Theme: Words

At least a hundred times during my visit, I uttered the following question: "What's that?" Not only did I have a difficult time understanding the Irish and their brogue, I had a heck of a time translating their unique words and phrases. The tiny glossary I collected:

bangers — n., sausages

brollie — n., umbrella

busker — n., street musician

crisps — n., potato chips

fags — n., cigarettes

fair play to him — phrase, you gotta hand it to him

footie — n. slang, football (soccer)

frock — n., dress

grand — adj., swell, great, groovy, cool

half nine, half four, etc. — 9:30, 4:30, etc.

happy as Larry — phrase, pretty darned happy < If we can get down to the pub, we'll be happy as Larry. >

in the bad books — phrase, hard-up for cash

let — v., to rent

newsagent — n., a newsstand, be it on the street or in a shop

pin — n., mountain

plate — n., a license

rag week — n., Spring Break

I will not serve that in which I no longe believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.

— Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

He's everywhere. One cannot visit Dublin without tripping over James Joyce's droppings on street corners, in parks, throughout the city center. Whether you've read his work or not, Joyce and Dublin were inextricable, despite the amount of time he was away from the city. He wrote about it, and he hardly fictionalized a thing.

For the hardcore Joyce fan, there are ready-made Dublin maps of Joycean hotspots, including at least one map identifying every location in Ulysses, from the Martello tower in the first chapter (which I didn't get to see, damnit) to the 14 places in the "Wandering Rocks" chapter. I hit several – Davy Byrne's pub, Ruggy O'Donohoe's pub, the Sandymount Strand, Dublin Castle, the Ormond Quay, Sweny's shop, etc. Neither or them is dazzling themselves, but there's a visceral charge I found in retracing the route of these characters. What is the significance of following footsteps?

In north Dublin, on Parnell Square, is the James Joyce Center. It's an underwhelming place by itself, though they host some pretty exciting events, readings and festivals. The house is barely related to Joyce at all – the home of a dance instructor who taught Joyce's wife and who appears briefly in Ulysses – but it features the original door to 7 Eccles St., the home of Ulysses' main character, Leopold Bloom.

The center features a few artifacts, some interesting displays (picked up a great quotation from one of Joyce's letters: "White wine is like electricity. Red wine looks and tastes like a liquified beefsteak"), and one hell of a library. There's one entire cabinet dedicated to foreign translations of Ulysses – 153 thus far. Can you imagine that? Surely the music of the most innovative writer of English is lost or garbled in the translation to, say, Czech or Mandarin. How could one possibly bring over such puns as "landescape," "so this is Dyoublong?" or a passage like this:

Welcome as the flowers in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.

In back of the center, too, is a mildly intriguing mural painted by a relative, Paul Joyce, in 1996. It depicts the major moments of Ulysses.

Aside from Joyce, though, Dublin is full of the legacy of its literature. Every time you turn a corner, there's another monument or commemorative plaque hailing some native author. (Well, not always hailing them. The plaque in front of George Bernard Shaw's birthplace lauds him only with this insane understatement: "Author of many plays.") St. Stephen's Green is literally littered with literary monuments, and the garden at St. Patrick's Cathedral honors the greats from Wilde to Swift to Joyce to Brendan Behan. Heck, even Irish money pays tribute to writers. Joyce is on the 10 pound note – and you'll be hard-pressed to find a president or a politician on any other bills or coins.

Joyce on film: Oddly enough, the lone film adaptation of Ulysses has never been shown in Ireland. It's been banned for 24 years. Irish censors just lifted the ban this month, though, and the 1967 film Ulysses – directed by Joseph Strick and starring Milo O'Shea and T.P. McKenna – is due to finally be shown in Dublin this spring. It's available on DVD in the states, as is Strick's other brave venture, a film of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (Another adaptation of Ulysses was planned in the '60s, with Marilyn Monroe sought after to play Molly. Thank God for small failures.) A new adaptation of Ulysses is scheduled to shoot in Dublin this summer, likely starring Stephen Rea as Bloom! A recent film called Nora fictionalizes the complex relationship between Joyce and his wife, Nora Barnacle; it's making the rounds of film festivals now and stars Susan Lynch.

The journey:

Recurrent themes: