Odyssey/Ulysses

Tomorrow starts a reading group in which we read Ulysses alongside and in the order of The Odyssey (in order to see what happens!), so my weekend has been reading the first chapter of each. The translation of The Odyssey I have this time is Chapman's, and it's really astonishing. But Ulysses is something of a different order again. The life and richness of the characters and their interactions, the gentleness and humanity of Dedalus' ruminations along the shore, the delicacy and ease with which Joyce dances from internal monologue to conversation to remembrance to objective observation to allusion, and most of all the humour and sparkle through it all - your heart expands till it fills your chest and you can't bear keeping locked in all the mirth and Menschenliebe with which Joyce infects you. Unfortunately I was alone at home with no-one I could read it to (or just hug), and the Forty Foot is a bit far away. It's probably just as well. I was able to express a bit of it by going into university and practicing piano for a couple of hours, and by listening to Joanna Newsom's Ys, which has - or maybe I'm just projecting - something of the same openness and delight about it. But it's still all too much bottled up. Perhaps I need to join a Joycean dramatic group and learn it off by heart.

I read Ulysses for the first time when I was twenty or so, and I don't remember much about it except that I decided then too that I loved it like nothing else, despite not knowing what was going on most of the time. I'm not half as stupid now as I was then, so I hope that this time I'll get inside it as it deserves. (And this is my third time reading The Odyssey, but the first time not using Martin Hammond's fairly unmusical prose translation, and so far I'm finding myself 'moved' by it too, for the first time. Chapman's translation is really remarkable: you can see the attention he's paid to every detail, making every line somehow all of accurate, beautiful and dramatic.)