JOYCE James (1882-1941). - Lot 151

Lot 151
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JOYCE James (1882-1941). - Lot 151
JOYCE James (1882-1941). L.A.S. "James Joyce", "Via della Sanità, Trieste [2 December 1919], to Carlo LINATI; 2 pages in-4; in Italian. Long and interesting letter to his Italian translator, about his works and his difficulties for their publication and distribution. [Carlo LINATI (1878-1949), Italian writer and essayist, and translator (Yeats, Synge, Dickens, etc.) was asked by Joyce to translate Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He replied that he thought his play Exiles would probably be better suited to an Italian audience. He finally translated Araby, a short story from The Dubliners, and a fragment from Ulysses. It was to him that James Joyce sent the proofs of his famous outline of Ulysses, in order to help him in the understanding of this innovative and deeply confusing novelistic sum] Joyce thanks Linati for his kindness, and humorously refers him to Who's Who to find out more about him. He has lived in Trieste since 1904. He explains that, for the publication of The Dubliners, he had to fight for ten years. The entire first edition of a thousand copies was burned in Dublin by fraud; some say it was done by priests, others by enemies, others by the Viceroy or his wife, Lady Aberdeen. The whole thing remains a mystery... Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had been rejected by most London publishers. Moreover, when the courageous magazine The Egoist decided to publish it, not a single printing house in the whole of the United Kingdom could be found that would agree to print it. It was done in the United States. The sheets were sent to London and bound there... His new book Ulysses was to appear in The Egoist. Same story ("medesima storia"). The printers refused again. The work appeared in serial form in the New York Little Review. Three times its distribution by the postal service was stopped by the intervention of the American government. Then a lawsuit was launched against the book... Exiles caused a stir in Munich. His agent in Berlin wrote to him that nothing could be done for the time being, and that it would be better to wait until public opinion calmed down. He hopes that it will be the same in Italy... In England, it is not even mentioned. The play was included in the program of the Stage Society at the same time as William Congreve's The Way of the World and Gabriele D'Annunzio's La Ville Morte (in Arthur Symons' translation), but was later cancelled in the face of Bernard Shaw's protest that the play was obscene... Letters of James Joyce (ed. Stuart Gilbert, Gallimard, 1961, p. 148-150).
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