Sirens in Joyce in Italian in Zurich

Quite where the Sirens sang their songs is unknown, as perhaps it should be. The Odyssey places them between the rock of Scylla and the island of Aeaea, which would be quite precise if either of those places existed. James Joyce places the Sirens, with still more exactness, in the little labyrinth of bar, saloon and restaurant areas of the Ormond Hotel, Dublin:

In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each other, high piercing notes.
Ah, panting, sighing. Sighing, ah, fordone their mirth died down.
Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and gigglegiggled.

The Ormond Hotel also doesn't exist, but only because its last vestiges were demolished in 2018. The counterpoint of those goldbronze voices, by contrast, lives on, and Arianna Autieri has been listening to it. Her book is a radical re-translation of this extraordinary, overflowing prose poem. Famously, Joyce organised his novel around specific walks through Dublin taking place on a single day in 1904 — the equivalent today would be publishing a novel about what happened on a random day in 2006 — and yet, at the same time, Ulysses is exactly what its title suggests, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey. As if that larger-scale architecture were not enough, the episodes themselves are artfully structured, and the Sirens story follows the plan of a musical fugue. This is the music which Arianna has been re-composing, in Italian mingled with English.

If Joyce will always be a Dubliner, he will also always be a Zuricher, if there is such a word. (It's not really in the spirit of Joyce ever to ask if there is such a word.) In Zurich, Joyce conceived much of Ulysses, during the First World War: and so, even though Trieste and Paris were just as important in his life, it's always Zurich that Joyce's admirers think of. And it's in the riverside centre of Zurich, at Augustinergasse, between the great Fraumünster church and the Hauptbahnhopf, that the James Joyce Foundation now stands. The Foundation was founded in 1985 by Fritz Senn, whose scholarly collection of Joyce materials was unrivalled: and now, we're pleased to say, contains a copy of Arianna's book too. A sort of homecoming, which is always how an Odyssey should end.

At the Foundation

Arianna's book James Joyce’s Music Performed: The ‘Sirens’ Fugue in Experimental Re-Translation is here.