Joyce and Trieste: From the Joyce Festival to the Trieste Joyce School

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 12, Summer 2001© 2001 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 Joyce and Trieste: From the Joyce Festival to the Trieste Joyce School RENZO S. CRIVELLI Joyce’s presence in Trieste has often been recorded on a local level by a meager group of intellectuals such as Manlio Cecovini, Stelio Mattioni , Nini Rocco Bergera, Anna Gruber and Carolus Cergoly who, after organizing in 1971 the Third International Symposium, then founded a celebratory committee on the occasion of the birth centenary of the Irish writer. These celebrations, which took place in 1982, culminated in the display of a bust of Joyce (the work of a “Triestine” sculptor Mascherini who was born in Udine but lived all his life in Trieste)—in the Giardino Pubblico (the Public Gardens), beside the bust of Italo Svevo—and with a conference inaugurated by the Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, the belated publication of which came out in 1986. For some ten years afterwards there were no significant cultural events regarding Joyce until the foundation, in 1993, of the Joyce Workshop of the University of Trieste. This workshop emerged from the idea of a Research Doctorate on “The New Literatures in English,” in collaboration with the universities of Udine and Bologna, and with a section dedicated to “Irish Literature” that was transferred to the University of Trieste. The Joyce Workshop immediately set about demonstrating the importance of the Irish writer’s two sojourns in Trieste (the first from 1904 to 1915 and the second from 1919 to 1920), and, in the first place, it involved the city itself in its research. In October 1993, in fact, the Joyce Festival of Trieste was launched: this was an arduous undertaking that centered round a series of activities that lasted almost a month with a daily program that ran from 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. in the Teatro Miela which acted as host to 112 joyce and trieste the proceedings. The activities opened on October 1st with a presentation of the work program of the Joyce Workshop—directed by Renzo S. Crivelli and made up of a group of students doing a degree in modern languages in the Arts Faculty—and the opening of two parallel exhibitions: “A Journey through Dublin at the Beginning of the Century” and “A Journey through Trieste at the Beginning of the Century,” organized by Arturo Giacomelli. Among the events there figured the projection of the following films: “The Faithful Departed” by Kieran Hickey, “Is there One who Understands Me? The World of James Joyce” by Sèan O’Mordha (who, as we know, worked in consultation with Richard Ellmann), “The Dublin Suite” by Godfrey Graham (who was present in the hall), “A Painful Case” by John Lynch, produced by Radio Telefìs Eireann, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by Joseph Strick, an unedited film for Italy, “Ulysses” by the German director Werner Nekes, “Exiles” by Donald Farmer (RTE), the video “Edith Clever Liest Joyce,” based on Molly Bloom’s monologue, by Hans Jurgen Syberberg (ORF), and “The Dead” by John Huston. The Teatro Miela also put on some interesting events such as “Roba de mitico palcoscenico,” a brilliant theatrical piece by Silvio Fiore, with music and dance, inspired by Joyce’s encounter with Ettore Schmitz; “Otto poesie da un soldo” by Bilucaglia and Sillani, a work on magnetic tape with diaprojectors with a musical and visual setting inspired by “Poems Pennyeach,” written by Joyce in Trieste in 1912; “Anna Livia Plurabelle” in the Italian version revised by Joyce and recited by the actress Sandra Cosatto; a very original performance by Ariella Reggio who recited a version in Triestine dialect of Molly Bloom’s monologue, directed by the television director Pierpaolo Venier, author also of a video based on the rather bizarre but not at all absurd hypothesis, of the influence of the structure and cadence of Triestine dialect on Joyce’s prose (it is enough to mention, among the various hypotheses, the one which assimilates the idea of the stream of consciousness and a dialectal form of expression that leaves little room for cesuras and...