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Unlocking the language with Robert Burchfield
Unlocking the English Language by Robert Burchfield (Faber & Faber, 1989) had been sitting unread on my shelf for far too long, so I let it jump the queue and am very glad that I did. For readers...
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Flann O’Brien on translating Ulysses into Irish
I’ve been reading Flann O’Brien again, having picked up Hair of the Dogma (Paladin, 1989), a selection from his riotous Irish Times column ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’, which he wrote under the pseudonym Myles na...
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Anthony Burgess on James Joyce and dream-literature
"World history is family history, dreamt in a bedroom." —Anthony Burgess on Finnegans Wake — Stan Carey (@StanCarey) December 27, 2015 Fans of James Joyce’s writing who haven’t read Anthony Burgess’s...
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When is a typo not a typo? In the wor(l)d of Ulysses
Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake As a copy-editor I try to abide by the typographic oath: First, do no harm. When...
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Nora and James Joyce: making women’s speech the universal tongue
Maybe writing about typos in Ulysses triggered it, but I finally took Brenda Maddox’s book Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce off the shelf. It’s an exceptional study, rich in insight and research: highly...
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Joyce County by Ray Burke
It was a hundred years ago, in 1922, that James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. Joyce famously set the novel over the course of a day in Dublin; his connections with Galway, a smaller...
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Asperging words
Here’s a verb I don’t remember encountering before. It crops up near the end of this passage in Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark (1996), where the author describes a dramatic childhood winter...
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