from James Joyce*, Ulysses, page 42 (episode 3, lines 492-96):. . . Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. Già. For the old hag with the yellow teeth. And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. Già. My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the superman. . . .
from Don Gifford*, "Ulysses" Annotated, page 66:Già: Italian: "Already." As Stephen uses the word here, "Già . . . Già," it is an expression of impatience: "Let's go . . . Let's go."
from James Joyce*, Ulysses, page 312 (episode 13, lines 1256-69):Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a message for her. Might remain. What?
I.
Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide comes here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don't know.
What is the meaning of that other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not like.
AM. A.
No room. Let it go. Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand. Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels coming up here. Except Guinness's barges. Round the Kish in eighty days. Done half by design.
In terms of the Throwaway passage that I have been using as an example, some of the questions regarding annotation would apply in print or in a digital format. But others apply mainly to a digital presentation, or take on different connotations on the screen.
| Do these questions change for different categories of information (historical, other languages, intertextuality)? |
A short note with links to more detailed information might be a desirable norm for annotations, but not all details from the text of Ulysses will lend themselves to such well-ordered annotations. In the J-Joyce email discussion of annotation, Andrew Blom* suggested one such detail: it involves an Italian exclamation, "Già," near the end of episode 3 ("Proteus"). Don Gifford* annotates the word as an adverb, meaning "already" or "Let's go. Let's go." Blom suggests, however, that the word is an exclamation and derives from the German ja; he translates it as something like "yes," "sure," " of course," or "right," as in "That's me, all right. Yeah, sure." If neither translation is erroneous, then no single note can provide a quick first annotation. The initial note will itself be an interpretation.
A similar situation exists regarding an incomplete phrase that Leopold Bloom writes in sand on a beach at the end of episode 13 ("Nausicaa"). He writes "I." and then "AM. A." before he covers over the letters with sand. The text never specifies what else Bloom intended to write, if anything. Annotators who choose to comment on "I. AM. A." can do so only at the level of interpretation, since any consideration of what Bloom might be writing can be only speculation.
The complications that this question opens up don't affect the appearance of the annotations or the ways in which readers call them up, but they do suggest that the separation between factual information and interpretation is a thin, perhaps nonexistent, one and also that some first-level notes will have to be content to say something like "Critics disagree on the meaning of this detail."
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