Οι γάτες της Κοπεγχάγης

by James Joyce, Τζαίημς Τζόυς, Casey Sorrow (Illustrator)

Πώς διασχίζει κανείς καλύτερα το δρόμο; Με οδηγίες από αστυνόμο; Ή από γάτες οδηγημένος; Ο Τζέιμς Τζόις, σεσημασμένος αναρχικός της υπάρξεως, δεν έχει καμιά αμφιβολία για την απάντηση και είναι αποφασισμένος γελώντας να τη μοιραστεί με τους κατοίκους της Κοπεγχάγης μια που, απ’ όσο φαίνεται, η πατρίδα του Άμλετ ξεχειλίζει από αστυφύλακες μα έχει ξεμείνει από γατιά!

Γραμμένο το 1936 σε μια επιστολή προς τον τετράχρονο εγγονό του, αυτό το εύθυμο παραμύθι συνιστά έναν τζοϊσικώς αναιδέστατο Δούρειο Γάτο που χλευάζει την καταστολή μαθαίνοντας σε παιδιά και μεγάλους να διασχίζουν ελεύθεροι το δρόμο, χωρίς οδηγίες από αστυνόμο. Μόνο από γάτες οδηγημένοι.

Genres: Picture Books, Cats, Fiction, Poetry, Childrens, Short Stories, Classics

29 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nineteen sentences of jocular feline witticism with an anarchistic touch cat lover Joyce sent his grandson from Denmark in 1936 (instead of a sweet-stuffed cat). Its smooth pertness and subtle tackling of authorities one can do without represent a charming read, a few minutes of delight.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

C'est n'est pas un chat



A thin book about fat cats,
Copenhagen, policemen,
letters, letterboxes, fish,
buttermilk, young boys with
red bicycles, and soft beds.

It is a story filched using
exactly 230 words;
mixing dozens of fonts
on 20 rough cut pages,
matched with 15 ink cartoons.

This is a literary lark that
spins with the absurdity of all --
all while teasing the moon, oh,
and it holds my favorite caricature
of a relaxed James Joyce.

This book was first a letter
written and mailed by Joyce,
to his only grandson Stephen,
while James Joyce was hanging
out in Zealand and Amager.

This letter is a prose poem,
a child's story, penned by an
already literary God to his only
earthy grandson, now executor,
on an August day in 1936.

I like to imagine Niels Bohr
orbiting his new theory
of compound nucleuses all
while James Joyce purrs on
about his new theory of cats.

Both men in Copenhagen, both
in 1936, both exactly one
year after Schrödinger's cat
was born, or not born,
entangled, or not entangled.

So, perhaps, this is just
one more bookish box, a
Copenhagen Interpretation,
reinterpreted by a quantum
Joyce for a 4-year-old boy.

The Universe is an odd place (for sure).
Many-worlds made more odd --
when you +add the moon,
+cats/no cats + bicycles, all
with just a hint of buttermilk.

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 3 out of 5]

RIP, James Joyce's only grandson Stephen James Joyce, who died at the age of 87, 1/23/2020.

A children's book by James Joyce! Yes, THAT James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Dubliners, one of the greatest (and most difficult) authors of all time! This book is one of two children's books that gives Joyce authorship credit, books created from letters he wrote later in his life to his grandson and from related writings found in 2006, probably not intended for publication.

Once Joyce had sent his grandson a toy cat stuffed with candy. So the first line in one letter to his grandson states that there are no cats in Copenhagen. What emerges is a kind of slight and silly grandfather story that helps us appreciate Joyce's irreverence and humor and issues with authority and politics.

A find, for Joyce readers, yeah, but you know, it's not like it is one of the Lost Works, Finnegan's Wake part II! It helps to humanize the great and enigmatic author of Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Makes him likable. Reminds me of the great and stuffy T.S. Eliot and his Book of Practical Cats. I was unable to get this at any Chicago area library, so when I was at City Lights Bookstore in SF, I picked it up, a score!

[Jakob J. 🎃 · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw no cats in Copenhagen (insert obligatory double-entendre red light distract joke), unless, mewling at the midnight sun, they all turned into empty beer bottles littering the streets of Vesterbro like an assemblage of proverbial pumpkin carriages.

Hardly necessary for anyone but a Joyce completist—and how many of those can there possibly be? Even so, this was a public domain project that Joyce never intended to publish from an archived letter of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation. It was essentially snapshoted, illustrated, and published in 2012 to line the Cat Lovers display shelf at Barnes & Noble alongside I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats and Grumpy Cat.

[ع. ر. افّلا · Rating 5 out of 5]

می‌دونستید جیمز فاکینگ جویس داستان کودک هم نوشته؟

[Satyajeet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very similar to The Cat and the Devil, this is highly recommended!
Joyce thought the world of cats, this was quite evident in the first chapter of Ulysses, in which the very first conversation is between a hungry feline and the kind-hearted protagonist.
Both works are beautiful.

[Roya · Rating 2 out of 5]

جیمز جویس هم کت‌پرسن بوده؟!😌

[Payam Ebrahimi]

حقیقتا اصلا متوجه داستان نشدم.
چه خبر بود؟ چی میگفت؟ کجاش ضد استبدادی بود؟ نقش تصاویر چی بود؟
شاید مخاطبش از سن من خیلی بالاتره.
البته غلامرضا امامی همواره (و در این کتاب هم) نشون داده که چهار تا جمله‌ی شسته‌رفته و تروتمیز بلد نیست تحویل بده و ممکنه یه بخشی از این گنگی داستان به‌خاطر ترجمه‌ی (مثل همیشه) پلشت آقای نامترجم باشه.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Better than the Eliot cat book?

Probably not as better than the Theroux kiddie books.

But.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph...

[Maritina Mela · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason, I was surprised to find out that James Joyce had written a children's book.
Coincidentally, Joyce is also one of the authors whose work I always found to be intimidating and not interesting enough for me to engage with.
But I decided to pull the trigger and start give this one a try.

It's whimsical and quick to read, but not anything fantastic that is going to stay with me for a long long time.
At least I found out that the author wrote this as a letter to his grandson and that was indeed somewhat endearing.

[Aloha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me 5 minutes to read. Whimsical and delightful.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not quite what I thought this would be. But I wasn't expecting it to be this. It's actually quite funny, even for adults.

[Pınar Aydoğdu · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Joyce'un torununa Kopenhag'dan yazdığı bir mektup kitaplaştırılmış. Bir çocuk kitabı olmasından öte satır aralarında bir başkaldırı hissediliyor.

[Anastasia Herbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story is pure Joyce: a fascinating, quirky and highly condensed political satire in the Swiftian mode, written for adults and children. The first edition published by Ithys Press of Dublin, Ireland (Feb 2012) is expertly handset and letterpress printed by Michael Caine in an expressive array of late 19th and early 20th Century typefaces and is illustrated with highly inventive pen-and-ink drawings by Casey Sorrow. The Scribner/Simon&Schuster edition (Oct 2012) is an attractive small-format trade hardcover, published by arrangement with Ithys Press, featuring the Michael Caine's typography and Casey Sorrow's illustrations, plus two new drawings for the dustjacket.
More info here:
Ithys Press edition: http://ithyspress.wordpress.com/title...
Scribner edition: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Cat...

[Christopher]

A children's book from Joyce? Yes. Wonderful and strange; buttermilk, cigars and all. The language is briefly Joycean, of course!

The illustrations are playfully bizarre, but modern sensibilities might want to avoid normalizing smoking and so keep this one for the completionist in the family. For me, it's more about keeping a clean copy away from grubby hands.

[Herman · Rating 3 out of 5]

***1/2

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book in Naples for my daughter. It’s a really short, silly children’s book about cats that James Joyce wrote for his grandson, Stephen, and has now been illustrated and translated into Italian.

Unusual note: the illustrator made all characters cats (except for the narrator, who looks like Joyce), so although the text indicates there is a clear difference between cats and police officers, the police officers are drawn as cats.

I learned the Italian word for “buttermilk.”

[pedro · Rating 1 out of 5]

not my cup of joe. move along.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short little read from a letter Joyce wrote to his grandson, Stephen. He begins: "Alas! I cannot send you a Copenhagen cat because there are no cats in Copenhagen." In a playful fashion, Joyce proceeds to tell a short story that can be enjoyed by children and critically analyzed by adults as a commentary on tyranny. The illustrations are fun, too, especially the one representing Joyce himself.

[Pavel Beneš · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knížka samo o sobě je skvělá, navíc tím, že každá jazyková mutace má svébytnou grafiku, typografii, práci s barvou i formátem. Já českou mutaci téhle knížku dělám pro edici NOS (AlbatrosMedia) a nemůžu se nepochlubit reakcí majitele autorských práv:
It looks marvelous! Congratulations!
Anastasia Herbert
ITHYS PRESS
Avalon
Strawberry Beds
Dublin 20, Ireland

To potěší.

[Fiery Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this while I was having lunch today and was literally laughing out loud. It's so wonderfully quirky, funny, and charming. I loved it! The illustrations are fantastic, which is a nice bonus. This is the perfect remedy for the doldrums.

[Aslı Can]

Ulysses'i okumanın ve anlamanın zor olduğunu söylerlerdi de ne kadar zor olabilir ki diye düşünürdüm. James Joyce'un aslen torununa yazdığı bu hikayeyi okuyunca duyduklarım doğru olabilir diye düşünmeye başladım. Oradan oraya savrulan, hikaye olmayan bir hikaye. Ulysses'i de okumanın zamanı geldi sanırım artık.

[Književne crtice]

Nakon ove kratke priče (slobodno možemo reći slikovnice) ništa vam neće biti jasno. Je li ona zaista namijenjena djeci ili krije mnoge tajne između redaka?

[Maide Karzaoğlu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ayy.
Bu kitabın bazı sayfalarını kesip çerçevelettireceğim evime asmak için :(
Çok özür dilerim ama çok güzel olacak :(

çünkü Kopenhag'da kedi yoktur :(

[WrittenbySahra · Rating 3 out of 5]

آقای جویس، این همه استعاره و نماد توی داستان کودکان، نهیب به بزرگترهاشون نبود؟

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Um, what?

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won this book in a contest which I had entirely forgotten about. Since then it has only brought me joy and laughter. I have opened this up when I have been sad or down and it has had the miraculous ability to cheer me up. In these moments I do not take Joyce's work seriously and treat it like a children's story, which this publication clearly is asking you to do, as it is illustrated in a beautifully simple manner. However, I can see where the case for extreme depth could be. This book will please the cat lover, the book lover, and the Joyce lover.

[Kasandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A charming and odd little book with fantastic illustrations and typesetting and a strange story, very thought-provoking. One of a kind! Makes me want to finally sit down this winter and read Ulysses. This is a VERY short little story. Even for a kids' book, it's short. But it's like nothing else you'll have in your library!

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book only consists of about 15 sentences. I recommend it to anyone who truly loves James Joyce and wants to read up on his lesser writings.

*I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

[Melanie Hetrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very strange book. One of James Joyce's 2 books for young children written for his grandson. Both grandfather and grandson shared an affinity for cats.

However, this book doesn't make much sense. Cats, mice, policecats, mice on bikes delivering mail...

Huh...