James Joyce - Ulysses

1922, Oxford University Press 978-0-19-953567-5

Homer trans. by Emily Wilson - The Odyssey

2018, W. W. Norton & Company 978-0-393-33625-0

It’s been years since I read The Odyssey and never this new translation by Emily Wilson – author of Circe, which I chewed through a few summers ago. There’s the movie now, which I haven’t seen yet but came up in conversation with a friend. We’re both Joyce fans, and he informed me that Ulysses actually follows the text of the Odyssey section-by-section, and that they can be read together.

That seemed like a good excuse to finally pull Emily Wilson’s new translation off the shelf – and also finally read Ulysses!

I’ve decided to diary my confusion and delight here section-by-section.

Book 1

Athena visits Ulysses’ son Telemachus and suggests that he murder his mother’s suitors and then head to Athens. They flirt and promise to take a bath together later.

Buck Mulligan visits Stephen Daedelus at his mother’s funeral wake (I think?) and suggests he go to Athens. They go skinny dipping.

Suitors swapped for grievers? An abandoned wife for a dead one? Plus, god Athena for godlike medical student Buck Mulligan?

How direct is the connection between these two narratives?

Book 2

Telemachus, the “stuck-up, wilful little boy” gathers everyone to whine: he’s in purgatory grieving his maybe-dead father and on top of that all these courting freeloaders are eating all his food, drinking his wine, and making themselves feel at home when they are unwelcome. He threatens to leave and storms off.

Later Athena pretends to be him and prepares a ship for him to sail to Athens and check up on his father, meanwhile drugging all the suitors into a deep sleep.

When we last left Stephen Daedelus he was getting drunk with his friends after they’d all attended his mother’s wake… in this second book I’m having a hard time connecting much directly to the action in The Odyssey’s second book. He seems to be teaching a history class, then visits an older friend Mr Deasy who gives him financial advice (here’s a connection: Daedelus & Telemachus both complain they’re broke – though the former owes money to everyone in town while the latter is being bled dry by everyone in town) which devolves into an anti-semetic rant.

The second book ends with Mr Deasy sharing another anti-semetic notion I don’t really feel comfortable repeating here. I’m not sure how direct to be when looking for connections, but maybe Deasy is meant to slot somewhere into the role of Antinous, the old man who suggests to Telemachus that Odyssus isn’t dead and also there’s got to be some way to get rid of the suitors before Odyssus comes home to murder them all. Is that a parallel to Deasy trying to shame Daedelus into being more financially responsible? What the hell is with all the anti-semetic ranting?

I’m bookmarking Erwin R. Seinberg’s The Source(s) of Joyce’s Anti-Semitism in “Ulysses” for some side-channel reading on the subject.