"Ulysses in the South": II (Molly) Bloomsday Celebration in Niterói, Brazil, 12 June 2019

Bloomsday celebrations in Brazil are too many to count. They have kept fans of James Joyce together in several cities for over three decades now. In 1988, Haroldo de Campos and Munira Mutran organized what was a Bloomsday to remember. That night, friends in Joyce convened at Finnegan's Pub, in the city of São Paulo, to create the Society of the Friends of James Joyce in Brazil. The following year, the Society became the current Brazilian Association of Irish Studies (ABEI in Portuguese).

As a carioca, I was curious about the first Bloomsday in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Thanks to Peter O'Neill, an Irish friend who lives in Brazil, I was able to learn that it took place in 1998 as an initiative of José Rache de Almeida, the former Ambassador to Brazil in Ireland. Peter O'Neill was so thoughtful that he even preserved a copy of the program, in which we see the names of Antônio Houaiss and Bernardina Pinheiro, two translators of Ulysses into Brazilian Portuguese who had not met before and would not meet again—Houaiss died the following March.¹

From Rio de Janeiro, we crossed the Guanabara Bay and soon arrived in the city of Niterói. There, on the afternoon of 12 June 2019, the research group Joyce Studies in Brazil, with the support of the Irish Consulate, and Education in Ireland, held the II Bloomsday in Niterói at Fluminense Federal University—UFF. Molly, instead of Leopold, was the protagonist in this edition. The event had four parts: lecture, reading, music, and food and drink.

The Consul General Barry Tumelty's opening words were followed by Joyce scholar Patrick O'Neill's paper. Since the protagonist of this (Molly-related) Bloomsday was, of course, Molly, our guest speaker delivered the very lively "Weaving a Textual Web: Molly Calypso Penelope Bloom." After asserting that in Ulysses Joyce "weaves a textual web of echoes and resonances of Homer's Odyssey," he demonstrated how Joyce created "onomastic linkages" between characters in the novel and characters in the Odyssey whose names serve to identify the eighteen episodes of Ulysses. Then, with a touch of humor, O'Neill portrayed Molly as a character who mirrors "all of the several female figures identified by the chapter names 'Calypso,' 'Scylla and Charybdis,' 'Sirens,' 'Nausicaa,' 'Circe,' and 'Penelope.'" Any attempt to summarize the talk cannot but fail to do justice to its acuity.

We proceeded to the reading session. This year, the passage selected was taken from Molly Bloom's monologue.² Fifteen people—among them, Andrea Lombardi and Susana Kampff Lages, the co-organizers of the Bloomsday with me—read the 163-word excerpt in English and different translations in French, German, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Russian. The Latin translation was especially made for the occasion by Beethoven Alvarez, who teaches Latin language and literature at Fluminense Federal University. I thank him for allowing me to share his translation with you:

O etiam mare et puniceum mare uelut igneum interdum et gloriosus solis occasus et fici in Alamedae hortis ita vero et omnes angiporti peculiares et roseae et caeruleae et croceae aedes et rosaria et hyacinthus et gerania et cacti et Mons Calpe uelut puella ubi fio montis flos ita uero quando florem posuit in coma sicut Andalucianae puellae solentes uel an rubram ornanda sim et quomodo ille dedit mihi milia basia sub Morisca moenia et rata sum tantum alterum quantum alterum et tunc eum quaero oculis meis ut etiam quaerat ita uero et tunc is me quaesiui me uero quaerere ita uero montis flos meus et primo bracchia mea posuit circum eum uero et eum detraxi apud me ut is sentisset meum pectus omnis fragrantia ita uero et eius cor factu'st delirans et ita uero dixi ita uellem ita uero.

Then, we went from literature to music. Alex Navar played several tunes in his new uilleann pipes, among them "An Londubh" ("The Blackbird"), "An Fáinne Óir" ("Gold Ring"), "An Chúilfhionn" ("The Coolin"), "An Phis Fhliuch...