Translation, Introduction and Notes by José Ruiz Mas

Valencia: Tirant Humanidades, 2024, 136 pages.

ISBN: 978-84-1183-304-2

One must be brave and patient to dissect even a single one of Joyce’s works. Translating Joyce into any given language requires a special added effort, for he did not use words at random and each one of them has to be weighed up and researched by the translator for its nearest linguistic and cultural equivalent that may convey the multiple layers that he often placed on them. And considering Joyce’s prose is notoriously complex and intricate, translating the poetry of Pomes Penyeach (1924), originally published only two years after Ulysses and already a beacon of the spirit of experimentation of “Work in progress”, may be a truly mind-blowing experience.

The “pomes” of Pomes Penyeach are brief, usually of no more than two or three short stanzas each, but through them Joyce chronicles a handful of personal highlights of his life spanning from 1904 to 1924. In his “pomes” Joyce narrates, experiments, recalls, revives, revolves, criticizes, weeps, laments, rememorizes and evidences a wide range of spiritual and bodily vibrations and epiphanies, no easy task to transfer to the foreign words of a non-English target language, no matter which. Furthermore, translating also the three additional poems usually accompanying most editions of Pomes Penyeach is demonstrative enough of how challenging it may be to delve into Joyce’s elusive and somewhat cryptic allusions to the literary panorama of early 20^th-century Ireland and to the personal circumstances that could have influenced his decision to exile himself from Dublin.

Joyce’s second, and last, poetry book of his ouvre is arguably one of his least valued works, with the possible exception of his only play, Exiles. However, Pomes Penyeach has been translated into Spanish several times, by Martín Triana, Barbachano, Álvarez Amorós, Zavaleta, and Jiménez Emán, all of which are valuable contributions to joyciana. Indeed, the popularity of Pomes Penyeach among Spanish-speaking translators may be attributed to the reduced number of pieces of the collection, only thirteen, and to their limited length. The inevitable temptation of any Joycean translator to confront in small, though intensive, doses the genius of words that Joyce produced may also explain the relative frequency with which the collection has been transferred to Spanish, or indeed any other language. However, José Ruiz Mas’s edition is different from the Spanish versions that have preceded it for two reasons. Firstly, because it is the first attempt made in this language to respect the original register, rhymes, alliterations, wordplay, metaphors, puns, and even rhythm of Joyce’s “pomes”. And secondly, because the translation of the entire poetic corpus of Pomes Penyeach + “Ecce Puer” + “The Holy Office” + “Gas from a Burner” = Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses, is accompanied by a detailed explanatory analysis of the collection as a whole and of each of the “pomes” and “poems” of the collection. In the introduction, Ruiz Mas includes numerous timely details about the different contexts that surrounded the genesis of Joyce’s poetic production and endeavours to explain his daring stylistic resources and the subsequent reactions that he presumably elicited from his envious Irish contemporaries in the first decade of the 20th century. Some of Ruiz Mas’s interpretations of the different “pomes” and the other accompanying verses are bold, daring sometimes, but they are not devoid of a Joycean logic and a familiarity with the poet’s world that cannot go unnoticed by any expert on Joyce’s works, deeds and moods.

Ruiz Mas’s edition includes the Spanish translations of the thirteen “pomes” of Pomes Penyeach, i.e. a dozen “pomme-poems” or “apple-poems”, preceded by a customary “tilly” (or “mandaíco”) or extra piece in the basket (here the thirteenth “pome”) generously given by an imaginary shopkeeper (here the poet) to the customer (here the reader), as was the custom in Dublin markets. The thirteen pieces, different in theme and form from one another, constitute a collection of unique reflections of Joyce’s mind and soul. Joyce’s “pomes” and “poems” are followed by their respective Spanish versions so that the dedicated bilingual reader and scholar may be able to critically compare both the original English texts and their translations in Ruiz Mas’s pen at the same time. The thirteen pieces of Pomes Penyeach are also ordered chronologically as they were originally written, thus providing a subtle autobiographical leaning to Joyce’s poetic collection, for his cities of residence and creation are also added, these being his native Dublin, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, from 1904 to 1924.

Joyce’s “pomes” are followed by three “Other Verses”, which include the poem “Ecce Puer” and the two longer poems, “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner”, with their respective Spanish translations. The first of these three was written by the pessimistic hand of an ageing Joyce who had just become a grandfather but believed he had failed as a son to his own father. The two poems that follow, written a good twenty years earlier, described the long-gone pre-exiled beginnings of a young and aspiring writer who felt hurt for being misunderstood by his Dublin peers despite his strong intellectual expertise and the literary worth that his works had, of which he was rightly sure. Ruiz Mas has extensively used relevant quotes taken from Joyce’s published and draft works together with an wide range of secondary bibliography in order to contextualise the writer’s poetic production and, when possible, to interpret the incisive criticism that he dedicated to W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Padraic Colum, George Russell (AE), George Roberts, William Kickpatrick Magee, Seamus O’Sullivan, Joseph Campbell, George A. Moore and James H. Cousins. Most of Joyce’s lines were aimed at the allegedly cold hearts of his contemporary writers, never friends, but of whom he proved to have personal, sometimes private, information that he indiscreetly shared with all the Dubliners of the universe. His rejection of whom he perceived as rival poets and playwrights sprang from their avowed literary and spiritual connection with the then fashionable Celtic Revival in Ireland with which Joyce did not however sympathise, a divergence that he did not disguise. He believed that his vain and wronged patriotic peers should have described the paralysis of Ireland more faithfully to the reality of the country, and not create sugar-coated and romanticised pretty pictures of its culture, its history, its myths, its people and its national complexes. Joyce’s longest poems, the satirical “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner”, help to explain, at least partly, the reasons for his setting out on his never-to-return exile from Dublin. As Ruiz Mas implies in his introductory study, Joyce finally came to terms with the fact that he could have never succeeded in his hometown or in his equally beloved and despised Ireland because he believed that everyone around him was trying to push him aside and would do anything in their power to exclude him from the Irish Parnassus. He believed that the Irish writers of his time were jealous of his own profound knowledge of philosophy and literary criticism, of the elite Jesuit-education that he had received, of his promising, but still unproved, literary career, and of his accomplished life experiences after his incursions into all types of settings of Irish society. Accompanied by his recently and timely found lifelong partner Nora, nothing remained but to leave Dublin and Ireland, where he felt he was not wanted.

No matter how much Joyce may endeavour to hide behind the curtain of his verses, whether they be “pomes” or poems, Ruiz Mas has managed to prove that the writer does provide some autobiographical information about his rivalries, personal interests, readings and main influences (Jonson, Nashe, Yeats, Ibsen, the Bible, the opera, Greek and medieval philosophy, Eliot, MacLeish, Hardy, Stevens, etc.), his secret romantic projects, his painfully strong feelings for his children’s welfare, his literary frustrations, his high-flying aspirations, his tantrums, and even the likely reasons behind the style in which he shaped his parodic poems, so full of razor-sharp personal allusions against his fellow writers and their real or exaggerated flaws. Indeed, this is one of the main achievements of the edition at hand. Both translator and editor, Ruiz Mas has captured them and explained them to both the scholar and general reader. In A penique el poma y otros versos, he presents two faces of Joyce: Joyce the poet and Joyce then man, the latter in his manifold capacities of husband, lover, father, actor, son, grandfather, friendless youth, donjuan and even as a victim of his own weaknesses and illnesses. On the one hand, through his translations and explanations, the editor draws the reader’s attention towards the pessimism that the poet felt when he saw old age catching up on him, or the sadness of a father who foresaw the future burden of the fragile mental or physical health of his children, or the frustration of a middle-aged English teacher who felt hopelessly inflamed by the beauty and the youth of Amalia Popper or other female students. But Ruiz Mas also portrays an angry and jealous Joyce who is unable to digest Ireland’s contemporary writers’ literary successes as a result of the help that they were receiving from their spiritual leaders Lady Gregory and Yeats, the visibility of their works thanks to the Abbey Theatre and the Irish publisher Maunsel & Co. and even the financial collaboration of the odd Irish-American Maecenas-figure, while he was struggling to make a name for himself and finding this unfair to his genius.

As an additional and unexpected bonus to the thirteen “penyeach pomes” and the three “poems” of the collection are the two extra pieces that Ruiz Mas has translated and generously added in two footnotes in the “other verses” section. True, they are only two inconsequential and lesser-known sarcastic limericks, which were found in Ellmann’s biography of Joyce, about a highly-strung young candidate to fame struggling for recognition and which he dedicated to those with whom he rivalled or disagreed, i.e. to Lady Gregory and to William Kickpatrick McGee. As far as I know, these have never been translated into Spanish before. Indeed, this an unexpected and welcome “mandaíco” on Ruiz Mas’s part.

Having said this, I highly commend this new version of Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses, a collection often perceived by critics as yet another phase and face of Joyce’s capacity for experimentalism. These “pomes” and “poems” also bear witness to Joyce’s intimate and pessimistic view of his own uncomprehended Irishness as well as his critical position towards anyone who did not agree with his egocentric vision of the universe. Apart from the daring literary quality of the Spanish translations and the valiant boldness of some of the proposed solutions, A penique el poma y otros versos is well worth exploring both for the avid general reader and the scholar specialist.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the funding by the Spanish Ministry of Universities (FPU21/01232) and the support from the Women, Literature and Society (HUM-874) Research Group and the Communication and Society Research Centre (CySOC) at the University of Almería.