The The editorial Odyssey of James Joyce’s Ulysses: between censorship, infinite varieties, and vanished editions: essay review following Lucio Gambetti’s book An editorial Odyssey: one hundred years from Joyce’s Ulysses. Biblion, 2022

Abstract

The book by Lucio Gambetti, An editorial Odyssey: one hundred years after Joyce’s Ulysses, little more than a hundred pages, leads us on a journey through the publishing history of one of the most important and influential novels of the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Ulysses. In particular, the book focuses on the Italian edition of the novel, exploring its publishing history, its critical reception, and the linguistic challenges that made it difficult to translate and interpret such a complex work. In the past, the issues related to the question of copyright for the various editions of the novel over the decades has been already addresses, the copyright claims made by the heirs, in particular by the late Stephen James Joyce (who passed away in January 2020), and the double expiration of the author’s copyright, first in 1992 and then in 2012. The subsequent battles over the copyright of the unpublished manuscripts, the veto on investigating what the original text of the work was, the censorship biographers were subjected to at the hands of Stephen Joyce, and the editions that disappeared from the market are all issues that the author of this article is familiar with. Throughout the twentieth century, numerous acts of censorship slowed down the availability of translations or revisions in the publishing market in various countries. Therefore, this paper is an essay-review, with some new references missing in Gambetti’s book, such as the recovery of a sentence of an Italian Court, which can be found at the end of this paper.