48
48 JOYCE, James. Ulysse. Traduit de l’anglais par M. Auguste Morel, assisté par M. Stuart Gilbert. Paris: La Maison des Amis de Livres, Adrienne Monnier, 1929 “There was no perhaps about Sullivan’s voice” – presented to an unqualified genius First edition in French, number 164 of 170 copies on alfa vergé “exemplaires d’auteur hors-commerce”, presentation copy inscribed by Joyce on the half-title to the Irish tenor John O’Sullivan (1877–1955), “A John Sullivan, dalla voce eroica, Parigi, di 17 9mbre [i.e. November] [1]929”. This pleasingly polyglottal copy of Joyce’s international masterpiece, translated into French, and inscribed in Italian, to an Irishman, has a superb association: O’Sullivan was one of the most prominent people in Joyce’s life around this time. Born in Cork, O’Sullivan had lived and worked in Paris since the turn of the century and toured internationally. Joyce (himself an amateur tenor) was alerted to O’Sullivan by his brother Stanislaus, who encountered him in Trieste reading a copy of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . He went to see the tenor perform in Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera in October 1929 and was bowled over by his “heroic voice”. They soon became friends and drinking companions (he appears in Finnegans Wake as “Jean Souslevin” [i.e. “under the wine”]), and Joyce set about promoting his fellow countryman’s career.
This Joyce took to excess, himself caught in a creative slump around his own work on Finnegans Wake . His letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 18 March 1930 reveals O’Sullivan’s great significance to him at this time: “When I ceased contributing to Transition I felt a sudden kind of drop as I was determined not to try to attack the second part [of Finnegan’s Wake ] in such an ill-equipped state . . . In this frame of mind I first heard Sullivan singing and for the last four and a half months I have been working incessantly to try to get him past the Italian ring which protects the London, New York and Chicago opera houses . . . No doubt I may have . . . made myself ridiculous in the eyes of soberthinking people, but I do not care very much, for it is incomparably the greatest human voice I have ever heard”. Few others, however, sided with Joyce’s enthusiasm for O’Sullivan’s booming voice. Sylvia Beach later remembered, “with Joyce, Sullivan’s cause became an obsession, and the more he failed the more he persisted in his efforts. Mrs Joyce grew so tired of it that she forbade the mention of Sullivan’s name at home” ( Shakespeare and Company , p. 190). Morel’s French translation was only the second translation of the novel, after the German edition of 1927. It was begun in 1923 at Joyce’s request by Varlery Larbaud, but Joyce then halted the project, saying that Larbaud would turn Ulysses into a “mutilé de guerre” – a casualty of war (Casado). Morel’s translation was overseen by Larbaud with the direct input of Joyce, who was far happier with the result. The edition was published by Adrienne Monnier at her bookshop La
INEXHAUSTIBLE LIFE
36
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker