Aaron Gwyn on X: "The Gabler ULYSSES was the first edition I read. It’s not my favorite, though. When I taught an undergraduate ULYSSES seminar a few years back, I used the 1934/1961 Corrected Text that Modern Library puts out. This is the edition I recommend."
Many of the people who read this blog are big Joyce fans; is there a consensus on this?
3 comments:
Bob liked the 1961 Random House edition of Ulysses. In the 80's when the Gabler edition appeared,Bob wrote an article criticizing it called "Five Masters Make a Miss". I may have a copy of the article in a box in the garage. I don't know if I will ever find it. I did find my copy of "The Crying of Lot 49" yesterday and reread the first 24 pages.
I'm curious as to what the differences are between additions... it's not like we're talking about a translation to English, right? Right? /sarcasm - just in case.
A great book by David Collard, Multiple Joyce – 100 short essays about James Joyce's cultural legacy. said it was "Hans Walter Gabler who introduced numbered chapters in his controversial and widely-discredited synoptic version of the text..." He refers to Ulysses which, of course, didn't have numbered chapters when Joyce released it.
Collard has a piece (chapter 29) discussing the Gabler edition. He says that Gabler and a team of 10 worked for 10 years and said they corrected 'more than 5000 errors' that had crept into the first edition. Ah, those pernicious creeping errors will get you every time. Collard then writes:
"A cynical observer might suspect that this corrected text was commissioned because the Estate wanted to create a version sufficiently different from prior editions to justify a renewed copyright, and that cynical observer would be right."
Collard also offers up the main criticisms to this edition from Joyce scholar
John Kidd:
"1. that Gabler included a number of hypothetical documents that have been lost, but the existence of which is inferred by other documents, and had treated them as authoritative in developing his copytext;
2. that when working with the new copytext , Gabler corrected Joyce's spelling of English and foreign words and revised Joyce's own punctuation, use of compound words and certain details such as dates and sums of money (in Bloom's end-of-day-book-keeping);
3. that Gabler ignored Joyce's continued involvement with the text after completing the manuscript, such as his directions to professional typists, his corrections to printed editions published during his lifetime and his agreement to changes made by others;
I'd love to read Wilson's thoughts on the Gabler edition of Ulysses if it turns up.
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