Many fans of James Joyce and of Ulysses in particular may have recently celebrated Blooms day. Situations like this create an almost overpowering attraction for online writers to try to conflate this date and celebration with whichever trope they believe in (or are pushing…).
Having said that, I did find a couple of these sorts of articles which are nearly valid, in that they present some interesting questions… For instance, would James Joyce, a man who had long standing eyesight problems, and who never typed, find the iPad to be a worthwhile writing tool?
I am certain that his stenographers would have loves this tool…over his scribbling on butcher paper with pencil… As to the great author himself…I would assert (with about as much authority as anyone else…) that it wouldn’t have made much difference to him or to his creative methods…one way or another. Of course, this point of view renders the question (and its ultimate answer) as…moot, at best…
The second question relates the fact that Joyce had supported himself while writing Ulysses as an English teacher. The premise is whether he would have been a fan of the increasing amounts and quality of machine translation of languages…
Once again, I can only rely upon my perceptions of this seemingly reasonable comparison and state that while this blog has an app to (machine) translate these wonderful posts into a wide variety of languages (over 40 the last time I looked!), I have some experience as an English teacher, and consider this to be a lesser evil at best…
Would Joyce, who was far more deeply involved with the ultimate boundaries of language, of trying to encompass internal narratives, and what may be the utter limits of what can be communicated…Machine translation? To me, this is similar to discussions about artificial intelligence…it’s a great idea, and one which needs a lot of research and experiment…but that is not the same as stating that it is a fait accompli…
I am interested in artificial intelligence, as I am with machine translation (especially for non-literary works…such as mine). But this is not remotely the same thing as what Joyce was playing with in Finnegan’s Wake…
Laptop Wireless Card | Would Joyce Use An IPad?
http://laptophome.org/Laptop_Home/laptop-wireless-card-would-joyce-use-an-ipad
IT IS A fact not at large appreciated outward well read circles and institutions staunch to the expenditure of Guinness, that every year on June 16, Dublin goes somewhat potty.
Bleeding Edge initial encountered the materialization called Bloomsday whilst sightseeing nearby St Stephen’s Green in 1992. It was the initial time we had visited the home of our ancestors and we were not unequivocally ready is to spectacle.
We detected a town reliving – with many revelers in time dress and with assumingly extemporaneous readings – something that never happened: the day in June 1904 that spans the events described in James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses.
What would the Joyce of currently select to create his work? It would roughly of course not be a typewriter. Although one of the many loved exhibits in the Dublin Writers Museum is James Joyce’s typewriter, the fact is that the writer suffered severely from major eye problems, inclusive iritis, cataracts, and glaucoma, could not read typed characters and deserted suggestions that he use a typewriter.
Instead, he hand-printed in large letters using a colorless pencil – that snapped off ceaselessly – on butcher’s paper. The typewriter was used by his stenographer.
Were he essay today, it seems to us he would be drawn to the iPad, and quite to Adobe Ideas ($9.99).
The app is written as a sketching/annotation apparatus with absolute features such as layers and the capability to import photos. But for hand-printing in assorted colors, it is wonderfully simple. It allows you to save any page to a manuscript or email it as an editable PDF file. It would have been the best apparatus for Joyce, quite with a corpulent Just Mobile AluPen stylus that we saw in Streetwise final week for $27.95.
We’re flattering certain his eyesight and his personal disposition would have done him something of a computerphobe. Like Jonathan Franzen , who declares ”you can’t write major novella on a P.C. that’s related to the internet” – Franzen private his laptop’s wireless card and shut off up its Ethernet dock with a sawn-off line and superglue – Joyce wouldn’t have taken to Twitter or anything similar to it. Indeed, having written what was until not long ago the longest judgment in English novel – 4391 words, in Ulysses – we can’t suppose him even attempting to write an SMS or a tweet.
Despite that, we can’t suppose he could have vanished overlooked in any era. His works, with the difference of Finnegan’s Wake, are existing giveaway in assorted eBook editions at Gutenberg.org. So far, Ulysses has been downloaded roughly 14,000 times.
Language Isn’t A Firehose: James Joyce and the Future of Computerized Translation
http://www.fastcompany.com/1760456/language-isnt-a-firehose-making-google-translates-api-work-again-bloomsday-edition
In celebration of Bloomsday (June 16, the 107th anniversary of the fictional events that occur in his Ulysses), I’ll reach beyond time, death, and the limits of my own or anyone else’s knowledge to affirm that James Joyce would have adored Google Translate.
The Irish novelist was first a translator, a student, and teacher of modern languages. He composed Ulysses over eight years in exile, on the run from World War One, supporting himself teaching English to the Italian, German, and French speakers of Trieste, Zürich, and Paris. Part of Ulysses’s celebrated difficulty is its untranslated bits of these three languages, plus snatches of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Irish Gaelic, Norwegian, and more.
After finishing Ulysses, Joyce set to work on Finnegans Wake, an even more ambitious stew of musical puns in languages he barely knew all incorporated into his own dream-logic Irish English idiolect. Joyce listed 40 separate languages on the final page of Finnegans Wake’s manuscript. To represent reality in all its fullness, it wasn’t enough to mine English, but all human languages that ever were, are, or could be.
