If Homer marks the beginning of Western literature, Joyce suggested, Ulysses was its culmination. For example, in one Homeric episode Odysseus descends to Hades, the world of the dead in Joyce's version Leopold Bloom-a Jew and therefore, like Odysseus, an outsider-goes to a funeral. Ulysses does not slavishly follow the Odyssey, though each episode in the ancient tale has a counterpart in the modern one. Penelope is represented by Bloom's not-so-faithful wife, Molly. Joyce masticates Homer's Odyssey and spits it out in his saga of a day (June 16, 1904) in the life of two Dubliners, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus). Only after ten years, and a goodly number of Boy's Own adventures, is he restored to his faithful wife, Penelope, and his stalwart son, Telemachus. Odysseus has some difficulty getting back home. Homer's saga tells the story of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, who sails with his army to sack the city of Troy. "This translation is quite monumental." As the name implies ("Ulysses" is a Romanization of "Odysseus"), Ulysses is organized around the Greek myth known as the Odyssey. "In old age one should do something monumental," says Xiao, who is eighty-five. He has earned the right to his reservations: he and his wife, Wen Jieruo, have just finished a labor that might have humbled Hercules-translating Ulysses into Chinese. XIAO Qian, a Chinese war correspondent and a literature student, stood over the grave of James Joyce in 1946 in Zurich and mourned, "Here lies the corpse of someone who wasted his great talents writing something very unreadable." Forty-nine years later Xiao still thinks that Joyce carried his virtuosity too far.
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