James Joyce. The man, the myth, the legend. The man whose beer we're bound to hold forever. I have a rich history with James Joyce. Back in 2012 my favorite method of merciless smothering of huge chunks of time was translating his poems from "Chamber Music" into ukrainian just because i could. And i did it over and over again. Because reasons. It was an interesting period of my life. I was full of artistic ambitions and desperate to break into the literary world. Which manifested itself in behaving like a moron and saying bad things to people who had better things to do than deal with me. I got better later.
"Chamber Music" caught my attention after spending summer translating Ezra Pound's "Lustra". This thing never really turned out into a legit book but the experience served as a crash test in poetry writing. Ezra taught me a lot of tricks. But I felt bad about messing up the translations and so i thought it would be a good idea to try Joyce. Secretly i felt the need to punish myself. And so i was spending evening after evening trying to do legit translations.
It went nowhere in the end. While i've finished first round of translations - i never went back to revise and edit them. I just didn't cared. Not that it was particularly disappointing experience. I just felt that something was off in me and that prevented me from truly engaging with material. The resulting translations were cold and detached - nothing like those tender, gentle verses you can find in "Chamber Music". It was more related to Gertrude Stein than Joyce and that really bugged me.
After a year gap i came back to Joyce and finally started to read "Finnegans Wake" (it was my third attempts, the other two were in 2006 and 2010 respectively). It was transforming experience. It helped me to understand how to compose text without falling back on tried and tested tricks. Two years later i did a little mash-up of "Finnegans Wake" thunderwords with various screenshots of Futurama through Morbotron.
And now this:
This my found poem. It is a table of contents for "Chamber Music" as presented by Monoskop' "Collected Writings". Seeing it was a gut punch. I immediately felt the need to screencap it. You know that feeling: "This is the thing". It reminded me the works of Erica Baum, "Card Catalogues" series in particular. Erica Baum is a great master of recontextualization of the things that are not meant to be pondered upon. In her work she tries to reveal hidden narratives, rhythms in the systems of references.
The resulting poem is a memorial of the world it was disconnected from. Every number meant to lead to a certain place. But now it is stripped of its function and left on its own. In that way - it is a conceptual piece in a Fluxus vein. It is hollow inside. That is void is toxic. It creates certain kind of tintinabullation. It is unbearable nothing. On its own it is "every picture tells a story". Just like Louis Aragon "Suicide" it intentionally omits the any notion of comprehension and instead plays in pulling fingers while holding breath and trying not to smile. That makes this found poem so special.
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