The Polish capital joins in the worldwide tribute to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The place to go is the Warsaw University Library which, together with the Irish Embassy, is organizing the event. The programme includes a lecture on Joyce’s civic imagination, a recital of traditional Irish songs used in the writer’s books (by Fran O’Rourke of University College, Dublin) and a multi-media show by Emilia Gowin-Pacuła Leopold Bloom’s Phantasmagories.

The show combines photographs from the Bloomsday celebration in Dublin in 2004 with a selection of quotations from Ulysses, in English and Polish.

The first Polish translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Maciej Slomczynski, was published in 1969.

This was UD‘s toast, at Ireland’s Four Fields, to James Joyce on Bloomsday. She raised her pomegranate martini; Courtney and Mary Anne raised their Guinnesses.

The bar was pretty quiet; UD wanted a quiet Bloomsday this year. Her tattered and taped up copy of the book sat on the table by the shepherd pie and the apple pie. While waiting for her friends (both were once students of hers at GW), UD read the opening pages of the book, puzzling as ever over why the words

the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak

have such surpassing beauty. They’re like these lines from a James Merrill poem:

I hear the ferrous, feather-light diluvian / Lava clink at a knife-tap from our guide.

What is it? The delicate combination of hard Ks and gentle Ls?

My students – my friends – were
brimming with life. We laughed.
At the Cleveland Park metro we

embraced and said goodnight.

One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year.  The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:

A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.

The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.

Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.

… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…