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With the Bloomsday centenary today, widow recalls translating Joyce's Ulysses

A small but well-read group of people on the mainland will today be joining the worldwide celebration of Bloomsday.

It was on June 16, 1904, that advertising salesman Leopold Bloom spent what appeared to be an average day wandering the streets of Dublin. Ulysses, the story of his adventures by James Joyce based on Homer's Odyssey,  became a modern epic.

This year marks the centenary of Bloom's journey and the 10th anniversary of the book's translation into Chinese.

That Bloomsday is being celebrated on the mainland is evidence of a maturing taste for modernist writing among a small group of Chinese, said Ding Hongwei , a professor of foreign language and literature at Peking University.

The university's library has hosted a two-week exhibition on Joyce's life and works.  The exhibit opens in the Lu Xun Memorial Museum in Shanghai today.

Where people lined up for the first edition of the translation in 1994 largely out of curiosity, today the affection for Joyce is rooted in a recognition of his startling originality.

'The receptiveness is a sign that the Chinese are in a true sense becoming integrated in the culture of the world,' he said.

Joyce's 'stream of consciousness' technique, until now, has only had a marginal influence on contemporary Chinese writers and a few experimental narratives were very tentative, Professor Ding  said.

In the 1990s, the Joycean world took on a special appeal for Chinese intellectuals. Some had read Ulysses in English or had some knowledge of the book through literary criticism by western scholars.

The depiction in Ulysses  of an ordinary man caught in a timeless struggle against cosmic forces resonated with the intellectuals faced  with the aftermath of the 1989 student-led democracy movement that ended in bloodshed.

In 1990, Xiao Qian , known for his acclaimed reporting from London during the second world war, at first turned down a publisher's request to translate the work.

Already advanced in years (he was born in 1909), Xiao was considering  a memoir of the dark days of the Cultural Revolution.

But his wife, Wen Jieru , a veteran translator of Japanese and English literature, persuaded him to instead translate Ulysses with her.

'I told my husband that to live is not to repeat ourselves but to move forward,' she said.

It  was a redemptive experience. Ms Wen, now 77, views the translation as the most rewarding time of their 45 years of marriage.  Day after day, they deliberated on every passage and compromised on the choice of words.  It took four years to decipher the dense, layered narrative  and render it into Chinese.

Xiao, in the preface to the first edition of the translation, paid loving tribute to his wife's energy and dedication, calling her the 'locomotive' of the effort.  Xiao passed away in 1999.

Thanks to her knowledge of the Japanese language, Ms Wen could check Japanese translations of Ulysses to help her  understand some difficult passages. Her Catholic background also gave her an edge in grasping the more obscure religious  allusions.

The translation went into a second edition in 2002. Another translator, Jin Di , published two volumes,  one in 1994 and a second in 1996.

Ms Wen will join a panel of experts to speak at the Bloomsday centenary  at the Lu Xun Memorial Museum today.

Last Saturday, the Irish community in Shanghai celebrated Bloomsday four days early, visiting seven  pubs and restaurants, and held  readings from Ulysses at each stop.

Mark O'Neill in Shanghai contributed to this article



How Dublin's literary giant found his voice in China