James Joyce - Ulysse [Deuxième édition] - 1930

James JOYCE

Ulysses

Complete French translation by M. Auguste Morel, assisted by M. Stuart Gilbert, entirely revised by M. Valéry Larbaud and the author.

New edition

Paris: Adrienne Monnier, J.-O. Fourcade, 1930 (imprimatur, Oct 1930) in-8 (21 x 16 cm), 872 pages.

Second edition with the definitive translation entirely revised by Valéry Larbaud and J. Joyce.

The action of Ulysses takes place in one day, in Dublin, in 1904. The character of Ulysses is a small Jewish clerk, Leopold Bloom; Stephen Dedalus, a young Irish poet, is Telemachus; Marion, Bloom’s wife who betrays him, is Penelope. Nothing extraordinary happens during this day. Bloom and Dedalus wander the city, minding their affairs, and end up in a brothel in the evening.
Each episode corresponds to an episode of The Odyssey. But the parody leads to a questioning of the modern world at a time of muflism. Joyce expresses the universal through the particular. Bloom, Dedalus, Marion are archetypes. All of life, birth and death, the search for the father (Dedalus is also Hamlet), that of the son (Bloom has lost a young son), all of history are contained in a single day. It is to Rabelais, to Swift that one can compare Joyce’s art, which wrote, in Ulysses, the great epic and satirical work of our time.

Leather binding in half-mrown with corners and raised bands, title and author gilded, covers and back preserved, edges stained