Re-creating Ulysses across the Pyrenees: Antonio Marichalar’s Spanish-European Critical Project

Abstract

“Joyce est un peu espagnol—pas?” Antonio Marichalar (1893–1973) asked Sylvia Beach in November 1924, alluding to his efforts to disseminate Joyce’s name and work in his native Spain (Letter to Beach). That month saw the publication of the influential and inventive essay/translation/review “James Joyce en su laberinto” [“James Joyce in His Labyrinth”] in the Revista de Occidente [Review of the West] in Madrid by this young, little-known scholar. Two months later, in January 1925, Jorge Luis Borges would famously yet erroneously proclaim himself “the first Hispanic adventurer [aventurero] to have arrived at Joyce’s [Ulysses]” when he published his celebrated translation of the novel’s final page in the Argentine journal Proa [Prow] (3).¹ Yet unlike Borges’s “complicated, lifelong dialogue” with Joyce’s fiction, as Sergio Waisman rightly characterizes it (157), the lives of Joyce’s works in Spain—where they have shaped literary practices and discourses for generations—have only begun to receive scholarly attention more recently. The “Spanish Joyce” has been the subject of studies and collections including Joyce en España I and II (1994 and 1997, respectively), La recepción de James Joyce en la prensa española [The Reception of James Joyce in the Spanish Press] (1997), James Joyce in Spain: A Critical Bibliography (1972–2002) (2002), Silverpowdered Olivetrees: Reading Joyce in Spain (2003), and several chapters in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe (2004), along with an array of articles and bibliographies, many of which have cited Marichalar’s role in launching the circulation of Joyce’s works in Spain.²