James Joyce in His Labyrinth

Extract

Jorge Luis Borges claimed to be “the first hispanic adventurer to have arrived at Joyce's [Ulysses]” (3) when he published a translation of the novel's final page in the Argentine journal Proa in January 1925; in fact, the Spaniard Antonio Marichalar was the first to translate passages of Ulysses into Spanish—just two months earlier, in the Revista de Occidente in Madrid. One of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 1920s and 1930s, Marichalar (1893–1973) was largely responsible for circulating the works and poetics of a number of anglophone writers, including Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Liam O'Flaherty, Hart Crane, and D. H. Lawrence, among hispanophone audiences. Prior to 1924, Joyce had been mentioned briefly in the Spanish press by Marichalar, by the English travel writer Douglas Goldring, and by several others, but no one yet had substantially treated the Irish author whose work was at the center of a revolution in European literary aesthetics. Marichalar's groundbreaking article/review/translation “James Joyce in His Labyrinth” was a remarkable introduction to and adaptation of Joyce's modernist cosmopolitanism in Spain, where the author's influence remains profound.