggie last year to a demure, confused widow, who regales all present with tales of her husband and their twelve, or is it thirteen cats, named after the twelve Apostles.

The voice of sanity comes from the group attendant Paddy (Gerry Halliday). Paddy wisely does not participate in the sessions, opting to go home instead to his wife and children. But by play’s end we discover that real life presents its own challenges to Paddy.

This lampooning of therapy groups which were a big hit in the late 60s and 70s is guaranteed to give you an evening or afternoon of pure escapist fun.

Renée Huish will be assisted by Roisin Murphy.

Performances will be at the Celtic Club at 7.30pm on Friday, 22^nd and Saturday 23^rd March, with a matinee performance at 2.30pm on Sunday 24^th March.

Performed under licence by kind permission of Rosica Colin Ltd. 

Bookings: online at http://www.bloomsdayinmelbourne.org.au/bookings.htm; or phone Bob 03 9898 2900

3 A Party to Launch Bloomsday 2013

P. J. O’Brien’s (genuinely) Irish pub on Southbank is in 2013 continuing its support of Bloomsday by hosting the launch of our extended 2013 season. Buy a pint, and enjoy P.J’s legendary hospitality (remember the Tatty Tenors Concert in August 2012), and meet the Bloomsday Players performing in 2013, and the incoming Theatre Director, Wayne Pearn, award-winning director and founding manager of Hoy Polloy. Entrance cost is $15 and includes food (but not drinks). Thursday 18 April 2013 at 7.30pm.  Booking details to be announced.

4. BLOOMSDAY, 2013

16 June 2013 will mark our 20^th successive celebration of Bloomsday. To celebrate this milestone, this year we will be mounting an extended programme run over four days from 13-16 June. We will be collaborating with fortyfivedownstairs, the bijou, arts-focussed theatre in Flinders Lane.  Details on email/website from end of March.

Details are still being finalised but will probably include five performances (Thursday and Friday at 7.30pm, and Saturday at 6pm and Sunday at 1pm and 6pm) of our usual high-quality play, a seminar on Life and Death in Joyce on 16 June at 3.30pm, and free lunchtime readings in the Gallery at fortyfivedownstairs on 12 and 13 June.

We are excited about the script which uses Jacques’ speech from As You Like It for presenting an irreverent account of the life and fiction of Joyce.

All the world’s a stage

And all the men and women merely players:

And one man in his time plays many parts, 

His acts being seven ages...

 It gives us the opportunity to range widely through Joyce’s works, from Portrait to the Wake and to show how art became Joyce’s ‘cracked mirror’.

Making a Tax-Deductible Donation to Bloomsday via ABaF

Bloomsday in Melbourne greatly appreciates the support patrons have provided to our annual festival over the past 20 years. Many patrons have commented on the increased dramatic quality and professionalisation of the theatrical offerings.

Last year we registered Australia Business Arts Foundation’s (AbaF) Australian Cultural Fund in an effort to raise the funds necessary to maintain the quality of our offering and raised $900, for which we thank businesses and patrons. This Fund was established to encourage people to donate to the arts and enable not-for-profit groups like Bloomsday in Melbourne to benefit from this generosity. All donations are made to the Australia Business Arts Foundation (AbaF) which considers donor preferences when allocating grants. In the past eight years more than $10 million has been donated to AbaF and granted in full to more than 400 artists and cultural organisations – it is a great program for groups like ours.

2013 marks 20 years of celebrations in Melbourne of James Joyce’s novel.  Our main event will be a very lively account of Joyce’s life told through his fiction, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. It is an original play entitled The Seven Ages of Joyce. Our mission is to bring Joyce in the form of high quality theatre and discussion to as wide an audience as possible. We are firmly of the view that it is a treasure to be shared by all, not just the academic boffins. We think this play will be of broad general interest, and we are taking a risk in staging it at one of the city’s bijou theatres, fortyfivedownstairs (at considerable cost, but hoping to capitalize on their extensive mailing list and their enthusiasm for the project and marketing know-how). We also plan the traditional seminar (on birth and death, we hope), and lunchtime readings in the Gallery at fortyfivedownstairs.

As you no doubt know, Bloomsday costs rather more than we can bring in the door on the day itself, so fundraising is a major task for us if we are to pay actors what we think their 3-4 months of preparation warrants. Our major costs in 2013 include (these are indicative, except for the theatre, which is a fixed price):

·       Creative personnel (theatre director, lighting designer, designer, about 8 actors) ($14,000+?)

·       fortyfivedownstairs theatre (45 Flinders Lane)  ($4000)

·       Public Liability Insurance ($800)

·       Flyers and postage ($800)

·       costumes ($400)

·       music rights ($250?)

·       theatre heating ($250)

·       Seminar Paper Honoraria ($300)

Small donations will help Bloomsday afford materials for our fine prop-maker ($20), or buy tights ($5), or create special effects or hire another light. Every little helps.

We are therefore asking you whether or not you would be willing to support us through ABAF. Inevitably some paperwork is involved.   If you can help, we’d be very happy to do what we did this year and acknowledge your support in our program and on our website.  We understand that there are many calls on people’s resources, and if the kind of support that better suits you is attendance at our events, that’s also grand, and more than welcome. Perhaps you could support us by bringing a friend? Or organising a group? 

Donate via ABaF Now.....

ABaF information is available online and the form needed to make donations is also available online. Be sure to specify that you are a Bloomsday supporter, please.