Bloomsday
Yesterday, 16 June, was Bloomsday or the day that Joyceans dedicate to celebrate the peripathetic journey of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s master work Ulysses, which takes place on 16 June 1914. Most people will probably spend no more attention to this date than to any other, but in Seville, my hometown, the figure of the Irish genius is remembered year after year. Bloomsday is celebrated in many other places all around the world, mainly in Dublin, Joyce’s birth place as well as the location of Bloom’s advetures in the novel. However, Seville has kept this tradition for many years now, due to the fact that its university owns one of the most important groups of reasearch devoted to the Irish writer. The International James Joyce symposium was held in Seville in 1994, and there exists a James Joyce Spanish Association that gathers together once a year, everytime in a different city of Spain, celebrating conferences and activities dedicated to Joyce’s works.
Seville is known for its bullfights, its Feria de Abril, its Holy Week and its tourist attractions. More and more, Seville is being known for the celebration of Bloomsday, in part thanks to the efforts of Professor García Tortosa, who has devoted more than 20 years to the study of James Joyce and has published the last translation of Ulysses into Spanish.
The tradition, on this date, is to meet at Casa de la Provincia to read together our favorite passages of the novel. After that, we all move to an Irish pub, where we drink Guinness and eat kidneys, paying homage to Bloom’s breakfast in Episode 4, “Calypso.” This year, there was a novelty, having an open discussion on Joyce’s Ulysses before the readings. Unfortunately, there was someone who argued that some of Joyce’s passages were boring and made him sleepy and that his last work, Finnegans Wake, was a failure. As we usually say, Joyce chooses his readers. But one does not need to read Ulysses or Finnegans Wake to enjoy such a pleasureable time, on a day when many citizens of Seville feel attracted by this mysterious author, from whom we know every single bibliographical detail, but don’t know what his works mean sometimes.
“If he had smiled why would he have smiled?” (U, 17. 216).