An exhibition on James Joyce's life and work is on a world tour as part of the Department of Foreign Affairs contribution to the centenary of Bloomsday. Terence Killeen caught up with it in Lisbon
There were some pleasing symmetries at the opening of the exhibition, International Joyce, in Lisbon earlier this month. One was the location of the exhibition: the Casa Fernando Pessoa, the former home of Portugal's own great Modernist, Fernando Pessoa, a poet who carried a major Modernist principle or tendency, that of fragmentation, to the point of dividing himself into several personae in order to produce his poems.
They are written under different names, each name designating a fully imagined fictional character, and thereby from completely different perspectives. Just to add a further twist to the tale, some are written under the name of Pessoa himself, a persona that may well be as fictional as any of the others. A selection of them has recently been published by Dedalus Press in fine translations, with facing Portuguese text, by David Butler and, in another pleasing reciprocity, an exhibition devoted to Pessoa was recently held in the Irish Writers' Centre.
The Lisbon event was (informally) opened by the Irish Ambassador to Portugal, Patrick O'Connor, and quite a few Irish expatriates were, naturally, among the attendance. So too, though, were Portuguese people with a special interest in Ireland, among them Laura Paes de Vasconcellos, who has translated many Celtic legends into Portuguese. The exhibition is organised by the Cultural Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs, with the Bloomsday Centenary year as the obvious occasion, and is being shown at an impressive number of foreign locations, both in Europe and further afield: Beijing, Cairo, São Paulo, Boston and New Delhi are among the venues, as well as places I never heard of, such as Zadar and Nagoya (all the better).
One place I have heard of, however, and where the exhibition will be particularly at home, is Szombathely in Hungary, the home town of the (fictional) father of the (fictional) Leopold Bloom, and hence a town with a rather special connection to Ulysses.
There are 15 sets of the exhibition so it can show in different locations simultaneously. The cost of the venture is estimated to be over €300,000. It consists of 22 large panels, each containing text and images. They provide a comprehensive overview, in a necessarily brief compass, of Joyce's life and work. International Joyce is very much intended to provide basic information for people around the world who know the name Joyce but who would like to learn more, and in this it succeeds. Some of the images, such as the photograph of Ormond Quay in 1904, are very evocative. While one might debate the degree of influence that Leo Tolstoy exercised on Joyce, the text's reference to him is more than justified by the photograph of Tolstoy, from the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow: the word "sage" takes on its full meaning only after one has viewed this image. The fine photograph of Ibsen bears a remarkable resemblance to Joyce's nephew, Ken Monaghan, of the Dublin James Joyce Centre, with whiskers.
The text is by Joyce scholar Michael Barsanti, of the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, and Declan Kiberd has acted as editorial adviser, providing, one imagines, an Irish perspective. While the panels are in English, the linguistic issue has been addressed by providing considerable introductory material in the vernacular, in this case Portuguese: this exhibition is certainly meant to reach out to the peoples of the cities where it is on show.
It would have been nice to have had some Joyce memorabilia (a page of manuscript, a letter, a cane . . .) on display, but there are obvious security difficulties about bringing such items around so many locations, and this is a year when institutions are particularly chary of parting with any element of their precious Joyce holdings. The image which is labelled "O'Connell Street, 1904" is actually a photograph of the part of Grafton Street opposite the Provost's House - these images are sometimes hard to decipher.
International Joyce: from being a pariah, an exile, a rebel, James Joyce is now a name with which the Irish State is eager to associate itself on the world stage. And very naturally so, but it does make one muse on the strange twists and turns of history. As I mentioned, there were some pleasing symmetries at the Lisbon occasion: the most striking was the presence of a middle-aged, very Portuguese-looking gentleman who was The O Neill, head of the O'Neill clan and a descendant of Hugh O'Neill, exiled Earl of Tyrone. There was something particularly appropriate about the presence of the descendant of an exiled Irish rebel at an event held in homage to the work of another exiled Irish rebel.
Proof once again, in a surprisingly concrete way, that it is in fragmentation and dispersal that Irish history finds its continuities.