A Joyceful of Talkatalka: From Friendshapes for Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli ed. by Raffaella Baccolini, Delia Chiaro, Chris Rundle, etal (review)

This Joyce-related festschrift is the first volume of essays meant to celebrate the outstanding career of Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli. It is a multifarious collection, both a tribute to a “founding mother” of Joyce criticism in Italy, and a significant snapshot of diverse approaches to Joyce studies in Italy and abroad. Bosinelli is presented by the editors as a “multifaceted self” and a “multidimensional character” (11), whose range of interests is aptly mirrored in the book. She was instrumental in broadening Italian scholarly interest in Joyce and incorporating areas such as translation and discourse analysis. Her work has led to the establishment of a renowned program in translation studies in Italy. She also supported the creation of one of the most useful libraries for Joycean studies, including the books of the Italian translator of Finnegans Wake, the late Luigi Schenoni, and the Benstock library (13). Given the wide-ranging nature of the collection, and to avoid the risk of being too cursory, I will not discuss all of the essays contained in this volume but will follow the thematic undercurrents of the book’s in(ter)dependent sections (essays on Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake and on Joyce and other writers) instead.

Linguistics is one of Bosinelli’s main interests, so it is not surprising that many of the essays deal with its various branches, from corpus-based discourse analysis to pragmatics. The first contribution, by Marcella Bertuccelli Papi, presents a linguistic analysis of “Araby,” in which she suggests that “the literary complexity of a text is enhanced when its global coherence is the result of multiple underlying coherences” (40), thus deploying an approach that is respectful of Joyce’s own composition strategies. An essay focusing on linguistics closes this volume: Romana Zacchi reads Joyce’s dramatic Epiphanies as “elusive fragments of conversational interaction,” whose mimesis of everyday conversation is confirmed by pragmatic analysis (387).

A fresh take on Joyce and linguistics is to be found in articles by scholars who are not Joyceans by trade, like Paul Bayley and Donna R. Miller who studied the occurrences of the words “Joyce” and “Joycean” in the British quality press in 1993 and 2005. Despite its short length, their investigation proves interesting as a cultural analysis of Joyce’s presence in England, although more could have been said about the newspapers being British. A comparative analysis with Irish newspapers might have proved equally revealing. Silvia Bernardini and Adriano Ferraresi also attempt a cross-fertilization between literary criticism and corpus linguistics for their study of “Lestrygonians.” In so doing, they provide further evidence for previous readings of the episode such as those of Melvin J. Friedman and Erwin Steinberg, as well as shed new light on Bloom’s distinctive narratorial style.¹

Translation issues raised by Joyce’s texts are also the focus of linguistic analyses within A Joyceful. Lavinia Merlini shows the use of Italian suffixation in Joyce’s own translations of Finnegans Wake, observing a particular fascination with alternatives, compounds, and blends. Her analysis is informative and clarifies the way Joyce saw suffixation as a typical feature of colloquial Italian. Because she is not a specialist in Joyce’s works, it is understandable that other similar expressions in Ulysses (for example, “Commendatore Beninobenone”—U 12.584) are ignored, but they certainly confirm her opinion about Joyce’s attitude towards Italian. Similarly, Margherita Ulrych and Simona Anselmi focus on the Wake with their “Translating and Re-narrating Multilingual Texts: The Extreme Case of Finnegans Wake.” Tackling the problem through a more distinct cultural stance, they argue that the Wake is a chief example of translation issues of multilingual texts. The translation of two fragments by Joyce himself and Nino Frank (whose help is regrettably barely acknowledged in both this essay and Merlini’s) is an instance of the unavoidable deforeignization that multilingual...